Things to do and perv at this weekend

According to the Western Mail, if you're looking for something to do over the Bank Holiday weekend, how about a trip to the Botanic Gardens?



I must point out that it was my girfriend who pointed this out to me, which can only be a good thing!

That's disgusting!

I've always though there was something a bit odd about the English royal family, and this disturbing expose by the Daily Mail confirms it.

thanks to the other Rhys Wynne.

incest, royals
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WelshBlogs.com

While searching Technorati for who's linking to my Welsh blog, I came accross a link from WelshBlogs.com. I wasn't aware of this website until now nor that a blog of mine was on it.

Unlike Blogiadur.com and BlogCymru.com, it includes both Welsh and English language blogs. So far I can't see a list of which blogs are included apart from the one's from which the most recent posts are from.

The categories in the right column are from the tags on the original blogs. I've not been tagging that much lately as I wasn't sure if there was much point, but this gives me more of a reason to do so.

I think the people behind this site are also responsible for IrishBlogs.ie.

welsh, blogs, aggregators
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Belated Happy St George's Day

As ours is a multi-cultural household we get to celebrate St David's Day and St George's Day. Sadly I forgot it was St George's Day on Sunday until I watched clips from the London Marathon, but so had my girfriend, so I wasn't slain like the poor dragon on the telly + Blogger was playingn up yesterday. Here's a picture from a few years ago when I went to the trouble of making special St George's Day breakfast.


st george, st george's day, patron saint, england
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Playing god in the garden

The 'thing's to do' list for the house seem's endless. After dragging my feet over each job for ages I finally get going. About a quarter way through I remember why I was so reluctant to start the job, but by then it's too late and there's no turning back.



I'm trying to level a big dip in the lawn, and at the same time get rid of a load of soil that's gathered down the end of the garden following the destrucion of the previous owner's "rockery". Rather than take my girlfriends advice of scattering the soil over the dip, I've tecided to dig up the turf and stick the soil beneath it (a bit like a Tom & Jerry, where the carped's raised and the mess hidden beneath).

It reminds me a little of one of my favourite Amiga games, Populous.

Am I bothered?

It's green bag day today in my part of Cardiff, but you wouldn't think so by seeing how empty the pavements are. The council collect the bags from right outside our doors and there's no need to even seperate the glass, cardboard or tin/cans, just bung them all in the same bag.
Maybe my neighbours are all waste neutral and don't actually have anything to recycle - unfortunatley I now that's not the case as I hear so much glass smashing when the black bags are collected.

cardiff, recycling, environment, landfill, council
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Multilingual blogging, tagging and mapping

I'm planning to visit Bilbao next month to watch Wales play football aginst a Basque XI side. As I'm too tight to buy a Rough Guide, I've been looking out for stuff to do and places to visit through websites and blogs. As a Welsh speaker I'm naturally interested in the Basque language (Euskara), so anything like festivals or gigs related to the language are things I'm looking for.

While searching, I came across The English Cemetery, a tri-lingual blog (in Basque, Spannish and English) by Luistxo.
The blog concentrates on technical things mainly, which isn't all that usefull for my trip, but there's links to mapping sites (which are useful) and lots to do with software and localization of websites (which although is over my head, is still interesting):

Maps.ask.com: A mapping site like Google Earth and Multimap, but with usefull features like a route-planner

Tagzania: social software meets tagging and folksonomies. Mixing Google Maps with the strategy of del.icio.us.
This is the fun bit, an open source mapping site, which you can adapt to your own langugae, and which can cope with placenames in more than one language. You can use it to make your own maps like 'Football pitches in Wales' etc. I've started plotting a map showing pubs in Wales reviewed on the PubsCymru blog.
I guess it's similar to what Dafydd has done with the Gigmap but open to plebs like myself to play with.

Tagzania Blog

Bitakora is a blogging service similar to Blogger, but available in Basque, Spanish and English. I think it's still in the testing stage, but if you fancy having a look at how it works and how easy it is, you can open an account here. What's unique about it is that it's tag based.


basque, blogging, mapping, taging, , language
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More smiling, less whining

I feel as though I should appologise for the infrequency of my blogging, and the negative tone of the posts. You'd never guess that I'm a chirpy happy-go-lucky type of guy in real life (ha!). Despite all this, according to my stats page, people still visit here.

It's hard to believe, but some people actually blog for fun - I know, it sounds crazy to me too. Anyway's the Irish Blog Awards were held last month, and by reading the list of category winners, I came accross the winner of the 'Most Humorous Post', which was New York Diary by Twenty Major. You've got to read it to the end, well I liked it anyway.

They winner of the 'Best Use of the Irish Language in a Blog' category was An tImeall. The blogs author, Conn Ó Muíneacháin has recently started to blog in English as well, and the first posts discuss blogging in a minority language and how this fits in with things like Google, AdSense and Taging. Before reaching the decission to start posting in English as well as in Irish, Conn posted (in English) on his Irish blog a post under the title; So, should I blog in English?. It's a long post but the following sounds very familiar:

When I started blogging, I chose to blog in Irish because:

1. It is my preferred language
2. I wanted to encourage others to do the same and so provide me with gael-blogs to read :-)
3. I didn't think I had anything to add to the discussions taking place on English language blogs.

Reasons 1 and 2 have not changed - but 3 has. Back then, I thought that there were so many people blogging in English, that anything I might say would probably have been said already, and better, by somebody else.

As you may know I also blog in Welsh and contribute (again infrequently) towards They All Speak English?. The reasonong behing this blog and 'They all Speak English?' is to give a Welsh speaking perspective on various subjects, but in English to a wider audience, while still blogging mainly in Welsh.