In the news (by alaric)

BBC local news report on the flooding around here

Crickly Country Park (by sarah)

Ages ago now - about six weeks or so my perants came up for the weekend and we went for a day outing at Crickly Country Park - there is geology, archeology and lots of wildlife there so it was lots of fun. I was also impressed with the visitors centre! though it needs a little cafe/shop thing really and the loos were a bit - hmmmm.

Jean loves collecting rocks!

Alaric decided he'd roll down the hill I can't remember why - this was on the back were the old Roman Hill Fort used to be.

Dad spent alot of time drawing cats and the like and reading all the notices - he was especially enamerred with the fossils and models at the visitors centre.

Jean became jellous of other children she found as they had hats and she didnt - this was how she ended up wearing Alarics fold-up hat!

I kept trying to photograph this poor creature but everytime it felt safe enough to venture out some one with a dog or small child would come walking through and scare it away again - hence no good pics!

The visitors centre had a giant snakes and ladders with velcro attatched to the wall and big cloth dice - Jean loved it though we did have a minor tiff about returning the dice to the little room were the game was!

Badge (by sarah)

I made a badge for Alaric at the centenary camp - I've finally got around to blogging about it over on Salaric!

He is now wearing this badge continuously on his coat of many pockets 🙂

CRB trial and identity cards (by alaric)

Last night, I had a funny feeling there was something special about today... sure, it's our third wedding anniversary, but something else...

Oh yes. I'd agreed to go to Bristol about three months ago.

Quickly I checked the time I needed to be there - 1:20pm to 3:20pm - phew; I'd neither need to be up specially early, or be back too late to take Sarah to her writer's circle or stop off at the district scouting supplies shop to pick up some badges my Cubs had earned.

So what was I in Bristol for? The Criminal Records Bureau trial of their planned new identity checking procedures...

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Cloth badges (by alaric)

As I mentioned before, I have a cloth badge sewn onto my coat of many pockets. Now, Sarah is an avid collector of most things, including such badges; she has bags and boxes of them, generally not sewn onto anything. I don't have the urge to collect like that, but I wouldn't mind a few more to sew onto my coat.

I wouldn't want just any badges sewn on, though; I'm not even keen on picking up badges from places I visit and sewing them on to mark the event.

I think I'd probably like some nerdy ones, to be honest. A NetBSD logo or a hacker emblem would be pretty cool. But I'd really like something Lispy, so I designed the following:

Now, I've found places that will make badges for you, but the minimum orders tend to be in the realm of 100, at a cost of 85 pounds or so... and I don't know if I can sell the spares on to anybody 😉 Perhaps I need to set up a "nerdy cloth badges" business...

The SVN source is available for download, BTW. It was made on a Mac and uses an Apple font for the nice curly lambda, but I'm sure other platforms will have a good font that can be used instead.