So, Live Eight was formally announced today after a few weeks of rumours.

It’s interesting to see how the papers are reporting it. From the speculation around the Spice Girls :

Spice Girls reunion unlikely

“The Spice Girls offered their services but they don’t fit the bill,” a BBC source told the Daily Mirror. “With all respect to them, Live Aid II isn’t Party In The Park.”

To Bob Geldof’s calls for the Pope to join in :

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Music | Geldof unveils Live 8 show plans

Geldof told reporters in London that he had asked for the support of Pope Benedict XVI.

“I think he should turn up. It would be his first gig,” he said.

Whatever happens the fact is this. To double our expenditure on the people these concerts would cost you and me the price of half a piece of chewing gum.

Good luck Bob.

Posted by Mark at 8:17 PM | Permalink

This place has a thing about goats.

It’s the county show and we arrived early after a trip on the double decker bus, right at the front for the best views. Joanne, Richard and me one side, Daddy on the other side with what Richard called a “dolly bird” sitting next to him. No telling Fhai ….

We spent the day wandering the show, judging cattle and trying all the food and drink on offer. The hot tubs were a little too big for the back gardens we decided but we like the cars on the Alfa stall so perhaps when it’s time to change the Golf we may have found a replacement.

After picking up a plant for Fhai we came back to Thai food feast with chocolate cake and custard to finish. Everyone was really tired and even Daddy had to have his pudding on the sofa.

A great day out.

Posted by Mark at 11:47 PM | Permalink

Today I at least feel that I can get up and walk around which is just as well as it's Karen's birthday and we all went out for a meal.

There seems to be something about me and car parks this week. I had to go into the town to pick up a few things and I decided to drive rather than walk. I got to the barrier at the car park, pressed the button for a ticket and the machine said, car park full. I waited, a few cars came out and tried again, still full. Then again, and again. All the time cars are getting in on the other lanes and people behind me are begining to get irate. Turned out that the thing had run out of tickets so more waiting for a man with a box of tickets to fix the problem.

The presents seem to go down well and we had a nice meal at the old water mill. Despite it being local I'd never been inside and the last time I was there was to drop Karen off for a meal over ten years ago.

So, that's it for another year and once again I'm not the oldest :-)

Posted by Mark at 11:24 PM | Permalink

I don't know if it was the stress of yesterday or something I ate but boy do I feel ill today. I slept most of the morning and managed to make it out in the car to get something for Karen's birthday. Problem was when I got back to the car the radio worked, the lights worked but no way would the ignition. After a call to the VW breakdown line (which seems to have relocated to India) a lot of spelling of street names and car park names I sat around listening to the afternoon play until the AA appeared. I really don't know why I bother with the VW Assistance as out of the 3 times I've called them a bloke in a VW, with VW parts has only appeared once.

Anyhow, the AA chap prodded and poked and declared it was a dead battery. After 15 minutes of getting authorisation to swap the battery (which they didn't charge for) and a 10 minute "discussion" with the car park operative as my ticket was no longer valid at the barrier I was on my way home...

Posted by Mark at 6:46 PM | Permalink

Well, a long stressy day and I’d figured, somehow, I’d left them all behind. Maybe this time I will.

Tonight, outside on the patio, with beer, music and the laptop, watching the bats and playing Formula Fuelers.

Posted by Mark at 11:43 PM | Permalink

I’ve always admired Kirsty Wark’s work and the recent programmes on BBC4 are no different. Last week it was Barcelona, this week it was Greece, a place I know little about.

This programme uncovered so many interesting people and so many stories.

Yiannis Boutaris and his brother worked in the vineyards their Grandfather started until in 1996 he left to start his own winery, Kir-Yiann specialising in select wines and, it seems, he left to some success.

KIR YIANNI

“His ‘97 Ramnista is intoxicating with fruit and spice, a heady experience, and this is the first commercial release.”

That in itself would be an achievement except that Yiannis is a recovered alcoholic who cannot drink what he produces. Suprised ? Well, that suprise is compounded by the fact that Time awarded him their European Hero 2003 Award for his work establishing a sanctuary for rescued dancing bears.

“‘What are you going to do?’ they would say. ‘Drop your grapes to save the bears?’” and that, in effect he did.

“We’ve been pioneers,” says Boutaris, 60, “not because we’ve done something unique, but because we altered people’s attitudes about the environment here.” Better yet, he adds, “we did so without hysterics.”

Aris Georgiou, founder of the Thessaloniki Photosynkyria festival and the first director of the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography was a name I really didn’t know but his photography amazed me. Stark, amazing images like this one.

Perhaps the last thing you would want to put in front of your children is a book by a Professor of Criminolgy but Eugene Trivzas’s book The Last Black Cat captured me from the small extract which was read.

WHSmith: Welcome: The Last Black Cat: Trivizas, Eugene

Our hero, the black cat, has only ever worried about stealing fish and wooing the beautiful Graziella, until the fateful night when he witnesses a fellow cat being kidnapped. It’s just the beginning; horrific abductions of cats are taking place all over the island, and soon, not only black cats, but all cats are being pursued. A sinister society has corrupted the government and plans to make a fortune selling mousetraps once the cats are gone. They come close to succeeding and it looks as though only one black cat remains. But with help from his friends, the last black cat foils the horrible plan - and finds there’s last female black cat still around too!

It’s an allegory about prejudice and superstition, where black cats are marked for elimination by a secret sect that considers them bad luck. You can see why he’s so successful, with over 100 titles to his name and why children and adults alike both enjoy his work.

The final revelation for me of this program was rembetiko, a Greek form of urban blues performed in lowclass joints where the social misfits of the twenties known as “rembetes” gathered. There’s a few samples, courtesy of Amazon, here.

All in all an amazing programme.

Kalinihta ! [1]

¹ Good night in Greek…

Posted by Mark at 10:06 PM | Permalink

"Ahh, she needs a wireless network", Karen had told me, so off I went tonight to see her friend Trisha and check out what was needed.

It turned out major surgery was needed. No up to date antivirus; a firewall turned off; loads of malware; email which doesn't work and no backup of the source of all knowledge for her business.

It's easy to see where most of her issues come from when you look to see the sites her son's been visiting. The search for MSN addins and smileys probably didn't find anything too interesting but it did come with all the added fun of 50 odd viri and lumps of malware.

After trying to fix her copy of Norton (unsupported and 3 years old) I gave up and put Grisoft on instead, turned on the Firewall and ran Ad-aware.

Three hours later having watched the footy on the TV I came back home to a trip to the Chinese at the top of the road. All up my street you could hear parties out in the gardens and beer being drunk.

The celebrations at Liverpool's win looked good on the TV as I waited for my order. "Been a great game. Where's Milan ?" asked the chap as he handed me the bag.

Posted by Mark at 11:44 PM | Permalink

A little while ago I posed the question of when the birthday of this place was.

I was reading David Allen's blog today and noticed a link to Arianna Huffington's blog, which seems to have caused a stir in the general blogsphere.

What made me laugh was the strap line, "DELIVERING NEWS AND OPINION SINCE MAY 9, 2005".

Not even three weeks, a stirling service indeed.

Posted by Mark at 8:37 PM | Permalink

Arutz Sheva - Israel National News

“In the copper scroll, the first five lines say, ‘In the desolations of the Valley of Achur, in the opening under the ascent, which is a mountain facing eastward, covered by forty placed boulders - here is a tabernacle and all the golden fixtures’”

Is this really where the Ark is located and will the man who is supposidly the model for Indiana Jones find it this year ?

This is actually a really interesting article, even down to the fact that the name of God is never written in full.

All very Indiana Jones.

Posted by Mark at 8:00 PM | Permalink

Today turned into a film day as I didn't have much else on and the weather here was awful.

I went to see Kingdom of Heaven which had all the great camera work of a Ridley Scott movie, the great use of light and rich colours.

The more I watched it the more I wanted to go to Essaouira and wander around the old town.

Posted by Mark at 7:44 PM | Permalink

I live in a one way street which last night became a racetrack. Only problem was the chap doing the racing lost control and managed to take out two cars.

After a comedy moment when he tried to pull “his” car (untaxed, back window broken) back, not noticing the nearside wheel was snapped off, he decided it was better to run off.

So, a fun night of calling for the police, waiting, statements and then cleaning up.

Posted by Mark at 8:23 AM | Permalink

I finally tracked down someone who knows a little more than me about Sharepoint. On a call today he proudly announced that to make this product look like a corporate website it would take 500 lines of code and that, after many hours, they had almost finished it.

I can’t help but think there’s loads of products out there which would do it in 50 lines…

Posted by Mark at 6:20 PM | Permalink

I miss Barcelona, I guess it started reading Shadow of the Wind. Tonight the excellent Tales from Spain made the longing worse.

The pictures of the rooftops and squares, the harbour and Las Ramblas just made it all worse.

It's a great city, perhaps it's time to revisit it..

Buonas noches.

Posted by Mark at 10:24 PM | Permalink

There's a clear market for people who know Sharepoint, the problem is that I don't want it to be me.

Maybe with another look at it tomorrow I can figure out the missing bits.. then again perhaps not ...

Posted by Mark at 8:43 PM | Permalink

I finally got home and sorted early enough to see Richard and pass on his presents.

It being a birthday we managed a little drink, a laze on the floor and a lot of fun with the new Brio Builder.

Brio stuff is really well designed with easy to use tools, parts which are well made and which link together in all kinds of ways and easy to follow plans to make the models from.

I’m really impressed how well Richard’s taken to it and we gave up on the formal plans and decided to make a drag car with a crane instead.

Not the usual mix of form and function but even on the carpet it went fast…

Posted by Mark at 11:16 PM | Permalink

The strange case of the Piano Man just highlights what the human mind is capable of doing.

BBC NEWS | UK | Fantastic response to ‘piano man’

The man has not said a word since police picked him up wandering the streets of Sheerness, Kent, in a soaking wet suit and tie on 7 April.

The man’s talent came to light after staff at the Medway Maritime Hospital gave him a pen and paper in the hope he would write his name.

Instead the patient, dubbed The Piano Man, drew very detailed pictures of a grand piano.

The man shocked staff with a performance of classical music after Mr Camp showed him the piano in the hospital’s chapel.

Mr Camp said: “When we took him to the chapel piano it really was amazing. He has not spoken since the day we picked him up.

“He does not make any sounds but I think I can communicate with him through tiny nods.”

The man has since written music, which has been verified as genuine.

Mr Camp added: “It is extraordinary. The first time we took him down to the piano he played for several hours, non-stop.”

Several lines of inquiry have been followed, and the hospital brought in interpreters to see if the mystery patient was from Eastern Europe.

He is now being held in a secure mental health unit in north Kent while an assessment is carried out. Mr Camp said he was “extremely distressed” and may have suffered a trauma.

Let’s hope it’s solved soon. Somwhere people must be worried about such a talented man.

Posted by Mark at 8:51 PM | Permalink

Well the Americans are back today for strike two at the upgrade and training. All the pre-visit planning has been done and today it was down to getting things done and on the whole it's been a successful day.

I can't say I'm used to getting up, suited and booted, and driving to an office but in a way it's nice to be back and learning.

Posted by Mark at 11:26 PM | Permalink

Summer day, hot weather, the village high street blocked off and all the fun and friendliness of a summer fayre. The Morris Men were out, well fuelled on local beer and cider, along with musicians, jugglers and two people dressed up as something from the Muppets (they were actually very funny and stole the show).

There was loads of food on offer from burgers to pancakes, to homemade jams and pesto plus the chance to talk to all the people who produce it.

As the stalls ran out the local shops took over with one of the few old bookshops benefiting from loads of people browsing and me picking up the odd sable brush….

Posted by Mark at 8:16 PM | Permalink

Every wonder how you come across ?

On balance, I don’t think I did that well ….

Posted by Mark at 11:32 PM | Permalink

BBC NEWS | Technology | Developers to play with BBC wares

The BBC is giving web developers and designers outside of the organisation access to its content so that they can “create cool new things”.

Called backstage.bbc.co.uk, it gives people who create computer programs, applications or graphics the chance to put their stamp on BBC digital content.

There’s some really cool stuff at Backstage. Rebotcast is a prototype which turns the BBC World news feed into a Podcast which can be read to you.

Check it out for some other very cool ideas.

Posted by Mark at 6:12 PM | Permalink

There was a brilliant documentary tonight on BBC 4 about life on India’s railways during the monsoon season.

The scale of the railway in this continent is staggering :

• it’s the biggest civil employer in the world with 1.5 million employees
• one station, Kharagpur, has the longest railway platform in the world, at one kilometer in length
• 11 million people travel every day on the railways
• bureaucracy runs the railways with 12 thousand different forms being used to control every aspect of railway life
• Every day 1 million people travel through Howrah station
• The current Indian Railways Minister’s first act on coming into office was to ban plastic beakers for drinks, so re-employing hundreds of potters who supplied china mugs to the railway

Posted by Mark at 3:35 PM | Permalink

At last I have access to a Sharepoint server to play with.

I kind of fell into saying I’d look at Sharepoint for work after meeting a chap who wanted to implement a Quality Management System on it. As we don’t have anything like a website, document management or even a shared calendar for the team this seemed to be the fastest way to set those up.

Ok, well it did until I started to play with it. It’s far from intuitive and whilst you can get some of the way without programming I think you need to have some knowledge of things like Biztalk to get any real value from it.

At the moment I’m laying out the pages and adding in the default webparts. I need to find somone whose done this before and who understands it all …

Posted by Mark at 7:35 PM | Permalink

Tonight : Huddled into the corner of the patio to get the last of the sun over the rooftops opposite with a bowl of rice and prawns, the Sunday Times Review and a little music playing on the laptop. I need an hours more sun to let me sit out and read.

Posted by Mark at 7:45 PM | Permalink

I can’t beleive it’s Monday already. Where did the week end go to ?

Posted by Mark at 8:34 PM | Permalink

Sixty years ago today war ended in Europe. After so much darkness, the lights came on again over London, rations had been saved for the street parties and people put aside overalls to dress up and take to the streets.

It’s unusual these days for a single act to unite everyone across a country but at that moment no one seemed to be untouched. Everyone had lost someone in the war, everyone had suffered rationing, some restriction in liberty and listened at night to the sounds of the bombers. It’s hard to understand what that all meant and harder to understand the joy at being free from it all.

True war wasn’t yet over, as Churchill said that day, “We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing; but let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead”. For us that was the war in the Far East but for many VE day meant the replacement of one tyranical regime with another.

For much of Eastern Europe VE day started the clock ticking towards the Communist era. The long years of the supression of free speach and free thinking, the rise of the gulags.

Now, mercifully, many of the Communist states have been overthrown. Whilst Russia is still wracked by corruption and murder it is making a slow, but painful, progress to democracy. Maybe at last, all these years on, we can see the peace and hope on the horizon that everyone hoped for that May day sixty years ago today.

Posted by Mark at 9:20 PM | Permalink

Today was the local transport festival so we went along to check out the cars and lorries. We were looking for a new sports car for me but in the end got talking to an 80 year old lady about her life in Glasgow next to the Singer sewing machine factory and wondering where all the engineers had gone in this country.

There was really too much to see in the time we had so Richard and I wandered off to do the more modern cars and heard how a man in a brand new Jaguar, talking on the phone, drove into the side of 1950’s Morris Minor police car, ripping off it’s rear bumper. As the lady owner said, “This is nothing, you should have seen the mess it made of his car”.

In the end the storm hit us and we had to hide under one of the sideshow stalls to escape the hail stones before we ran back to the van for a warm trip home.

Posted by Mark at 5:04 PM | Permalink

Out today to the Tate Gallery in London to see the Turner Whistler Monet exhibition.

I never knew before how much these three painters shared, both in terms of subject matter, but also in terms of tragedy in their lives. The overall theme of the exhibition was the pollution of London and the effect that the great smogs had on these painters.

There was some really interesting works here including Whistler’s Nocturne: Grey and Gold — Westminster Bridge and Monet’s pictures of Venice, like the Doge’s Palace.

Whilst all three painters loved water and the effect of light, and pollution on it, for two it proved to be the setting for loosing their partners. For Whistler, staying with his dying wife in the Savoy Hotel whilst painting the Thames proved too much and with her death he never painted the Thames again. For Monet, it was the canals of Venice, a trip he took only at his wife’s insistance. Her death meant that the paintings he completed have a sad air, as if trying to re-capture that time with her. He never went abroad again.

After the exhibition I walked back into the City along the Thames. This part of London is known as Millbank, because it used to have mill here as well as a famous jail. This was used to house prisoners before they were sent to Australia. That was demolished many years ago to build the Tate.

The most exciting thing along here now is in Victoria Tower Gardens, a Gothic Revival drinking fountain with a brightly covered spire which easily outshines the Houses of Parliament at the end of the small park.

London was full of tourists, many of whom were standing around looking confused at the rehearsals for tomorrow’s VE day celebrations in Trafalgar Square.

When I walked past Katherine Jenkins was busy with a big band and orchestra going through the finer points of “The White Cliffs of Dover”. Something tells me on the night Vera will walk in to take over…

Posted by Mark at 11:56 PM | Permalink

After too long a break Lad’s night is back. With an even more confusing selection of games at the CBBC site, a stack of CDs to listen to and box or two of beer it’s been a great end to a long week.

Posted by Mark at 11:50 PM | Permalink

“Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia” Tours England, France, and Germany - Persian Journal Latest Iran news & Iranian Newspaper

The exhibition, which aims to introduce people to the culture, art, and civilization of Achaemenids, is the largest ever on Ancient Persia, the wealthiest empire in the Ancient Near East (from 550 BC to 330 BC). The historical items have been selected by a joint team of Iranian, English, French, and German experts from collections in possession of Iran’s National Museum, the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Vorderasiatisches (Ancient Near East Antiquities) Museum in Berlin. Representing features of the art and civilization of the Achaemenids of Iran have been the central concept for the selection.

This looks really good and it’s due to arrive in London at the British Museum this September. A great opportunity to learn about one of the great empires of the world.

Posted by Mark at 7:50 PM | Permalink

At last the results are in from the Webby Awards and it’s nice to see so many of the sites I have enjoyed over the last year or so receive the recongnition that they deserve.

• In the automotive section, the excellent Mercedes-Benz site

• In best navigation/structure the ever cool 10×10

• Best celebrity, Jamie Oliver

• Best practices, Google

There’s loads of great sites, both winners and close runners up, so check them all out here.

Posted by Mark at 8:10 PM | Permalink

Please find below your Mileage and Tier Point Balance.

----------------------
BA Miles: 21305
Tier Points: 20
----------------------

We need to plan a trip....

Posted by Mark at 8:49 PM | Permalink

The sun drove us out from under Fhai’s feet today to explore.

We went to the model railway first for a ride behind one of the steam engines and a walk around the lake. We then went for the one of the longest drives in history to cover such a small distance.

After a lot of bad directions we stopped at the harbour for a meal, sitting out on the balcony in the sun watching the boats move up and down the estuary. The food was nice and the beer nicer, Guiness and Kronenbourg White. After fish and chips and a burger we headed off to see the Abbey to make daisy chains and check out the ruins for lost Knights. See the pictures here.

Posted by Mark at 7:09 PM | Permalink

Out today with Karen, Elizabeth and Alex to watch the Civil War re-enactment at the local ruin to celebrate May Day. Despite living close to it for ages I’ve never been to one of these events.

The sun, and the beer festival, brought loads of people out to watch the armies fight, the cap followers cook in front of their tents and the dead from the battle be raised by the magic of applause.

It’s amazing the attention to detail these people put into the whole event and the willingness to talk about the battles and the history. See the pictures here.

After checking out the local pub we headed home for football, tricks on bikes and Sunday roast.

Posted by Mark at 11:15 PM | Permalink