Daily Archives: July 8, 2005

Too Close To “Home”

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And St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington is treating 10 people, two of which are in a critical condition.

Three of St Mary’s patients have been transferred to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital’s specialist burns unit, bringing the number there to four.

A spokeswoman for Chelsea and Westminster said they were being assessed by a team of plastic surgeons.

That’s a little disturbing. Paddington was “our” station and St Mary’s was just up the street from the Indian restaurant (Indus Delta) where we had our first dinner in London… when we felt we’d been welcomed by the city, and were totally ready to succumb to its grubby charms.

That was also the morning when we had our first taste of Fuller‘s. It goes without saying that last night on my way home I had to stop at Binny’s Bevvy Depot for some London Pride.

Tower Bridge

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Flickr

towerbridge-thumb

Originally uploaded by GinnyRED57.

Another photo from the 2004 trip to Britain. I have to remember, until I figure out how to get the text to flow properly on photos posted from Flickr, that I need to write enough text to clear the bottom of the image, or the problem posed by having a floated image within a floated center column will keep screwing things up. I keep fiddling with the customized CSS at Flickr; images blogged from Flickr look great over at the Blogspot photoblog, but they’re are handled differently there (no CSS drop shadow) and the layout is a simpler 2 column one. Picasa/Hello, another photoblogging tool, had some clearing divs in their markup that I tried over at Flickr, which looks fine on Razzberry but like hammered poo on Blogula.

There, is that enough text to wrap around the image? If not, I can blather on about using both Flickr and Picasa/Hello. One is by Yahoo and the other is by Google. One is used to build communities around photos, and the other one is more person-to-person, while both have decent “send to blog” tools. Both are easy to use, in totally different ways. Both have organizer capabilities. Picasa’s raaawks, because as soon as you load a flash card full of images, Picasa detects them and loads them up in a way that makes it really, really easy to flip through them, cull the crap, put them in a folder, rename them in a batch, and even add some effects. The only thing I can’t seem to figure out how to do is resizing, because that happens “automatically” if the image is sent to a Blogspot blog. I seem to have to fire up Photoshop Elements to do a little custom resizing if I want to put an image up on MT.

Anyway. Photos. There you have it.

St Paul’s

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So thanks then, terrorists. You’ve just succeeded in bringing the families of millions of Londoners that bit closer together, giving them an increased love of their city and an enhanced appreciation of their way of life. You might have destroyed the lives of several hundred people, but – and this is stating the bloody obvious you fuckwits – you’ve achieved nothing.

My train goes through Kings Cross and my office is less than half a mile from three of the bombs, and how did it affect me and thousands like me? I had a longer walk to the station on the way home; it was an otherwise beautiful evening and I needed the exercise anyway, so big deal. Oh, and I got a bit angry, a mood tempered by St Paul’s Cathedral, still a symbol of London’s resilience, gleaming proudly in the evening sun with a huge Make Poverty History banner wrapped around its dome.

Get it into your thick skulls that this kind of shit just doesn’t work. Never did and never will. Right now, my thoughts go out to those who’ve been more directly affected by this morning.

Damn straight. I’ve been reading clagnut for about 18 months now via Bloglines
yet I’d only had a vague idea that Richard was somewhere near Brighton, not that he might work in London and commute.

The controlled fury of the Londoners whose stories I’ve read fills me with admiration. They won’t lose sight of the really important stuff or be dissuaded by the actions of a few misguided extremist wackjobs.

They’ll just get on with it. As should all the rest of us.

Union Jack raised at State Department, Washington DC

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Flickr

Union Jack raised at State Department, Washington DC

Originally uploaded by Antarctic Lemur.

I may have to email this to Debbie in Washington. I don’t know if the Union Jack is being raised in place of the Stars and Stripes, or if it’s going up on a “guest of honor” type of flagpole. But if it’s the former, the alternate reality folks will get a kick out of it.

I approve of the sentiment and hope these guys don’t catch any flak.