Month: May 2003

The BBC have an article on complaints from residents about the noise from new louder train horns on SouthCentral Trains rolling stock. This follows an article on BBC South television, and articles in most of the area’s papers, including the Observer here in Chichester.
Firstly, a factual inaccuracy. The train illustrated in the BBC article is a SouthWest Trains class 159, which is neither new nor fitted with the loud type horns. OK, I’ll take my anorak off now.
Secondly, the people who are moaning about the SouthCentral class 375s are probably the same people who moaned about approaching trains not warning users of the Fishbourne Road pedestrian crossing in Chichester, where several people have been hit by trains over the years. The trains now use their horns as they approach that crossing, and as someone who uses the crossing from time to time, I can say for sure that you’re not going to miss the approach of the new trains.
So it seems that people want the railway to be made safer, but only if it is done quietly. Bloody nonsense. If you bought a house by the railway (it has been there for nearly 150 years, after all!), then you must expect noise from the trains, including their horns. Shut up whingeing, and get a life.

Rant over.

I don’t really feel like going to the bar tonight. I’m pretty tired, and my throat, whilst a lot better, is still a little sore and would probably be better if not exposed to loads of cigarette smoke. So, I’m going to be a boring old home body tonight. I had originally planned to go and see the invalid Charlie, but thought she might not appreciate a cold in addition to her damaged Achille’s tendon.

I’ve just ordered a new 40GB hard drive for my home desktop, which should make the acquisition and storage of mp3s a little easier, particularly after I had a rather embarrassing "download failure due to full disk drive" when receiving an mp3 from Bella last night. I know 40GB isn’t much, but for a desktop that currently only has 2GB and doesn’t merit vasts sums of money being spent on it, I reckon that is plenty.

Good progress made with the decorating, including, thankfully, the arrival of materials for cladding two of the walls. The office should look great when it is finished.
Pooped now. Going to rest a while.

Paint, paint, paintity-paint. Looking good.

I’m considering moving the links to other weblogs out of their little pull-down menu and into a simple list of links. Why? Because:

• it would be an excuse to update them and delete the dead links and those that I don’t visit that often these days
• it would provide a good opportunity to add a few new links
• it means that when you lovely users click through the links, this site will show up as the source in the referral stats of the target site (which, currently, it doesn’t)

But, it would make the sidebar on the right of this page even longer than it is now. Hmm. Perhaps I should put them on a separate page? Comments/ideas welcome.

Finally put my last MVC voucher to good use that was given to me for my birthday by Tim and Jane, and purchased The Cinematic Orchestra‘s "Man With A Movie Camera" – a new soundtrack to the 1929 classic by Dziga Vertoz, about which more can be found here.
It’s excellent, so I’m going to stay in and have a restful evening listening to it, downloading music and resting my sore throat.

New look for orbyn.com. Beautiful.

Diplomatica looks at the EU’s draft constitution and offers an analysis. This site will be added to my favourite places, I think.

I have a sore throat and a temperature. On a hot and very humid day, this is not good.
I also have a customer who has ambitious plans and ideas, but expects to pay only peanuts to achieve them. I just warned him that he runs the risk of producing something that "will look crap", but I honestly don’t think that being blunt with the man will make any difference to the end result. We have previously supplied a large number of plants to him, a considerable number of which died because the site was not properly prepared and the soil conditions were awful (the result of heavy machinery having been operated repeatedly over a small area).
I hate getting involved in these sorts of projects, as I always feel that whatever we (the nursery) are involved in reflects on us – and unless it is good, it gives a less than good impression, no matter how good the advice, products and services are that we’ve provided. Such are the hazards of dealing with customers, I guess, particularly those who prefer to cut corners rather than do the job properly.