Failure is the Key to Success

I know that sounds strange, but my paternal grandfather has been my family tree brick wall. I posted about him a couple of months ago in Which of your ancestors would you want to meet?

FindmyPast has updated their Outbound Passenger Lists to include up to 1929 and a quick search looks like I have found him making 4 trips from Liverpool to Lagos, Nigeria between 1922 and 1928. It time to buy some more credit and check the records.

I don’t really know where the last 3 weeks have gone. About 3 weeks ago there were some events that refocused my attention elsewhere and even though I had got back to my normal routine over a week ago, I hadn’t got back to posting more than the odd comment here or there. I see that it has been 2 weeks since my last post and so I have some catching up to do.

The weather here this last week has been exceptional for the time of year. We had the wettest day of the wettest June on record on Monday. It wasn’t too bad in the south of the country but further north, parts of South and East Yorkshire were severly affected with over 100mm of rain in one day (1.5 times the average rainfall for the month). At least four people have been killed and more than 3000 properties have been flooded. I was reading on the BBC website that more heavy rain is expected on Saturday. It has also been unseasonally cool for June with temperatures overnight around 10-12′C

Unfortunately, the bad weather has proved a disappointment for the kids’ school. The PSA at Watling Lower School had organised a funfair for this coming weekend, but due to the weather, the school fields are too muddy and soft for the heavy equipment, so this has had to be cancelled. The PSA put a lot of work into organising these events and so it is sad when the weather spoils it. A meeting will be held after school tomorrow to see what can be done instead.

I finished listening to the audio book today of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini read by the author. This book was recommended to me by jmb back in February in the comments to my Book Meme post. In the same comment she also recommended The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay. Both books were excellent in their own ways; the later is a good fantasy book which I must now get the others in the series of. The Kite Runner isn’t a book that I would have naturally picked up to read, but very soon after starting I was transported to Afganistan in the 1970’s and how life and society changes there with the coming of the Taliban. A big thank you to jmb for the recommendation and if you come across it pick it up and have a read.

On Saturday, Gary posted Instant Message Me Direct from Azazil.net where he talks about Plugoo, an instant messaging widget for your website/blog. On Sunday evening, while watching a re-run of Ramsey’s Kitchen Knightmares on More4, I was checking out some blogs and while I was there I thought I’d give it a try. I had a quick chat with Gary, and as all Brits do we discussed the weather (as a nation we are obsessed with talking about the weather!). I can vouch for the fact that Plugoo works really well, although it would be better if you had a bit more control on the size of the widget. I liked it so much that I have added it to my contact me page. The only problem it seems to have is that it is beta at the moment and sometimes the Plugoo servers are not responding or a bit slow. So if you want to have a chat when I’m online by all means pop over to my contact me page and chat away.

Last night I watched a film that I hadn’t seen for about 20 years. I watched Kagemusha by Akira Kurosawa. This is a film set in 16th Century feudal Japan, where the powerful warlord Shingen is replaced when he dies by a double to deceive Shingen’s enemies. The double is a thief who has to transform himself into the great leader and maintain the deception. There is a battle scene at the end of the film that I remember from when I saw the film 20 years ago and in my mind it was a much bigger battle. It’s strange how your mind plays tricks on you like that.

So that’s it for the moment, normal posting should now be resumed. If it isn’t give me a kick.

Tags:kagemusha,kite runner,plugoo,uk weather

I have been tagged by B.Y. Penman at Savvyology with the eight
random facts meme.

Here are the rules to play:

1. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
2. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
3. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged.

My random facts:
1. I had my appendix removed while in Scotland about 20 years ago.
2. 15 years ago I used to own a boat and go water skiing.
3. In 21 years of driving, I have owned 6 cars. The latest one for over 5 years.
4. I have never travelled outside of Europe.
5. I used to do fantasy roleplaying every week (sometimes several times a week) for over 5 years.
6. In 21 years at work, I have only worked for one company.
7. The oldest emails in my storage folders are over 10 years old.
8. I have a small piece of the concrete from when the Berlin wall came down.

I tag:

jmb at Nobody Important
scanman at Scan man’s Notes
gary at azazil.net
David Airey at Creative Design
vikas at Techbold
ilker at The Thinking Blog
carol at My View of IT
evel at And Another Thing

Tags:random facts

I don’t know if I am just getting older and more aware of it, or have driving standards really have dropped.

I don’t have a particularly long drive to work, about 30 minutes, but in the last few weeks, the sheer stupidity and lack of respect by some drivers for other road users has amazed me.

This morning was a prime example: leaving town, I travel through a cutting with a 40mph speed limit and I had a little white Renault van impatiently sat behind me, obviously annoyed because I was driving at the speed limit. After the speed limit is lifted, there is a roundabout which you take the right lane to go straight over on the A5 or the left lane to turn off on the Leighton Buzzard bypass. I take right lane as I follow the A5 for most of my route to work and wasn’t surprised to see the Renualt come up the inside of me, however when I stopped to allow the traffic on the roundabout, which has priority, to continue round, I didn’t expect the Renault to carry on onto the roundabout forcing the traffic to stop. Once they had stopped, he then pushed through the gap he had caused and continued on up the A5. Once the traffic had cleared, I continued on the A5 only 2 cars behind him all the way to Hockliffe, where he left it very late going through the lights as they went red as he turned off to Woburn.

I sat at the lights in Hockliffe at the front of the queue today, but quite often I am further back, where on most days I witness another dangerous annoyance. When approaching the lights from the south, the road is a single lane splitting to two for maybe 20 yards. When traffic is queuing in the right hand lane to go straight over (or right) the queue will stretch back beyond the split of the lanes. Almost every day everything from cars to vans and minibuses will mount the pavement and drive half on the road, half on the pavement down the inside of the queue just so that they can wait at the red light a few yards further ahead.

Overtaking is another area that seems worse than it used to be. When I learnt to drive I was taught that you only overtook when you could do so safely without danger to other road users. Last night while driving home, an oncoming motorist, couldn’t wait until I was past; the road behind me was clear. He just indicated and pulled out and then proceeded to force me to take avoiding action. All he had to do was wait another 10 seconds and it would have avoided the issue.

Drivers just seem so much more impatient and don’t look ahead the see oncoming dangers and obstructions. Drivers seem so intent on there own goals that they lose awareness of the needs and rights of other road users. Others like the Parcelforce driver a couple of weeks ago who in a traffic queue, deliberately moved over into the cycle lane to block the way for the cyclist who was riding up, are just agressive.

Is it just me or do you have similar stories?

Tags:bad driving,driving standards

I had an email from Alan at WeatherUnderground thanking me for my post about weather stickers. To get rid of the annoying ads, he has sent me a 1 year gift membership, which allows you to see the WeatherUnderground site without any adverts. I didn’t even know they did memberships, it just looked like another ad on the site at first glance. Anyway, I’ve added the widget under the WeatherPixie one, which gives me temperature in Celcius and a clock, I’m not sure if the clock is picking up from the local system or displaying UK time, maybe you can let me know in the comments what you see.

With my membership, I get to give a gift membership to someone else, so what I’ll do is the first person to request the gift membership in the comments will get it, just drop me an email after leaving your comment so that I have your email address, my address is on my contact me page.

The weather today was really a scorcher, and so this afternoon, we went to the Hertfordshire Steam Engine Preservation Society (warning: website only works in IE not Firefox or Opera!) traction engine rally off the Leighton Buzzard bypass, about 15 minutes away.

This year was the 42nd Annual Rally, with over 300 exhibits from Traction engines and Steam rollers to Fairground organs and vintage farm tractors. I took my camera along to try out another film type (Kodak Portra 400VC) and the kids had our old digital camera. We got a new 128MB memory card for the old camera a month or so ago as they are so cheap, so now they have about 280 pictures to take on the card.

My son went a bit snap happy and looking at his shots there are some really nice ones, we’ve just got to get him to listen when we tell him how to hold the camera, as some were spoilt by stray fingers across the lens. It’s strange looking at the world from a seven year old viewpoint. I have added an album on my gallery for some of the photos he took today, it called Steam Rally 2007. Some of the photos, he was oblivious to what was in the shot, he was just concentrated on the target.

We had ice creams and the kids rode on the steam train and at the end we got some fudge from one of the stalls. A really good afternoon out.

Tags:steam rally,traction engine