Yet more flooding. I basically live on the flood plain, so there are quite a lot of fields that I haven't seen much of for several months as they've been under water.
Which is fine, because that's what flood plain is there for.
What's less good is when the rivers are flooded, the ground is saturated and it won't stop raining. I.e. right now.
On Monday the drains gave up being able to drain (and/or backed up), and the main road started to vanish into a series of large puddles. When I waded back from my tennis lesson it was completely covered at... continue reading »
When I moved house earlier this year I kind of mostly forgot to consider one of the things Gloucester is most recently famous for - flooding. (although mostly it doesn't matter as my flat is on the first floor)
And last week it rained an awful lot. I checked twitter on Sunday morning to see a whole pile of tweets from @Glos_Police about overnight road closures. Flash flooding and rubbish drainage there, I think, but obviously all that water was also headed for the rivers...
So all the media rush to Tewkesbury, because that's an easy target and you get to use... continue reading »
Well, London 2012 is over (with the paralympics still to come, of course)
I've paid no attention to most of the build up - not because I "didn't approve" of London getting the games, but because it's all just crappy media hype and ridiculously scary over commercialism - things I generally try and stay away from.
The actual sport is another matter. I've been glued to various TV/computer screens watching all sorts of things. Obviously the canoe slalom and sprint featured quite highly Mountain biking wasn't as exciting as I'd expected to watch on the tv, but the utter carnage of... continue reading »
Gloucester had some vip guests a week or so ago - the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh!
Not a very exciting visit, and certainly not worth standing outside for an hour and a half waiting for.. I wandered out 10 minutes before they were due, narrowly avoided eye poking injury from some flags, and took a few pictures. Job done.
Anyway, they sailed up the canal, did a very quick turn around the main Docks basin in front of the flag waving masses, then vanished again. Off to a certain distinctively shaped building in Cheltenham for the afternoon!
In the news again this week - the Atheist Bus Campaign. Posters on buses (and the tube, etc), in reaction to some especially preachy adverts from religious idiots telling people that they'd burn in hell if they didn't go to church. Or something, I wasn't really paying much attention...
Now, I don't consider myself an atheist. I'm not religious, I don't believe in any higher beings etc etc. But people don't go round defining themselves according to whether they believe in the tooth fairy, do they? The whole concept strikes me as being somewhat counter-productive.
If I hear the phrase "extreme kayaking" mentioned again this week I am going to start hitting things. Yes, some people ran the Llyn Brianne spillway. Wow. Not like that's never been done before, and it's hardly the first time anyone's put photos/video of it on the internet either...
Actually I'm more annoyed by all the idiots who immediately react with "oh, extreme sports should be banned beause they're dangerous and the NHS has to pay when someone injures themselves blah blah blah waste of taxpayer money blah blah". Ahem. Ever heard of insurance? Oh, apparently that only exists for skiing... continue reading »
Today I have mostly been irritated by this bit of "news": Porn posted on web forum.
Big deal. It's spam! Unfortunately, this is what happens to the vast majority of public web forums. Spammers create accounts and post crap. It's not even real humans doing it - just bots. And unless someone has specifically taken steps to stop spammy registrations or posting (which they haven't, it's a bog standard looking vBulletin installation), the bots will find the forum and it will get spammed.
Of course, it could be an actual human posting bad stuff just to cause drama. That tends to happen... continue reading »
It's no secret that I see absolutely no point whatsoever in Eurovision. So every year I avoid it.
Every year, the UK does not win. Good! And every year this ends up in large amounts of bitter sulking about how it's all politics and "not about the music" blah blah blah. Again, yawn. Talk about being bad losers...
This year, even Wogan's throwing his toys out of the pram about it. Seriously, grow up!
In more interesting news, I would like to report that Firefox 3 on KDE is an ugly mess. I need to find a different theme that isn't broken. Not... continue reading »
ooh, look what I wrote on the fridge this morning:
There I was, gossiping and wasting time online as I usually am at 1am, when suddenly the whole house started shaking. Bit confusing at first 'cos I wasn't sure what was going on - things rattle a bit sometimes when fast trains go past, but this was much more violent and went on for longer. 15 seconds maybe? It was quite an odd experience.
Then it suddenly occured to me that maybe we'd just had an earthquake! and oh look, I was right. hehe.
This makes my brain hurt. Mainly because I refuse to believe that people really are so stupid.
Negative numbers aren't scary, unless they're the ones representing my bank balance...
Although saying that, I was sleepily failing to get my head around this kind of stuff in a rather dull lecture yesterday. It makes sense now I've re-read it though. mmmm, geeky.
It's been raining. Lots. This means lots of water in the rivers, and then lots of water on bits of land next to the rivers.
Yup, floods. I'm well practised at floods - Monmouth is very good at them, and I've seen some quite impressive examples.
Ludlow, on the other hand... The big river here is the Teme, but there's also the Corve which is usually small and weedy. However, yesterday evening it decided to stop being small and weedy and rose very very quickly - from being within its banks to completely flooding the main road in about an hour and... continue reading »
In the way that I really hate it, think it is absolutely disgusting and ugly and a massive waste of money (£400k - how? why?!).
First reaction on seeing it at some point yesterday lunchtimeish was an interesting mixture of laughing and disgust. Seriously?
But apparently it's meant to be aimed at the 'youth' of Britain, quite possibly in the same slightly cringy way that politicians like to think they are 'cool' and 'down with the kids'. So not at all then...
Not found anyone saying anything good about it yet either, heh. ... continue reading »
so, Keele's in the news again today. This time because someone vaguely high-up has taken offence at students saying not-entirely-positive things about the uni on Facebook. Shock horror!
OK, so having a group called "so and so is a twat" probably isn't the nicest thing to do, so I can almost see their point on this, but sending an email to all students about it, and threatening a code of practice is a little bit over the top perhaps.
Also, Facebook is full of completely stupid and pointless groups (heh, I'm a few) and there's a whole system there for reporting... continue reading »
Mountain biking wasn't as exciting as I'd expected to watch on the tv, but the utter carnage of... 
