I added a weird music thing to show what I listen to on my PC. And it might make a lovely personalised radio station that plays things I like, if I listen to stuff enough and it learns. Apparently.
LastFM. :)
And I read about Blogger's tagging, kind of makes sense.
Hmmmmmm.
Another week that went quickly, though this was mainly because I went to Wales Tuesday afternoon and came back Thursday evening - made the week a bit odd and tiring but was, well, interesting. I went for a training course at
exeGesIS about the new version of their
HBSMR software, which we use for our Historic Environment Record in Leicestershire/Rutland. The thing I liked learning about the most was the xml transforms, changing xml into either other xml or html. I tried something with the transform to html but I will probably have neither the time nor the inclination to mess about with it too much. Ah well. Sometimes I feel like the internet is leaving me behind. I don't really get this 'tagging' thing, is it like the old metatags that all the search engines used to use, before Google? I note that blogger now wants me to tag each post.
Anyway, the training course is pretty much the only exciting thing I've done this week. Rob's brand new (well 1 month old) Ford Focus was vandalised this morning. We can't work out what they were trying to accomplish, but they stuck a crow bar or similar into the top of the door and levered it open, bending the top half of the door (with the glass) outwards so now it sticks out about 10cm and has a big gap into the car. I suppose they'll have to put a new door on it. It's not like there was anything in it to steal, and who'd want to steal the car once the door was that messed up? I doubt the fleet car people will fix up the nasty gouges on the roof and the scratches to how it looked before, all shiny and new. :(
I'm reading
SilverFin at the moment, a book about James Bond's school days in Eton, it's really good! Just thought I'd mention that in passing!
Bye for now...
So... this week went by quite quickly, it was odd. Can't remember doing much. Hmm. On Wednesday we watched
Flightplan with
Ali and Sarah. It was okay, the film, though their plan seemed to hinge on one very big thing not happening at the beginning. I will say no more, if you watch it you'll probably come to the same conclusions!
Thursday, hmm, what did we do on Thursday... it snowed! That's what happened on Thursday. Though the predicted lots of snow (15cm plus) did not appear. We had 5 at the most. It was fun though. When I went past Nelson Mandela park there were many snowmen all over it. Amazing! Friday it melted, though it was hovering around freezing. It was a sleety sort of day.
Saturday was fun,
Ali, Rob and I went to
Ullesthorpe Garden Centre for lunch. It was really good to see Mark again, hadn't seen him since Christmas. That's a smaller not-seeing him gap than usual, mind you. The Garden Centre did an okay savoury meal-type thing, but the best thing was the amazing homemade cakes, yum yum yum. And I thought I was allowed one, I'm well within my weight range now, I've lost over 3 stone(s). I'm never sure how writing imperial things works, hence the (s), beats me why we don't weigh people or do heights in metric. Maybe it takes a few generations for these things to sink in.
Today I haven't done much, I've been feeling a bit ropey. Nothing serious though.
Holly the hamster seems fine, she hasn't been out yet this evening. After a few days of frantic climbing and falling off she discovered the hamster wheel and has been using it in virtually every moment she's not asleep. Silly thing. :)
I did watch
Top Gear tonight, it was really good though very worrying... They bought second hand cars instead of renting, then did various tests, as per usual. But the real oddness started when they did an 800 mile road trip through the southern states. One of the tests was to decorate each other's cars with offensive graffiti and see which of them would get shot. Unfortunately, the graffiti (such as Man Love Rules OK and NASCAR sucks) did actually nearly get them shot. They stopped for petrol then had to run away when the pickup truck full of scary men was called in, and their camera crew vans were pelted with rocks! I find it hard to believe people are that, well, stupid. It wasn't particularly offensive, surely? And what made it worse was when they got to New Orleans, and gave their cars away to people via a charity, another pickup truck of armed men turned up and told them to get off their street! Perhaps we can forgive the people of New Orleans, who have been through a lot, but I won't be visiting the backwaters of Alabama any time soon.
What a strange world we live in.
Last time I blogged I had no idea why it had been so hard getting home Tuesday evening (Saffron Lane in Leicester had been closed). It was eerie walking down what is normally a very busy road with no cars about. It turned out that a grandmother and mother had been taking a little girl to school and were killed by a car that drove along the wrong side of the road then flipped onto the pavement.
You can read about it here. Tragic stuff. There are loads of flowers next to the site of the crash, which is just opposite my morning bus stop. If I'd been catching a bus less than an hour later than usual I would have seen the accident...
Friday evening my Mum and Dad came up to visit. They turned up earlier than I was expecting them and came to help at the Kids Club we do on every other Friday. Which was nice. Saturday they helped clear out the cellar - Mum's suggestion, I thought she'd rather go out somewhere for the day but she thought she'd help me get something done. It's not like we'd managed to do it and I'd wanted to for ages, so... hooray! It turned out that the carpet down there had become rather damp and mouldy, mainly because the person who'd owned the house before us had put sheets of wood
over the carpet, so that the damp couldn't escape. It's very tidy down there now. There were many trips to the tip.
Sunday I played bass at church in the morning, then Rob,
Ali and I went to
Steam Toys in Action at Abbey Pumping Station. The main reason my parents had come to visit was so that they could demonstrate/sell
Pop Pop Boats. They were doing a roaring trade! They hardly had time to talk, so we had some very cheap and very tasty cake and hot beverages and looked at all the other bits and pieces there. The parents went home straight from the event.
We've been playing
The Burning Crusade a bit, we made Draenei characters. I have a mage called Harmonique. I never managed to get very far being a mage, it's probably a new record for me! The new starting zone is extremely well done. I've been enjoying it a lot.
Yesterday we went to get a new hamster! Her name is Holly and she's black and white (or very dark brown and white, I'm not entirely sure). It took a long time to decide upon a name. She seems to like chewing and climbing. She's very good at climbing. She wasn't very good at all yesterday, she kept falling off, but she's improved a lot with all the practice. She can even climb on the vertical bars on the two shorter sides of the cage, it's very impressive.
I should go to bed I suppose, have to make sure I keep warm since the temperature's supposed to be pretty low tonight - minus 5 degrees C I think. Brrrr. I don't know if it's really going to snow this week but it's certainly being very cold and frosty.
Bye!
