On the way home from work at 03:40 this morning I saw two foxes. I've never seen a real live fox before, only dead one, so it was quite exciting. The first one was just trotting across the road with out a care in the world; I thought it was a big cat at first until I got closer. I then saw another one by the side of the road a bout a mile further away. I was quite surprised at how small they looked, I always though foxes were a bit bigger, they looked really beautiful though.
Orbital have announced that they are splitting after 15 years together, their last live show will be at Glastonbury this year. I've seen Orbital play live twice, both times at Cambridge Corn Exchange and both times it was amazing. When I was a student at Aberdeen Uni one of the guys I lived with was a big Orbital fan, but I never saw the attraction. It wasn't until I saw them live for the first time that I started to take an interest in their music. They have a new album out later this year, I was quite looking forward to seeing them tour to promote it. Anyone got any spare Glastonbury tickets...?
Ex-Blue Peter presenter Caron Keating died last night after a seven year battle with breast cancer, she was only 41. I don't normally write about what's happening in the normal world, but I had such a crush on her when I was a teenager that I had to post something. When I was at high school and she was on the telly I thought she was absolutely beautiful and that Irish accent she had used to turn my knees to butter.
My new swimming kit that I ordered from Mailsports arrived this morning. The trunks I was using were starting to fall apart; all the elastane had rotted and they had gone all baggy. So I decided to order another pair as they were soon going to be un-wearable; they've also changed the colour and I quite like the red stitching. I also ordered a new pair of goggles as mine are past it, they fog up after about 25 metre and you can't see a thing.
I doubt this new kit will make me go any faster, but you never know. I managed 2700 metres in the pool yesterday morning before heading to work, but because I was feeling ropey on Monday and it's Easter Friday tomorrow, that's the only pool time I'll have this week. I really need to get the finger out and get there earlier as I'd like to raise the distance I'm doing to over 7500 metres a week.
One of my neighbours has mentioned a triathlon in Bedford that he's thinking of doing and he asked if I'd be up for it. Since we were down the pub and I'd had a few I said yes. Turns out it's a sprint/super sprint distance triathlon (400m swim, 20Km bike, 5km run); I've got no qualms about the distances of each involved, just how I'm going to get off the bike and start running. So we'll see what happens as this triathlon is part of a series; it might be more beneficial to do some cycling and running and do a triathlon later in the year.
Looks like my blog has been targeted quite heavily over the last few days. I haven't removed any spam comments since the first of the month so they've built up a bit. It did look like it was calming down a bit as I went a few days without any; this must have lulled me into a false sense of security. So this morning I've just removed 25 spam comments that have been posted to my blog in the last six days. I'm getting pretty tired of this...
On another note, SpamAssasin is doing quite well with my email, although it's still letting quite a few obvious spams through the net. I'm slowly building up a good corpus of email to use to train bmf; although I'll have to manually move all the spam that's reached my mailbox and put it into one of the spam mailboxes before training.
I'm also going to have to learn a bit more about Procmail and Maildrop (it's just been installed on CSoft's servers) as all comments from my Blogs seem to get tagged as spam. I could write a recipe that check to see if it was a blog comment before sending it to SpamAssasin. I'll have to investigate as anything I can do to reduce the amount of spam I'm still getting would be a good thing.
All the local Magnolia trees are in full bloom at the moment, they look wonderful. Karen bought me a Magnolia tree for my Christmas and it's got a few blooms on it, but not to the scale of some of the well established trees. I don't think I'd seen one of these trees before moving to Cambridge, but they've become my favourite spring tree as the blossom so beautiful.
I was wandering into the kitchen last night when I noticed one of the cats playing with what looked like a bit of dead leaf. Upon further investigation I realised that it was a creature that the cat was trying to lick to death, so stepped in to rescue it. It turned out to be a little baby lizard of some description, I've never seen anything like it before. It looked so small and fragile but soon perked up from the warmth in my hand. I let it go outside in the field; I just hope it doesn't die from the cold.
