Monthly Archives: January 2007

Little Chef

I see from Iain Dale that Little Chef is in financial difficulties.  I completely missed this on any other news source, so thank heavens for RSS.

Little Chef used to be good.  We used to go there for family treats when we were little – in hindsight, that must have been a good value family outing for the years when my parents were struggling a bit financially.

Recently, I have been back during long journeys, and I haven’t really been impressed.  It’s pretty expensive for what you get. And the food is universally awful.  Processed, tinned, frozen.  Microwaved to within an inch of its life then plated.  A little bit of garnish.

Was it always so bad and now I’m ever so slightly more discerning than I was when I was under 10? Or has the quality declined in the twenty years since then?

I do hope someone will be able to take over all the restaurants and produce something of good value with good food all over Britain’s A roads.  It would be a shame to see them fall to an existing brand.  Too much of the roadside offer in this country is terrible at the moment.

Techy help!

I have just been poking around my web host with my FTP client, and found a huge file called error_log. It’s about 41MB.

Peeking at it, it seems to have entries like this one:

[07-Nov-2006 07:11:11] PHP Warning: Unknown():
Unable to load dynamic library './/usr/local/lib/ixed.4.3.lin' -
.//usr/local/lib/ixed.4.3.lin: cannot open shared object file:
No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0

[05-Oct-2006 19:25:17] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information
- headers already sent by (output started at
/home/privatedirname/public_html/wp-includes/wp-db.php:102) in
/home/privatedirname/public_html/wp-rss2.php on line 8

… over and over again. In fact, it seems to be every 4 seconds since the 5th Oct last year, and since the timestamp is now, it still seems to be growing.

What does it mean? How can I fix it?

Wii update

It’s arrived!   well, no, it bloody hasn’t but they’ve shipped me the games I ordered without the console, and I was actually expecting them to send them all out together.  Bah.  How frustrating!

New Year Mega Monkey Marathon

Again with those well-aligned priorities!  I’ve spent a couple of days over the New Year — not sorting out my paperwork and cleaning like Dave Radcliffe — but spending hours and hours replaying a decade-old computer game that I haven’t touched in years.

It started well enough.  I had to tidy my room to find my P60s to complete — late! — my tax return.  I eventually found them amongst various wodges of vaguely important paperwork, but before I got there, I threw out enough cardboard to fill the recycling wheelie bin. Not enough cardboard to expose much in the way of carpet, or desk. But in doing so, I uncovered my Monkey Island Bounty Pack.  The Pack is supposed to have Monkey Island 1, 2 AND 3 in it, but I lent 1 and 2 to someone years ago (Hannah?) and so only had 3 left.

Oh, well, it was fun reliving the adventure, The Curse of Monkey Island.  Oh, the sights and sounds of the Caribbean. Caber-tossing on Plunder Island.  The lost art of insult-sword fighting. And who could forget Sherman, the lactose-intolerant volcano ably guarded by Lemonhead.

Erm.  Getting a bit carried away.  Will there be Monkey Island for Wii? Do Lucasarts still make Monkey Island-style games – their website seems to be covered in Star Wars tie-ins, and doesn’t seem to have anything like Guybrush Threepwood or Grim Fandango, or even Day of the Tentacle any more? Is the adventure game really dead?

Smash!

Erm.  Does anyone know where large, extremely fragile, hand-painted glass baubles can be obtained, preferably without having to travel to Austria?