Pericles on his lounger

As Kate and I have now moved into a house in Battersea, she is now allowed a cat. It is something she has wanted since her last kitty Bertie died a few years ago. We went to Battersea Cats and Dogs home with James and chose a stray called Tommy Boy. He’s a short haired tabby cat, about two years old and he had to be renamed. Now, I wanted to call the cat either Bastard, Satan or just Cat; Kate was against this, so we used a classical name. We went through the Mythological characters and finally settled on the name Pericles, the great Athenian general and man behind the Parthenon.

He’s now settled in to the house, but has picked up a bit of a sniffle and is currently hiding under the dresser. Hopefully he’ll be out and about soon.

I’ve created this google map of wedding directions. You can print this one off more easily and do driving instructions more easily.

View Larger Map

The map above shows all the vital locations for the wedding on the 29th September. Have a click around on the icons and you will find that the beds are hotels, the cocktail glasses the pubs, the masks the wedding, the pin the church and the transport icons signify the trains and bus.

If you still can’t get this to work drop me a line.

St Lucia's cricket ground

Just got back from the Island of St Lucia, what a brilliant place. We stayed at the Sandals Halcyon in the North of the Island. Everything they had to offer we tried: windsurfing, water skiing (crap at that!), scuba diving – 109 dives now, tennis, shuffleboard, eating, cocktails, patois etc. We also went to the semi-final of the world cup, even though they had lost my tickets. The ground is really beautiful, makes me want to perhaps start playing again.

Oh well, now back to the drag of work at the British Museum. A couple of weeks till we launch a revamped CCI and try out the mashed up features that I’ve built around Google and phpclasses. Could be interesting.

After a few months of on-off work, I’ve finally finished the British Institute of Persian studies website. It has taken a bit longer than I expected as we’ve had to get comments from various stake holders on the committee of the Institute. I’m actually quite pleased with it and I’m getting more pleased with textpattern as a web content management platform all the time. I’ve also started using a vitual server at oneandone which seems pretty good value for around £19 pcm.

The website has two domains, bips.org.uk and bips.ac.uk (we’re not totally sure about future directions for this.) Any feedback on this gratefully received. Now onto the ICOMON website which will be trilingual. Bit less time to do this one though! Maybe I’ll burn a candle as usual from both ends and the middle (I’m also working on some Iron Age data at work at present… but that is a secret….)

Just got back from 7 days of skiing in the Alpine resort of Serre Chevalier. I’ve now managed to come down red runs after 10 days of practice; they’re hard man! An interesting trip with loads of snow and some strange concoctions called Dr Pepper.

Stu Ervine took some great photos, and they can be seen on Flickr.

World cup ticket for St Lucia

I’m going. How great will that be, two world cups in one year; rugby and cricket – the two greatest sports on Earth!

Corinne's website - Ourpasthistory.com

This week, I’ve been helping out Corinne Mills with the upgrade of her website entitled “Our Past History”. Corinne has been a great supporter of the Scheme that I work for at the British Museum and she’s just started to dabble with content Management Systems and plumped for textpattern. I’ve been using this for a number of sites recently and it’s great once you get the hang of it! Anyway, her site is now configured and is available at http://ourpasthistory.com It rocks!

The site also consumes RSS feeds directly from the PAS database – she therefore has a feed to all her finds down the side of her homepage which is powered by the excellent simplepie plugin. I’ve got a couple more txp sites to come soon….

I’ve not updated for a while, but I’ve just returned from Libya after a whirlwind 5 day visit via Voyages Jules Verne. This encompassed trips to Tripoli, Sabratha and Leptis Magna. The latter 2 magnificent examples of Roman town planning. However Leptis is by far and away the more impressive and reminded me of my youth and summer time in Caesarea, Israel. We stayed at Hotel Yousser in Tripoli and I sure did miss my Gin and Tonic seeing as it is a dry country; however their non alcoholic beer isn’t that bad! However, I almost didn’t make it there due to a high speed crash on my mountain bike. All I can say is the pavement is bloody hard when you hit face first….

Dapper photographs of Nick and Rachel’s wedding can now be purchased direct from the photographic clown who covered their big day. They can be seen here:

www.cdouglasphoto.co.uk/pett

Here’s a sample of the mafia at work.

I’m on leave from the British Museum at the moment, so I am using it to do something more useful. So I’ve been surfing the web, looking for a car to buy (at the moment it is looking like a second hand Lotus Elise), a new house (bored with mine) and avoiding doing work as I get tempted whilst out of office!I’ve just got back from the Loire valley, where I managed to find some decent white wine, some cheap champagne and some rather nice method traditionelle Vouvray. I also might have got snapped speeding near Calais (although the cameras can’t get you here until next year.) Whilst I’m on the subject of France. What sort of place has supposedly 24 hour petrol pumps that are unmanned and don’t let you use overseas credit cards? I’ll let you work that one out.

Holiday is stacking up at the moment, I’ve accumulated 58 days over the last couple of years, and I’m going to make use of it this time. Off to Libya to partake in some Roman ruin viewing during November, New Year in Herefordshire, February skiing in France and then who knows. That’s still around 40 days to use. Perhaps I should work 2 day weeks for a bit. Next challenge Bank Of England rugby this Saturday.