'Impeach Blair Now'

It was the above title which made me pick up and buy a copy of the Spectator magazine the other day. Although I do like to pick up one of the political periodicals fairly regularly, the Spectator isn't normally one I'd read, as its partisan line isn't exactly to my own tastes. However on this occasion mention of impeaching the PM did grab my attention.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been so easily swayed by a headline, but in my opinion Blair's seemingly reasonable work at managing the country so far has been irrevocably overshadowed on what appears to have been a fool's errand in Iraq, and I won't at all mind seeing the Blair - Bush pact given a bloodied nose over the whole affair. And so I read about the proposed impeachment of Blair with at least a touch of expectation.

The Spectator made the proposed impeachment sound like quite a realistic proposition, whereas in the story on the BBC website, the whole idea seems to have been given little regard by MPs as a whole. Interestingly, it transpires that Boris Johnson, editor of the Spectator, is one of the 11 MPs supporting the impeachment. I suppose that explains their upbeat coverage of the proposal. Alas, perhaps Teflon Tony will walk away with it again ...until the election at least.

Back from a break

I'm back following a week or so of travelling, seeing the sights and entertaining friends. Look out for photos from some of the trips and places appearing in the photo album soon, which includes a trip on the Caledonian Sleeper from London to Inverness. I can't claim that much sleeping was actually done, but it's certainly a reasonable way of making such a long journey.

I've also been to the Edinburgh Festival, and I've got to say that the shows I saw were excellent, both thoroughly entertaining and proving to be of a higher quality than I had expected (having seen Newsnight Review's coverage of some of the shows). Street-performers I can live without, but the show about John Lennon's death and an evening of comedy poetry both went down an absolute storm. The latter had the lyrical wordsmiths pay homage to the 80's, declare their love for an orange girl (who had been on the sunbed too long), and declare the hell-holes that are call centres, each in their own distinct and witty styles.

I've a great deal of sleep to catch up on, as the past week has consisted largely of full days working and sightseeing in many cases, then eating out and getting to bed late. Unfortunately given the current hour unless I make a particularly valiant effort to sleep in tomorrow I'll still be behind on my quota for kippage.

Slogan of the day

While browsing International Broadcasting websites I came across the following banner graphic for Aljazeera. Good choice of slogan I reckon...

Night shots

The next set of photos to appear on the photography website will be some night-time shots I took the other weekend in central London. Some of the shots were challenging, in that i was trying to get the camera to balance on the side railings of say Westminster or Waterloo bridge in order to take a shot down the river. Some came out, others not.

My favourite shots from the evening were the long exposures of traffic, which isn't something I'd really tried before, not least due to having lived in a place where there's not much traffic anyway. No such problems on Waterloo Bridge or on the Mall, and some of the results look pretty funky. It's certainly something I'll be experimenting further with in the future. Red London double-decker buses make for some of the most best subjects.

Farnborough Airshow photos

I'm currently going through over 250 photos taken at the Farnborough Airshow today. It was a good day, with plenty to see inside and out. Perhaps even too much - I was often torn between seeing the air display and the stands inside. There wasn't much dealing going on - that all went on last week. The weekend is for the public, so most of the stands have a skeleton staff, mainly handing out freebies rather than taking orders for millions of pounds worth of aircraft.

Look out for the airshow pics on my personal photo gallery.

Here's an interesting news story about a B52 which, scheduled to appear at Farnborough one day last week actually missed the airfield completely and ended up going around another airfield a few miles away. Makes you wonder how they manage with precision-bombing sorties thousands of miles from home!

Going Live!

This message is a bit overdue, but yes, the new website is now live! There's still a fair amount of work to be done, and old pages are being left in their original locations too to cater for existing links to the site. The content is largely in place, however, so it's onwards and upwards from this point on.

Getting there now...

Most of the sections of the new site are in some form of order now, and although not all of the content is complete, I'm looking at putting the site live in the not too distant future and working on it as I go, so at least some current content will be available. I'm aware that what's on the site at the moment hasn't been updated in a while.

The main areas that will be updated after going live will be the images in the Travel section and content in the World Media section.

New website - latest news

I've been working on getting the design of the website to my liking in the past couple of weeks and have been tweaking some display issues along the way. Although the site is designed for 800x600 resolutions and above, it should also resize okay in smaller windows.

I've changed the look of the navigation so that it looks clearer and better then before.

The main challenge now is to prepare the rest of the content for the new site. I haven't touched the World Media section in a while now, and I need to be making progress on it.

World Media

Having completed the Travel section aside from images and photographs, the next priority is the World Media section. I'm going to modify this section to reflect how my own listening to international broadcasters has altered recently. This will give focus on broadband internet content, which I'm currently exploring, but will continue to feature shortwave information and developments with Digital Radio Mondiale.

New site design update

Due to the number of pages this site has and the amount of time I've spent updating the site in the past, I've made the decision to use frames in the new site design. Although I'm quite aware that many in the web design community aren't keen on the use of frames, until such time that I'm able to create a database driven site, frames will allow me to ensure the whole site is kept current as efficiently as possible.

So far I've been testing the site in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox with good results. I'll be trying out Opera as well soon, so most of the major browsers should display the site as it is intended.