I took Friday afternoon off and went down to Bristol to see an old friend from university this weekend - had an excellent time! Here’s a summary:

• Found out some great news
• Dunk lots of good beer, including Butcombe Bitter and Smiles Best
• Somehow managed to find a lock-in on both Friday and Saturday night (in two separate pubs)
• Had a very funny night in fact on Saturday!
• Listened to Miles Davis Kind of Blue
• Watched some of the Olympics (perhaps not a highlight of the weekend), including the whole of the Women’s Marathon.
• Watched two very different films on Sunday while nursing a sore head:
  • A really, really weird Japanese film called
    Batoru rowaiaru (Battle Royale). This is worth a watch if you don’t mind a bit of violence.
  • and a rather odd French film called 8 femmes Probably not my first choice of film, but if you’re learning French then it may be useful…
• And I got to see Bristol, which is a first for me.

Anyway, the journey there was awful (M4 and Reading don’t mix), and while the journey back was traffic-free, my route was slightly less then conventional and it took way to long!

So now it’s back to the grindstone

Got lots done today. Have been working on a news portal web site today, and it’s all falling in to place nicely. I don’t like working on CMS/admin systems as a rule, but it’s good when it all starts working. This should be a good site Anyway it’s been a long day so time for my bed now. Hooray!

It’s half past six. I had my ‘lunch’ about an hour ago, and am so hungry I’m going to have a pizza. Then I’ve got to get on with work. I’m really far behind on a web site that needs to be finished by the end of the month. There are just not enough hours in the day! God I need a holiday.

I’ve been looking at the RPC interface to Ping-O-Matic, as it pings loads of sites when you update your blog. WordPress does this automatically for me on this blog, but I’m going to have to work out how to do it myself for BritBlog. Alas, I can’t find any documentation for it

Still, should be able to look at the code of WordPress to see what’s going on Thank you Open Source Software!

Why do people have to drive around with their bright headlights on all the time? Headlights seem to be getting brighter and brighter all the time, and they’re a bloody pain in the backside!

A large number of offenders are these people that drive around in 4×4s and people carriers. I guess the reason it seems to cause a problem is that their lamps are higher up, so they shine directly into your car when they come up behind you.

But the twats that speed down the motorway with front spots on and headlights on full beam/foglights on should all be lined up and shot. I agree it’s nice to be able to light up the road in front of you, but these people should really have some consideration for others. grumble grumble.

Still, been quite a productive day today, though wasn’t as early a start as I’d have liked. Was up and working by 6:45 AM on Monday and by 7:45 on Tuesday. Lack of sleep finally caught up with me this morning though, and I didn’t really start ’till half nine. I need a holiday!

Been getting some 404s generated by a bot claiming to be googlebot. According to Whois Source, this address is owned by Google. So what is their bot doing making up random requests? I guess they are seeking out XML feeds, but you’d think they would look for feeds linked to from the page in the header meta tags…

Anyway, I’ve made some modifications to my .htaccess file. Boy this file is getting long now!

RewriteRule ^mark/blog/feed/rss2/atom.xml$ /mark/blog/feed/atom/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^mark/blog/atom.xml$ /mark/blog/feed/atom/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^mark/blog/rss.xml$ /mark/blog/feed/rss2/ [R=301,L]

Right, I’m going to give this WordPress thing a go. I was planning on waiting for a PostgreSQL port, but it looks like that will take for ever to arrive. So I’ve gone for the MySQL version.

Initial thoughts:

• The interface is very comprihensive, and at the same time very cluttered.
• There seems to be a few errors popping up, and it looks like code that isn’t finished.
• I don’t like the fact that everything is dynamic (created on the fly). It doesn’t really need to be, and because it seems to do so many queries against the database, it’s not exactly quick. I woud rather see WordPress creating static files (or includes so that they can be used with a dynamic template). The other option would be to cache data in a file so that it doesn’t need to be got from the db.
• I don’t like the fact that you can’t assign blog info values to variables. All you can do is print them straight out. This makes some customization rather hard.

Now as the documentation is so poor, I may have picked up on things that aren’t really problems. I’ll post my thoughts to the forum and see what they say…

Had a good time in Cambridge. I was staying with some friends who have just bought a house in a pleasant little village just outside of the town. Within two hours of me arriving we all found ourselves locked out of the house, which could have been slightly awkward. However, like true piss-heads, we managed to make the most of it. We.d already had some G&Ts, so we went to the pub and had a swift half of local ale, while making use of the amenities. After a quick stop in the local shop to stock up on wine (with screw tops), it was off to the train station for us as we set out in pursuit of the spare front door key.

The journey to King.s Lynn was swift, and we managed to ration the wine well. Luckily P.s parents live half an hour.s drive from here, and her father kindly met us there with the spare front door key. 40 minutes later we were back in Cambridge (with empty bottles of wine), and we managed to make it to the engagement party as intended (albeit slightly later).

Had to get up at 6:30 this morning to finish some work off for a client (and have it ready for him at 9.00 AM). Urgh, I think I may go back to bed now!

*By the way, I don’t really take psychedelic chemicals.