They cut the streetlight down.

I’m gutted, yet delighted at the same time…

Firstly, “They’ve” finally removed the only working SOX lamp which was visible from my house. It’s been on the chopping block for months.

A couple of days ago, I noticed they’d placed some cones on the central reservation on which the SOX lamp resided, but there didn’t seem to be a lot going on. New posts were erected in February, painted black in March, abandoned since then.

Anyway, I finished work at 8AM, and am thankfully off for the next X days, so I decided to stay up, and do some stuff on the computer. I had some MP3s I wanted backing up, along with my ~10Gb Photos directory, therefore I’d be up for a bit. To while away the time, I played online scrabble.

After getting trounced (20, double word score), I looked out of the window, to notice something odd. The SOX lamp had just been switched on, still glowing red.

The view of the post itself was slightly obscured by bushes, but I could see high-vis jackets busily doing stuff at the base of the post. Surely they weren’t going to take it down?

I watched, as the post wobbled. The lamp turned from red, to orange, and then off. Dark, and black, like the very pit of my soul. Its life terminated, like so many of its fallen bretheren who once lit the depressing streets of Hartlepool.

The post shaking began to get stronger, and eventually, the lantern clips gave way, allowing the polycarbonate bowl to swing softly in the autumn air.

A mechanical grabber begins to rise from the street below, carrying some primitive machinery designed to keep the post in place, as it is severed from the base by a circular saw. The cutting disc eventually begins to make contact with the post. Sparks fly, as shards of white-hot metal spew out from the blade, emitting a display reminiscent of a Catherine Wheel on November 5th.

Within minutes, the post is in two. A final shudder finds one half still buried deep into the ground, the other half now hanging in mid air. The grabber gracefully performs an act which sees the fallen streetlight being delicately lowered to the ground, before being sliced into smaller pieces, and placed into the back of a low-loader.

Hmmm. Maybe I can get on with my life now.

Technorati Tags: cut, down, removed, replacement, streetlight

It’s been a while, but I’ll update you on the streetlighting situation on Easington Road. It looks as if the old posts are finally going to be taken down. I went out today, on my way to Employment Place, and noticed that there were cones laid on the central reservation.

Over the last few days, I’d noticed that they had also carried out some on-the-fly repairs to the existing posts - the broken post which once provided illumination to Mercuryvapour Towers had its tube removed. Presumably, it was still good, and had been removed to relamp another post somewhere.

I took a quick glance at the situation this morning, and, at the minute, there doesn’t seem to be a great deal going on…

Yes, for those who are new to the blog, I physically went out, and took a photo of the central reservation. With cones on it. And, for those who are old hands when it comes to reading this blog, I’m sure you expected no less. I will keep an eye out, and post even more photos as soon as I get some.

No, really, I will.

In other news… er, there was none. It’s been a desperately quiet period. Went to Nottingham on Saturday. Needless to say, I took my camera. Unbelievably, I only took about 10 pictures, therefore, it remained pretty much unreported. Those pictures can be viewed on flickr if you’re Chris, or Daddykins. I hope you’ve remembered your logins!

Technorati Tags: hartlepool, lamp post, replacement, streetlight

Well, it is no more than a number of small, wee hours before I depart this great land and head skywards to the land of many different types of sausage, and “Ich habe eine scheidenenzundung” is a polite way of informing your doctor that you have a vaginal infection.

Interestingly, my little £4.99 phrase book doesn’t have the… um… “penis” equivalent…. The dictionary part goes from penicillin, to penknife Ironically, both of these, could cure an infection in the ol’ trouser equipment department, one in a slightly more brutal fashion than the other. So, just in case, does anyone know the german for “My little man is weeping stinky green tears”?

Actually, no, don’t bother.

Moooooooving on rather quickly, I’ll try to change the subject from my holibobs, despite the fact everything I currently think about returns to thinking about it….. sooo, streetlights, then.

Yes, I did witness the removal of some old streetlights not too far away from where I live…

Forgive my shocking ineptitude when it came to taking this image. I had my phone headset on threaded through my t-shirt, and it was just too short for me to hold it at a comfortable angle. The one to the right, on the other side of the road also got taken down.

Oh, yes, I also promised an update on the shirt. Yes, THE shirt. The night I took that picture, I wore it to the club, in the hope to get a reaction. It didn’t take long…. I think I counted about 14 seconds before some random guy, who I believe was called Brian, said something. He was sat in a chair behind me. I had just approached the bar, after entering the club during a particularly heavy rain shower….

Brian: “Is it raining outside??”
Me: “Yeah, just a bit…”
Brian: “I can see that, your cannabis leaves are growing”.

I’d have been rolling around on the floor if it hadn’t been for the fact I’d thought of exactly the same. In fact, in order to emphasise the fact, I was going to show that picture of the shirt next to a picture of a cannabis farm I’d found on Channel 4’s website. But, then they might have done me for copyright, so I never used it….

There’s method in my madness. This shirt is probably going to be the one I wear on the plane (back to the holidays again, sorry), and as I’ve never been in a plane before, I have no idea if I’m going to be airsick or not. But, if I AM airsick, and I miss the bag, it won’t show up on this shirt!

Anyway, this is more than likely going to be my last posting before the holiday. Play nice, feel free to leave comments, though they won’t be authorised until I get back. I intend to have the first internet-free week of my life since 1998.

EDIT: You know, in the previous post, I whinged about the 30p it cost to send a text message to Jth which he will never receive? The other day, my phone accidentally sent 15 blank MMS messages to Coatesy, again at 30p a pop. That’s going to cost me £4.50 when my bill comes in. You know what’s the killer? He didn’t receive any of them either. Grrrrr.

Technorati Tags: cannabis, hawaaian, lamp post, replacement, shirt, streetlight

Yes, it’s splot time! ohhh, it’s a while since I had a good splot.

What are splots, I hear both of the readers cry. Well, the word “splot” is an onomatopoeic word for one’s arse dropping out, coined when Dave, who I worked with many years ago, registered a user on my ex-forum as “(name of ex-boss) is a whore”. Each time anyone did anything like that at work (which was often, trust me), I would add a new restriction to the forum, such as banning the works IP. When anyone came to access the site from work, and found it was banned, used to say “uh-oh… Jamie’s splotting again”, or “What’s he splotting over this time?”. In the end, I gave in, and ditched the forum.

In more recent times, it has been used when a certain action, or set of actions, have occured for me to get overly paranoid, and remove posts, etc. without a decent explanation, or at least so little explanation that it wasn’t worth me even explaining it…. er, if you see what I mean.

This particular splot, once again is about work, but seeing as I’m typing this, at home, sat on the sofa with the washer humming and clanking quietly in the kitchen, I shall say no more on the subject. Now do you see what I mean about crap splot explanations?

Ahem. Moving on swiftly, there’s not been a lot happening again. Chris came round on Saturday, and we sat and had a good few cans, while pissing around with the laptop, and hammering youtube and Flickr.

Speaking of Flickr, they broke down rather spectactularly the other night. Some peoples’ photo profiles ended up filled with random pictures, and a proportion of these were actually porn images. I was one of those affected. I laughed like a drain when I searched through my thumbnails, and found that instead of a picture of James’s cat, I had a thumbnail of a rather large breasted lady pleasuring herself with a dildo. I kid you not. The bug has been fixed (I bet it won’t stop you clicking the link just to make sure) and the bug was traced to a fault with the cache servers which meant that nobody’s images were actually lost, however, it’s one of the more embarrassing and ultimately damaging things that could ever happen to a photo hosting site.

Although I did find it funny at the time, it does make me wonder if, in the long term, I can rely on an exernal website to host irreplaceable pictures. Now that I have 800Mb space on this site at my disposal, which can be backed up instantly at the click of a mouse, I might start hosting some of the larger pictures on here again.

So, the 800mb. What can I do with that amount of space? I did say i’d have a think about it, but I could only come up with suggestions that have already been done hundreds of times before. A podcast, for example. I did think of doing one years ago, and in the past I have recorded them in different formats. Back in the summer, Chris and I actually recorded one, but it turned out to be so abysmally bad, I only managed to get 10 minutes into editing it, before I decided it was totally unusable. My chair squeaked all the way through, I sounded like a twat, Chris was too far away for the microphone to hear him, and the subjects we talked about which did get recorded were of such low interest to anybody, there wouldn’t have been any post posting it anyway.

Which is just as well, really, as I appear to have deleted the only copy of it. Oh well. C’est La Vie.

And, just for the hundreds who have been begging me for updates on the streetlight situation, there hasn’t been any. The old ones are stuck permanently on, which I may have mentioned in another post, and they still haven’t put up any more new posts. Even I’m bored with that now.

Technorati Tags: 800mb, abandoned, forum, podcast, splot, storage, Streetlighting, website, work

You may have noticed that I’ve not updated this site with the progression of the streetlight replacement. This wasn’t because every person in the whole entire world threatened to stop reading my blog if I continued posting about them, it’s because there’s been absolutely no progress for a week.

The only thing that’s happened is that they’ve managed to dig the holes to place the new posts, and also force some of the old lights to be on permanently. The one behind my house has been on since Wednesday. I always thought it was photocell controlled. This clearly can’t be the case, unless they’ve over-rode it. In fact, I bet thet’s what they’ve done. I’d hazard a guess that the old posts are now running off the new cables, but with the switching mechanism disabled in some way. Makes sense, I suppose. It saves them having two sets of live cables running where they’re digging.

Enough about streetlights. I might as well incorporate two posts into one, and mention that Music Zone hasn’t closed after all. As I reported earlier, 68 of the stores have been bought and reopened by Fopp. You know, I wonder if they have a branch of stores that sell pornography. They could be called Fopp Fopp Fopp Fopp….

Technorati Tags: closure, music zone, streetlight