Mutterings for the Minority

National Route 43

I decided to check out part of the Sustrans Route 43 National Cycle Network today between Clydach and Ystalyfera. The ride was approximately 14 miles (roundtrip) and was very easy going given due to the flat nature of the route and took around 1 hour to complete.

There’s plenty of scenery to enjoy along the way with the path hugging both the Swansea canal and River Tawe at various points along the route. There are also some cracking views of the Swansea Valley and Black Mountains towards the Ystalyfera part of the route. All in all it’s a great ride for a family outing, but off-roaders looking for some thrills would need to look elsewhere I’m afraid.

Seeing as it’s been such a glorious sunny day the DDWT family also made a visit to Swansea Bay, well the beach that sits on the doorstep of County Hall. I took a couple of the snaps which you can see below - the first one shows Mumble’s Head in the distance, the 2nd was taken from the County Hall car park (complete with palm trees!) looking out over Swansea Bay.

Anyone who has been onto the beach will tell you how great the views are and how lush the sand is to walk on! I can highly recommend walking along the beach at sunset - for the romantics amongst you - but not whilst the tide is coming in of course!

Even before all of this exercise I took it upon myself to weigh this morning - as Sunday is ALWAYS weigh-in day - and I was pleasantly suprised to see me now weighing in at 17st 4lbs. This was great news and I am chuffed to be losing weight at a steady and safe pace. If I could only keep in check the amount of chocolate I eat, I’m sure it would be a lot easier. Anyway, progress is progress so I’m happy with that.

Half-time Surprise

You can imagine the shock and surprise I had last night (during the half-time break at the Swans v Bees of Brentford match) to be summoned onto the pitch to collect a prize! DDWT Junior had won a very large ‘Cyril the Swan’ mascot doll (picture below) in a txt your seat number competition for members of the Cygnets club (i.e junior Swans fan club).

Although I was chuffed to bits that he’d won - I was rather embarressed to walk around the pitch clutching the toy, especially in light of comments such as “Got off his lead did he” and “I like your bird fella” from the chuckling hoardes. Further humiliation is guaranteed with a picture of me being presented with the doll (from Cyril the Swan) being in the next match day programme.

Anyway, back to the football - a great night was had all round with the Swans winning 2-1 in a very entertaining game and an electric atmosphere to boot. Friday night games at the Vetch Field were always special and it looks like more of the same at the Liberty stadium - long may it continue.

I picked up my free edition of ‘The League Paper’ (a weekly football newspaper) along with my match programme at the game and must say what a well written paper it is. It focusses on the Championship, League One and League Two with lots of coverage on the majority of clubs, with stats, match reports and guest columns as well. It’s a very good read and presents a very unbiased view - so worth the £1.20 weekly cost. It was also interesting to read Lee Trundle’s view of his career to date and how he see’s it developing longer term.

Received an interesting email today from PlusNet (my broadband ISP) who are offering a free upgrade to their 8MB service for all existing broadband premier customers. It’s worth mentioning that even new subscribers can get 8MB connections for as little as £14.99 per month. Anyway, I quickly went in search of the ADSL capacity of my local exchange and was very pleased to read that it is due for ‘ADSL Max’ (i.e 8Mbps downstream and 448kbps upstream) activation on March 31st. I just hope that as I live roundabout 2km from my exchange that it isn’t going to affect the bandwidth - which is currently 2MB. So here’s hoping for 8MB.

35 today

Today saw me celebrating my 35th birthday and a good day was had all round. Special thanks go to Mrs DDWT for a cracking party and homemade chocolate sponge birthday cake (lush!) - which was enjoyed by the entire family. Thanks also to all of those who sent me cards and the gang in the office for the cakes they bought. The fireworks in the back garden are also worth a mention - especially the one that decided to go awol and almost take my combat trousers with it. My ears are still ringing from the bangers as I type. Anyway, everyone enjoyed themselves which was the most important thing.

Got back onto the running today, as I’d taken some time out to recuperate after last week’s illness. The break had done me good and I enjoyed the run today more than I thought I would. I opted for a shorter run than normal (some 22 minutes odd) as it was my first one back in over 10 days. Went along the beach in front of Swansea Marina and along the jetty at the end of the beach - where today was moored the Swansea to Cork ferry. It’s amazing how impressive such a ship is when you see it close up like I did today. I wish I’d had my camera with me *sigh*

Cardiff here we come

WAHAY, the Swans did it! By beating the U’s of Colchester 2-1 tonight (and 3-1 on aggregate), the Swans now face the Cumbrians of Carlisle in the LDV Vans Final at the Millenium stadium in Cardiff on Sunday, April 2nd. It brings back fond memories for me of when we played (and beat on penalties) the Terriers of Huddersfield in the Autoglass Trophy Final (LDV Vans as is now) at the old Wembley Stadium in 1994. I’m well excited now and can’t wait to get my ticket!

Couldn’t help but chuckle today when I read an article on ‘The Register‘ web site about the Metropolitan police and their stance on its officers writing blogs - have a read, it’s rather interesting.

Spent a considerable amount of time today reading through various articles and web sites about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and conformance to web accessiblity standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). So being the inquisitive chap that I am, I thought I’d run my blog through one of the automated tools on offer - such as WebXACT. One thing I should mention at this point is that you should ALWAYS test your site manually - not just using autmated tools. Anyway, the results proved quite interesting with the site passing the Priority 1 checkpoint but failing miserably on both the Priority 2 and 3 checkpoints. Have a look at your site (be it a blog or not) as it’s quite a revealing exercise and will give you plenty of food for thought for any future design you might undertake.

Food for thought?

Given the opportunity I like writing poetry, so I thought I’d start to share with you some of my past works. This is one which I wrote back in the late 1980’s when I was starting university, it’s called ‘Boredom’.

Boredom is one’s self decay,
Thinking, wasting time away.
The occupation of the mind,
Could be the answer you might find.
Depression strikes almost every day,
With boredom to help it on it’s way.
Be happy and forget the strife,
For you have only one chance of life.
Life’s a bitch some might say,
So take it easy day by day.
Looking back along these lines,
I remember so many happy times.
Don’t despair if you’re in trouble,
Just take your time and solve the muddle.

Not a classic by any stretch of the imagination, but it meant a lot to me at the time of writing. No doubt, I’ll be sharing some more of my little ditty’s over the life of this blog - so you’ve been warned!

Swans caught in a flap

No not the swans I saw on Fendrod lake yesterday - the Swans I saw at the Liberty stadium today (that’s the Swansea City football team for those of you that don’t know what the hell I’m on about). A one all draw with the Saddlers from Walsall wasn’t the result we needed and if I’m brutally honest we were very lucky to get a point! A fortunate deflection in the 87th minute saw big Bayo Akinfenwa equalise for us after we looked doomed to defeat.

There were so many things wrong with the performance, attitude and application today and in all honesty there were only a few players worthy of wearing the shirt today - Gary Monk (again), Willy Gueret and Alan Tate. I think everyone else must have either been hungover or taking inspiration from the Welsh rugby team’s 2nd half performance yesterday.

Ever the optimist I still think we can make the automatic promotion places (don’t worry I’ll keep taking the tablets!) and I won’t give up on the idea until it’s mathematically impossible for us to do so. I mean lets face it, if someone had said at the start of the season that the Swans would be even pushing for a League One promotion place - well I would have laughed at them.

My own opinion is that I don’t think we’re strong enough in squad depth or ability to survive in the Championship - so should we miss out on promotion this year, I won’t be shedding too many tears. I’ll settle for a concerted push next year after a summer of squad re-inforcements.

Take a walk by the lakeside

Decided to visit Fendrod lake today for an early morning walk and for DDWT Junior to feed the ducks and swans. It really is quite a pleasant and tranquil setting considering it’s smack in the middle of the enterprise zone in Llansamlet (near Swansea for those not in the know). The number of fishermen, walkers and joggers we encountered during the hour or so stroll was testament to this. As usual, I took a few snaps for the purpose of posterity *smile*

After the lovely walk, we returned home to watch the rugby (Wales v Italy) - boy do I now wish I’d stayed at the lake! After a bright opening to the game, I’m simply lost for words as to how Wales could contrive to almost give Italy their very first away win in the 6 Nations EVER. As a proud Welshman, I found today’s draw very very hard to stomach and just illustrates how much the dragon has stopped breathing fire. So in the words of Eminem (well almost), would the dinosaurs in the WRU “please stand up” and explain why in God’s name Mike Ruddock is no longer at the helm. *big sigh*

I watched ‘School of Rock‘ last night and whilst the storyline was a wee bit thin on the ground, the musical creativity and imagination shown in its delivery was very good. It wasn’t as gut bustingly funny as I thought it would be, but it had its odd moments and perhaps in all honesty the aim of the film wasn’t really meant as a comedy but as an example of how you can be what you want to be if you express yourself (especially in terms of music in this case). Anyway, if you haven’t seen it, its worth a look.

A sight worth seeing

Seeing as I’ve been under the weather somewhat this week, I thought I’d cheer myself up by looking at some of the various snaps I’ve taken from around the Swansea area over the past few months. Here are a select few I thought I’d share with you.

Shimmering sun on Swansea Bay

Clydach in the snow

Sunset in Birchgrove

Mumbles Pier as seen from Oystermouth Castle

For anyone who’s got hundreds or even thousands of digital pictures, I can recommend using a free piece of software from Google called ‘Picasa‘ - which catalogue’s all of the images on your PC (or just the images you wish to catalogue). It’s a nifty program and much better than some of the commercial offerings out there.

Sick as a pig

Phew, what a day. The house of DDWT is now a house full of people with gastro enteritis - which for those of you who know, isn’t a very pleasant experience. At the last count, I’d lost 13lbs in less than 24 hours - scary indeed and no doubt it will take a good few days to build myself back up again. I’m all for losing some of my excess waistline baggage - but not this way!

A thought occurred to me whilst writing here as to the whereabouts of the term “sick as a pig” actually comes from - as it doesn’t really strike me as being an obvious association to make. Hmm, I couldn’t even find reference to its origins via Google (which is a rather unusual occurrence).

Thanks to Magic Door (whom you can tell is a knowledge analyst) for the pointer to the answer to the question I posed above. I still reckon it’s a weird expression though.

When is a ping not a ping

Being a self-confessed IT anorak, I was most intrigued to read about the use of the term ‘ping‘ in the blogging world. For me ‘ping’ was synominous with TCP/IP networking. But hey I suppose when you really stop and think about it ‘ping’-ing your updated blog to a blog search engine is the same kind of idea *smile*

Whilst on the subject of blogs, I came across ‘Ping-o-Matic‘ an excellent site which lets you ping your blog updates to a variety of search engines. This is a must-do if you want your blog to reach all corners of the internet globe.

As a newbie to the world of blogging, I’ve often wondered whether or not it’s good blog etiquette to post mulitple entries onto your blog daily or just pour out your rants, thoughts and feelings in one long entry? Any help would be greatly received by the blogsters out there reading this.