For what its worth, the appeal season at work is almost officially over. One or two stragglers which need to be sorted, but mostly its been a successful year for our team. Naturally, parents denied access to their chosen school would never agree, but I think that in almost every case a fair and just decision has been made. I'm struck again and again that I'd never want the job of panel member - difficult decisions, emotional parents and terrified presenting officers. Not inspiring stuff is it?

Tonight, the oddly evangelical Open Source bandwagon jumping movie Antitrust aired on British TV for the first time. The fact that it appeared on Channel 5 which has notoriously bad reception even via DST meant that I completely missed Miguel's cameo. Never mind. Strange film, not entirely bad, but a bit uncomfortable.

Strangely irritable and frustrated tonight, possibly due to the strange time of year, the complicated and confusing week I'm having, and veiled accusations of electronic tomfoolery. I remember what an oddly anticlimactic time it was last year. Lots of effort expended on a short burst of intensive activity. Fixing my sights on a possible further attempt on the Fishguard Class 37 at the weekend, and the upcoming conference.

Finally finished the various additions to Inkblot, a GNOME printer ink level tool, based on libinklevel.

Inkblot lives in the notification area and gives a 'traffic-light' indication of overall ink level status. Clicking the icon gives more detail in the form of a dialog, and this can be expanded if your printer supports reporting on each colour reservoir. Inkblot should detect your printer automatically.

Right now, I only have a tarball of the release - attempts to make the necessary packages of libinklevel will follow. You can download Inkblot here:

inkblot-0.99.5.tar.gz

...as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know.

D H Rumsfeld (1932-)

Still a bit surprised at the strength of my reaction to Paignton yesterday. Dug back through old versions of this site on The Internet Archive to find I described my last visit as "the strangest weekend of my life". Particularly remember a muggy, thunderous Easter Monday. Sitting on a bench in Victoria Park looking at a ship at anchor in Torbay, wishing I hadn't eaten a breakfast which was now fighting my attempts to digest it. I also remember walking feverishly around the bus station, and alongside the tracks toward the level crossing and Goodrington Sidings in order to find a usable mobile phone signal to try to fix the mess I'd made of things. Then, a speedy dash back home on the train because I'd realised what a bad idea it was to go to Paignton in the first place! All the way back I worried about who would help me get a decent shirt for my Election photograph. Strange days indeed, and who'd have thought they would stay so vividly with me four years later.

I suppose I'm more sensitive to 'place' than I ever thought, which is perhaps manifested in the attraction I have to Peter Ackroyd's ideas of 'privileged space'. All sorts of strange questions and wonderings rattling around my head this past couple of days as a result of that trip, and the strange coincidences that follow. Fact is, I thought I knew what I wanted - or at least what I thought I didn't want. Perhaps its all much simpler than I thought, and I in fact don't have any self-awareness at all? At times like this, Mr Rumsfeld worryingly begins to make sense.

Achieved quite a bit today. Major tidying exercise in anticipation of flat inspection. Also added the missing bits of the Inkblot puzzle. I ought to give it some sort of useful home on this site, rather than expecting prospective users to wade through my dirty laundry to find a link! I also, rather excitingly, invented a way to stuff a duvet into its cover which didn't take me 20 minutes and result in near-tearful bouts of frustration.

Combined with the relative success of the last couple of weeks at work, I feel sort of 'on course' for something - not entirely sure what, but its more comfortable than any of the alternatives I'm sure. Looking ahead now to my upcoming London trip.

Loyal readers will remember when all the daylog entries were as self-obsessed, painfully trite, and pointlessly oblique as this one. Call it an Independence Day special!

Today began as a bit of a farce. Having decided to get up later than usual, woke to a bunch of messages about a major mix-up regarding the coaching stock for Virgin's 'Holidaymaker Specials'. In short, it wasn't where it needed to be and was horrendously late in setting off to get there! Eyed the Live Departures Boards cautiously whilst preparing to leave. Seems that 1E99 - due to call at Weston at 10:53, and therefore my preferred first move - had started from Exeter St. Davids making up some time.

Arrived at the station to find a reasonable number of fellow cranks, and some customarily confused normal folks. One of these attempted some disparaging remarks before realising that there were more of us than of him! Dead on time 67029 at the head of 11 very lightly loaded Virgin liveried Mk2's arrived. Time for a quick photo before hopping aboard for a speedy and smooth run to Temple Meads.

Some more pictures at Bristol, then over to Platform 9 to watch the other northbound special arrive. This had started from Paignton as planned, and as a result of being somewhat late both 67 hauled services were at Temple Meads at once. Shame they weren't on adjacent platforms for the photo opportunity however! Watched 67016 and 67029 depart northward, then got coffee and settled in for the wait for 1V15 - one of the southbound specials.

After some platform changing strangeness, 67027 arrived with another 11 almost empty coaches. Lets hope patronage of these services improves over the coming weeks - my father assures me that the 'factory shutdown' fortnight at the end of July will help! More pictures before setting of on time for a non-stop run to Exeter St. Davids. Hampered by a preceding Voyager some of the way, but we got moving quite respectably south of Taunton.

On to the sea wall at Dawlish - a spectacular bit of railway and an experience I never tire of. My favourite memory being of a stormy high tide six or seven years back, with waves landing the wrong side of the 158 heading for Penzance! 67027 seemed to make particularly swift progress here - there must be some impressive shots from the photographers at Dawlish out there on the various fotopic sites! Some talk of bailing at Dawlish for the northbound Virgin HST, but I decided to stay on to Paignton for old time's sake!


In retrospect, probably shouldn't have done. The strange distaste I developed by visiting the town when in a very unhappy state of mind seems to still trouble me. The sad part is, I used to love a run down here, taking pictures of trains from the footbridge, a decent lunch and a walk to Goodrington. Today however, changed platforms for the 1530 Voyager heading northwards, and left swiftly.

Reasonably uneventful run back. Passed 67002 hauling the other southbound service at Exeter, very late having being swapped on and off the train at Crewe earlier in the day. Changed at Taunton for a packed 143621 back to Weston. Not many miles travelled, but some interesting haulage.