Year: 2003

End of year quiz

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No idea who started this meme, but Google shows quite a lot of results. In any case, I’ve nicked it from LordRich.com, although I managed to find question 29. 21 is still a mystery.

1.What did you do in 2003 that you’d never done before?

Drink a pint of lager. No, seriously.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

Kind-of, and yes. I did reduce my drinking, eventually, but I really need to exercise more and eat better food. So they’ll be my resolutions. Oh, and try to save even more money.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

My cousin and his wife now have a lovely daughter called Eve, born in September. She’s adorable.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Yes, my godfather, back in August.

5. What countries did you visit?

Just France this year.

6. What would you like to have in 2004 that you lacked in 2003?

A girlfriend? Although I’ve lacked that in 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999…

7. What date(s) from 2003 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Probably my godfather’s funeral.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Passing my first year with a 64.8% average.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Not passing with better marks.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Injury: odd sore finger, but that’s it. As for illness, I seem to have had every cold going, plus the ‘flu. But nothing too serious – I’ve never been a hospital inpatient apart from when I was born.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

Difficult one. I’m pleased with my Duex MP3 player

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

All my friends.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

Tony Blair for being a suck-up and not taking time to get his ‘facts’ checked out properly.

14. Where did most of your money go?

You tell me.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Sometimes even little things get me excited so the list here would be too long.

16. What song will always remind you of 2003?

Probably either “Fly on the Wings of Love” by XTM or “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” by The Darkness.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

  1. happier or sadder? Much happier.
  2. thinner or fatter? Probably a bit fatter. See new year’s resolutions.
  3. richer or poorer? Slightly richer in terms of money in the bank, quite a bit poorer if it’s offset against how much I owe in loans.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Socialising and exercise. Unless someone opens a pub in the gym the two are hard to mix.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Playing Solitaire. That thing has wasted far too much of my time. And eating junk food.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

Hrm, no-one told me I should’ve done this last week…

21. Who deleted question 21?

I blame Elmo.

22. Did you fall in love in 2003?

Not really.

23. How many one-night stands?

None. Like I’d ever be in a position to get a one-night stand.

24. What was your favourite TV program?

It’s a tie between the repeats of Coupling, My Family, QI and Have I Got News For You.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

Other than Blair, no. In fact the inverse is more true.

26. What was the best book you read?

“Just For Fun” by Linus Torvalds. Although admittedly that was the only book I read 🙂 .

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Probably “Time to Fly (Climax 69 Remix)” by Lyala. There wasn’t much decent trance out this year unfortunately, and any half-decent stuff was by established artists.

28. What did you want and get?

Probably that MP3 player again.

29. What did you want and not get?

World peace and new mobile phone.

30. What was your favourite film of this year?

Probably Return of the King, but I only saw a handful of films this year.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

Attempted to go out but couldn’t get in anywhere. I was 19.

32.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

A really close friend.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2003?

Less beige, more dark green and black. And scarves.

34. What kept you sane?

My friends. Although my sanity parted company with me years ago.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

I tend not to fancy celebrities, but Cate Blanchett is pretty fit.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

Top-up fees, followed by the War in Iraq,

37. Who did you miss?

Friends from college.

38. Who was the best new person you met?

There were several.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2003.

Too many to name, but not as many as last year.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

I’ll do what Richard did and quote a Warrior lyric: “If you’re standing accused and you’re lost and confused, you don’t have to take the blame. If your life’s rushing by you I’ll be there beside you, I’ll help you to ease the pain.” I don’t really like the vocalist but the song is good.

Merry Christmas!

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(oh come on, what else could I have called this entry?)

So it’s Christmas morning, and in fact I have rather more presents than expected – I wasn’t expecting that much since the new laptop was supposed to be a present.

Anyway, you can divide my presents pretty much into three categories: sweets, booze and socks. I have all manner of chocolate, Turkish delight and Kendal mint cake to devour over the coming weeks, plus a selection of mini-bottles of Absolut vodka and two pairs of socks. I also got one of those chargeable mini remote control cars, a new top (which I’m wearing now) and, the main present: a tripod for my camera. It’s quite a good one since it can stand around 5 feet off the ground – I’ve wanted one for doing decent night-time shots as I need something to keep the camera steady, otherwise the picture becomes blurred.

So, it’s off for breakfast. I wish everyone a very Merry Christmas, and I hope that you get all the presents that you wanted. And don’t get too drunk on the brandy. 😉

WeeMee

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The above is my ‘WeeMee‘ character. It’s a silly thing for MSN6 that allows you to create a cartoon image to use as your avatar while talking to people – that was my best attempt at getting one that looked like me. Though obviously I’m a bit taller. And at the moment I have considerably less hair, although no doubt it’ll be that long in a few weeks.

For some reason, you need IE for it, even though it only uses Flash – it wouldn’t load in Firebird. If it suits you better you can create your own South Park character.

Finally, other than using glorified Flash-animations to draw cartoons of myself, I’m not doing anything much tonight, if it interests you.

John Bramham 1944 – 2003

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A photo of John Bramham at his daughter's wedding. He's wearing a green suit and a top hat

My godfather, John Bramham, died of a heart attack earlier this week – we just found out today. My parents are both devastated – my father has known him since grammar school and he’s been a friend of the family ever since. He has also worked for my mother’s charity, so when I phoned her at work to tell her it was a shock to the whole office.

He was the sort of person you couldn’t not know – he was a very eccentric, friendly and amusing character whose name always brings happy memories. Probably my best memory of him was at his eldest daughter’s wedding (where the photo shown was taken) where he organised everything, leaving his daughter and her newlywed husband to merely ‘follow orders’. That said, it was very well-planned and everyone had a very enjoyable day.

He will leave behind many friends, whether they are friends of the family, friends at places he has worked at, or friends in his local village where he was a member of the local parish council and was very much involved in village events.

We’ll miss you, John.

Why Thunderbird is better than OE

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You may have heard that despite reports earlier in the week, Microsoft will still develop Outlook Express after all. But unless Microsoft pull off something truly remarkable, I’m not going to switch back from my beloved Mozilla Thunderbird. And what’s more, I’ve given you a list of reasons why I’m not switching, in no particular order 🙂 .

  1. Themes – bored of the normal look? Change it. 10 themes are already available and it’s only at version 0.1
  2. Extensions – add on extra features without using shell hooks (like OEQuoteFix uses).
  3. Junk Mail filtering – considering OE is the world’s most popular mail client, I’m surprised this isn’t already in. But it isn’t. Thunderbird uses Bayesian filtering which is one of the best forms.
  4. Better message filtering – much more powerful than the rather basic filtering in OE, and easier to use too! Great for adding a filter to mark out mail that SpamAssasin thinks is spam, since you can specify custom header matching.
  5. Not full of security bugs – I can open an email infected with Klez and know that I won’t be automatically infected. And not a security patch in sight.
  6. HTML Sanitization – you can either view HTML messages in their full glory, or with things like images and CSS removed so that your address cannot be tracked as easily. You can even view them all as plain text.
  7. Sanitization for Junk Mail – if you like pretty messages but still want privacy, you can enable sanitization only for emails marked as junk.
  8. Cross platform – you probably could run OE in Wine on Linux, but this baby runs natively on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. And it’s already being ported to all manner of other OSes.
  9. Text Zooming – it’s been nearly a year since I used OE properly so I can’t remember if it does this, but if IE is anything to go by, even if it did it wouldn’t do it properly. You can make text larger or smaller in all emails, whether they use CSS or not. Great if your aunty sends everything in 64pt fonts.
  10. Automatic folder compression – those DBX files can get awfully big in OE, even if you delete all your mail. Thunderbird can compress them automatically, rather than waiting for you to do it yourself.
  11. Javascript Console – I’ll but good money that OE will never have this feature.
  12. Three-pane vertical layout – Outlook has this, but OE does not. But Thunderbird does 🙂
  13. Customisable start page – Yes, you can change it in OE but only by going into the registry or using X-Setup (a blatant plug because I wrote that plug-in myself 🙂 ). Thunderbird has it on the opening tab of the Options dialogue.
  14. On-screen alerts – You can have it pop up a message near the system tray when mail arrives. Handy that.
  15. Message labelling – Have important emails marked as red, or personal ones marked in green, although naturally you can change the colours easily. And you can set mail filters to do this automatically.
  16. Graphical emoticons – MSN Messenger has this, why doesn’t OE?
  17. Spellchecker – yes, OE has it but in some cases it’s buggy. And you can also change the language without buying a new OS.
  18. Doesn’t get hijacked – one of my ISPs decided to add an ‘Infobar’ to the bottom of OE once, taking of valuable screen real estate. And then there was the Hotmail advertising bar, and the ‘Outlook Express provided by…’. Yes, again X-Setup can fix those but how many users in the world have X-Setup? Probably about 0.1% or something.

I’ve probably missed many others, but that’s 18 features that I personally find useful that OE doesn’t have. Are you convinced yet? 😉

Added: meanwhile, there’s a guide for switching from OE to Thunderbird, complete with screenshots and very simple instructions. Check it out! 🙂

Holiday write-up: Part II

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Four more days in the life of me while on holiday. I’ll write more as I have time, but at least now the first week is done.

Monday 30th June

A photo of Le Grau de Roi

Le Grau du Roi

The plan for today was to visit Aigues-Mortes in the Carmague (about an hour and a half driving from where we were staying) and then have a look at le Grande Motte which was just down the road. But on the way we passed this coastal town called Le Grau du Roi, and thought we’d take a look.

It’s not particularly big and isn’t exactly a world heritage site, but it does have an old lighthouse and is full of seafood restaurants – as you’d expect for a major fishing port. There’s a few old buildings, and a swing bridge in the centre of the town over the canal. If anything, it’s a bit like Sète, albeit less posh.

A photo of the exterior of Aiges-Mortes

Aigues-Mortes

We probably spent about an hour there before heading on to Aigues-Mortes itself. We’d been here 12 years ago (when I was a mere 7 years old), and indeed, I have a near identical photo to the one shown that I took way back then in one of my older holiday photo albums.

Since we spent quite a bit of time in Le Grau du Roi, by the time we’d got here it was heading towards lunchtime, so most of the shops were closing for lunch. Down here, it gets very hot in the early afternoon sun, so most shops close at around 1pm and remain shut until 4pm, though typically they are open later into the evening than in Britain, where everything shuts at 5pm.

Fortunately, the ramparts, which stretch around the entire old town, were open all day, so we could pass the time strolling along these. They give great views of the town and the surrounding area, which is largely flat since it’s in the delta of the Rhône river. The big white piles are of salt – the seawater is pumped into salt pans and drained, and the area is one of the largest sea salt producers in Europe, apparently. Camargue rice, which is my favourite type, also originates from this area.

A photo of the inside of the walls at Aigues-Mortes

So, back to the ramparts (walls, if you must). When we last visited, they were free, but large areas were closed off so you couldn’t walk on them. Now, although you have to pay to get onto them, they form a complete circuit around the town, spanning for 1.63 metres, which is only a few metres longer than a mile. Lifts and ramps have also been added in some parts to allow disabled access – something that I couldn’t see happening in York, although admittedly the way the walls were constructed means that one section is accessible to those in wheelchairs.

After wandering around the walls and climbing up the towers, we strolled along the largely empty streets (the only places that were open were the bars and restaurants) before returning to the car and having lunch. Fortunately, the large amount of flat land around the edge of the town means there is plenty of room for car parks.

le Grande-Motte

Our intention was to visit this town, which is very much like Cap d’Agde in that it’s a seaside resort that was built in the 60s. Apparently a lot of thought was put into the design of the town, so that it didn’t end up like some of the Spanish Costas. Except that one thing they didn’t plan very well was signs for car parking.

We headed for the town centre, to find no spaces. And, as we headed out, the signs weren’t very well positioned, and we ended up going into a suburb of the town, effectively getting lost. And after it took 15 minutes to get back on the right road, we gave up. Of course, as we left the town we spotted a huge sign saying where all the car parks were, but of course it looked completely different to all of the other signs so we didn’t notice it.

Still, the town was twinned with Hornsea, a coastal town in East Yorkshire that I used to visit often with my grandparents when I was younger.

A building in Pezenas

Pézenas

Since it was mid-afternoon when we gave up on le Grande-Motte, we quickly raided the guide book for other places to visit. Pézenas came up – after all, it was only a slight detour from the route home, and it was recommended, so we gave it a try.

Most of the buildings date from the 17th century, and there’s a nice church there, along with a few pretty squares. My parents were more interested in the architecture, dragging me around various old buildings that had the odd carving on them. Not really my kind of thing, but they seemed to find it interesting.

Tuesday 1st July

A photo of the black granite church at Agde

Agde

Now would be a good time to explain about the Commne of Agde. The Commune consists of four localities: Agde (also known as La Cité d’Agde), Le Cap d’Agde, Le Grau d’Agde and La Tammarisière. They’re basically four towns/villages located near each other, run by the same council, which is good because the tourist office can encourage those visiting the Cap into visiting the other places.

Agde itself is considerably older than the Cap. Whereas the latter was built in the 60s, the main town has been around for over 2500 years, making it older than many places in the UK (even York is only 1932 years old, founded in AD71). That said, much of the town is considerably newer.

Photo of a sculpture in Agde

Most of the buildings are made out of local stone, which is basalt. The nearby Mont St-Loup, which overshadows the commune, is an extinct volcano, so the rock is all volcanic, hence the dark colour of most buildings. In fact, the cathedral looks like it’s been made out of glorified breeze-blocks, although it did have some nice stained glass windows to make up for it.

Like Sète, Agde has jousting competitions, and in fact during the time we were there the local jousting association was celebrating its 100th anniversary. The boats they used were out on the River H�rault, which is where the area gets its name.

A photo of le Grau d'Agde

Le Grau d’Agde

Another Grau, just down the road from Agde itself (‘grau’ indecently means the mouth of a river, or something like that). It’s similar to Le Grau du Roi in that it is also a fishing village, although it has more of a tourist trade. We hit the town during the market just before lunchtime, which was a mistake because seeing all the food out made me very hungry indeed. The town is also home to a number of very nice restaurants, with seating built out over the river.

To the other side of the river is La Tamarissière, a smaller village that is also part of the commune and linked by a ferry (the nearest bridge is further inland). It’s quite pretty but we didn’t get around to visiting it.

Wednesday 2nd July

A photo of the outer wall of Carcassone

Carcassonne

Last time I went to Carcassonne was in 1996, at the age of 12, so I still remember this place quite well. Like Aigues-Mortes, it is a walled city, although Carcassonne is much older. It is up on a hill-top, and very well preserved (dating back to Medieval times), and is a tourist magnet.

So, as you’d expect, even outside full season it was quite busy, not helped by the fact that the streets were very narrow and twisted. It was also full of shops selling tacky souvenirs like plastic swords, but also had many restaurants, which were actually surprisingly cheap. But then that’s probably the result of competition.

There is a castle in the very centre but there was a queue to get in, and I seem to remember we went there last time anyway, so we gave it a miss. Still, it was very nice to visit the place again. I’d love to show you more photos but I’m a little lacking on disk space.

Thursday 3rd July

Today we visited the thing that gave Le Cap d’Agde its name – The Cap. It’s outcrop of hard volcanic rock that stretches out into the sea, and the town has since been built around it. The town’s war memorial is built here, for example. Not hugely interesting but it did give us a chance to explore this end of the town.

Holiday write-up: Part I

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This is the first of several posts about what I did on my holidays, initially covering the first four days, with photos. Future posts will have the rest of write-up.

Thursday 26th June

Photo of a fountain in Reims

Reims

Reims (pronounced ‘remm’ but most English people say ‘reams’) was the first of our two overnight stops on the way down to the south coast. Having overestimated the delays on the roads (despite heavy traffic on the M11 and A14), we turned up at the motel at 4pm, giving us a whole 3 hours before dinner was served at the restaurant. Instead of vegetating in the hotel room, we went into the centre of the city, since it’s been a while since we last visited, apparently (I have no recollection of ever visiting it, but there you go).

Photo of the cathedral in Reims

Reims is regarded as being the capital of the Champagne region of France, home to that expensive fizzy alcoholic drink of the same name, so obviously there were a few champagne shops around. However the prices were about the same as we’d pay in England (and probably more than the Calais hypermarkets and wine warehouses would charge) so we passed on the opportunity to stock up. The city itself is nice, with many of the streets in the centre having been pedestrianised partially or entirely, so you don’t spend the whole time dodging traffic. The main square is quite pretty, and includes a fountain and a statue, along with shops and bars, most of which had tables out on the street as is customary in France (and increasingly over here too). It’s here that we stopped for a biere pression (beer from the tap) to recharge our batteries.

Reims is also home to a cathedral and various large department stores, which I had a brief dabble in, however I didn’t buy anything.

Friday 27th June

A photo of a giant steel chicken at le Poulet de Bresse service station in France

Touron and Tain l’Hermitage

Having left the motel in Reims, we headed down the motorways towards Valence, calling off at the amusingly named le Poulet de Bresse service area on the way – literally translated it means ‘the chicken of Bresse’ and this fact was reinforced by a large steel sculpture of a hen overlooking the picnic area. Bresse, by the way, referred to the nearby town of Bourg-en-Bresse.

Photo of Tournon and the bridge across the river Rhône

After lunch, we pulled off the motorway (having sneakily avoided Lyon on a new motorway that had only been open 6 days), we arrived at Tain l’Hermitage and its sister twon Touron. These two towns are located either side of the river Rhône, one of the widest in Europe and one of only a few to end in a delta. Tain l’Hermitage is the smaller of the two, and is home to the Crozes Hermitage wine variety. Stocking up with 6 bottles of the stuff from the Cave Cooperative is the main reason for stopping here, but Touron is a nice town to spend a short amount of time in. There is a wooden footbridge linking the two towns, and Touron has a castle and a few older timber framed buildings. Again, we made use of the bar facilities, before heading south to Valence for our second overnight stop.

Saturday 28th June

A photo of the town of Sète in France

Sète

We ended up at Sète after visiting probably the largest hypermarket I’ve ever seen in Avignon. We didn’t intend to go to Sète today but we got fed up of the slow-moving traffic on the motorway around Montpellier and pulled off onto the older coast road, which happens to pass through the town.

Sète can be best described as the French equivalent of Scarborough, a rather jolly British seaside town just up the road from my home town of York. Except Sète has nicer weather and a canal running through it, and it has water jousting.

A photo of some water jousting at Sète

Now, anyone who has seen films about Camelot, or has been to the British theme park with the same name (I haven’t), will know that jousting is usually two knights in armour on horseback with long poles and shields, and the aim is to ‘poke’ the other knight off his horse as the two approach each other. Now apply the same principle, but remove the armour, change the horse into a boat and slow the whole process down somewhat, and you have water jousting. And being a Saturday afternoon during the early part of the tourist season, the locals were out doing it. It’s quite fun to watch, particularly when one of the jousters falls off in a ridiculous way, or, as sometimes happens, they both lose. The activity is obviously part of the town’s heritage as there’s even a prominent statue up in the middle of the town heralding the sport.

While this occupied most of our time here, we did have a brief wander around the rest of the town, which is mostly home to posh holiday flats and seafood restaurants. And some very large seaward pleasure boats.

A photo of the sea view from our apartment window in Cap d'Agde

Cap d’Agde

And, finally, we had arrived. It took us some time to actually find the apartment block that we were booked into as, in the typical French tradition, the signs for it disappeared just as we started to get close. Well, okay, they didn’t disappear but were positioned such that you only saw them once you’d turned to go in the wrong direction. But, anyway, we arrived.

Photo of the Mail de Rochelongue

The ‘residence’, as it is known, was called Les Rivages de Rochelongue (Rochelongue being the ‘suburb’ of Cap d’Agde that we were staying in), and to be honest, we’d have been hard-pressed to find a better place. The photo I’ve included here is the actual view from our balcony, which is certainly a par with the view we got when we were in Barbados three years ago. As you can tell, the beach is within staggering distance and the pool is even closer. There’s also a good variety of shops, bars and restaurants literally next door in the Mail de Rochelongue, which is the main street in the area. It also has a most superb ice cream stall, with something like 90 different flavours on offer, including a very nice lavender flavour which I’d never seen anywhere before.

Sunday 29th June

Not wishing to exert ourselves too much after such a long drive down, we spent the morning exploring the town and the afternoon slouched out on the beach.

Going Away

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This will probably be my last entry before I go away on my holidays. Just about everything is packed up now (and in fact it all fits in the car remarkably well), so we’re all set for an early start tomorrow morning. We’re due to leave here at about 4:30am so that we can be in Folkestone for a 11am crossing through the Channel Tunnel. The AA reckons it’ll take us 4 hours and 23 minutes, but bearing in mind we’ll be travelling through rush hour, and will probably need to stop off for breakfast (usually at Bishop’s Stortford on the M11), we’re leaving some extra time. Admittedly we’ll hit rush hour while travelling on some rural stretches of the A1, but still, there’s the M25 and the Dartford Crossing to negotiate. Glad it’s not me that’s driving, but then I can’t drive, so that really is a good thing 🙂 .

Andy will hopefully pop in occasionally to review and publish any comments you guys leave. All that’s left to say is: see you in 2 weeks!

My first Amazon purchase

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The cover of the book 'Just for Fun' by Linus Torvalds.

Call me strange, but despite having been an internet user for over 4 years now, I have never bought anything from Amazon (sponsored link). Until now.

I ordered the book “Just For Fun” (sponsored link) by Linux creator Linus Torvalds last night, and it’s due to arrive tomorrow morning. I’ve read bits of it in bookshops (although nowhere in Bradford appears to sell it) and decided to go out and buy it. After all it is my birthday on Sunday.

Talking of money, now that I can get back into my PayPal account (after my two week hiatus), you can now donate money to me, if you are feeling generous. Although I’m on track to finish the year with at least £600 in my current account, any extra will be gladly accepted.

Okay, I’ll stop begging now 🙂 .