Caboose

I’ve been looking through my site stats again, most of the visitors are search engines. Which means my site must be indexed all over the place, but few people are actually looking.

If you’re a real person feel free to leave a comment, or use the email form to let me know you’ve been.

I’ve added a page with my GnuPG public key. So if anyone feels like sending me encrypted emails, give it a go.

After dropping off my bike at my Grandparents’ in Norfolk this weekend I had to make my way back to Cambridge by public transport. Even if you don’t share Mrs Thatcher’s hatred of sharing a vehicle with other people this tends to be an experience that just gradually grinds you down.

I got to the bus stop in Wroxham at 1630, five minutes before the bus was due to start its run outside Roys just up the road.

By five past five I was about to start walking back to the house when I saw the bus going past in the opposite direction. It then took twenty minutes to go a mile up the road and turn round. No apology from the driver, no explanation of why he was almost an hour late.

So I missed my train and had to hang around Norwich station for three quarters of an hour. The Anglia Railways service through to Cambridge was good though, the train was clean and on time. It was also mostly empty so I could stretch out and read (Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm).

In fact it was so quiet the guy sitting on the other side of the train seemed to feel quite happy to finish doing his homework (or whatever it was), pull out his packet of king-size Rizlas and sit producing one joint after another for the next ten minutes or so. He got off at Ely, he probably needed some chemical assistance with facing the flat, desolate horrors of The Fens.

Tomorrow I really should do some Christmas shopping. Need to buy cards and some presents as I probably won’t get the opportunity in the next few weeekends.

The other thing to do tomorrow is to take my bike through to my Grandparent’s in Norfolk. It’s going to be spending the winter in their garage away from salt and similar nasty things.

Since watching the first Shuttle launch at school I’ve always been fascinated by it, so I just had to watch these videos.

Reminds me of the fun I had wandering around Kennedy Space Center.

My flight back from Edinburgh last night was delayed a bit, you soon run out of things to do in the departure lounge unless you want to drink yourself unconscious at Wetherspoon’s.

As I was walking out to the plane I noticed an amazing fan of light in the sky to the north, which I worked out must have been the lights from The Bridge.

Approaching Stansted I spent a while trying to clean the blurry bottom half of my window before I realised that the blurriness was due to the jet exhaust outside. Even though I now find flying very tedious there’s still something special about approaching your destination, especially at night.

The delay to my flight meant that I arrived at Stansted just as the Cambridge bus was leaving, so I had to hang around for an hour. Pretty much everything was closed, including all the checkin desks. The only signs of life in most of the terminal building were the car hire desks and the poor souls trying to sleep on the deliberately uncomfortable seats.

Sony are now selling their Bluetooth Memory Stick in the UK.

I really want one of these as it means I can use my Clié for email and web access without having to balance my phone on a convenient surface (or my knee) and make sure I keep the infra-red transceivers lined up.

On the other hand GBP140 does seem a bit steep.

While I was spending the compulsory hours hanging around airports this weekend (Edinburgh and Stansted, could have been worse) I noticed an odd thing.

Around checkin there were a couple of BT’s shiny internet payphones but once through security there are only standard payphones, no internet access.

A quick peer through the windows of the BA lounge at Edinburgh revealed that their two terminals were out of order. Is this some kind of additional security measure or just a bizarre coincidence?

It’s encouraging me in my efforts to work out a way of posting to this site from my phone and PDA.

We had a family gathering at the weekend, to celebrate Grandpa’s 80th birthday. I flew up on Saturday morning (the 0410 bus from Cambridge [shudder]) and returned last night.

I took a few photos:

Grandpa is in the foreground on the right, with Granny to his left and my cousin Kirsten standing behind them.
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