Today was the first day of the year that was both sunny and not a work day, so I headed out with my new camera. I spent the morning in Oxford and then headed out to Thrupp and Shipton-on-Cherwell, on the Oxford Canal just outside Kidlington. I’m generally pleased with the pictures – although they show no technical skill on my part.
An oil depot has exploded in Hemel Hempstead. The BBC have a live video feed. Reports say the explosion could be heard as far away as Holland and Northern France.
Update: Check out this photo on flickr.
JCB Song by Nizlopi is going to be the Christmas number 1. Well, it is if I have anything to do with it!
A YOUNG British man thought to be the first person to have shaken off HIV, the virus that causes Aids, is to undergo further clinical tests in the hope of a breakthrough in treating the condition.
Andrew Stimpson, 25, said yesterday that he was willing to do all he could to help to tackle the condition, after it emerged that his body had apparently rid itself of the human immunodeficiency virus.
Mr Stimpson, a Scot living in London, was found to be HIV-positive in August 2002, but 14 months later a blood test suggested that he no longer carried the virus. A further three tests confirmed the finding.
Doctors believe that this first confirmed case of �spontaneous clearance??? of HIV could offer important insights into the behaviour of the virus, and possible means of defeating it.
Much more wary of todays’ front page than Blairs’ foreign policy.
Wired – great website, fantastic magazine. It’s quite hard to find over here, even in Oxford, and when I do it’s �4. If I were in the States, though, I’d be able to get 12 issues delivered to my door for $10. Obviously this is heavily subsidised by advertising, but I also have to turn ten pages of adverts to get to the contents page, and more often than not the products being advertised are available to me in the UK anyway, so it’s not as if the marketing budget is going to waste on international readers.
If you have hypertension, it’s important that you can pronounce this word. A sphygmomanometer is more commonly known as a blood pressure reader, and ehow has an article about how to use one.
The puffball fungus produces so many spores, that if every single spore germinated, after two generations the offspring would be 800 times the mass of the Earth.
Last.fm has just had a redesign, and it’s a great service. Install the audioscrobbler plugin, and it reports the tracks you play in your chosen media player (iTunes in my case) and logs it all.Where’s the fun in that? It builds up an idea of what you like listening to, and you can download their radio player, and listen to your musical choice from their servers. One better, it recommends new songs based on what is in the playlist of other users with similar taste. It’s a great way of finding new music.
The service is completely free, but for a premium of �1.50 a month (which I think is a bargain) you get priority access to their streaming services, a few extra radio modes and so on.
There’s a comprehensive commentary on Last.fm and social architecture by Stowe Boyd over on corante.com.
Lions at a drive-through safari park in Merseyside are chasing small cars, thinking they are prey. According to the BBC, Smart cars and Minis are particularly easily mistaken by the pride.
Orange are running orange wednesdays, and as such have a promo appearing before the start of films at the cinema. The latest one shows Darth Vader approaching the Orange Film Funding Board with a script about a Sith Lord, only to get completely knocked back by the marketing executive.
