garan.org

On Saturday we went into Guildford to get a spot of shopping for the new kitchen. Instead of battling into the City we stopped at the University for the Park and Ride scheme. There were signposts off the dual carriageway but the signs disapeared once we were in the main University campus. So we abandoned the car in the main car park and jumped on a bus. Unlike Reading's park and ride schemes, the buses are all regular services that call at the University rather than dedicated Park and Ride buses. So 80p each return into Town and ten minutes after parking we were standing at the bottom of Guildford High Street. Stress free is an understatement!

Getting back involved a trip to Guildford Bus Station which is as pleasant as a trip to a 1970's bus station can be!

So a couple more signs or a noticeboard would make everything smoother but the £1.60 to park for about three hours couldn't be beaten!

My neighbour's just bought himself an iPod touch. Wow! It's a lovely piece of kit. Paired up with a wireless connection it does a lovely job of displaying the BBC's iPlayer content. Very impressive. One day when the iPhone has 3G+ data speeds I may be tempted..

I had my first Freecycle experience over the weekend. We're currently having a new kitchen fitted and Dave the kitchen fitter suggested that we eBay or Freecycle the old double oven. So I stuck it on the local Freecycle list on Friday evening. It's so much easier than eBay as there's no website to battle with, photos to take and upload or payment details to worry about. Saturday morning I was greeted with about half a dozen requests. So I employed the first come first served principle and the oven was gone to it's new home by 7pm on Saturday evening.

Drupal 6 now includes support for OpenID logins so I've been having a nosy.. My understanding at the moment is that you need to either setup your own OpenID server or use someone elses who is willing to vouch for you. I've signed up with https://www.myopenid.com/ which got me part of the way there. But to stop myself being tied into them I have delegated MyOpenID to vouch for 'garan.org' by adding some header tags into the front page of this site.

More detail here:

http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2007/01/03/OpenID-for-non-SuperUsers
http://wiki.openid.net//Delegation

and here's a link to the drupal module:

http://drupal.org/project/openidurl

If you're a runner who lives or works in and around Hook in Hampshire then go and have a look at http://hookrunners.com/. The site has been setup to encourage runners in the Village to get together.

I've moved our home phone back from TalkTalk to BT. The costs seem pretty comparible for the light usage that the phone gets. The main reason is that about 50% of the time the TalkTalk service wasn't presenting callerid to mobiles. Also the voice quality was horrendous when dialing out to mobiles suggesting some sort of contended/compressed voice over IP link somewhere in TalkTalk's network.