• YouTube – Deckchair
  Another fine film from Sheepfilms.
  humour film youtube

• Heritage Open Days
  It would be good to get to some of these – maybe the net sheds in Hastings or Bishop Otter College in Chichester.
  heritage history uk architecture art buildings events

• Nokia E52
  How interesting. Nokia will sell me an E52 with a new T-Mobile tariff. But T-Mobile refuse to offer it to me as an upgrade from my E51 on my existing tariff, or even with a tariff change. Considering that I was recently described by one of their customer service bods as "a premium, high-spending customer" (typical bill is £35 or more), I find their approach to customer retention to be pretty shoddy.
  Nokia E52 T-Mobile service shoddy

• Interception & outbreak charts
  Fun information for plant health geeks. This is the plant health equivalent of ambulance chasing or using a police scanner.
  plant health interception outbreak FERA horticulture

• BBC – Paul Fletcher: The hopes and fears of football’s free agents
  Whilst life might be full of fast cars and faster women for the ovr-paid primadonnas of the Premiership, life is not quite such a bed of roses at the business end of football.
  sport football

• Bestwestern.com, the World’s Largest Hotel Chain.
  Back to the annual hunt for a room in Essen in the last week of January. I was chatting with my parents' neighbour the other day. He had visited Essen in the past. Around 1943, at the controls of a Wellington bomber.
  hotel Essen Germany

Cod philosophy from a four-and-a-half year old boy.

Today is the tenth anniversary of grayblog. A great deal has happened over the last ten years, in terms of this blog, in terms of my life and in terms of the wider world. I’ve started a business, met an amazing girl, got married, started a family, had some adventures, had some good times and some less good times. Some of that has been recorded here, a lot has been left out.

grayblog has turned from a diary, verging on a confessional for catharsis, into more of a linklog these days, with sporadic bits of content and the odd recipe. It’s not as good as it used to be (they all say that) and readership is but a fraction of what it once was (hi Gordon, hello Dave, good day anonymous RSS readers), but I keep paying the bills on it and I keep the project ticking over. Maybe, one day, I’ll dedicate more time to it (a redesign might be in order at some point – and perhaps some more content. Hmm, actual content. Maybe even a revival of radio grayblog or the passport project. Who knows? But don’t hold your breath.)

Blogging in general has also changed. When I started out, most of the UK bloggers knew each other on first name terms. Some of us even met up for beer and vodka jellies. I’ve made a few friends along the way and quite a few more acquaintances. Now, thanks to improvements in technology and a general acceptance of putting your life online, just about every Thomas, Richard and Harold is at it in one form or another, even if nine-tenths of them can only muster 140 characters at a go, a path I’ve studiously avoided to date. We’ve seen “social networking” in all its glory come along, which surely is only a form of what everyone has done through history (you know, talk to people, make new friends, use networks of contacts to improve or change their lot, or just to call in favours) but brought up-to-date for this internet age. Blogging in the form that this blog has generally taken will, I suspect, been seen as a phase that communication passed through, rather in the way that stone tablets or papyrus have passed by. Where once this was cutting edge, now it is has-been, a relic of a past time. No reason to stop, though. Not yet, anyway.

Yeah, I’ll keep this going. There’ll be more stuff to write about, from things to do with business, travel, food, drink, current affairs, cats (it is a blog, after all), the weather, Sussex County Cricket Club, Brighton and Hove Albion, music, science, nature and, well, stuff. Life throws up things which are thought provoking – lately, most things thought provoking either come from the mouth of a certain four-and-a-half year old boy or are related to the rather pressing issue of the mortality of our own parents (you’ll have spotted links to various charitable organisations specialising in some rather unpleasant medical conditions). How my concerns have changed over ten years! That said, I’m still up for a beer if anyone asks me. And assuming I can arrange Tom-sitting.

So, there you have it. grayblog. Ten years of tripe and drivel, with a few pictures and some links. Thanks for reading. Stick around, if you will.

• BBC News – How Richard Feynman went from stirring jelly to a Nobel Prize
  I'm currently reading The Secret Life of Birds by Colin Tudge. In it, he asks how anyone could possibly fail to be fascinated by nature – how anyone could not look at the world around them and just marvel and then want to understand why and how. The same motives drove Feynman and it is something that I identify with. There is so much for an enquiring mind – and those minds that are both enquiring and rigorous can be brilliant, like Feynman.
  physics science feynman

For reasons known only to technical wizards (i.e. not to me), yesterday’s tenth birthday post didn’t appear in the RSS feed (unless you know otherwise). I think it may be because I posted it retrospectively (wanting to be clever and make the post time the same as the very first post, ten years ago). Anyway, for you RSS readers (both of you), now you have a reason to actually visit the site so that you can read it.

Now, where’s my coffee?

• Join the ‘Protest the Pope’ March Against The State Visit of Pope Ratzinger | National Secular Society
  Unfortunately, I can't go to this, although I sympathise.
  secularism pope catholicism protest

It just goes to show how much attention I pay to this thing. I’ve just installed WP 3.01 and noticed that my RSS feed is dead (403). Turns out that it has been dead for nearly six months since I last upgraded and I’m at a loss to understand why.

Any clever chaps who can help out?

The RSS feed for comments is working.

The RSS feed for posts is not.

Mystified.

UPDATE: I’m trying the WP forums (fora?) – no good. But I have some help on the 34SP forums, so we might get somewhere with this.

FURTHER UPDATE: it seems to be working now. So hello again to all the RSS readers – maybe say hello?

Well, the RSS feed is now fixed, so hopefully those people who never the visit the site will now be reading something. Unless they unsubscribed in the months that it hasn’t been working on the basis that grayblog was dead. Ho hum.

If you haven’t unsubscribed, then you’ve missed loads – the tenth birthday post, lots of links and, um, er, well, that’s all really. Must do better.

• Two drinks makes elderly unsteady on feet – Telegraph
  This explains a lot. Combine alcohol with serious illness, and you have a real problem.
  alcohol medicine
• Sellers Beware: New Breed of Aggressive Plaintiffs Hunt Expired Patent Numbers on Products and Product Literature; Demand Billions
  Hmm. Could make a few pennies on the side with this wheeze. Equally, I need to watch a few patents that I'm responsible for, although I'm a few years off expiry yet.
  USPTO patent expiry law US
• BBC News – Albion’s Falmer stadium museum plan gets go-ahead
  Hurrah!
  Brighton football museum news
• Mapping Stereotypes by alphadesigner
  Moldova – oh dear!
  maps europe humour
• London to Paris Flights via Brighton Shoreham Pontoise – Brighton City Airways
  Sounds promising.
  Brighton Paris airlines

• Blogging like it’s 2000 // katy lindemann // seemingly unconnected
  You see, blogging isn't dead at all. I've resisted Twitter largely because I don't want to be limited to 140 characters, although it is not often that I write longer pieces these days. Strangely, my blog has mutated into a linklog, even without the change in platform. And now I see Darren making a plea for me to go over to The Other Side. Perhaps I should try to have a presence in both forms – I can't deny that I haven't been considering it for some weeks, maybe even a couple of months. But Katy's post makes me think even more that "real" blogging is alive and well, and might just be going back to the way it used to be when it were all fields around here.
  blogging history retro reminiscence future

• Plane that manoeuvres without flaps developed – Telegraph
  Of course, the Bleriot XI moves without flaps and has done so since 1908. It employs wing-warping, although the entire tailplane acts as an elevator. You can still see it flying at the Shuttleworth Collection, Old Warden.
  aircraft technology news

• BBC – Newsbeat – ‘My details appeared on ‘porn’ list’
  Interesting. The girl in this article doesn't seem to be wearing any clothes. But seriously, recipients of these letters from ACS:Law are in an invidious position as it is impossible to prove a negative – which is why most will simply pay the £495 just to make them go away.
  news downloading filesharing law
• BBC News – Relate survey suggests mid-life crisis ‘begins in 30s’
  I'm not sure that any of this is surprising. With pressures from work, high expectations of children, increasing responsibilities to aging parents, it should not be surprising that people aged 35-45 are feeling under pressure. I'm not sure that those pressures are any different from those experienced by previous generations, although, in today's high-speed world, perhaps they are felt more keenly. In my view, just about every age in life has its pressures – for example, when you are four-and-a-half, the pressure is to finish your toast before you get dragged out the door to school.
  social_science news middle_age

• BBC News – HQ chosen for South Downs National Park
  A fine building. But, given the requirement for access by public transport, surely a town with a railway line would have been better? Petersfield? Lewes? Arundel?
  South_Downs park
• Kew News – One Fifth Of The World’s Plants Are At Risk Of Extinction
  This is excellent research and should be a useful tool to focus minds on conservation. What is most worrying is that we are literally missing species that are not properly understood (or even discovered) before they are already at or near extinction. Potentially they could be very valuable for medicines, fibres or even for ornamental horticulture. So more knowledge is bound to help and, hopefully, this research will help to encourage action.
  conservation plants Kew environment

• BBC News – Belgium’s beer sellers see trouble brewing
  Beer – tick. Chocolate – tick. But no mention of that other great Belgian tradition – horse butchers.
  Belgium beer politics

• The Color I want! « Notion Ink
  Want an Adam (well, yeh, duh!). Then vote now for your favourite colour. Hels chose bright blue, which seems particularly unpopular. I'm surprised at how conservative voters are in their choices.
  Notion_Ink Adam technology
• BBC News – BT to roll out fibre broadband across Cornwall
  We have FTTC here which I can gain access to as I'm on a business tariff. The cabinet is only 100 metres or so from our door, so we don't get too much loss over the copper cable. But others in our road are connected to the exchange itself, nearly two miles away, and report terrible connection speeds. You get what you pay for. And I'm not expecting FTTH any time soon here.
  broadband BT technology news

• BBC News – News presenters warn over BBC strike plan
  What?? Cuts to Shaun the Sheep caused by strikers!! Outrage!!!
  Shaun_the_Sheep news BBC union politics