I was on a train the other day on my way back from picking some things up in Guildford when I spotted on of those scratchcard you get in magazines and newspapers on the seat just opposite me. I’m aware of how these things work, what with their premium rate numbers and suchlike, but I also know they all have to offer a non-purchase route to winning. I’ve often wondered what would happen if someone actually tried the claim by post route, so I decided to give it a go.

The competition is run by Purely Create, a company with a registered address just down the road from where I went to University in Lancaster, and the company behind most of these scratchcard competitions. A brief search also turns up some quite negative reports in the papers, especially the Mirror. Despite that I figured, as long as I was careful, there was nothing to worry about. Their website, incidentally, is run on WordPress.

My scratchcard had three chances to win on it, and for each one you had to find a set of matching symbols with a prize for finding two and three matches. According to the small print on the card all distributed cards have a set of three matching symbols, a set of two matching symbols, and a losing card. Mine was no different. The small print also said I could claim one two symbol prize and one three symbol prize per household, so I did. In order to claim the prize, you need a claim number. Normally this is obtained by ringing or texting a premium rate number, but there is a postal route too — this is the route I’m taking. In order to claim you have to send a stamped SAE to their address and wait 28 days for the claim number to come back, so I put together a set of envelopes with the appropriate details on them and dropped them in the post.

That’s 4 first class stamps (that’s what I had to hand) , so the cost so far is £1.84. I’m not counting the value of my own time, of course. Based on the prizes listed on the card I should make this back (or an equivalent) many times over no matter which two prizes I win. I’ll keep you updated wit how I get on.

There are only minor changes in this version:

• Modified the behavior surrounding preceding and trailing white space in tokens and values.
• Modified behavior so leaving the replace box blank now assumes a match removal rule even if ‘remove matched’ is not checked.
• Added an uninstall function to tidy up settings when uninstalling.

I hope the white space handling will help out a few people who wish to match strings which include white space before and after their match string. Please leave a comment if you run into any problems with this release!

We are short of space on our sink, and Dana and I share a little plastic cup to keep our toothbrushes and toothpaste in. This used to work fine as there was plenty of space for two brushes and two tubes of toothpaste. Sometimes there was a problem with balance, especially when one of the tubes was nearing the end, but generally it was a perfectly satisfactory setup. But then, for some reason, Colgate came along and made the caps on their toothpaste tubes huge…

It seems they think that people want their toothpaste tubes to be self-supporting — that by giving the tubes a big cap they can stand on their own single big foot — but I really don’t see it as an improvement. The problem we have now is that the majority of space in our little toothbrush cup will be taken up by the lid of the toothpaste. Once we both get on to our new tubes the problem will be serious. Once we’re down to the bottom of our tubes and they start to flop under the weight of their new caps the balance problem will be greatly increased too.

People have been managing to find a way to store their toothpaste — on it’s side, in a cup — for years. This is hardly a revolutionary design. Were the old style caps really so bad?

I’m heading back from Scott and Jess’ wedding this weekend. They had a handfasting ceremony and asked me to do their photos for them. While I was, of course, honoured that they would ask me and trust me to shoot such an important event, I was more than a little nervous. While I’m comfortable shooting live events and theatre, I had actually never previously shot a wedding. Wedding photography is not something that I have ever really wanted to get into, but I have known Scott since we were very young and Jess a few years now, so I agreed on the understanding that they know my style and they knew what they were getting.

I travelled up on Friday morning and stayed with my dad for the weekend. (I’m not sure how long I will have that luxuary now my mum has started her new job. Their house is up for sale and I guess it all depends on how long that takes to sell.) On Saturday my dad went to take some things to my brother so I had to find my own way to the place the wedding was taking place — the walled garden in Manor Heath Park, Halifax. It’s been years since I used the busses around Halifax for anything other than going directly into the town, so I thought I should leave myself plenty of time. I set off about quarter past 12, wandered down to the bus stop and had a look at the timetable. There was some information saying that there was only one bus which went near the hospital (which I knew was the right kind of direction) and that I had missed it this hour. I decided to catch a bus to King Cross and walk from there. the first bus which arrived was from a new company in the area, Centre Bus, so I got on and asked the driver if it went to Kings Cross. He told me it didn’t, that it turned up by the fire station. I thought for a moment, despiratly trying to work out where the fire station was. I couldn’t. I gave up and decided not to risk it. As the bus drove off it dawned on my where the fire station is. It’s exactly where I wanted to go. The next bus which came along did go to King Cross so I got on that and walked to the park from there.

I was very early when I arrived so I got myself a drink from the cafe in the park and sat on the grass in the gardens. The sun was wonderful. I’d been a little bit worried that the weather might not be so good based on the previous days and the forecast, but the sun came out and stayed out for the whole ceremony. Only once we got back to Scott’s grandma’s house did the rain finally come. Twenty or so minutes after I got there Gary turned up in a brand new, fresh from the packet, shirt. He was meeting Neal at 13:50 by the gates to carry out ushering duties. A short while after the lady carrying out the ceremony arrived and we were asked to help her bring her things from the car: a little table and a witch’s style broomstick.

Soctt and Jess had chosen to have a handfasting ceremony as they felt it was the least officially-sanctioned, most non-religious ceremony they could while still having a centrepiece for the occation. The ceremony itself was nice. The lady carrying out the service explained that quite a lot of the symbolism has worked it’s way into the more common wedding ceremony and that some common terminology relating to marriage comes from the traditions in the hand fasting ceremony. I shot the all the way through, trying not to get anyone’s way while still covering the the important things. After the ceremony Scott, Jess and I slipped off to take some more formal pictures aruond the gardens, the plan was to do photos with just them in the gardens themselves and then, once we got back to Soctt’s gran’s house to do all the stuff with the families.

Scott’s gran’s house is between the wedding venue and the reception venue, up a little side track, with a nice garden. We wanted to shoot the formal pictures backed on to the garden and up the steps, but by this time the weather was deteriorating. After the speeches by Scott’s gran, Jess’ mum and Ben, Scott’s best man, the toast, and the cake cutting, the rain started to fall and most people retreated inside. I tried to get some candid shots of people as they chatted inside, especially of the grand parents who had been the harder people to shoot during the service, until a break in the weather. We managed to grab a few family shots on the grass before the rain started again, so we moved to under an umbrella and did some more there. These photos are the ones which I was most worried about, and I don’t think they are the best formal photos from a wedding, but I think they will be ok. I hope no one is dissapointed.

After the grandmother’s house we moved on to the reception venue. The Malt House in Rishworth is a nice venue. We had the whole upstairs function room area and the whole thing was very informal. We didn’t have a seating plan, and the meal was buffet style. I think this is just what they wanted — I don’t think they would have enjoyed a very formal type of meal and reception, so it worked well. The people who had been at the ceremony itself mingled a bit and some people who were only coming to the reception turned up. I slinked around the edge of the room most of the time trying to take the most natural pictures I could. I got pictures of all the key things: guestbook, favours, cupcakes, and I think I covered most people who were there. I might have missed some who were in the other room and who didn’t hang around too long, but I will have to see. I hung around until near the end when a group of us took a taxi down the valley. I was heading back to Sowerby Bridge and a few others on to Halifax.

The day was very enjoyable. It was nice to see people again, and the whole event was very laid back. I’m sure, as everyone else has said, that Scott and Jess will be very happy together. The day was pitched just right for them. Now I just hope that the photos can live up to the day itself…

The full changelog is below:

• Added the option to apply rules to either pages, posts, or both.
• Added the option to match or ignore case in matches.
• Added option to remove matched string, not replace it.
• Reworked the admin page to (hopefully) make it easier to use with new options.
• Added settings link to plugin page.

The plugin can be downloaded from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Judging by the posts on Facebook Scott’s stag weekend seems to have been a success. In all honesty I thought that perhaps this little review would be a little less positive after the first night but in my opinion things got better the second night even if I did end up falling into my (not uncommon) “responsible adult” role at three in the morning.

The weekend started off when the advanced party, Ben the best man, Neil Ben’s father, Alyx who we met in Chester because he lives there, and myself arrived at the Bunkhouse to the news that the other building had been let for the weekend to a Hen party.

Our plan on arriving was to unpack the car and head into the local village to stock up on some provisions for the weekend. As we passed through the village on the way we had passed the local pub which looked to have closed down, a Butchers which had also closed down, and the local Londis convenience store so we headed down towards that. The four of us piled into the shop and had a quick look around. It was a little disappointing. The plan had been to buy something like pizza for the evening when the others arrived and something for the morning, and at some stage we also knew we needed to buy something for the next evening’s barbecue. A decision was taken based on the selection and quality of the frozen pizzas to go and look for another shop. The assumption was that there must be a larger shop not too far away. It turned out this assumption was simply wrong. Rural north Wales, it seems, is just that: rural. Ten miles down the road, in Bets-y-coed, we ended our search at Spar, the selection of pizza apparently being sufficient. We bought all they had in stock. (Further research found the nearest Tesco to be 25 miles from where we were staying.)

With food sorted we headed back to the bunkhouse to chill out until the rest of the party got there. By the time we arrived three of the girls from the hen party had arrived: the bride, her twin sister who had organised the whole thing, and a friend. We had just been sitting chatting in our kitchen when the friend came and knocked on our door to introduce herself. We were shortly joined at the door by the bride and her sister and we had a little chat. We didn’t talk much and soon they had headed back to their house and us back to our kitchen. It wasn’t very long, however, before there was another knock at the door. It was the friend again and this time Neil invited her in and offered her a beer expecting her to say she didn’t want one; she accepted and hung about talking to him.

For some reason the thought of making friends with the girls seemed to be totally unacceptable for Ben and when they invited us around to their house to have a beer with them a little later on he instructed his dad to go and tell them we were having something to eat and therefore too busy to go and see them. This resistance to interacting with them seemed to be a recurring theme over the weekend although, admittedly, not always just on our behalf.

When everyone else arrived we had the pizzas ready fresh out of the oven, they seemed grateful. A number of them had been drinking since early in the afternoon while they waited for the car they had hired to become available. I was glad I had been picked up by the advanced party — the thought of being stuck in a 7 seater car with people who had been drinking quite a bit already wasn’t a very appealing one. There were hugs and dramatic greetings aplenty from the two groups. It was nice to see some people I had known from school but hadn’t seen for a while.

After pizza people moved outside to carry on drinking. The weather was nice but there was a problem with small flies in the area between the bunkhouses. In an attempt to keep them away it was decided that we should light a fire in a makeshift barbecue stand a previous group had made. Neil was the self appointed head of the fire and made a reasonable job but it wasn’t exactly impressive. As the evening wore on more of the girls from the hen party arrived, each one was watched, and assessed, by the members of our group. I got the impression that the overall opinion was less than favorable. (While this was born out the next night by people’s comments, it wasn’t totally proven through their actions.)

At one point in the evening the owner of the bunkhouse came out to talk to both our group and the girls’ group. When she came to us she was obviously concerned that we didn’t have anything planned for the next day. She told us that the girls were planning an early night and had obviously hoped that we were too, but on discovering we didn’t she tried to appeal to our good side by saying she thought we should respect their early night with a curfew of 10.30pm. This didn’t go down well. From our chat earlier we already knew the girls had lots of things planned for the next day, but the thought of them ruining our first night of drinking was just unacceptable for some people in our group. I tried to compromise: “as long as they are still up, I think it’s fair game.” I could see in from both points of view — for our group the point of the weekend was to stay up late and drink lots. That’s why they had chosen a bunk house in the middle of nowhere; so they didn’t have to worry about disturbing anyone. In the end it actually worked out OK. The girls stayed up quite late — well midnight — and by the time they finally did all go to bed our group had moved most of the noise inside. We did stay out pretty late but apparently we weren’t too noisy to disturb many people. At least not enough for anyone to complain.

I was one of the last to bed, as I kind of expected, and the first to get up next morning. I don’t sleep well in different places (although I’m considerably better with that than I used to be), and especially not when there are no curtains. The night was no less eventful than the day, however. Not long after I came to bed I heard sounds coming from Prav’s bed. I pretended to be asleep and hid under the covers so he didn’t try to talk to me, and I just listened. It sounded like running water. I peeped from under the covers, in the gloom I could see Prav kneeling up on his bed. It soon dawned on me — Prav was urinating on his bed. Apparently in his very drunk state he hadn’t even tried to get to the toilet, he had (sort of) consciously chosen to use his bed instead. I hid again. When the noise stopped there was a short pause and then a kind of rustling noise. I looked back. He had apparently tried to go back to sleep but noticed the bed was wet for some reason — he was trying to pull the covers off but wasn’t getting very far. After a few minutes he gave up and just tried to sleep at the other end of the bed. I hid again and tried to get to sleep but it wasn’t long before Prav started snoring.

I wasn’t the only person who was disturbed by this, both Neil and Ben were woken up by it. It’s always the same in these situations — everyone who is woken up says a few words to each other about it, and then someone shouts across to the person who’s snoring to shut up. Invariably they don’t wake up. There is then another few moments more before someone finally gets up and tries to move the snorer so they stop. In this case Ben got up to use the toilet, and on his way back he gave Prav a very hard smack on the head. It worked for a moment, but not long. Next to try was Neil. He went and tried to roll Prav over and in the process noticed he was wet. “It’s probably sweat” said Ben. I kept quiet. After a few minutes of prodding and poking they managed to get him into some kind of position which seemed to shut him up. Everyone went to sleep for a while. I was vaguely away of one more thing when Prav moved from his bed on the floor to the bed above Neil. The next morning it turned out that he’d moved up there, found Neil’s bag and, finding his own clothes wet, changed into Neil’s t-shirt. Neil decided to wash that before putting it on again.

And so came Saturday. But that’s for another entry.

Today my journey is to Chester to meet up with a group of friends to celebrate Scott’s impending marriage. The weekend will be spent in rural North Wales, the rest of the journey from Chester to the bunkhouse in which we’re staying will in Ben’s dad’s car.

I was thinking I might try to get this blog up-to-date while I was on the train, but it’s been so long since I last wrote I can’t think how I should start. In all honesty, from day to day, not an awful lot has changed. work is still the same, and I’m still living with Dana in our little flat. The biggest difference, I suppose, is there might be some romance on the horizon.

There’s a girl I met online and she’s lovely, but she’s from Romania. We talked for going on 6 months at first once or twice a week, and more recently every day. And then about a month ago we finally met face-to-face. I have been having all kinds of problems getting a passport sorted out (although I think there’s light at the end of that tunnel at last) so eventually we abandoned the plan for me to be the first person to travel so we could see each other, and she came to visit me in London. We both took a couple of days off work, and she flew over on a Friday.

I met her for the first time at arrivals in Heathrow’s terminal 4. I though I had set off from home nice and early – I think I gave myself something like 4 hours to get to the airport – but thanks to the tube I still found myself standing on a tube station platform in west London watching planes coming in to land, counting the minutes to her estimated arrival and fully expecting her plane to some flying past. (As it turned out it didn’t. Had the service arrived at the time it had for the previous few days and the flight stats was expecting it would have. Thankfully it landed on time.) Of course we knew what each other looked like, we had talked on Skype a lot before we met, but when she came through the doors she was even more lovely than I had imagined. She was dressed in green (apparently not especially dressed up, but I’m sure she looked smarter than I’d seen before, and than she did the next few days), dragging her suitcase, and looking very cute.

I thought it might be a good idea to get to know each other face to face before we did anything else, so we headed into London on the tube so we could sit in a bar for a while and just talk. The tube trip was a little awkward for me. I just didn’t know what to say. I’m not saying we sat there in silence, I doubt she would have liked me had I done that, but there were times when I felt I should be saying something but just didn’t know what to say. Things got considerably better from then on. Once we got used to each other things went really well.

I had thought we might head to the seaside on Saturday but the weather didn’t really suit it. It wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t as warm as I might have liked to go to the beach so we just stayed around home. We got up late, went for a walk, got something to eat, and just relaxed. Even though we didn’t do much it was still a nice day. Sunday we headed into London. Her return flight was at 4pm on Monday and I didn’t want the whole day to be rushed heading back to the airport so we stayed over night in a hotel in central London. It turns out Sunday night stays are really not too expensive. So Sunday we spent wandering around London. She wanted to see the tourist things, so we walked through Westminster, past Buckingham Palace, and on to Hyde Park. We lay in Hyde Park for a while together. We also got tickets for the London Eye and I thought we should go on it a bit later – my hope was that we could go on it just as it stated to get dark, but sadly that didn’t quite work out. We went up at about 8.30pm but it was still very light. It’s still a good experience, but now I’ve done it both at night and in the day I’d defiantly say it’s better to go up once it gets dark.

So Monday came and we headed back to the airport via a few souvenir and magazine stands. She bought some little keyrings for her friends and a fishing magazine for both her dad and her boss. Once she’d checked in we sat at Costa and had a final drink and slice of cake. I guess we both knew that moment would come when we had to say goodbye again, but I think we wanted to put it off as long as possible. The final goodbye came at the door just before security. We hugged and kissed and hugged again some more. I didn’t want to let her go and get on that plane just when we had got used to each other. As a left the airport and sat on the tube again by myself I just couldn’t help feel like I wanted her back. After only 4 days I’d confirmed what I had started to suspect before: I love her.

Of course now we are apart again and things are hard. My passport is on the way, and as soon as I get it I’m going to head off for a few days to see Bucharest. Of course there will be the time at the end of that when I have to get on the plane myself and leave her behind there. I think it will be just as hard as that Monday was but I’m trying not to think about that. Maybe one day we won’t have to do that again.

Sunday 17th April saw the 2011 Virgin London Marathon. As in previous years I ventured out with my kit bag to shoot the event. This year’s plan took me from Charlton to Mudchute on the Isle of Dogs, then to Poplar High Street and Limehouse, and on Westminster bridge.

This year, thanks to my new Android phone, I was able to (partially) record the route I took and plot it on a Google map. The photos are here and the map is below.

View London Marathon 2011 in a larger map

Blue lines were recorded automatically by the My Tracks application from GPS, grey lines are times when there was no GPS signal because I was below ground, and red lines complete the route after my battery ran out (and for some reason in the gap around the University of Greenwich, perhaps because of the BBC’s OB trucks in that area).

Now I have settled on writing here, a site I have had since about the same time I stopped writing at the Open Diary, I have decided to go back through and add all those entries to this blog. There are a lot of entries over the years I was writing there so it’ll take some time to finish uploading (and proof-reading, and spell checking) them all, but I’m working backwards from 15th November 2003. The old posts start here.

I think it’s also worth mentioning that I made some good friends (who, sadly, I have since lost contact with for one reason or another) while writing on the Open Diary, and I have a backup of their comments too. Where there are comments I have added them to the bottom of the posts using the names they had on the site at that time. While I appreciate this can sometimes make it difficult to keep track of people when they changed their names, I feel it best represents how things would have been back then.

The full changelog is as follows:

• Added option to match partial words.
• Extracted regular expression building into it’s own function called by all replacement functions.

As always, the plugin is available from the WordPress Plugin Directory.