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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Dr Plokta's LiveJournal:
| Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 | |
| 8:43 pm | Cygnet Update Mixed news, I fear. Apparently eight eggs were laid with one lost soon afterwards (which we knew). Five have hatched, but three of the cygnets have died. One more egg has been lost, and one has still not hatched, so it must be looking pretty dubious now. So we may only have two live cygnets from eight eggs, assuming that they both survive from now on. |
| Monday, May 5th, 2008 | |
| 12:40 pm | Cygnets! We finally have cygnets -- I think three have hatched and four are about to hatch. ( Cute cygnet photo behind the cut. ) |
| Monday, April 28th, 2008 | |
| 4:03 pm | A New Element This (gacked from Slashdot) is an astonishing story, if true. The first element discovered (as opposed to created, or found in nature after first having been created) since 1939. And they think it has atomic number 122 and a half-life of over 100 million years. Poul Anderson was right all along. |
| Saturday, April 26th, 2008 | |
| 8:33 pm | Ghastly Effects of Facebook I just realised that there's probably an entire generation of first year undergraduates out there who think that they're the class of 2010, not the class of 2007. |
| 2:51 pm | Cygnet Update I was clearly deluded in this post, as we got a good look at the eggs a couple of hours ago, and they're still eggs. But I was expecting there to be five of them, and there were seven, so she must have carried on laying for a few days longer than we thought, and the hatching will be correspondingly later. |
| Friday, April 25th, 2008 | |
| 7:02 pm | Wildlife Update No cygnets yet (due to hatch any day now), but add Chiffchaff (not seen last year), Peacock (the butterfly, not the bird), Small White, Blackcap, Willow Warbler & Swallow. ( And here are some more photos of the local waterfowl ) |
| Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 | |
| 1:08 pm | The Reality Distortion Field at work In January this year, Apple agreed that within six months it would revise its pricing on iTunes to bring the UK price of 79p per track more into line with the Eurozone price of 99 cents -- when the original complaints were made, the Eurozone price was around 70p, so 79p was over 10% more expensive. Apple have now done it, three months early, and without changing their pricing at all -- 99 Euro cents are currently worth 78.9p. |
| Monday, April 7th, 2008 | |
| 8:59 am | Torchwood thought ( Spoilers ) |
| Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 | |
| 5:26 pm | I don't have to walk 27 miles next week Tube strike is cancelled. |
| 11:46 am | Baaa ( That dialect meme. ) |
| Sunday, March 30th, 2008 | |
| 3:54 pm | Baby Birds The great crested grebes on Canada Water have hatched a couple of chicks. And there are ducklings too. ( Photos behind the cut. ) |
| 11:22 am | T5 In irritation at comments on news sites, I've been checking Wikipedia. If Heathrow T5 gets its problems largely sorted out by next weekend, which still seems entirely possible, then it will rank as a triumph of efficient British management and engineering, by comparison with almost every other airport project of similar scale in the history of the world. Compare with Singapore Changi (half the airport was still being built at the time it opened), Hong Kong International (cargo traffic was moved back to the old airport after months of chaos), Bangkok Suvarnabhumi (domestic traffic was moved back to the old airport after months of chaos), Paris Charles de Gaulle (the ceiling of the new Terminal 2E collapsed, killing four people, and the entire terminal is now being demolished and rebuilt), Denver International (opened 16 months late with a baggage handling system that never did work and was eventually scrapped) and even Tokyo Narita (riots killed several people, and opening was delayed due to sabotage). The only surprising thing about the trouble at Terminal 5 is that it seems to be coming under control already, mere days after opening. |
| Friday, March 21st, 2008 | |
| 9:06 am | Hugo Nominations Note that due to a fortunate coincidence with the scheduling, you can purchase a DVD containing all three Hugo-nominated episodes of Dr Who, and no others, for £6.98 from Amazon.co.uk. |
| Thursday, March 20th, 2008 | |
| 11:48 am | Eggcam Update No photos of eggs today, I fear, as ( there seems to be something large and white in the way. ) Yes, Petronella seems to have finished laying and started incubating, so there are six or seven eggs and (all being well, which it wasn't last year) you should all expect cute cygnet photos around Friday 25 April. |
| Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 | |
| 10:25 am | Still Going ( Has anyone got a rather large eggbox? ) |
| Monday, March 17th, 2008 | |
| 7:00 pm | Eggcam update ( Another one appeared last night. ) |
| Saturday, March 15th, 2008 | |
| 10:14 am | Another egg! ( And then there were four. ) |
| Friday, March 14th, 2008 | |
| 12:58 pm | Expecting the splish-splash of tiny feet No, not those kind of tiny feet... The swans have clearly not read the bird guides that say they should use the same nesting site every year, because when the nice Trust for Urban Ecology people dumped a load of reeds at our end of the dock for use as nesting material, they decided to come and sit on the pile and call it a nest, instead of lugging reeds back to the corner where they have nested previously. So we can keep a closer eye on them this year. ( There are three eggs so far. ) |
| Saturday, March 1st, 2008 | |
| 6:30 pm | Spring is here ( And there is photographic evidence behind the cut tag ) |
| Monday, February 25th, 2008 | |
| 4:38 pm | Photos 95 photos (out of over 2,500) from our South Africa trip are here. |