Month: August 2004

So I’m sitting at the bar in the Agricultural, a pub in Islington, last night, nursing a pint and waiting for my friend Bill to turn up. Several American guys come in. Two of them look familiar, kind of. They’re sitting either side of me at the bar, but I don’t speak to them. I’ve been living here long enough to have overcome the urge to speak to anyone I meet with an American accent.

Anyway, I finish my pint and go over the road to see if Bill is waiting for me outside the Islington Academy. He is, so we go in and watch Glenn Tilbrook finish his solo acoustic set. Then the band we really came to see comes on and I’ll be damned. I’d been sitting in the pub between Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger (AKA Fountains of Wayne), probably the two greatest songwriters currently alive on this planet. I’ve really got to start watching more MTV. If only I’d recognised them, I’d have bought them each a glass of mexican wine.

The latest threat to the global climate is the huge dust clouds from the Sahara stirred up by SUVs, which are increasingly replacing camels as the preferred mode of transport. MSNBC has the story, and an amazing photo of one such dust cloud taken earlier this week.

In recent days, ridey.net has been hammered by a very aggressive robot called Pompos, from a French search engine called dir.com. It would come in, and rifle through the entire site, sucking up lots of bandwidth. So I’ve banned them via robots.txt. Not sure why it took such an interest in ridey.net.

While looking at the server logs (something I hadn’t done for a while), I also noticed another French visitor called Torpedo had been hijacking an image from an old blog entry. That is to say, they were linking to the image file on ridey.net, thus every time someone looked at their site it would pull in the image from mine, in effect stealing my bandwith. Not acceptable! So we did a little Photoshop work and now visitors to Monsieur Torpedo’s blog will have a little surprise.

High atop a cliff overlooking Omaha Beach is the final resting place of more than 10,000 US servicemen who gave their lives to liberate France. The day we visited, hundreds of French people were paying their respect. And all across Normandy, American flags flew in every village. The French have not forgotten.

… from two fantastic weeks in France. Here’s the view we had from the place we were staying at. More photos and details to come.