Seemingly overnight, the streets of Birmingham have been overrun by these flower daleks. They add some much needed colour to the streets, but some are quite badly placed - the one pictured here makes the pavement very narrow and is on a busy pedestrian route along a fairly busy road.

Update: 04/07/2005
Since I took the first photo, it looks like somebody has been stealing the flowers from this one!

There was a fairly impressive thunderstorm this morning. Lots of bright flashes and loud thunder - with only about a one second gap, so it was fairly close. But there was no rain, which means that Fleetwood Mac were lying when they sang Thunder only happens when it's raining. The rain didn't start until a few minutes later.

I suppose it's my own fault for complaining about how much time I spend travelling to and from work. This morning, I was stuck at Canley station in the middle of a thunderstorm. None of the local trains were running but a few express trains thundered through. The station was effectively cut off - the phone line was down and the bloke in the ticket office couldn't find out what the problem was.

After an hour of no news, I waited for a break in the rain and walked to the bus stop to catch a train to Coventry station. According to the screens there, all the local trains and about half of the others had been cancelled. I managed to get a Virgin train to Birmingham. As we pulled into Birmingham New Street, they announced that the problems at Coventry had been sorted out and that the trains would be back to normal soon.

Earlier today, it occurred to me that I'm losing half a day each week to commuting. Once I've taken into account the walk to the bus stop in the morning, waiting for the bus, travelling to the station, waiting for the train, travelling to Birmingham and finally walking to the office, around an hour has passed. If I'm lucky enough to get to the station in time for the fast train (and not the slow local stops-at-every-station one) then it's around a 45 minute journey but that only happens about once or twice a week if I'm lucky.

Travelling home usually involves me catching the local-stopping train and walking from Canley because that's actually quicker than going to Coventry station and waiting ages to catch a bus home from there.

So normally I lose about 2 hours each day to travelling or waiting to travel. Every now and again though, something goes wrong, such as last night. A train had broken down at Hampton-in-Arden and blocked the line to Coventry. My train had to wait at Birmingham International. I decided rather than wait around in the blazing hot sun, I would risk the bus back. I caught the no. 900 which slowly took me (and a load of other people who didn't fancy waiting for the trains to start moving again) around Meriden and Allesley Village before eventually dropping us off at Pool Meadow. Rare good timing meant that a no. 12 was waiting to leave, which takes me to the end of my road. Even so, I was over an hour late getting home.

Both hamsters were running in the wheel when one of them either stopped running or tried to change direction. The other hamster kept running. The wheel kept spinning. The first hamster did a loop-the-loop and went round the top of the wheel. It didn't seem to affect him - he wasn't hurt and a few minutes later was back to running around like a mad thing. To me, it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

When I was in the kitchen in work, I looked out of the window to see some geese on the grass outside the building, near the visitors car park. You don't normally see geese in the middle of Birmingham. They were still there when I was on my way home so I took some photos:

One of the problems with my new Nokia 6630 is that it came without any games pre-installed. I was looking for games to download when I realised that the phone was probably powerful enough to run a ZX Spectrum emulator. I knew that one had been written in Java so I looked to see if anyone had adapted it to run on a phone. Instead, I found ZX Boy, which is designed for phones which use the Symbian operating system.

The emulator runs surprisingly well - slightly faster than a real spectrum (which makes playing arcade games a bit more of a challenge). The main problem of course is the lack of a proper keyboard. For games with only a few controls, it is possible to redefine the phones keypad, but a text adventure or anything which requires a lot of typing would be too awkward. There is an on-screen keyboard for typing in small amounts of text, but it would be nice to be able to type by using the phone's keypad in a similar manner to texting.

I intend to browse through some of the spectrum archives on the internet to find some more games to download. At the moment, I am playing Football Manager a lot, especially on the train while travelling to and from work.