RECAPTURED: Frankie Mouse

Master escape artist defies five foot fall and finds way into kitchen.

Frankie Mouse, renouned escape artist has confounded the authorities again by escaping from his tank for a second time. Towards the end of last year, before his counterpart’s untimely demise he was part of the great tank escape where a clever use of the water bottle enabled him to escape onto the roof of his tank. Fortunately this was noticed and no actual escape happened.

This time though sources believe once again the waterbottle trick was used, this time when the lid was removed to air out the tank.

Frankie not only managed to escape his tank, but then survived a five foot fall to the ground before disappearing. Shortly after his escape was discovered a one man search party began methodically searching the living room for any signs. The search was widened to include the kitchen after no trace was found in the front room. Several slug trails were found and this has been noted for future study.

He fell down there

After a few minutes searching in the kitchen, a pair of beady red eyes were spotted underneath the vegetable basket. Using a combination of a mixing bowl, patience and a rich tea biscuit the escapee was recaptured and returned to his tank.

After his exploration, Frankie is now enjoying the remainder of the very biscuit that aided in his recapture.

Yes, we survived… buy your T-Shirts soon…

Read all about it, newspaper in "lack of basic knowledge shocker"

Image from here

I’ve just been sifting through my photos using Picasa, looking for ones to add to my Retro Computing Collection. Amongst the masses of outdoor photos and I came across a small group of pictures like this one - public information displays, Internet kiosks, cash machines, etc that all have one thing in common - they’re all broken or not behaving as they should be.

Consider this album a celebration of when tech goes wrong and nobody is around to reboot it. I’m always on the lookout for this stuff, it’s funny.

There’s also some curiously dumped monitors that I found in the middle of North Wales, miles from anywhere. Some thoughtless sod had evidently parked his car near the wall and thrown them over the side. And while in Oxford one year we found this monitor just lying on the pavement.

My photos from a trip inside the Mer Du Glace.

The entrance

Translucent ice

Refracted light

Solid glacier ice

A melted hole

The glacier at this point is covered in a layer of rock

Looking up the Mer Du Glace

One of the walks we went on started from Le Tour and went over the Aiguillette des Possettes after a brief wander into Switzerland. The weather was excellent, being neither too hot nor too cold, clear and sunny all day. The terrain was fairly easy to walk over too. Here’s today’s selection from a much larger set.

The summit

Mont Blanc through the trees

A cairn

The Swiss border

Mont Blanc from Le Tour

Since I have taken a lot of photos, I’m going to be spending the next few days picking out the best and displaying them here.

To begin, here are photos from my cable car trip up the Aiguille Du Midi

The lower viewing platform

The summit of the Aiguille Du Midi

Hanging Icicles

Looking down towards Chamonix

The Aiguille Du Midi cablecar station

Vertigo

Once again the French have excelled themselves at turning an otherwise hazardous, death creating force of nature into a mere tourist attraction. And a very cool one at that. The Mer De Glace is a glacier that runs out of the mountains and into Chamonix, where it unceremoniously melts into the hillside. For a the not too bad sum of €21 you can buy a ticket to ride the Montenvers Railway, then catch a télécabine down to the Mer De Glace itself and … go inside it.

Yes, you can go inside the glacier, not just touch it from behind a safety fence, or look at it from a distance of 100m. You can actually walk around inside it. And not content with just letting you walk around a carved tunnel they even went to the effort of carving out some pretty sculptures and fitting lights to refract off them.

It was really good, I have nearly filled my memory card in my camera with stuff from it.

No GPS route for today, it’s hard to get a fix under ten metres of solid ice

Earlier this year I decided to try and make the weed-strewn mud behind my house into something more interesting than nettles, bindweed and rosebay willowherb (which I just learnt is edible). So I went to the garden centre and bought a few packets of “meadow flowers”. Being of the opinion that wild flowers are quite able to germinate by themselves, without human intervention I scraped the weeds and glass off my patch of land and threw the seeds on and left them.

The flowers have made good use of the hot, sunny weather and torrential downpours of the past month and there’s a bright riot of colour behind my car. It’s pretty good

http://photos.piku.org.uk/v/Humberside/Hull/Vikki+Birthday/

After an excellent weekend that possibly involved eating more cake than the average person is supposed to consume in a year, I have just emptied my digital camera. Having way too many photos for the likes of Flickr I have copied them to my own photo server. Follow the link above to see them all. What follows are the highlights

People in the photos: Vikki Beerman Pink Fearie and me.

Inspired by a set of photos on nuxx.net of lightsticks that were cut open and tipped down a toilet (why? well… they glow, what other reasons do you need?) I decided I had to have a go. While making a cup of tea I discovered a glowing drinks stirrer and set about it with a pair of scissors.

My photos, while interesting, don’t quite have the alien glow of c0nsumer’s. I think I’ll try again with some proper glo-sticks. Mine look like luminescent creatures in some underwater cave, or possibly a Predator with severe haemorrhoids

All photos shot with my Canon A85 camera and a 15 second exposure. My bathroom now has a pretty sparkling effect after I accidentally flicked some glo-juice up the walls and onto the floor.