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Older items of news have been archived here. This is a lot easier to do since I wrote a perl script to handle it all from a form. One day it may be reasonably current.
Regular visitors may notice the appalling change to the background image. This is in honour of our new Dyson DC04 Absolute, purchased at a knock down price (cheaper than all the high street names + free delivery!) from QED. We didn't buy the yellow one! If you're in the market for a domestic appliance, we can certainly vouch for this one. Hoover's (don't) suck, But Dyson's do it 100% of the time! With four kids to tidy up after, it was well worth the wedge.
12th January 2001
Craig went to let the chickens out this morning, and found a bat hanging from
the trellis. It had a damaged wing and looked as if one of the cats had had a go
at it. Diane went into mother mode and brought it in to the house and
bunged it in a card board box. After some surfin' and a couple of phone calls
she tracked down the Batman. He must really be bored with that joke. He advised
us that most bats die from dehydration so we gave it some water which it slurped
up in no time. It was also partial to the jelly from the cat food. It then
decided that it wanted to crawl up Diane's jumper and head for the throat, but
she managed to persuade it to jump off back into the shoe box.
Bat Update:
The bat has now been sat in its box for a couple of hours and is making frequent scratching sounds. Rhiannon has told Imogen that if the bat gets out, it will bite her bottom. Imogen is now petrified of the bat. So much for sisterly love.
The Batman Cometh
Batman (and Robin!) turned up at 16:30 to collect Bertie. It transpires that he is a
serotine,
one of the larger bats in the UK. All bats are an endangered species
these days, and the Batman was grateful that we had contacted them.
They have invited us to the next open day at
Borde Hill Garden.
We're looking forward to it.
Moving Our Domain
We're in the process of relocating our domain and email forwarding. This has involved much fiddling about, so please bear with us whilst the 'Net plays DNS catch up. Normal services will be resumed as soon as possible. I've also been taking some stick from various Northern Folks regarding my maybe less than glowing references to their accents. I may update my page at some point in the near future. You have been warned!
18th January 2001 - RIP Bertie
The bat has died. Good news for the bat world is that they don't know what type he is. So they are sending his body off to London for identification because he may be an extinct one. He clearly is now!
Bertie is Mouse Eared
It's official. Bertie was infact a mouse eared bat. This species is allegedly extinct in the UK, the last one having been seen 10 years ago. Bertie was also female and has thus been posthumously renamed Gertie. She was also quite elderly and underweight, which probably explains her demise.
The bat community are very excited about the find and we're preparing to fend of swarms of persons waving bat detectors. They think it's quite likely that there will be a roost within a 5 mile radius.
23rd January, 2001
Various calls were received from the bat people yesterday.
They'd been worried that the bat might have had rabies or something else
nasty, but she was given a clean bill of health, despite being dead!
The bat people have been out in force checking the last known roosts of the mouse eared bats. We're told that the BBC are going to be informed of our find, so we may make the local news, or maybe even the national news today/tomorrow. We've also got a journalist coming from the Chichester Observer to take some photos of the kids and do a story on the whole thing.
24th January
We've made the national press! Today's Guardian newspaper
carries an article
about Craig finding the bat.
Guardian Website
Our news has made it onto the
Guardian Umlimited website. We're allegedly in the Daily Mail as well.
Craig's In The Spotlight
We've made the Daily Mail as well! We've also had a couple of photographers round taking pictures of Craig for the local newspapers. As and when we've seen the articles, we'll
post 'em up for your perusal.
25th January 2001
Craig is in the Chichester Observer. A whacking big
A4 sized article it is too.
More Newspaper Clippings
Just for posterity, here are the articles from the Worthing edition of the Evening Argus and the Daily Mail.
They're a little on the large side so please be patient when viewing.
Friday 26th January
Gertie was featured on the local BBC lunchtime news. I got it on video. As an when I've acquired the ability to produce mpegs, I'll make it available. Alas, we're not in the article ;-(
I Love My Wife, But...
Those of you who know Diane may know that
she is prone to malapropisms. I overheard her talking to one of the numerous
journalists who've been ringing of late. She said that Gertie wasn't in that poor
shape when we found her and that she didn't think she was emancipated
at all.
Now that I've stood up again, I've therefore renamed Gertie, to Emily, in honour of the great lady (Pankhurst, not Diane!)
31St January 2001
We'd been using Plus Net as our ISP for the last three months. They'd been reasonable apart from their pathetic "10 recipients" per email rule. However they've just decided that we're running a business and have cut us off! Rubbish! I'm just smart enough to figure out how to get a Linux box to pick up the mail every 20 minutes or so.
It beggars belief that they offer a surftime 24/7 package and then expect you not to use it. 24/7 obviously means 24 minutes every 7 days in their book. I would not recommend them to anybody.
Thus we've moved to Demon Internet who understand how many hours there are in a day.
12th February 2001
Those scabs at Pusnet have had the nerve to try and charge us our next three months subscription, despite the fact that they cut us off a fortnight ago! Miffed? Just a tad.
One of the advantages of PC banking is that I was able to check that they hadn't yet got their sticky fingers on my (hard?) earned wedge. They'll have fun when they try!
We've Dumped Prohosting
Our former hosts, Prohosting appear to have forced some more naff advertisments onto our pages. I'd managed to kill most of them off with some reasonably cunning javascript, but alas, these ones won't budge. Thus I've relocated the site to a home brewed RedHat Linux server hosted courtesy of Cybis.
In order to keep the amount of traffic to a minimum, I've configured the Apache Web Server to use mod_rewrite to
grab all the images from Demon Internet. Only text comes from my server, everything else comes from Demon.
It's true what they say about mod_rewrite: voodoo, but damn cool voodoo.
18th March 2001
Well, to cut a long story short, no. Not knowing why she croaked doesn't stimulate the appetite, and anyway you can't eat something with a name. Fatal flaw in the master plan, that, naming the dumb birds.
When the weather gets better, we'll be after another three, so we really will be self sufficient in the egg department.
Bognor 10K Road Race
I've done it now! I've entered the Bognor Prom 10K Road Race. Read all about it and sponsor me All proceeds to go to the
Samaritans
20th May 2001
The Bognor 10K Road Race was a great success. My knee held up, so did my wings. All this and England won at cricket.
Brings a tear to the eye and makes you proud to live in Bognor.
OK, so that's a bit over the top, but check out the comprehensive road race pages
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