Posts Tagged ‘west norwood’

Yesterday, I tweeted "According to my LibraryThing records I’ve read 141 books this year: 26 novels, 7 non-fiction, 102 graphic novels and 6 ‘other’."

Then I went out and bought another two graphic novels… But it must be said that most of the comics I’ve read this year came from West Norwood library, and now that I’ve exhausted most of their good ones, and some of their bad ones, I think 2010 may be slightly less weighted towards graphic novels.

How many of my 2009 books have you read?

Available as a poll over on Live Journal (you don’t need an LJ account to vote, just an OpenID account which means an account from WordPress.com, Google, Yahoo, Blogger, etc.)

Read the rest of this very true thing…


1999: Iceland, Kwik Save, Co-Op, [pub], [Woolworths]

2009: Iceland, Somerfield, [pound store], Tesco, Sainsbury’s

Today and I rushed home from work because (a) it was the start of the long weekend and (b) we could shop in West Norwood Sainsbury’s on its opening day.


As we’re all blogging for history, here’s a bit about my day.


Alarm went off at 7:00. Lettice got up. I didn’t. Whoops. Staggered out of bed at 8:00 and between checking e-mail, showering, eating breakfast and faffing about managed to get into work around about 9:45. No meetings this morning so not a problem. Check work e-mail and calendar and tell the project manager that I love her because she’s worked out that in our incredibly tight schedule for the site (www.visitlondon.com) redesign I actually have no tasks allocated to me between the end of November and the sometim in February so I can take some holiday after all. But then I groan as I realise that Friday is booked up with meetings from 10-12 and then 12:30-16:00. Ouch.

Spent most of the day working on a project for our kids’ site (www.kidslovelondon.com). Nothing terribly exciting – a bit of CSS, bit of XSLT, bit of JavaScript (enforcing my own recently written coding standards to avoid document.write and use appendChild() etc.). Minor panic regarding the half term edition of the kids’ newsletter but it got sent out on time and everyone seems very happy with the new style.

Went to lunch with Lettice – she’s working at VL for a few weeks. And after that it was time for today’s round of meetings about the redesign project. Time and money versus ambition. Same as every project I’ve ever worked on. We actually have a very good team (and soon to be a much bigger team, an ad will be appear in this week’s New Media Age for six positions within the web team at VL) and doing most of the work in house will cut down on some of the headaches.

Ended up working until 18:30 which makes up for the late start, though a fair chunk of the last hour was spent playing Bang! Howdy (www.banghowdy.com) whilst waiting for other people to go through the designs of the Christmas pages with me. We need to have some pages up very soon in order to cover the switching on of the Christmas Lights.

London Bridge was busy and I just missed the 18:39. I bought this week’s New Scientist (suckered in by the ‘what would happen to Earth if humans vanished cover story) and this month’s .net (a couple of articles that I can quote mine for a brainstorm in one of Friday’s endless meetings). Ran into Séverine and we caught the 18:51 to Tulse Hill and then walked up to West Norwood together.

Home, sausages for dinner, then watched CSI: Miami with Lettice before sitting down to write this.


So there you are, not my usual sort of post and probably not of any great historical interest.


The Post, the free local paper that gets shoved through my letter box every week, contains an article about a rail users group who want the local train services to run with tube-like frequency. They seem to have overlooked the fact that most tube lines have very few branches and junctions whilst many different rail lines join together and use the same tracks in South London. The train operators showed admirable restraint when they said “it is difficult to say whether their demands are reasonable or unreasonable until we sit down and look at the timetable.”

Elsewhere in the article there was a survey of “almost 200 commuters” which found that:

  • ninety-five per cent of them used the service four or five days a week

They’re commuters, of course they use the service four or five days a week!

  • sixty-four per cent were dissatisfied with the service
  • 98 per cent thought it was unreliable

In the spirit of Josh from The West Wing, taken literally that means that 34% think that the service is unreliable but are still satisfied with it.