The long weekend

It was the aptly named Spring Bank Holiday Weekend and to make up for the debarkle that happened last long weekend (the May Day Bank Holiday) I booked a trip up to Glasgow to visit Damien, Annmarie and their two kids. I couldn't find any flights to Glasgow that suited me (either they were too expensive or too early) so I chose to travel by train this time. I may have been slightly hasty doing the actual booking since I didn't notice that my trip up north was actually 3 connecting trains with over 3 hours waiting times at various stations. It was basically the worst journey I've ever had, about 11 hours (my train left at 11:30pm and met Damien et al in Edinburgh at around 10:30am) with virtually no sleep and not exactly pleasant fellow travelers for the most part.

All traveling stories aside, the weekend was quite nice, good to see Damien, Annmarie and the kids again. We had a couple of meals and on Sunday we went to see the Falkirk Wheel. It's a giant "boat lift" that's a replacement for a series of locks, essentially two giant baths that rotate to lower/raise boats to the canals that connect to it. Even better, the whole thing is almost completely sponsored by Irn Bru complete with an Irn Bru Fun park. The fun park is really just a regular playground, but the bins all look like Irn Bru cans, as do the enclosed slippery dips, and the rubber "won't hurt when you fall on it" ground is also made up with the Irn Bru logo. We even got some fresh air and exercise from the walk from the train station.

The trip back to London was quite a bit better, one continuous trip on a new fangled Virgin "tilting trains". I think Damien may have already told me this, but I was pleased to see that the trains have power points on it. They say they're only for laptops and mobile phones, but everyone makes good use of them. If they supplied broadband internet access as well I could very well travel everywhere by train. There's a flight company that gives broadband in the air, so I can't see why train companies couldn't offer it. Maybe in first class, but on trains first class isn't absurdly expensive as it is in air travel.

I've been playing around with MySQL a little for work, phpMyAdmin seems to be a very useful tool. I'm trying to find free web hosting that has php and MySQL so I can try out some things. I opened an account at SiteBurg.com, but I used a stylesheet to hide the banner ads which I think led them to shut down the site. My Internode webspace runs PHP, but not MySQL so it's not very useful just now. My interest in World of Warcraft has also shifted slightly to making a guild website and looking at the addons for it. The website for the administration side of it and the addons use an interesting language called Lua. It's a light weight language that I think is intended for third parties to build into other systems as an extension system.

Well I better go do some washing and get to sleep. Good night everyone.