Aghillo

A great video from Grant Davis and great soundtrack too! I love this – we really, really, need to get this going in the UK…

A little jaunt out this morning along the seafront to keep up the 30 days of biking. It was exceptionally clear cross Morecambe bay and I could see Barrow and the bay wind farm quite clearly. Then up to the canal where you can’t help but notice the difference in environment from breezy sea front, oystercatchers and red shanks to canal boats, dogs and blue tits. Very nice though! The route is shown on an embedded interactive google map above which now has the added attraction of street view. Drag and drop the yellow man and you get to see the street view pictures! (Hmm – street view doesn’t always appear so there may not be a yellow man on the map!)

In the spirit of playfulness, DIY culture and ‘Making do’ I wondered last night what I could do with Eric Morecambe and his statue on Morecambe’s sea front. The joy that this statue brings to people is a wonder to see by the way – there’s always smiles and laughter around him. What to do though? Well, he’s sat out on the sea front 24 hours a day / 365 days a year so he clearly sees a lot of weather. So the obvious thing to do is let him have his say about it – find a suitable weather API (after playing with wunderground and google, I finally settled on yahoo), parse the weather data into a string, use the weather condition codes to generate comments, then send Eric’s thoughts on their way to the world via an automated tweet twice a day. Quite a fun thing to do with just an API, some PHP and a cron job. Feel free to follow Eric’s weather at www.twitter.com/ericsstatue