Let Me Take You By The Hand…

…and lead you through the streets of London…

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Quota music video after this comment on my last post. This was undoubtedly Ralph McTell’s biggest hit, re-released in 1974 – I haven’t heard it in years, but the busy guitar work does remind me of bustling London.

1 Comment | Posted in this is south africa

Bollards. Bollards of London.

Kaboom. Every now and again, there comes a time when we discover something so utterly amazing that we have to immediately share it with you, the esteemed readership of 6000 miles

This is one of those times.

Because I have discovered a site devoted entirely to bollards in London, handily entitled “Bollards of London“. Yes, that’s bollards, the singular of  which is defined as “one of a series of short posts for excluding or diverting motor vehicles from a road, lawn, or the like”.

Yep – this site is full of photos and painstaking descriptions of bollards. Who would be interested in bollards, you might ask?
These people would:


And yes, before you ask, that is an inverted cannon bollard.

What a beautiful piece of street furniture, the fact it just sits in the middle of a paved area with its beautiful rusting tapering body (outwards) with a narrowing curved top that leads to an almost door knob type handle.

And here’s a description of how and who found it:

My fellow ‘bollardarians’  from left to right @sophontrack @itsyourlondon @AboutLondon @Rigsbyhatstand and @philipkelly29 with the upturned ‘cannon’ bollard in the foreground. I will take this opportunity to thank them all again and to let you know it really was a hunt for this wonderful piece of street furniture. At the beginning of the ‘hunt’ we had a coffee on St Mary’s Axe not 100 yards from this site, it really was a bollard hunt/search with plenty of other little treasures found along the way. Badges are being prepared and made for this great bunch of people.

A wonderful hunt with lots of treasures (a coffee shop) found along the way. Pfft. Why would anyone be interested in… wait. What? There are badges?

I WANT A BADGE!

If you want a badge from Bollards of London, you’ll have to go bollard hunting. In London. And if you’re going to do that, then why not visit Leadenhall Market after trying some LSD?

If you do want a different place to visit in central London the Leadenhall Market is most unusual because of the colours/artwork/bollards/dragons which you’ll find everywhere. In part two of this post I’ll reveal the bollard I was looking which we found in the most unusual place.

Dragons everywhere? Riiiight.
Incidentally, “unusual place” in which they found the bollard turned out to be on a road, which didn’t seem that unusual to me. If they’d found it up a tree or in a lift, I would have considered it more “unusual”, as it is, I consider it disappointingly “usual”, aside from the fact that they then wrote 500 words about it. That strikes me as being a little unusual.

It’s only a matter of time until I begin the Bollards of Cape Town blog but I have some way to go to catch up with the prolific Bollards of London, who are well over 200 posts, each one of them about bollards. In London.

Amazing.

2 Comments | Tagged , , | Posted in recommended site, that's a bit mad, uk

Waze and means…

I’ve been fiddling with the Waze app on my Android phone this week. It’s not the first time I have played with it, but I found that it was of very limited use last time out (probably about a year ago), simply because I was the only (slight exaggeration) person in South Africa bothering to use it.

Described as:

…a free social mobile app that enables drivers to build and use live maps, real-time traffic updates and turn-by-turn navigation for an optimal commute. 100% powered by users, the more you drive the better it gets.

Waze allows you to send information about your journey to other Wazers on the road, so that a real-time map can be built up and the app can help other users to avoid troublespots. Because of this, it requires a “critical mass” of users to make it worthwhile and, as I pointed up above, it didn’t have that. Now, however, it has joined forces with MiX Telematics who already have 30,000 users using realtime reporting through their vehicle tracking services.

I found out about this from a rather enthusiastic John Maytham on Cape Talk, who has been enthusing enthusiastically about Waze ever since. Quite how this sits with Primedia’s support of the Lead SA campaign, I’m not sure. After all, they aren’t usually very impressed with people using their cellphones while driving.

My first impressions haven’t been brilliant. There are still very few users in Cape Town, and the information seems only to state the bleeding obvious: traffic is bad into town in the morning, traffic is bad out of town in the evening. Add to that the fact that because of the MASSIVE lump of rock we like to call “The Mountain” and its proximity to Table Bay, there aren’t an awful lot of alternative routes to take in the Mother City and Waze’s usefulness is immediately limited.

And then there’s the battery drain. Wow. I have never known an app like it for using power. A journey from Ysterplaat, via town, to home (about 30km) took over 50% of my (admittedly old) battery life. All of which means that even with a fully charged phone, you aren’t going to get much more than 90 minutes of Waze-related driving fun.

I’m too worldly wise to give up on apps very quickly, but Waze is already on the danger list.
Anyone care to tell me why it deserves to stay on my phone?

More on Waze in SA.
Waze on Android Market Google Play Store [QR].

UPDATE: Ooh – looks like 5fm Breakfast is running a Waze promotion next week as well. 6000 miles… slightly ahead of the curve again…

1 Comment | Tagged , , | Posted in android, learning curve, this is south africa

Late Night Lab Work

It’s a public holiday in South Africa, but TB has no respect for days off, so I didn’t have a day off.

In fact, it seems that having any time at all is a bit of a luxury at the moment. Anyone else ever have this feeling?

2 Comments | Tagged , , | Posted in quota photo, this is south africa

Simplicity

As someone once kindly said:

Simplicity is more often than not, a thousand times MORE.

And that’s probably why I love this picture taken at Strandveld Winery so very much.

I spotted it in the Cape Agulhas 2012 Tourist Guide and it popped up on my timeline again today. It’s almost as though it’s hinting about getting a spot on 6000 miles… Who am I to deny it that honour?

Gorgeous.

2 Comments | Tagged , | Posted in Cape Agulhas, positive thoughts, quota photo, this is south africa
myScoop