Just as I was falling asleep last night I heard on the radio that firefighters were battling a fire at Bleak House in Broadstairs. I spent a good eight years of my youth in Broadstairs and was in the same class at school as the owner’s daughter so I’ve had the odd peek inside this house. You can see it here at the top left:

I’ve read that it has been sold recently to a new owner, which is a relief, who is apparently a jewellery magnate so locals are now calling it Bling House.

Broadstairs is in/on the Isle of Thanet, or Planet Thanet as its affectly known as, which is made up of Margate, Broadstairs, Ramsgate and a big airfield. Once an Island it’s now connected to the Kentish mainland, although you wouldn’t be able to tell that if you went there. People are still wearing Campri ski jackets.

For the latest Thanet news you must check out the Thanet Life blog. You’ll be able to read for yourself that this is unlike any other island. Dr Moores, who runs that site, has taken some amazing aerial photographs from his plane. You can see them at his Flickr photoset.

I’d also recommend the humourous Eastcliff Richard blog, subtitled “Ramsgate, the new millionaires’ playground, as seen by a new millionaire”. A post this morning has already called the Bleak House fire the “Bling Blaze”.

My yearly horse racing bet, the Grand National. I’ve been ‘up’ more often than not and won £300 one year with a £15 bet.

This year the going is good so it’s more than likely that one of the top four favourites will win. The odds of 5-1 for Hedgehunter seem a bit tight for a long 40 horse race though. My to-win bet is on NUMBERSIXVALVERDE at 12-1, I’ve also done three small each-way bets on RISK ACCESSOR, LE DUC and BARON WINDRUSH which will more than pay back my bets if they come in 2nd, 3rd or 4th. I’ll update later with the results.

UPDATE: My horse came in!! I put £15 on NUMBERSIXVALVERDE and I got £195 back from the bookies. Another successful year!

UPDATE 2: I’ve just seen that RISK ACCESSOR came 5th! I had £3 Each Way at 66-1 which would have been another £50 in the pot if it had come 4th. Oh well

“A 600ft observation mast, it would carry a pod holding up to 100 people gently upwards, providing dramatic and sweeping views of up to 25 miles on a clear day. The futuristic, slender structure would be taller than both the Eye and Blackpool Tower, but its narrowness would minimise impact on the cityscape.” From The Guardian.

I’m totally in favour of this as its all privately funded and won’t come out of my council tax bill. I just wonder how much it’ll wobble on windy days. And I’d be a bit scared to live closer than 600ft downwind.

Today’s link: The strange case of the man who took 40,000 ecstasy pills in nine years. From The Guardian.

I think there’s quite a bit of hypocracy when you have an American court using the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui to discuss the human and emotional cost of 9/11. George Bush will never have to go through a similar trial in Baghdad to listen to witnesses talk about the human and emotional cost of losing their relatives during the war and current occupation of Iraq. It must be great being immune to prosecution for a possible illegal war. In this trial though I just can’t see the point in raking up all the feelings of New Yorkers in front of that man. Find him guilty and send him to the chair, I don’t mind, but reading out the names of the 2972 people who died that day seems wrong.

Environmental annoyance of the day: New Greenpeace research shows that McDonald’s are partners in forest crime that is creating a trail of destruction right into the heart of the Amazon rainforest. The chicken they sell is fed on soya grown in areas of the Amazon that have been illegally cleared. Check out this flash animation.

Free downloads for today:
Tux Paint. The free drawing program for children (PC & Mac).
Grid Wars. Scroll down and download the Grid Wars game. Its a modern Robotron clone with great graphics. You have to open it up in WinZip or similar and extract it in a new folder. Then just click the exe (PC & Mac).
Take a look at the most popular free software downloads from Sourceforge. I’m going to give Gaim a try as my Trillion instant messenger is playing up. I’ll also be downloading PhpMyAdmin to play with the databases I’ve been creating, woo!

I’ve always wished I could be better at logo design. I just tend to open Photoshop and play around with fonts to create anything these days. Luckily logo design is merging with technology more and more and the ability to create stunning designs on your PC is becoming easier. Maybe it’s time to buy Adobe’s Illustrator. There’s a great article at Graphic Design USA highlighting the current fashion trends in logo design.

One of the most memorable and unchanging logos of all time must be the IBM logo created in 1972 by Paul Rand. For a blue chip company this is amazing longevity and they’ve saved quite a few quid on expensive rebranding exercises.



This was an update of his earlier IBM logo which had exactly the same City Medium font. The new logo contained eight lines which are meant to represent “speed and dynamism” but I also hope that it represents eight bytes, which in binary can store numbers from 0 to 255.

On the IBM website you can take a look at all its previous logos, including many when it was called International Time Recording. ITR eventually merged with the snappy sounding Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and eventually became International Business Machines.

So I’ve been told, the computer ‘HAL’ from 2001 A Space Odyssey was named by replacing each letter of ‘IBM’ with the letter alphabetically before it.

For the last 2 days I’ve been trying to get the wonderful php (which is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML) to talk to MySQL (the world’s most popular open source database) via IIS (Microsoft Internet Information Services).

Now if reading that hurts your head then you really should try installing them individually on your PC then get them to communicate to each other. Each one seemed to work on their own but they just wouldn’t call each other. I was up till 3:00 last night posting desperate questions on a number of forums, none of which were answered. Thank the lord for Google and the 10 scraps of highly scribbled on paper in front of me. I must have changed just the right one of over 100 configuration settings to finally get it to work this evening.

So now I’m having a nice cold beer and listening to some lovely minimal tech house downloaded from Brique Rouge to relax.

Today’s link: Screenshots of all the sound effects used in the old Batman TV Series.

I’ve been playing around with Flickr Mosaic. Top row are my photos - middle row are Mrs Pitt’s - and the last row are from some friends and contacts of mine.

1. Baby Graffiti, 2. Silver Globe at Blend, 3. West Pier 2, 4. Pole Dancer, 5. Just Married, 6. Royal Pavilion, 7. Hidden Lilly, 8. Barbelith, 9. Kent in May

My usual technique to reduce my hangover on a Sunday is to pop down to the Brighton Station giant boot fair. Looking around a load of old tat on the off-chance of finding a decent CD or collectable comic book works better at clearing your head than you would probably think. The all-day breakfast in a bagette will sort your stomach out too. But after I’ve had a couple more drinks than normal or if the weather isn’t so good I normally go and visit Brighton Station’s boot fair’s disabled neice, the Bhasvic boot fair.

Unlike the Station boot fair which runs from 6am till 2pm, this opens closer to 9 and is usually all over by 11. The tat to quality ratio is also much higher than the Station’s. I’d put a TTQ ratio of 10:1 for the Station, whereas Bhasvic would get a score of 100:1. The only reason I go is that it’s much nearer to home and there’s no hills.

The crowds at Bhasvic are half the size and there’s only a few fresh-to-market goods on offer. There’s so many copies of redundant software like FIFA 98 for the PC, thousand of Poundshop DVDs and tacky oil painting prints, I wonder why most of them bother. It’s not bad for books though. Other interesting items were Lost Season 2 episodes 1-16, this time being sold by a nice lady rather than the oriental out-of-a-suitcase pirate DVD sellers you get at the Station.

Every two years I normally pile up my crap and do a boot fair in conjunction with friends at Brighton Station. The fact you get to sell for four times longer and it’s twice as busy means that the potential to shift my rubbish is increased by a factor of eight. Looking at all the crap in my cupboards I realise that I need to do one again soon, good job its getting warmer.

Today’s link is to Fancy Pant’s Adventure which is a rather good browser-based Sonic the Hedgehog clone which uses an interesting art style. Enjoy!

Starting this month I’m going to try one post each day. I’ll also be changing the content from just a link blog to a link blog with some more personal comments. This will only last the month of April so please come back in May. To start the ball rolling here’s a poem.

Fat little Man,
deciphering the machine,
confusion seems new,
no change in your pocket but a passer-by gives you 20 pence.

Fat little Man,
returning to his car,
reading the instructions,
fumbling with sticky-taped paper like a five year old child.

My first poem since GCSE English.

March stats were the best yet. I had 2177 unique visitors and over 30,000 hits.

Today’s link: Man flogs wife’s box on eBay. The comments at the bottom are very funny.