The Word is Not Enough

Finding the right gym is something of an artform. I'm not sure I've mastered it though. I spent a good week or so investigating the local gyms, ended up joining one in London Bridge and I'm not sure I made the right decision.

Virgin Active - Strand
Very nice. Very shiny. Lots of machines. Has a relatively small pool. Most of the free weights were available. Just hideously expensive, not quite as easy to get to for me as ones near London Bridge and the membership person wasn't very helpful. You also have to fill out a whole lot of forms to even get a trial. Towel service extra. Men's toilets were a bit nasty.

Fitness First - Beckenham
Good equipment. Good use of space. Helpful membership person. Towel service extra. Just a little bit soulless and very hard to get to by train and public transport.

Virgin Active - Bickley
Easy to get to if you're going by train from Victoria, since it's near Bickley station. Great facilities. Lovely pool. Massive number of machines and free weights, including the fabled power plates. Has a good café. Nicely priced too. If it had been better located, I would have joined this one (and still might).

Fitness First - Cottons (London Bridge)
The one I actually joined. Reasonably priced (compared to Virgin Active - Strand anyway). Has a smallish pool. However, it's always busy; the front of counter staff and membership staff don't seem to care; they messed up my health check-up booking so I never got it; the pool flooded the lower levels; I've been turfed out once because they were closing the gym at 3.00pm to connect it back up to the National Gird; almost all the doors have been taken off the men's lockers (I don't know why); they gave me someone to set up a training programme who had never used half the machines; and it closes at 6pm on Saturdays and Sundays (I was turned away at 5.30pm). And all that in only the last fortnight. Towel service included though.

Weather in London

Weather in Wales

What's up there then?

It's Shrove Tuesday today. Does it say something about me that I'm more excited by the thought of Pancake Day than I get about my own birthday?

Q: What are Santa's little helpers called?
A: Subordinate Clauses

I'm going to be on Christmas break between the 22nd December 2007 and the 1st January 2008. You can send me an email or leave a message on my voicemail and I'll get back to you on the 2nd January.

We went for a short weekend in November before the EuroStar switched over to St Pancras. Here are some piccies:

The Pompidou Centre from a couple of different angles

After quite a long break, I've spoken to Chris Coles of BDO again about progress on paying out on the ring-fenced fund to Highbury creditors. After admitting that paying out by Christmas last year was hopelessly optimistic, he now thinks BDO should be able to pay out within a couple of months. He says:

“Because of the way it was set up, it raised some complicated issues. At first view, it was simple and quick, but it's just delayed it.”

There are still some technical issues to overcome to with tax liability and determining whether there are any separate classes of creditors, but BDO has definitely been appointed by the courts to deal with the issues.

Not sure how much to rely on that “two months” thing with Christmas coming up, but fingers crossed it won't be too much longer now.

The observant among you may have noticed that I've changed web host. Goodbye Dataflame, hello LivingDot. Dataflame finally pushed me over the edge by locking down the permissions on my cgi-bin for a week while I was on holiday (without telling me) then locking them down again for two days while they did testing, simply because I was running Movable Type for this blog (and my other blogs).

LivingDot has the virtue of being a preferred partner of Six Apart, the company that makes Movable Type, and while the performance on their servers isn't as good as Dataflame's, the server occasionally times out on some requests and they're a little more expensive, they have several advantages

• They let you use SSL encryption on email in a way that's compatible with Microsoft Entourage
• They let you support a huge number of domains (50 I think) on your server at no extra cost
• They actually know what Movable Type is and how to support it.
• Large numbers of MySQL databases to call your own

The only hassles I had with the move was a couple of files that somehow got left behind; and problems getting my old MySQL databases copied over (leaving some strange characters on entries that used £s, “s, …s and Greek script). Otherwise, all is good and happy again.

I went to Cardiff in October and stayed on the bay for a few days. Here are a few shots, cos it's a really lovely place - I can't wait to go back!