This weekend, whilst bored in Camden, me and Heather decided to go to London Zoo. Compared to previous times where I’ve been for free because Dad worked in the garage over the road, and fixed someones car, this time I got free entry by making a charitable donation of £28. Now it’s the first time I’ve seen this happen, but I’m guessing other attractions are doing this too or will be soon. As by making a donation, instead of purchasing an entrance, the zoo are able to claim Gift Aid, which means the Inland Revenue give them £7.84 of the income tax I’ve already paid.

Google have now released (in Beta) some features that were only avaliable in the States.
Maps, which load near by cells in cache to speed up draging.
Local, which is a bit like Yell and
SMS, which lets you text google, and get directions, phone numbers, froggle prices or google search snippets.
For those who are worried about pub quizes, I’ve so far found it too slow.

My only problem with Maps, is that they claim to get from my Mums to mine, you can do a U-turn on Broadgate, which anyone in Lincoln knows is impossible.

Just been looking at my blog, and noticed I haven’t posted in a while.
A couple of things I want to write down. For the last 4 years I’ve been trying to track down a supplier of Blackcurrant Tea. Not the cough medicine stuff that Twinnings sell, which is some herbs and blackcurrant infusion, I want tea with blackcurrant. I knew that Harrogates sold them, but had never found a shop selling them. Then the other day, whilst in one of the nicest shops in Lincoln Imperial Tea and Coffee on Steep Hill, oddly enough they were selling their own Blackcurrant Tea. I can’t believe that I’ve been visiting/ living in Lincoln for over a year, been in Imperial Tea and Coffee many times, and not noticed or even thought that they might sell what I’ve been looking for.

The second point in the title was Robots. Heather and I went to see this a few weeks ago, whilst the film was alright, the reason for posting was because we went to see it at the Kinema in the Woods. The Kinema is in Woodhall Spa, which isn’t too far away, and is located in (bet you can guess) a wood.
The Kinema still has (or has reconditioned someone else’s) organ, and if you are lucky you see it being played.
They still have the old style tickets and an intermission. The only problem we found was that they don’t take cards, so a quick dash to the High Street to find a bank was needed.

Finally other stuff, finished watching Season 6 of the West Wing, at first I wasn’t too sure of the mix and match of episodes going between the White House and the trail of the Primaries, however by the end of the season I really can’t wait for the next season.
I believe that a General Election has been called.
Charlie’s had a baby boy.
Vandals kicked in my wing mirror.
And my cousin Mark has had a kid, so I’ve got a christening to go to in a couple of weeks.

When you thought it couldn’t get any worse, the Tories “inadequate at a political, managerial, and community level” ruling party of Lincolnshire County Council, still feel it’s fine to run it alone. They’ve apointed Martin Hill to be the leader of the council, and he has appointed 9 other Tories to be on the executive with him.
Did they not read the Audit Committee Report?
Let just hope that come May 5th we’ll see a change in colour for the political map of the rather blue Lincolnshire.
Whilst we’re on the topic, a generic countywide Tory leaflet landed on my doorstep yesterday (I’ll scan it, when the scanner and photoshop are re-installed). It claims

Better Off With the Conservatives
Whilst costing you less, your Conservative Lincolnshire Country Council gives you more
…
Getting Around
* Lincoln Eastern bypass progressed
* Dualling of the A46 to Lincoln completed
* Bypass at Partney and Burgh le Marsh
* Bypasses for Bourne, Grantham, Crowland
* Rights of way greatly improved
* Rural bus service expanded
…

Strangely no mention of the Jim “put the Crowland Bypass, near my back yard to increase the value of my land” Speechley nor the fact that they’ve been branded as “weak” and “unlikely to improve without help”.

Thanks to Simon Titley for pointing out the new leadership.

I noticed today a press release from Brian Cotter about the 118 service.
Personally I believe that deregulation was needed. If I phoned 192 on my landline I spoke to BT, if I phoned 192 on my Orange Mobile, I spoke to Orange, if I called from a NTL line, I spoke to NTL.
These were three companies offering the same service, but only available via one route, and if you only had one phone you could only speak to that one company.
With the new system, OK we have a 100 different operators, however, pick only one (based on either price or ability to remember the number). If they provide a good service, continue to use them, if they provide a poor service, never use them again.
For the people who say they can’t remember the new numbers, didn’t they see the massive advertising campaign for 118 118.
Finally, before I get the comments, I can’t remember the last time I actually phoned one of these companies. I normally use Yell.com or Google via my mobile for business numbers, and I never need to get a personal number.

Just surfing around and found this. It’s Virgin Radio via GPRS/3G. I was expecting poor quality sound, with it cutting out every 30 seconds as per streaming over dial-up, however I’m pleasantly surprised to find that the quality is great, and that it hasn’t stopped once.
The only problem is that an hours listening equals about 7.2mb of data, which isn’t cheap.
Hopefully we’ll see more stations use this technology in the near future.

The LibDemBlogs site continues to grow It now has 25 regular posters, which has meant that over the last 3 months, the number of days shown on the main page has gone down from 7 to 2.

Other features that I might not have mentioned when they were rolled through are:
* An RSS feed – http://www.libdemblogs.co.uk/feed/rss.xml
* Daily Archives
* and some changes to the location of the BlogBox

If you have any ideas for more features please leave me a comment.

ps, try googling libdem

I went to my first Lincoln game, haven’t had a chance to go before as I’ve had conferences, family, sleep and cold weather when other matches were on.
The ground is only down the road (literally) from Heather’s, the game was a good one. We got to see two goals (well one, as I was reading the programme during the second). The crowd though were pretty quiet, which is odd as on some days you can even hear them from my place. Probably go again before the end of the season, and there’s always the chance that Lincoln might make it to the play-off finals, when I’m guessing the whole city will suddenly remember that they are fans.