Site History

A jaunt around the Midlands, visiting Warwick Castle (horribly touristy), Twycross Zoo and Kenilworth Castle (much better!) with new photos added around the album.

A visit to the Prescott Hill vintage hill climb has resulted in a new section in the gallery.

'1968 And All That' event at the National Railway Museum, so some more pictures have turned up in the 'Steam' section of the gallery.

Grace - We have a new four-legged member of the family; a grey kitten called Grace who now has her own area in the album.

The last day of the holiday (boo-hoo). A quick trip to the beach at Greve de Lecq in the morning and just a couple of photos for today; one of a nice print in the cottage (artist Tim Thompson, but I can't find the name of it).

Off to Jersey Zoo, or 'Durrell' as it is now called, after its founder; Gerald Durrell. I can't say I like the new name, but I still took lots of photos, the best of which are to be found in today's gallery update. Went to the beach at St. Brelades in the evening, just to add a few more pictures

Took the ferry to Guernsey today. Two of us were sick and I wished I'd walked. On arrival, I was interviewed by a journalist from the local press - I initially thought that he must have heard about this web site, but it turned out that he was looking for a story about the ferry which we'd travelled on as it has apparently had a run of technical problems recently.

Later two of our team mutinied and refused to board the ferry to Herm and spent the day in Castle Cornet instead. For the day's photos and a couple of bonus shots from last night, follow the link below:

Continued the continuation by adding pictures from the maritime museum in St. Helier. We went to a vineyard and a pottery as well, but I was too busy carrying Lois's shopping to take any pictures. Contributions to the J. M. Skilleter Wallet Restoration Fund are urgently required and will be gratefully received.

Continued the vanity insanity by adding today's collection of pictures from Mount Orgueil Castle.

In a totally pointless and probably futile exercise driven only by withdrawal symptoms from my regular games of Scrabble and a feeling of 'well, why not?' (the answers to which were very carefully ignored), I've decided to replace usual handing around of 100+ boring photographs to people who weren't interested after photo number 3 with an online, daily-updated, live photo album of the holiday whilst I'm on holiday!!! This must be great news for everyone as I can show off how clever I am (I wish) and everyone can honestly say "I've already seen them" when we offer to show them our holiday photographs when we get back.

New album! Bananas????

More photos added. Many more to go....

Finally got around to redesigning the site completely - well, nearly completely....

Got a new recently as well - a dark green Ford Mundano. Boring, but big, safe, reasonably driveable and (hopefully) more reliable than that bl**dy Astra and, for that matter, the previous bl**dy Astra.

Just noticed that I haven't updated this page for 3 years. Shows how exciting my life is doesn't it.

Zzzzzzzzz.........

Someone decided to try and embed their Post Office van in the side of my car as I was driving home tonight.

Yes, thanks, I'm uninjured. What? You didn't ask? What do you mean; you don't care! Well, really......

Well, I keep saying "I must update the web pages" and then do nothing about it. I haven't actually done very much this time, but at least it proves that I'm still alive (as far as I know).

I managed to resist the temptations of Perl, Java and ECMAscript, much to my sanity's relief, and I'm still plodding along in my day job with C for little black boxes. Nothing much seems to have happened over the last 6 months or so, which means life is peaceful but a little boring and I'm almost certainly going to wish that I'd never said that at some point!

Ho hum, well I got the pages sorted (or so I thoughted (so says, lapsing into whimsical rhyme for a moment)) only to have someone send me a nice email telling me that some pages had pictures which covered up the text! How is that possible with HTML? Goodness knows, it seems to be something to do with image alignment. Serves me right for not reading the manual. Oh well, I'll just have to go back and sort them all out. Two updates in two days, not to mention a minor tweak to the RoADA pages (Advanced Driving) as well! Goodness me, I'm becoming a proper little webmaster now! I even know what CGI is, although I still haven't a clue what it stands for. I'm also getting this strange urge to learn Perl, Java and even ECMAscript, which sounds like a particularly nasty skin disease....

Now where was I.....

Oh dear, looks like I either stick my images above/below my text or use tables with invisible borders to keep everything apart. I wonder if there's a better way to do this kind of thing. Off we go then, just when I thought I'd got rid of the tables on the site......

Righty-oh then (he says, out of character, but in an attempt to confuse the spellig checker) this thyme, I'm really, really, really going to get around to uploading the latest version of the web site to good old www.skilleter.org. Even though Rollercoaster Tycoon is beckoning at me seductively from it's CD jewel case, and I have some work on the Windows version of the Jed editor (superb bit of code, go to "The JED Programmer's Editor" page if you like your programmer's editors UNIX-style with lots of power and no bells and whistles) that I should be doing.

I'm going to get rid of those irritating tables and put some more text for you to ignore whilst looking at the pictures. I might even add a few more of them, since I've had some feedback over the last few months from one or two people who actually said that they like the site (no, not just my mother....)

Bit more work, played around with the design, went to bed. Night-night.

Another little update with a few new photographic imagary including one one or two of me on the Royal Scot many, many years ago (ye gods, 'twas over a quarter of century ago!). See the 'Butlins' link on the left for more information!

I've also stuck another nice picture of the boys on the site (I have a nasty feeling that I'm going to find a photo of me on the site somewhere if I keep letting Robert play games on the PC (Worms is a favourite at the moment (go to www.team17.com for information))

Just updated a few links and spelling mistakes. Nobody has joined the mailing list yet, which would be depressing if it wasn't for the thought of having to sending things on the list when people did join it!

Well, its the start of the last year of the decade, century and milleni.... mile... melly... minellium, so to celebrate, I've bought skilleter.org.uk as a present to myself, and why not!

Just got a new (well, newer) car, so decided that the most logical thing to do was to update the web site. I'm still trying to decide why that was logical, but it hasn't stopped me from doing it. Robert's in bed, so this update is all my own work. If nothing else, the speling should be right! For some reason that I'm blaming Microsloth for, the font's changed on all the new pages. When I get around to RTFM, I'll try and sort it out. In the meantime, I'm going to claim that it is an artistic effect, if anyone comments on it.

Just for the heck of it, I've created a mailing list for the site (why not join, below!) and with the help of a kind gentleman called Andrew Spaxman we have a wonderful advertising banner as well. At this rate, as soon as pay-per-view web sites are invented,   I'll be able to retire - assuming that I can survive on £1.50 per decade that is!

Eureka, I've found the logical link between the new car and the web site. The first place that we went in it was to the National Railway Museum in York. We had a marvellous time; saw City Of Truro and the Flying Scotsman for the first time and had a look around the new building "The Works" which only opened a few days ago. If anyone from the museum is reading this, we can offer our congratulations on a museum that gets better and better every time that we visit.

We've been travelling around the country a bit recently; we've been to the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, Peak Rail in Matlock, Armley Mills in Leeds and we've paid a few more visits to the Keighley & Worth Valley line where we saw (but didn't manage to ride behind) the L.N.E.R. B1 and, just last weekend we saw the J27 from the N.Y.M.R. (and didn't manage to ride behind that either!).

We've put some more of Robert's photographs on the site this time - he's getting quite good now that he's using 35mm film instead of his little instamatic 'Thomas' camera. I suppose that Patrick is going to want to start taking pictures soon as well!