We’re on a paperless tarrif for our gas and electricity and so all correspondence arrives via email. All jolly good, less wasted paper etc. Except that their email subject lines are terrible:

It is time for your meter reading

What the heck? IT IS TIME – It’s like a summons to climb the sides of mount doom. Why so formal? Even just changing “it is” to “it’s” softens the tone.

Then I get a follow-up email, with the following:

You have not yet given us your meter reading

Not much better. Did I commit a crime? Not really a gentle reminder. Does anyone in marketing even read these before they are put into production?

Made a few long overdue tweaks to the site in the past week. I’ve added Fancy Zoom to the flickr thumbnails on the front page. It seemed to be the most lightweight of the many “light box” solutions that still had a decent feature set. Incredibly easy to setup as well.

I also added links to the blog archive and blog search functionality at the bottom of the page. Since my last re-design the styles on the blog category pages weren’t ideal so I took this oppourtunity to tidy them up. The blog archives page isn’t great, I could do with a better way of visulising all of the historic content maybe using sort of tag cloud.

Last month Ria and I had two weeks in the USA travelling from New York to Boston to Chicago and then back to New York. After travelling ~8,300 miles on 6 flights, 2 rail journeys and numerous subway systems we’d taken a lot of photos. It’s taken me up until now to get photos from New York sorted out and put up online. Here they are:

View on Flickr

The trip was amazing! We ate lots of fantastic food, saw great shows, went up tall buildings, drank cocktails, went to zoos, took boat cruises, ate some more food, saw the sites, did shopping and generally stood around looking up and gaping at the tall buildings.

More photos to follow of Chicago and Boston.

Saturday

Arrived 2pm, collected tickets, checked-in, walked to Strand Leon, walked to Covent Garden. Wandered in shops, champagne at the Liberty champagne bar, then tube to Haymarket Royal. Saw Breakfast At Tiffany’s – good but uncomfortable seats (you get what you pay for). Hungry, found random Italian “Prezzo” and had calzone and wine. Bed.

Sunday

Breakfast from kitchenette then walked down Mall to palace, cyclists everywhere, saw Boris. Went up arch then tube to St Paul’s. Coffee and cake at Paul, peaked in cathedral, took photos and then walked across bridge to Tate Modern. Nothing new on so carried on along river to Tower Bridge view. Tubed over to north side and walked to British Museum. Tired, had coke and cream scone. Did bits of Egypt and Greece then headed back to hotel. Got ready and headed out to Benares. Very nice! Had brilliant cocktails, tandoori chicken, meatballs/salmon, deserts, bottle of wine, coffee and petit fours. Very swanky part of town. Tubed to London bridge and met parents in the Real Greek for a drink.

Monday

Checked-out, breakfast from Starbucks, got London Eye tickets, walked to Westminster and met parents. Went on Houses of Parliament tour, very interesting! Then waked over to London Eye and saw the view. Tubed to Liberty cafe and had nice lunch with parents. Realised it was getting on so went and retrieved bags from hotel and got to Kings Cross. Boarded train back north.

Four months ago Ria and I went to Arran for a lovely long weekend. Here is a GPS plot of a walk we did one day plus a whole bunch of photos:

View Arran Trek in a larger map

A couple of weeks ago I uploaded the sixth iteration of this site. This time I’ve paired things down even more and gone for a “life-stream” style layout. I rarely write blog posts any more, but I do upload lots to flickr, spraff lots of nonsense to twitter and make various other ripples else where on the webs. I’m pointing the re-design out now as most people probably read the site via RSS and so won’t have seen the new styling. Come and have a look!

All of my various online activity is aggregated by those nice people at FriendFeed. I then use their API to pull this out and display it in a nice fashion. Currently I’m aggregating: flickr, twitter, last.fm, upcoming, dopplr, delicious and my google reader shared items. I also wanted the full content of blog posts to appear within the stream. Strangely, this doesn’t appear to be particularly easy to do. FriendFeed only caches the title of a post and none of the content. So, I let FriendFeed aggregate my blog posts but then when I come to display that entry in the stream I use the wordpress “stub” (which uniquely identifies a post) from the URL to lookup the post in my local database and display it from there. Slightly convoluted, but it works.

Of course, a day after I finished getting the stream stuff working, FriendFeed announced that they’d been acquired by Facebook. Great. I suspect that moving forward Facebook aren’t going to maintain the current feature list and API access that FriendFeed allow currently. In that regard I’ll probably look at rolling my own lifestream aggregating solution. Possibly using the SimplePie PHP RSS library and it’s very neat looking merge_items() function.

For the nice large image at the top I’m using the PHP Flickr library to grab all of the image from my Favourites set. I then cache the heck out of these images and display a randomly chosen one. I’m thinking I might add some subtle navigation to allow you to “refresh” the image to get a new one.

All comments and suggestions appreciated!

From various backups and by re-doing a chunk of work I’ve managed to get bustrackr.co.uk doing something useful again. It even does sensible things like caching now!

My Virtual Machine got hosed. Excitingly I wasn’t doing any regular backups so I’ve had to revert to a backup I had from my last-but-one hosting account. Which seems to be from June last year :/ I’m devising some cunning way of pulling all my lost blog posts out of the Google Reader cache. Normal service will be resumed at some point soon.