Year: 2006

As you may know, Sal and I take a lot of photos (in 2004, my folder of JPEGs tells me, we notched up about 1,000 shots–last year, it was somewhere closer to 2,000).

For a while now I’ve been uploading a selection on a fairly regular basis to my other webspace, but I’ve never been totally happy with this–I’ve only got 250MB to play with, for a start, so I could never put the original images up, always resized versions, and I found the gallery software to be a bit clunky, to say the least.

Anyway, to remedy this, I’ve been looking around for a new solution, and I’ve opted for Flickr. It’s not perfect, but it does most of the things I want it to do (including being another outlet for me to keep backups of my precious photos–or at least the important ones–in case my ageing laptop decides to stop working one of these days).

So, from now on, I’ll be posting photos to my new Flickr photo stream. There’s only photos back as far as the start of February at the moment, but I’ll gradually be uploading the last couple of years worth of photos over the next few weeks.

It’s got some nice little features:
– I quite like this calendar view, for example
– and you can subscribe to an RSS feed, if you like, to see new photos as I upload them
– of course it does slide shows

– and, best of all, it stores the full original images, so you can always click “All Sizes” above a picture, and then look at the “large” or “original” version.

…here’s some links to some things some other people wrote.

– In Pope/Catholic/bear/woods news, it turns out that Estate Agents (especially Foxtons Estate Agents) are lying, cheating, scumbags.

– Privacy-related bug in Firefox breaks up relationship.

– And you must surely have seen this by now. Would it be wrong of me to speculate whether this was ever actually genuinely posted on their site, or whether it’s just a clever bit of viral marketing?

I’ve been watching quite a bit of the Commonwealth Games. I mean, yeah, it’s slightly embarrassing to admit, because I know it’s a really pointless tournament, and most of the best athletes in the world aren’t actually taking part, but as it’s taking place in Sal’s home town, we’ve had the BBC coverage on quite a bit. Last night we watched a fair bit of the marathon, which had been designed to show off the city of Melbourne by winding its way through many of the parks, the city centre, and the likes of St Kilda, and the waterfront at South Melbourne, all of which I’d imagine is rather more interesting if you know the places (rather like I might watch the London marathon entirely for the minor joy of going “Oh Look! It’s Tooley Street! That’s Right By My Office!”).

At the end of the men’s race, the BBC commentators were anxiously awaiting the arrival into the MCG of the British runner, Dan Robinson, who was on course to finish in third place. They were rather surprised, then, to see another runner enter the stadium first, wearing the colours of Mauritius. Funnily enough, we’d noticed this chap too and wondered what he was doing. Perhaps he’d skipped a bit of the race?

Commentator: Er, I’m not quite sure what’s happening here. We’ve been watching this race from the start, and there’s no way that this guy can be in third place.
[Dan Robinson enters the stadium]
Commentator: And here is Dan Robinson…. And unless something has gone very wrong he’s on course for the bronze… We’re still trying to work out what’s happened…
[Pause. Cut back to footage Mauritian athlete.]

Commentator: Ah. That’s actually one of the women runners…

Sal I couldn’t stop laughing for about 5 minutes…

Being a responsible technical author type, who likes to keep up with the latest developments in the world of DocBook, the XML standard I use for my work, I subscribe to the DocBook mailing list.

According to the minutes of the most recent committee meeting, someone who sits in on the meetings is called “Sandi Castle”:

> —–Original Message—–
> From: Bob Stayton
> To: docbook@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: [docbook] DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes: 15 March 2006
>
(snip)
>
> 1. Roll call
>
> Present: Steve Cogorno, Gary Cornelius, Paul Grosso, Mark Johnson, Dick Hamilton, Nancy Harrison, Scott Hudson, Gershon Joseph, Jirka Kosek, Larry Rowland, Bob Stayton, Norman Walsh
>
> Absent: Adam Di Carlo, Kay Ethier, Alex Povzner
>
> Observers: Sandi Castle

Fantastic…

We have a random switch in our flat.

It’s one of those switches with a red light on it, to indicate whether it’s on or off, as if it controls its own circuit, (like it’s something to do with the heating, or it turns an oven on or off, or something).

It’s by the door, but it doesn’t appear to control anything that is close to it, and if I switch it on and off it has no obvious immediate effect.

It’s been switched on since we moved in. Last night I switched it off, and I plan to leave it off until I work out what’s stopped working…

What can it be?

One of the more interesting events to occur during our brief stay in Melbourne took place on our final day there, when we went along to watch one of Sal’s good friends buying a house.

Generally the Aussies don’t go in for all that gazumping and gazundering nonsense that often happens when houses are bought and sold over here. Instead, they prefer to get the whole thing over with rather quickly–the majority of houses in Australia appear to be sold by public auction, which usually takes place out in the street just in front of the property. I’d seen this on Neighbours (and yes, Rob, you’re right, there is something worryingly fascinating about the “10 years ago today” bit on that website), but never in the flesh. So, when Sal’s friend Elise said that she was planning to take her first steps onto the property ladder courtesy of an apartment in leafy Ascot Vale, I was extremely excited about the prospect of going along to watch. (And try to resist the urge to scratch my nose / raise my hand / let my random number tourettes cause a scene in public).

It was a very sunny Saturday morning, and we turned up a few minutes earlier so we could have a look inside. Well, Sal and I did, at least–I’m not suggesting that Elise was planning to buy a property purely on the basis of a 5 minute viewing before the auction.

After we’d had a sufficient gawp, we headed back outside to take up a spot on the street under the shade of the trees, and watched as a chubby estate agent appeared and began ringing a big hand bell to announce the imminent event. Shortly afterwards, his younger, slicker, estate agent mate kicked things off with a few words to warm the crowd up, and a couple of gentle “one careful lady owner” style white lies about the property and its owners–he didn’t know that we knew that the girl who owned the place had been at the same school as Elise, making it rather unlikely that there was any truth at all to his claim that the vendor had lived there “for 10 years” and was “moving on to somewhere bigger” (we later found out that the actual reason for the sale was the fact that she had in fact split up with her boyfriend and they had to sell to pay off the mortgage; for some reason he didn’t mention that interesting snippet at any point during the auction).

But we were off. Well, the auction had started, at least, even if no one was ready to leap in with their bids just yet. (“Anyone want to start me off…? No, they never do, do they…”)

When the bids did come, the auctioneer did a sterling job of managing things, by making ever more ridiculous statements, implying that he was just about to sell and that this was your very “last chance” to get in with a new bid more times than I could count. He even went away with his mate “to talk to the vendor” at one point in a shameless attempt to drum up some tension.

But happily Sal’s friend managed to get her house in the end, thanks to some sterling bidding by her dad, who held off just long enough before putting in his first bid, and carried on strongly from that point onwards to make it look like they had all the room in the world in their budget, even though this wasn’t actually the case. Luckily, it was even less the case for one of the rival couples, who actually had to walk away before the end of the auction having clearly already gone beyond their limit, and not wanting to do something they might regret. After that, it looked like our friend might have it at just on her target, when right at the last second a guy at the back chipped in offering an extra $500–his sole bid of the day–and she had to go up again. Yeah, thanks for that mate, you just cost them $1500…

And so I find myself back at my desk, following a somewhat lengthy return journey on Sunday, the second half of which took place on a very hot, very full, Singapore Airlines jumbo on which, gasp! the on demand entertainment system wasn’t working properly and kept having to be reset, resulting in among other things, a 20 minute break to my viewing of that journey’s episode of Kath and Kim (thanks to the rotating selections on their entertainment system, over the course of the 40,000 odd miles we’ve flown with them in the last few months, I’ve nearly seen a whole series of consecutive episodes of this now. It’s possible that buying the DVD might have offered a cheaper and marginally more convenient alternative, though.

As always, by the time I get round to writing about it, it’s as if I’ve never been away.

But of course I have, and I have the photos to prove it. We were mostly in Australia this time for the occasion of Sally’s brother’s wedding, which he most inconsiderately opted to hold a mere 3 months after our last trip (surely it would have been the least he could do to have had it in November, when we were there for a whole month…) But no: the Friday before last I struggled into my suit on a sweltering 35 degree day as we sat out on the terrace at the Crown casino to watch the service, (which was presided over, I was very excited to discover, by a celebrant who had previously officiated at the wedding of Lou Carpenter on Neighbours).

The rest of our all too brief stay mostly consisted of eating and drinking, but there were a few highlights I might write about properly if I get the chance.

We even found time to catch up with Alex for lunch and shopping [for the record, by the way, we did indeed make it to the music shop in time to purchase the banjo, thus saving the day for Sally’s dad’s birthday–we got him the “Fender value starter pack” in the end, which contains just about everything you need to get started with that most peculiar of string instruments (although when I asked the chap in the shop if this included a sixth finger, he just laughed and said he hadn’t been to Tassie in a while…)].

Jordan and Andre,
With entourage and filming,
walking up some stairs

Far be it from me to suggest that some minor celebrities are now so desperate for attention that they are actually resorting to paying for their own people to follow them around with video cameras on a regular basis, but that’s certainly how it looked to us as we stood waiting to check in at Heathrow last night. Well, it was just as well they had the cameras there. I mean, could you imagine if some crucial “walking up stairs at Heathrow” footage wasn’t captured for posterity. Presumably we should expect to see it aired on ITV2 later this year. Clearly it’s what multichannel digital telly was invented for.

Anyway, so I’m in Singapore again, and the Internet is still free here. All rather painless so far, and only another 7 hours to Melbourne.

And it’s not just my company that’s in the process of moving. Last week Sal and I squeezed all our belongings into a small white tranny and headed over to our new home around the other side of Regent’s Park. And it looks like we have finally managed to extricate ourselves from the whole messy Landlady not paying the mortgage debacle that was the last year of our lives, without either being evicted or ending up out of pocket at all.

As you may recall, we spent much of July last year wondering if we were about to be forcibly removed from our home. After a short respite, things kicked off again in October, with the arrival (rather wonderfully, in a “you couldn’t make this up” stylee on my birthday) of a court summons addressed to our landlady for the possession proceedings, which were due to take place at the end of November (when we were going to be in Australia).

The hearing itself never actually took place, but we didn’t find that out until a few days before it. A week before the court date, the claimant’s solicitors sent a copy of their evidence to the flat. Although we were both in Australia at the time, a friend of Sal’s who was house-sitting for us helpfully emailed us the details. This made for very interesting reading, especially the parts where the solicitor stated that “the claimant has not consented to any letting of the whole or any part of the property and to the best of [her] knowledge and belief there is no other people other than the Defendant and family who could apply to the Court for relief”. Not exactly words to encourage you to believe that your interests are going to be considered, especially if you happen to be several thousand miles away and can’t attend the hearing. This also made for interesting reading considering that I’d previously contacted this firm of solicitors and told them that Sal and I were occupying the property as the tenants.

Luckily, I happened to be staying with my solicitor sister at the time, and she helped me draft a witness statement that we then faxed over to the court. A few days later (on the day of the hearing) a letter arrived at the flat back in London letting us know that the case had been adjourned. Who knows what really happened–maybe she paid her arrears in full–but I like to think we played our own small part in keeping a roof over our heads for the remainder of our tenancy.

Of course the problems didn’t end there. As the end of our tenancy approached we began to wonder how we might go about recouping our deposit payment (a month’s rent). Unfortunately, it turned out that this was held not be our landlady, but by the dodgy management agency, the Spencer Michael Consultancy, who, we then discovered, had entered into a Corporate Voluntary Arrangement at the start of November 2005 in an effort to avoid bankruptcy.

After spending much of Christmas worrying about how we were ever going to get that back, we ended up gently persuading the landlady to sort us out and attempt to recoup the money from the agency herself instead. Who knows, perhaps she felt guilty for the events of the last year…

Of course, although we’re now essentially settled in, a new flat brings its own new raft of problems. Most of those seem to be sorting themselves out fairly quickly, though, and so far the utilities lottery that has become an annual fixture of my life seems to be going off in a reasonably painless way: for the third time in a row I have had to get a BT engineer out to activate my phone, but it certainly didn’t require a full street’s worth of engineers this time. And sure, one of the previous residents might appear to owe the council a couple of hundred quid, but that’s nothing compared to the events of the past year. [The increasingly threatening letters that had arrived at the flat over the course of the past several months (while it was unoccupied) do make for amusing reading, though–you can clearly see the progression, as the early empty threats (“notice prior to committal to prison proceedings”) morph into what appear (judging from the fact that several months have passed without it actually happening) to be rather baseless promises to send the heavies round (“in your area this week”) and relieve the chap of all his worldly goods. With each letter, a bit more red appears on the page–the most recent claimed to be the “final notice”, but sadly I’ll never get to see if that too is just an empty promise, as I phoned them up to tell them he doesn’t live there anymore. It would have been fun to see where they go from there (entirely red paper? red ink? death threats?) but I didn’t want to take the chance that they might actually pop round and relieve me of my iPod. So I’ll never know…]

Idly flicking through the channels last night, after returning from a lovely curry with friends to celebrate Sal’s birthday (and to avoid any of that hallmark sponsored nonsense that might have been going on elsewhere), we chanced upon a late-night “adult” episode of the shabby student soap Hollyoaks. For reasons that were never adequately explored or explained, everyone appeared to be in the North West’s finest shabby seaside resort, my old home town of Southport. I shouldn’t be surprised, really, given that Hollyoaks is made by Phil Redmond’s Mersey Television, who occasionally used to film snippets of Brookside in the town (and I seem to recall that at least one character from that show came to a rather murky end buried beneath Southport’s miles and miles of golden sand dunes).

Last night’s episode of Hollyoaks mostly covered various characters hanging around in rather drab, chintzy looking hotels (yep, that’s Southport alright). The only exterior shots consisting of a couple of blokes wandering around a small area (well, round about here, actually) near the fair and the sea front (and there appeared to be some kind of sub plot about the characters having previously ridden on Southport Funland’s very own low-budget answer to Blackpool’s Pepsi Max Big One roller coaster, the Tizer Traumatizer).

(Sorry, I’ve just realised that there’s no actual point to this entry, I don’t have anything funny to say about it, and I’m not quite sure how to end it, so why don’t we just stop now and pretend this never happened. Right. Carry on…)