Robert Hampton

Another visitor! Stay a while… stay forever!

23rd March 2005

I practice kissing on my labrador
Posted by at 11.24pm | 3 responses | Uncategorised

Well, I’m back. “Real life” interfered with things for a while there, but regular bloggage (is that a word?) will resume as of now.

So what’s been going on over the last few weeks then? Well…

  • Got thrown out of a swanky bar (the ‘s’ is silent) for not conforming to their dress code. In fairness, I was looking quite scruffy (The firm I work for was moving to a new office, so trackie and trainers were the order of the day), but still, it hurt. Well, not really. They were the ones who missed out on a hundred quid’s worth of food and drink order from me and everyone from work who was with me. Heh.
  • Managed to get the celebrated †óflå†óflå†oacute;flå†óflå error from RISC OS while debugging a new program (stupid null pointer)
  • Waited ages for an up-to-date web browser for RISC OS, only for two to come along at once: Oregano 3 and, even more excitingly, Firefox.
  • Missed Look Around You two weeks in a row, only to be saved by BBC Two Northern Ireland showing it at 11.20pm, so I didn’t miss anything. Thanks, Beeb! Theeb.
  • Read some spoilers for the final episode of Star Trek: Enterprise — it’s rare that a web page causes me to exclaim, “you have got to be fucking kidding me,” but this one managed it. Even T’Pol thinks it’s appalling.
  • Became a member of the Suburban Electric Railway Association. Not quite sure how that happened, but I remember seeing a photo of their ex-Merseyrail Class 503 electric train, sitting in a siding looking all forlorn and rusty, and thinking that I could — nay, should — help out. But they’re based in Coventry which is awkward and tiresome to get to, so I can’t help right now.
  • Watched BBC One’s Supervolcano, all about the potentially devastating effects of a massive volcanic eruption from Yellowstone Park. I just hope Yogi and Boo Boo are all right.
  • Witnessed Merseyrail going from “minor delays” to “severe delays and possible cancellations” to “all Northern Line services are currently suspended” — and back again — during the course of 45 minutes’ wait at Liverpool Central station.
  • Admired the new Hornby Class 31 model. It is simply sex on wheels — no other description is adequate. Now what livery should I choose: ‘Dutch’ or weathered BR blue? Decisions, decisions.

I think I’m going to move the blog over to WordPress. This involves several logistical hurdles, not least of which is that WP requires a MySQL database. Which will require me to upgrade my hosting package. Which will require me to re-upload everything to the new server. Which is a pain, but worth it (I hope) because I’ve well and truly buggered (and not in a good way) the Movable Type installation. All this messing about with Perl scripts makes me nostalgic for good old FABland — no arsing about there, just write some HTML, sprinkle liberally with <font size="5"> tags, et voila.

As for the blog itself, from now on expect less navel gazing and more commenting on stuff that is happening in the world. After all, who wants to gaze at my navel? No-one, that's who!

Well, maybe one or two people. They know who they are.

3 Responses
  1. Comment by Seb
    24th March 2005 at 8:07 am

    “Weathered BR Blue”, definitely.

  2. Comment by Nick E
    25th March 2005 at 10:30 am

    Good to see you back Rob. Enjoying the blog.

  3. Comment by Robert Hampton
    29th March 2005 at 11:35 pm

    It’s just occurred to me I need some sort of poll system for this kind of inane question.

    PS Thanks Nick!