First Person Account

One of the survivors of the London bombings has given her moving account of the incident. Read Survivor's Blog at BBC Online.

It was only a matter of time

I turned on the television yesterday lunch time to watch the news on BBC1. A reporter was saying something about a bus and at first I thought there had been some sort of accident. I turned to Sky One's interactive service and saw that London had been subject to a terror attack.
I remember that when I first heard about 9/11, my reaction was one of total disbelief: it felt as if I were watching a movie. This time there was no sense of disbelief, nor even of surprise (I think everyone had expected this since 9/11). I just felt numb.

It's not the first time we've watched the aftermath of a terror attack, of course. I worked in London during the worst period of IRA bombing. I always wondered if they would ever hit the Tube. They planted bombs at Tube stations, but never on the trains themselves. And there was usually a warning. I do not for a moment think that the IRA were motivated by humanity to limit loss of life, but I do think that they held back to some extent because they didn't want to lose credibility and support.

The contrast between the euphoria over the Olympics the day before, and the horror that unfolded was particularly poignant. I think we need the Olympics like we need a hole in the head, but it was so uplifting to see the celebrations in London and Singapore.

Then I thought about Israel, and how London's terrible day is a way of life for Israelis. How many of those rushing to condemn yesterday's terrorism have been equally quick to excuse Palestinian suicide bombings as "desperation"?

I rang the one person I thought might have been in London; he was fine and so was his brother, but his sister-in-law hadn't been in touch (she was all right, it turned out).

One thing puzzles me, and, I'm sure, many others. Why were 1500 police officers sent north of the border to the G8 summit? I'm sure the Scottish police are more than capable of mounting a security operation of this nature.

This morning I watched the news, and then turned to S4C and, for the rest of the morning, watched the International Eisteddfod from Llangollen. It was a wonderful antidote - singers from all over the world united by their love of music.

I don't know much about Anime...

in fact I don't know anything about Anime, but I took this quiz:

YOU ARE ... INNOCENT SCHOOLGIRL! (Kareshi Kanojo No
Jijou)


What Kind of Anime Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

It's a long time since I was an innocent schoolgirl!

A new version of dashblog!

Version 0.12b has just been released and it gets better all the time. You can download it at June Tate's blog.

Dimitry Kirillov has developed a widget that allows Live Journal users to post from their desktops. Download it at dashboard widgets, or at Dimitry's website. Beautiful interface and nice features: mood selector, private/public/friends only selection and music pick-up.

Delicious Library

This is an awesome piece of software from Delicious Monster that catalogues books, CDs, DVDs and games and stores them on your hard drive in a - well - delicious interface. I have about 2,000 books and I've made half-hearted attempts to catalogue them the Dark Ages way (pen and card index) but never got anywhere. You can input details by hand or, if that's too slow for you, scan in the ISBN. There are other programs that do something similar, but DL is far and away the best IMHO.

I would like to see more places to look up in addition to Amazon such as Abebooks as many of my books pre-date ISBNs, but that's a minor peeve. I can enter the info myself and scan in the dustjacket or cover to provide artwork (once my HP all-in-one catches up with Tiger).

I've seen a couple of negative reports (I'm not going to link to them, but you can Google them easily enough), but these seem to relate to version 1; I have 1.5 (Tiger-ready) It even comes with a cute little widget.

Sorry PC-users - you'll just have to come to your senses and buy a Mac.

A Gripe

Why doesn't Blogger recognize Daylight Saving? I suppose I could say that I'm in France during the summer months (if only), but would that change the times for the whole Blog? Oh, well, a little enough wrinkle.

More about DashBlog

June Tate (respect!), creator of this widget, has a blog where you can download the latest release and read about DashBlog's progress. I cannot praise this widget highly enough!. You WinDO'Hs users don't know what you're missing.

Any British Blogger worth her salt ...

would be posting something insightful and incisive about the election. Here goes: Tony Blair got in again.

Waddya want - Jonathan Dimbleby? Robin Cook thinks he should step down as leader. Read all abaht it in The Guardian. I concur, but where does Cookie get off describing Lib Dems as 'reactionary'? I resemble that!!!!

Yes it can

It can cope with HTML.

This reporter for one welcomes our new Tiger overlord!

Problems

Connecting to the Internet has been a nightmare, although it looks as if everything has been sorted out now.

I do love Tiger - especially the Dashboard widgets. This Dash Blog gizmo is awesome. At least, it worked with plain text, but I'm using HTML now. Can it cope?

I've got a Tiger by the tail

I've just installed Tiger on my Mac. There are a few teething troubles, but I love Spotlight: an incredibly fast program for searching your computer, and Dashboard and its widgets. One of the latter is a cute gizmo that enables ypu to post to your blog (I hope)!