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This Little Piggy went to Bath

I’d planned on this being first post being all about the brave new adventures around England I’m embarking on over the new few days. It’s wholly different from any past brave new adventure around England, as for the very first time I have a Rough Guides to Britain. And all real holidays involve a Rough Guide, so this must be one too.

It’s my logic, I’ll do what I like with it.

Bath Abbey

Bath Abbey

I’m hoping to find out if we’ve become the “overweight, binge-drinking reality TV addicts, obsessed with toffs and C-list celebrities” type of race that Rough Guides claim we have. So where better to visit than the origins of British civilisation epicentre that is Bath. I have only tenuous links to make such wild claims but it makes for a great introduction, doesn’t it?

Bath is famous for many things, The mostly preserved ancient Roman baths (60-70AD), The Wife of Bath, Jane Austen’s residence for five years, it’s a World Heritage site, King Bladud… Wait….Who?

You probably all remember the story of late King Bladud of 3,000 years ago. He contracted a disfiguring disease (hit by the ugly stick). It was due to this that he was banned from the royal palace, and eventually travelled to the Avon Valley in his new line of work, “Swineherd”. Unfortunately for the pigs, they all caught “ugly” off of poor old Bladud, and it wasn’t before they went rolling in the hot mud around Bath that they became beautiful Disney pigs again. Seeing the miracle with his own eyes, Bladud joined in with the pigs in what would nowadays be called “mad”. But due credit to the guy, the magical springs did the trick and he returned to retake the throne. When he returned to the palace, he founded the City of Bath and dedicated it’s healing powers to the Celtic goddess Sul.

King Bladud's Pigs - Abi and Emily

King Bladud's Pigs. Abi and Emily

And that’s why 100 pig sculptures have been modelled, painted, decorated, been displayed in the greatest commemoration of Pass The Pigs the world has ever known. Oh, and to get Bladud’s statue out of storage and into Parade Gardens, of course. They’ll all be auctioned on 31st Oct 2008. So get to Bath while you can, or get ready to place those bids. If you don’t make it, hopefully old Bladud will be back on his perch in the gardens, with a brand new pig sculpture made from Bath stone. Let’s hope so.

You can buy a map of all said pigs in the tourist information for the extortionate price of 1 pound. It’s well-worth it though and an excellent way to explore the city, taking you places you’d probably raise an “eh” for, before. I managed to photograph 54 of them in my one day visit. If I had longer, I would certainly go and find the rest – but I still consider this to be a pretty good haul.

My first impressions of Bath is a beautiful city, full of friendly smiling people, grand impressive architecture, sprawling green parks, and well worth the short 90 minute train journey from London Paddington. You won’t regret it. Unless you’re Jane Austen. Or you hate pigs.

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Twitter – Now the machines are syndicating us

RSS recursion is not a toy

… that was syndication for the sake of it.

That’s what I said, word for word. Then a colleague pointed out that I could have twitter automatically update from my blog or Blakepics. And all hell broke loose.

I didn’t like Twitter as another way of updating my blog, or having it throw up all over my Facebook status every time I opened up my Twitter-enabled fridge. But reaching out to new audiences, and the potential to bombard mobile phone networks every time I bounce from one country to the next… Well suddenly it’s become quite cool.

And yes, I admit – I was tempted to install the application to syndicate my Xbox 360 status as well. But I’m not sure I’m ready to spam everyone that much. Yet.

“Kevin has just been killed by a bunny rabbit on Halo 3. Again”

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Last.Fm Ecleticity

I came across a whole bunch of Last.fm profile scripts on Anthony Lieken’s blog while I was looking for a Scrobbler plugin for Winamp. One of them gave me an eclectic score and made me feel all warm and fuzzy. How do you score?

Take your top 20 artists. For each of these artists, collect the top 5 similar artists. The resulting number of unique artists is your eclectic score. If the score is small (extreme = 5) your musical preferences are very limited, and if it is large (larger than 80, extreme = 100), then you have an eclectic musical preference. You can compute your own score at http://anthony.liekens.net/pub/scripts/last.fm/eclectic.php

My eclectic score is currently

86/100

The 86 related artists for my profile are Ash, Athlete, Audioslave, Better Than Ezra, Big Wreck, Blues Traveler, Breaking Benjamin, Bush, Cobra Starship, Collective Soul, Creed, Crossfade (2), Cute Is What We Aim For, Default, Disturbed, Edwin McCain, Elbow, Embrace, Fair to Midland, Faithless, Fall Out Boy, Finger Eleven, Fort Minor, Frou Frou, Fuel, Gavin DeGraw, Goo Goo Dolls (2), Hawksley Workman, Hoobastank, Hootie & the Blowfish, Hooverphonic, Howie Day, I Am Kloot, Idlewild, Incubus, Ingram Hill, Jack’s Mannequin, Jay-Z and Linkin Park, Jem, Joseph Arthur, Kate Havnevik, Ko?n, Lamb, Lifehouse, Limp Bizkit, Matchbox Twenty (2), Matt Nathanson, Matt Wertz, Moloko, Morcheeba, My Chemical Romance, Neverending White Lights, Nickelback, Nirvana, OneRepublic, P.O.D., Panic! At the Disco (2), Papa Roach, Pilate, Queens of the Stone Age, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Regina Spektor, Rob Thomas, Saliva, Shinedown (2), Something Corporate, Staind (2), Static-X, Stephen Fretwell, Stereophonics, Switchfoot, System of a Down, Taking Back Sunday (2), The Academy Is… (2), The Calling, The Early November, The Postal Service, The Starting Line, The Used, Third Eye Blind (2), Three Days Grace, Tonic (2), Train (3), Turin Brakes, Vertical Horizon (3), Wintersleep

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Team Iron Chef

Iron Chef America... Fuck Yeah!

Iron Chef America… Fuck Yeah!

I know a short blog post is highly uncharacteristic, but it’s especially relevant as I’ve just been talking about Twitter…

Is it just me, or does the new cover of Iron Chef America for Wii remind anyone else of Team America?

Just me then…

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Twitter – Conversation in the Machine

It’s another of those life-changing technologies which will not only improve the way you interact your fellow humans across the planet, but also shape and change the web as we know it for a brighter future beyond our current limited borders.

No it’s not.

It’s a micro-blogging tool which performs about the same function as your Facebook status, with a bit more history and more conversation potential than real speaking. It also falls into the category of “shiny web things” that the magpie’s of the Internet world run bounding towards with wings flapping, declaring their undying allegiance and overwhelming excitement about the grand new era of technology, society and communication.

I am said magpie. I just haven’t had much use for it, so whilst most people are bounding towards Pownce with their wings wide open, I’m still trying to find an excuse.

My Twitter feed is decidedly empty, having originally opened it as a way only of updating my Facebook status before I realised that was syndication for the sake of it (See integrations with BrightKite, Loopt, and Flickr integration for reference). But I do get a kick out of things like the Tower Bridge Tweets. The wonderful thing about this Web 2.0 stuff is that you don’t have to use any of it for what it was intended for (which is usually so vague and fluffy, it only really starts to take shape after the rules have been broken).

So I grabbed a copy of the Net::Twitter module for Perl and before you know it, my script that monitors if the Wifi connection on the Blakepics server had gone down was happily tweeting away with only three more lines of (my) code.

use Net::Twitter;
my $twit = Net::Twitter->new(username=>"username", password=>"password", source => "DowntimeMonitor" );
$twit->update("Internet connection ".($state ? "is now up" : "has been restarted"));