8 September 2003 23:43 [link]
fair's fair
I went to St Giles' Fair this evening. St. Giles' Fair is a funfair which gets set up on St. Giles, the main (very wide) road leading north out of Oxford City Centre for two days at the start of each September. It's really quite impressive. The roads are closed from Sunday to Wednesday morning, and the whole area is taken over.
It's the usual tawdry mix of coconut shies, hoopla stores, burger vans, candyfloss stalls, and a whole range of rides from mini Ferris wheels for children to huge whirling contraptions which made me feel vaguely sick without even going on them. They even had a rollercoaster.
It's not yet term time, so the event is very much a Town thing with lots of local accents in the hubbub. Lots of disreputable-looking youths, too. I feared for my wallet, but most of them seemed more interested in winning ugly stuffed toys at the shooting gallery (undesirables in pursuit of the undesirable, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde).
I was with Ed, Mark, Vicki, and other friends of theirs. There was a general desire to just meander, although a few of our number ventured on to some of the rides. (Dan, notably, became rather ill after a turn on a whirling spinning rocking thing.) Ed, Nicole and I went on to a "rollercoaster simulator", an experience which may be likened to sitting in a shaking metal while watching someone play a video game on a big screen in front of you while - inexplicably - someone else is playing bluegrass banjo.
I had no intention of going on any of the rides, really. Partly because I don't care for being hurled into the air, waved around, spun, tipped or twirled, and partly because, well, the things looked dangerous.
We retired to the pub, faired out.
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8 September 2003 20:03 [link]
conference
Today was spent at the Intranet Webmasters Conference - a gathering of all the people who are in charge of intranet sites at work. Quite a painless day, and notable for the workshop on how to implement a navigation bar using a system I'd developed. It's one of these things where people in the central team noticed it, said "oh, that's handy" and then took it and made it available to everyone. They never really involved me in the whole thing, which I was half miffed about and half relieved about. I think the relieved bit won. They gave me credit during the workshops, which was nice, and people were generally very positive about it. Nice to have, albeit inadvertently, helped people do their jobs.
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