I walked from one side of Sheffield to the other last night. I hadn't intended too, it's just that I missed the tram from Norfolk Park by 30 seconds and couldn't be bothered to wait 20 minutes for the next. I had just played football at the brand spanking new "
Goals Soccer Centre at Norfolk Park. I am brilliant at football. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar and is just jealous of my skills.
But that is besides the point; I walked from one side of Sheffield to the other and I have to say it looked very nice. A lot of effort has been made to make the key pedestrian routes through Sheffield look sparkly and pretty and now that the work is nearing completion you can finally start to see all the separate bits come together to form an attractive and cohesive whole.
Crossing the shiny new footbridge across the shiny almost completed Midland Station with its shiny new signs and shiny new entrance leaves a much better impression than it did when I moved to Sheffield 8 1/2 years ago. Within a month or so Dyson House will be dust like its equally ugly brother
Sheaf House is already, and work can be completed on the station concourse. Incidentally, him off of Grand Designs visited the demolition of Sheaf House, no doubt after reading about it on this blog, and Channel Four will soon be screening a programme about the regeneration of Sheffield.
The regeneration becomes even more noticeable as you follow the path up past the Polytechnic. You then cross the road past the shiny Millennium Galleries with its big bold red Anthony Caro sculpture outside (I am officially the only person in Sheffield that likes it), and onwards past the shiny new Winter Gardens, the new shiny Macdonald Hotel (which opened yesterday in fact). Then to the top of Fargate, past Victorian fronted buildings that were once blackened by soot but are now restored to their former glory. Onwards further past the newly renovated City Hall fronted by a couple of cool fountains.
You know, I really should take my camera with me on the same walk so you can see exactly what I am talking about. It is a huge difference over what was there before and it's not even complete yet. Of course maintaining a city like Sheffield is never really completed; it's like painting the Forth Bridge, an un-ending task. When the route I travelled yesterday is fully completed (within the next 12 months) work will begin on the Retail Quarter. Hopefully when that is nearing completion work will have started on the Sheaf Valley, rejuvenating another swathe of Sheffield all the way from Park Square roundabout to St.Mary's roundabout where Decathlon currently sits. That's if we don't all die from Avian Flu in the mean time of course.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005 1:39 PM
A journey that I'll probably never get to do in my lifetime (but would love to) is to go the
other way from Sheffield to Shanghai on a freighter ship. This would take me via New York and San Fransisco and in between pass through the Panama Canal.
Check out this time-lapse video of a week of activity at some locks on the canal. It puts travelling on the Llangollen Canal in its place.
Sunday, November 27, 2005 3:36 PM
Heh, this video made me laugh a lot. Which reminds me, pubs can open 24/7 from today. Yes! I don't know about you, but I'm going to go out tonight to drink pint after pint of binge and then start a fight with an old lady. I'M NEVER GOING TO STOP DRINKING. How will I know to stop if the pub doesn't close??? It's political correctness gone mad, gone mad. WHATCHULOOKINAT?
Thursday, November 24, 2005 8:23 PM
Uuugh. Bleh. Jesus.
As I watched Jimmy walk round and round in a very tight circle this morning trying to lick his tail, it occurred to me that something wrong. Usually he struts around the house with his tail pointing straight up, but the last couple of days it's just been sort of limp. A cat's tail is a kind of mental barometer, you can figure pretty much everything about its current mental health from what the tail is doing. The tail pointing straight up is kind of the equivalent of smiling.
So I gently felt along the length of the tail and there is a definite lump in the middle and everytime my hand passes over it Jimmy yelps. So I did what I saw the vet do when I took Tibbles to the vet, I sniffed it.
Uuugh. Bleh. Jesus.
I mocked the vet when he sniffed Tibbles. Not to his face of course, I mocked him later in blog-entry form. But the putrid smell from Jimmy's tail does indeed confirm that something is not right, there is probably some kind of infection, so it looks like a visit to the vet is needed. I just can't get the smell out of my mind's nose. I went to the shops and came back and noticed he'd been licking the area quite hard, so I knelt down to inspect and BLAM the smell hit me again. I went upstairs and noticed the matress protector on my bed had a small stain on it that wasn't there when I left. I thought to myself that I bet that is from Jimmy's tail, I bet that is where he was sat when he licked the bejebus out of his tail, and in doing so has burst some kind of pus-filled absess So to confirm this I leant down and sniffed it, and BLAM there's that smell again.
the horror. the horror.
Saturday, November 19, 2005 11:58 AM
Why use your own bandwidth when you can leach someone else's? That's my philosophy, and that's why I've uploaded my holiday videos to Google Video. So, the links on my
Video page now take you to Google Video instead of where they took you before (nowhere as it turns out, sorry bout that).
You may be wondering what
Google Video is exactly. Well, as you know, Google want to provide access to all data everywhere ever ever ever amen, and they want this data searchable. You have your vanilla
Google for searching the web,
Froogle for searching online shops,
Google News for searching online news, and many more, including most recently
Google Print for searching books, a blog post on which I have fermenting away in the back of my brain somewhere. In fact you can search for pretty much anything (apart from what to do in the event of an robot invasion - no reply from Tony Blairs yet by the way, though even if he did decide to tackle the robot threat, he'd probably do so by rounding up
Robosapiens and jailing them for 3 months without charge, a fruitless act that will simply serve to radicalise other robots, sparking off rights in the suburbs just like is happening in France right now, although the riots would start to peter out when the batteries start to run down).
Google Video is for searching videos. Really, if you hadn't guessed that by now, there's something not right with you. The idea is that production companies, film makers, programme makers submit their work to Google, where the unwashed masses can search it. In reality it seems to simply serve as a way for people like me to publish video to the internet without having to worry about hosting it.
Saturday, November 12, 2005 8:24 PM
I was sat at work today reading
Jesus of the Week and wondering to myself how I could make money off of the blind faith of Christians, and hit upon the idea of building a toaster that burns the face of Jesus into the toast, and selling the bits of toast on Ebay. With glee, I explained the idea to Chris & Tony, but they wasted no time in finding someone on the internet that had already done this.
Undeterred, I came up with another idea for a toaster, one with removable filaments which could be rearranged to make any shape or face you wanted. You know, for kids. But that's probably going to be hard to get past health and safety, and is of limited appeal. But then, so is
this toaster - which is basically designed for making egg McMuffins and aimed at people that don't currently have the facility to toast a muffin or cook an egg. So watch this space - coming soon - a toaster which you can use to burn any image you desire into your bread. Impress clients with toast displaying your corporate logo! Impress guests with toast displaying an immature rending of a big cock!
Tuesday, November 08, 2005 7:58 PM
What the deuce? In an effort to prepare myself for the possibility of an invasion of the planet Earth by an army of giant robots, I googled the phrase "How to handle a Robot invasion", and it returned NO results! I tried "Robot Invasion Preparation", and again - NOTHING. "Robot Invasion preparedness" - NOTHING. "Counter Robot Invasion Force" - NOTHING. ""What to do in the event of Robot Invasion" - NOTHING.
This means one of two things.
1) The robots are in the advance stages of planning an attack, and part of their plan has involved removing all information about how to repell such an attack from the internet.
2) There are no plans in existance for guarding the Planet Earth from an invasion by robots from outer space.
I find it hard to believe that *nobody* has ever thought to post guidelines about what to do in the even of a robot invasion, so I can only conclude option 1 is the most likely, the robots are coming, soon. God help us all.
UPDATE - I have taken it upon myself to send a letter to Tony Blair, warning the government of robot attack, and asking him to outline the government's preparedness. I will keep you informed about what I find out.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005 3:30 PM
