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“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce that the train is now running at its maximum speed of a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour, and is operating in tilting mode. I’m less pleased to report that due to a shortage of catering staff the shop can serve only tea and coffee, and the boiler’s broken so right now it’s not even doing that. On behalf of Virgin Trains I’d like to apologise for living up your expectations.”

Actually, the journey was very pleasant. The trains are quiet and smooth, and Virgin’s staff notably human. For my money, however, the only advantage of First over Standard is the power socket in the table. Yes, the seats are spaced more widely, but they also recline at a ludicrous angle which proves distinctly uncomfortable after six hours. And thanks to a fancy lighting system, headroom is down to only 6′, too. Bizarre.

Back in Glasgow, anyway. London a hoot; meetings useful if not directly productive; friends amusing; etc etc.

I’m slightly disappointed that Johnny Ball didn’t slag off my shows, last night. He was the guest speaker at the graduation show for the Imperial College Science Communication and Science Media Production MSc courses; I toddled along because I infrequently employ people off the course, and while they’re often a bit cocky they’re also usually quite good.

A useful evening, though the assemblage of ‘students’ and ‘TV/print/charity types’ led to a somewhat amusing atmosphere of touting and sharking, à la early university parties. While it was more about work than other pairings, the age differences made it seem agreeably seedy.

Johnny was rather good value – just gloss over his views on the greenhouse effect – and it was a pleasure to chat to him. He’s dead keen to write some maths items for How2, on which offer I might actually take him up.

Right: today, Pioneer Productions (hopefully – bumped into a contact at the bash last night and we’re going to try to meet up this morning) and Initial. Tomorrow: Maidstone for The Foundation and maybe Media Merchants. Must get cracking.

Walking from Euston Station to South Kensington – and no, I’m not quite sure why I did, either – can take one down Warren Street. Which features a wonderfully eclectic array of shops:

• Samuel French’s theatrical bookshop.
• A shop selling only flutes and flute-related items.
• A supplier of clay-gouging implements for sculptors and model-makers. They also sold clay, I believe, but very little else.

This sort of thing always catches me unawares: that it’s so obvious one is in the capital city of the land. Edinburgh has an obscure antique scientific instrument shop, and another selling wicker products. Glasgow has more limousine companies per capita than anywhere else I know. Leeds has a shop selling exclusively ugly teddy-bears. But only London has all of these on the same street. Remarkable.

Yes, it’s surprised the heck out of me, too. They’ve agreed not to cut me off while I’m in London, since they’ve clearly spent most of the year to date being stupid. Which is rather reasonable of them, I reckon.

Right. To the train station! Mark – I’ve got your number. Looks like a bunch of folks are gathering in Wimbledon (!) Thursday evening. They’re not all TV types so you should be safe. Or I’ll be around on Friday, Saturday morning.

Business cards, of the DIY inkjet variety, are fairly crummy. They’re either microperforated – which leaves a nasty serrated edge effect – or precut and stuck onto backing paper. Which is all well and good, but peeling the not-very-clean-printing card off the backing results in a curly card that instantly looks like it’s been floating around in one’s pocket for a few weeks. As opposed to the crisp rectangle of implicit professionalism one might have been aiming for.

My latest batch, therefore, have been coaxed into spending the night under… shall we say ‘inverse traction’? The weighty matter of the weight exercised me momentarily, until my eye came to rest on the perfect volume from my extensive, if not somewhat eclectic, library. The cards are beneath a charming little text, appropriately entitled Reinforced Concrete Bridges.

That should sort them.

Courtesy of the incomparable cult media store Fopp: the first series of Vic & Bob’s Randall & Hopkirk (deceased) on DVD, cheap. Hurrah!

OK, so it had hugely glaring faults the first time around – not least Mortimer’s acting – but for some reason I thoroughly enjoyed the few episodes I managed to catch. They were nicely written and mostly well shot, to be sure, but I think I was most impressed by the devil-may-care approach to plausible plotting: ‘hang it all, we’re having a hoot’ being an approach to programme-making I recognise, approve of, and attempt to echo at every possible opportunity. And we’ll forgive Emilia Fox for looking occasionally out-of-place, since it’s not her fault she’s capable of emoting on camera (one can almost smell her frustration at times; ‘For heaven’s sake man, stop being so wooden!‘). Mind you, one would likely be willing to forgive Fox just about anything.

So: diverting fun, even if it’s not objectively very good at all. Available from Amazon for the foppless. Frustratingly, the discs are cropped to 4:3 and not even done pan&scan – they’ve just been chopped, which is quite pathetic. Season 2 escapes such a travesty, apparently.

I genuinely toyed with the idea of starting this post with an ampersand, just to see what it looked like as a drop-cap. Must try harder. Got one reversed-out in the post title, though.

I’ve finally sent the email introducing the first bunch of testers to the web project I’ve been hacking away at for the last few weeks. This is the first genuinely collaborative website endeavour I’ve launched in I think three years, and I’m unexpectedly scared about it.

We’ll see what they all think, once the stunned silence/apathy wear off. With luck they’ll find most things working and I’ll be able to launch publicly in about a week. Not that it’s intended as a particularly ‘public’ site – it’s a rather specialist target.

I’ll echo the formal announcement here, when it happens.

Given Branson’s existing involvement with Scaled Composites, it always looked likely that he’d get involved with future developments of Scaled’s launch system. But I wasn’t expecting an announcement this soon; BBC story, Virgin Galactic. Approx. £100,000/passenger, from about three years hence. They’re going to build five larger versions of SpaceShipOne, starting with the VSS Enterprise. Yes, you read that correctly.

Blimey. I may have to start playing the lottery. Meanwhile, I guess we now know which direction the future lies: straight upwards from Mojave.

Hello London, this is Glasgow calling!

I shall be in the capital of our fine and treasured democracy from late afternoon on Wednesday 29th September, until shortly after luncheon on Saturday 2nd October. Wednesday evening I shall be attending a gathering at the Dana Centre (Science Museum), but Thursday and Friday evenings I shall make myself available for soirées & c.

Early booking is advised.

Edit: Baskerville has the most amazing italic ampersand. Sincere apologies to non-Mac users, you won’t be seeing this, and it looks fantastic!

Hopefully this will be my last extreme-geek post for a while, but somebody out there Googling might like to know that mod_rewrite actually does work with PHP-CGI at Dreamhost, contrary to my rant the other day.

For some reason that’s not entirely clear, index.php is not rewritten, but renaming the main script and fudging that way works fine. However, every single example I could find for the specific script I’m using was wrong. So I read the incomprehensible Apache mod_rewrite docs and built the simplest possible example case, then worked up from there.

If anybody really cares, here’s my full write-up at Dreamhost’s user forum.

Can I please stop being this kind of geek, now? It’s really not what I’m cut out for.