Category Archives: CNPS

Nine hundred and ninety nine #cnps

On the 15th August 2004 I started looking out for number plates. Consecutively spotting the digits in the middle. 2090 days later I have finally reach the end point which is 999.

The last hundred have been hard, and I’m blaming the Labour government for their scrappage scheme in which pretty much any car with the old style plates could be converted into cash towards a new and totally pointless plated one.

I’m sure I could pour through the stats finding the days I found the most, the longest period between finding plates, the fastest 100, but instead I’m just going to stop and never look at a plate closely again.

Twitter fun

This weekend I have been mostly playing about with Twitter.

First I created a CNPS (Consecutive Number Plate Spotting) TwitterBot. The bot watches for @ and d messages to it, it then adds the plates to my database. Anyone with a Twitter account AND and Artesea account can get it to work, just visit the mashup page here for more info.

Next I managed to exceed the weekly allowance for tweets to my mobile. Think it was something to do with a large number of followers at Conference.

And just now I’ve installed a New Post -> Twitter plugin. This one seems to be one of the best as it’s run from my webserver (doesn’t require frequent polling of the rss feed), and it has the option to enable/disable tweets for draft, edits or new posts, so unlike other who have similar plugins you should only get a tweet from my blog when I hit Publish.

I am an Anorak

I'm a political anorak
The BBC today called me an anorak, of this I am proud.
It at least shows that they are either reading my blog, or more likely my LibDemBlog site.
To answer their questions

One internet blog from a conference visitor – if not a windup – details the excitement he experienced driving to conference.

Nope it’s not a windup, if the journalist wants to follow my progress, top right of this page shows how far I’ve got, alternatively my CNPS tracker site will help.

How on earth can Charles Kennedy compete with that once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Hopefully it won’t be a once-in-a-lifetime moment, as I’ll beat that “record” before I finish.
As for Charles, I’m sure the birth of baby Douglas would easily compete.
Thanks to Will for the tip-off. Just a shame the BBC didn’t link to me!