Just back in West Lothian after our stay in Jedburgh for just under a week. Went back to a place we had been a couple of years ago, which is almost in the middle of the town and has cracking views of the town and beyond.

Had an easy time, I read through two or three books, reviews to follow. We also went visiting. Went to the Hizzy room in Hawick, had lunch in Cats Coffee Shop which also happens to be part of a bike shop and popped over to Kelso for a couple of hours.

Was great to see a lot of bikes in the area around Jedburgh, and got a wave from a group of folks on Harleys when we were in the Coffee Shop.

Didn’t do any big thinking, but such is. Sounds like old MartinS is going through the thirty something stuff too. I’ll be commenting on that soon.

Traditional weather, but a disappointment when you are paying the priviledge to see rain fall in a field. For those of you not in the know, the latest round of the British Superbike championship came to Knockhill last weekend. The racers zip around the track in a couple of sessions to set their fast times and decide their grid positions.

The first qualifying attempt finished just as we got to the track, getting up and ready and to the track for 10:10 or so just wasn’t going to happen on the first proper day of my holiday so we saw the other race classes out and about during the following hours.

The second round of qualifying for the 125cc machines came after the break for lunch at around 2 O’Clock and ran for about half of its allotted time before the heavens opened with big rain (you know, big rain drops) hail stones and a good bit of thunder rolled in for good measure.

I got soaked, then in a gap in the rain got back to the car to get the umbrella and the waterproof jacket then retrieved the rest of the family just before the rain came back on. We retreated back to the car but gave up after about half an hour and drove out of the circuit at about 15:30.

I mostly enjoyed the day, but missed the variety in sound of the superbikes which were due to come out later. The downside of going on the Saturday which is the day before race day is that slightly less is happening. The benefit is that you get to park within the circuit and it is generally quieter.

No guarantees in Scotland for outside events, so dependent on the weather, even in so-called summer months.

Thats it, I’m off work for two weeks. As per usual, things ran to the wire at work, leaving loose ends dangling in a generally unsatisfactory sort of way.

June for a variety of reasons, wasn’t a good one for me, with the last two weeks blighted by a nasty bout of a kind of cold flu virus which has made life challenging, to say the least.

I hope the next two weeks prove the tonic I need, or will at least give me time to think about things.

On a lighter note, tomorrow is a visit to Knockhill Racing Circuit for the British Superbikes qualifying. As is traditional, the weather has turned awful with wind rain and general unsettledness marking the event. All we need is snow and fog to round off the day.

Broxburn, home to the swimming pool I go to, and home to Scuderia Ecosse. They race Ferrari motor cars. Broxburn? Eh ? Excellent!

A sensationalist attention grabbing title ! 🙂

Reading in a few places about a chap called Dave Winer, who has given up offering a free service which up till a day or so ago hosted up to 3,000 weblogs. Reading between the lines it looks like he was on borrowed time. He stopped working for the company that hosted the servers about three years ago and recent changes meant he had to host things himself.

There has been an understandable reaction from the user community, which hotwired place an interesting spin on. Apparently Dave has offered to give an export, on request, of blogs. This will take him two weeks. This has been given as a reason for most people giving quiet comments on the lack of notice given by him, lest he take offence at disparaging comments and refuse to give them their lives back. On the other hand, some are laying in at the lack of notice and said that he would have known about the situation for a while. Such is, maybe it all got too much for him and he was overtaken by the situation.

The Register take a different perspective, choosing to make an independent verification of what were described as technical issues. Winer says they have server problems, The Register checks the operating system and extrapolates that Windows 2000 is up to the job and it is their admininistration that is suspect.

My take on the story? Mr Winer founded the free service a few years ago at the beginning of the blog phenomenon, when he worked at Userland and they provided the servers. Things changed and he left the company, but the existing management kept hosting the free service. Management changed there recently, didn’t have the ties to Mr Winer and went through some cost reduction. This tipped the level of responsibility for the service over the balance that Mr Winer was interested in, or could cope with.

The Internet is going to face this situation a few more times and I watch with interest to see whether the sense of benovolence that provides so much free will continue, or whether the costs will catch up with us and charging will catch up by stealth.

In the meantime, I’ll need to think about my own free hosting of my blog!

PS: Usual disclaimers, I know almost nothing about this situation apart from what I’ve read in the two articles referenced.

It was a post by Don Box that reminded me what I have been up to over the last few weeks. After the Bike show in March I worked my way through some books that I had bought.

My Amazon order history has In Search of Stupidity ordered in September last year, but it seems like I read it more recent than that. I also worked my way through Raw Spirit which I bought as a travel volume and its brief mention of Iain Bank’s VFR. Based on a recommendation by a colleague by the name of Pete Baugh, I got the entire trilogy of The Bourne Identity which is an excellent book with a lot more depth than the recent film adaptation. Another of the Dark Angel novels also went in there. I got a couple of cheap books to pass the time, for some amusement. They were both based on X-Box games, the first called Halo: First Strike and the other called Halo: The Fall of Reach.

More recently I bought a couple of motorcycling related books from Border Books in Fort Kinnaird while I was waiting on a dent repair to the Passat. One called The Perfect Vehicle by a woman in the states who runs a Moto Guzzi, and the other was the Autobiography of Steve Hislop who was a Motorcycle Racer in the UK.

So after name dropping someone who read the same book as me, I make that eight books to post reviews of.

Oh dear, that almost makes me sound as if I buy as many books as The Sutherlands :).