As somebody who always leaves their phone on, last night I switched it off. When I turned it back on at 8 this morning I had 3 new text messages.
Mum, Rebecca and Heather informed me to watch the news. I went straight downstairs, and saw the pictures. It’s seems that an explosion has happened at the Buncefield Fuel Depot (which is actually in Hemel, BBC), large flames can be seen on the TV and well as the huge amount of smoke.
I’ve spoken to my Mum and sister who were awoken at 6am by the large explosion, and they both seem to be fine, however I believe they will be spending the whole day indoors watching News 24 or Sky News.
As a child there were always worries about Buncefield as a possible target for the IRA, however it seems that our disaster predictions of the whole of Hemel disappearing in to a hole were wrong.
I’ve added a Google News feed to the sidebar for the moment for all the latest news at Hemel.

Watching the World Cup Draw last night on BBC2, I couldn’t work out why Motty wouldn’t shut up. The German presenter was speaking English and was explaining step by step what was going on, but John Motson needed to talk over the top, get confused and make no sense at all.
We were informed by the German that if an African team came out of pot 3, they would be put against Argentina, so when the Ivory Coast came out Motty got very excited that they would be playing England, even though Argentina came up on the big screen at the back, the German said they would be playing Argentina and that the footballer picked them out of the C pot (Argentinas) to determine where in the group they would go.

…or just more Davids in his shadow cabinet?

For the women:
Theresa May (Shadow Commons leader);
Theresa Villiers (Shadow chief secretary to the Treasury);
Cheryl Gillan (Shadow Wales secretary) and
Caroline Spelman (Shadow secretary for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister)

and for the Davids:
David Davis (Shadow home secretary);
David Willetts (Shadow education secretary);
David Lidington (Shadow Northern Ireland secretary) and
David Mundell (Shadow Scotland secretary)

not forgetting David Cameron (Leader of the Opposition) himself.

Whilst reading a story about 3G on the BBC website I found this quote

We have really good chances that the soccer championship next year will be the boom for this technology

Soccer championship? What Christophe Caselitz from Siemens is actually talking about is the World Cup.

Now I know bloggers like their PageRanks™, so today I spent most of the time creating a PageRank™ value button.
However I’ve discovered that my version/installation of php can’t cope with the large numbers that are generated to find the checksum value, so instead the script is hardcoded with the correct checksums for both this blog and LibDemBlogs.
It’s now working and I do have 12 icons for the different PageRank™ values, plus an error picture.
If you want the button for your own blog, leave a comment as I can either provide you with the full php code (which should work on most servers), or add your url to the safe list.

There is much fuss about this story on the BBC Have Your Say section of their website.
Now as long as bank don’t remove their current free cash machines, charge each others customers to use their own machines and that there is advance warning before inserting your card into the fee paying machine, what is the fuss all about.
The news story highlights how the number of fee paying machines are going up, whilst free machines have remained static.
Thats right the number of free machines hasn’t actually gone down, it’s just that we have more of these convenience machines.
They are mostly found at petrol stations, kwik-e-marts, pubs or clubs. The advantage of them is that you don’t need to leave the pub to go out into the cold to find a machine or leave the nightclub early as you’ve run out of money, and all for a small fee between £1 and £2.
Whilst I’m not that old, I do remember when the only way to get some cash on a Sunday was to get the pub landlord to cash a cheque and depending on what sort of customer you were depended on what fee you would pay.
Times have changed, but instant accessible non-chargeable money hasn’t and won’t with a free market.

On Saturday I staffed at the Nottingham Beer festival with the Young Camra lot, and I actually discovered that it’s a lot of fun.
You get a free half pint glass, a free t-shirt and 2.5 pints of free beer.
However as you have people asking “which is the best”, or “can I have a really hoppy one” of course you need to trial a small sample of all the beers 🙂
I ended up spending 5 hours behing the bar, hurt my legs from the bending up and down but did manage to get drunk.

An old application that I’ve been hunting for since I managed to destroy my old installation of Windows is Always On Top Maker.
It’s free, it’s simple and if you put a shortcut in the Startup folder it will always run.
Just a quick Ctrl+Alt+T will put a window on top of everything else.
Great for stuff like the BBC mini windows with the cricket scores.

The new season (7) of the West Wing began on Sunday in America, and having just watched the latest episode it’s great.
Was rather worried about the spoiler beginning, but in the end it doesn’t give too much away.
Looking forward to the next 21 episodes and discovering who will be the next President of the United States.

Having spent the week in Blackpool, me and Heather shot straight to Presthaven Sands in Prestatyn, North Wales to meet my brother. We spent Thursday and Friday there. The sand dunes were lovely and it was a chance to catch up with our sleep. We also managed a trip to Chester.
Then on Saturday morning we headed of to my Mum’s with Luke in the car, to go to Matt and Jane’s wedding in Dunstable and the reception at Whipsnade Zoo.
Finally on Sunday afternoon we drove back to Lincoln. All in all, we spent a week driving just under 700 miles. Luckily for both of us we’re insured on each others cars.