It’s been another slow “week” on the running front but not due to my inability to complete a workout. This time, it’s been real life getting in the way. In iPod news, I fixed the syncing issue so the music returned, and I think now the runs are getting longer, I welcome the distraction rather than the silence. I also went and broke my earbuds, though. They are hanging on to life by a thread, quite literally.

It’s been a while since I perused the mug scene, and since then I have been more interested in drinking hot chocolate and cups of tea (not in this weather, obviously). That being the case, the innovation that is taking place in the mug world is even more fascinating. I mean, who would have thought you would one day be able to properly hug a mug? They call it “the cosiest mug ever” and I can see why. Clutching at a mug on a cold day is fabulous (although I can’t actually remember what cold weather is). Apparently there is some kind of double insulation going on so that you can hug your mug straight away without getting burnt hands.

I’m officially confused. Franck is back with Girondins de Bordeaux for the next Superleague round at Brands Hatch. But why did he go? Why is he back? Why did he have to come back on a weekend when I can’t watch it? So many questions.

Yesterday, Gavin posted a great link in the Sidepodcast comments - 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Ghostbusters. For once, this is a list where I did not, in fact, know any of the items on it. To be honest, though, they aren’t all entirely fascinating, but you must keep reading to the end to uncover this gem: …you won’t find the music video on the home video version of the movie Ghostbusters, due to a plagiarism suit brought by Huey Lewis in 1984. Lewis charged that the tune to “Ghostbusters” was essentially the same as “I Want a New Drug” by Huey Lewis and the News, which came out six months earlier.

I’ve spent a good few months now trying to consolidate all my writing into one or two spaces. Sidepodcast benefitted from the F1 related thoughts that used to appear here, plus the articles I wrote for BellaOnline. Meanwhile, this here space of the web suddenly found itself merging with the other blogs I used to write, plus a whole load of archived stuff that was without a home. Going through the archives was a fascinating business, and while I would usually discourage such behaviour, there were a few things I wanted to pick up on.

There was no Franck Montagny at the Superleague race in Zolder this past weekend, and we aren’t the only ones who missed him. Firstly, the team finished 12th in the first race and 10th in the third (which sounds better but is actually only second to last). Meanwhile, there’s a post on the Superleague site today suggesting the team aren’t happy without him. Apologies for the rather dodgy Google translation:

Yesterday, I posted the results of my Alphabet Adventure when it comes to the letter G. As you may have gathered from the posts of Edinburgh, Falkirk and Gretna, I took a quick trip to Scotland to take in some of the scenery. I must say, for some reason, I really like things like this: Because I drove past it, and just around the corner was the sign saying ‘Welcome to England.’ I was so impressed that I turned around to take the above picture, and on the way back I noticed a sign had a message on the reverse. It was pointing out it was the First House in Scotland.

Gretna Green was a tricky one. I wasn’t 100% sure it counted - given that the rules of the alphabet challenge say it should be attractions rather than places that are worthy of a visit. I thought I could spin it that the anvil thing was an attraction, but that is technically called the World Famous Blacksmith’s Shop. None of those letters are a G. In the end, I went for it because there is something called the Gretna Green Group Ltd, which makes me think it is an attraction rather than a place. Plus it was on my route home.

We all know that I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter. I swore off it for a while, and when I returned I left the design as a default wallpaper - one you can get to under the settings tab. I looked on as many, many people put photographs and custom backgrounds on their Twitter account, and I never really felt the need to do the same. Since the World Cup began and Tweetdeck had all manner of problems (not all brought on themselves), I started going to the website to tweet more and more. At least when you see a fail whale you know where you stand.

I had initially planned to split the nine week course into three blog posts of three weeks each (you can catch up with weeks 1-3 here). But this fourth “week” has taken so long to complete that I just have to blog it and get it out the way. Week 4 Day 1 Wooo, now I can run five minutes at a time! Sort of. The shoes still rock (or bounce, I should say), and there were no aches today, except some kind of tiny recurring pain I have in the middle of my left thigh. Only appears after I’ve stopped. Found a new place to jog today, too, very peaceful, although today was a bit windy.

Autosport is reporting that Franck Montagny won’t be driving for Girondins de Bordeaux at Zolder this weekend, and it reads as though his time with the team and with Superleague has come to an end. Bourdais left the sport just a couple of days ago, and he said: I’ve stopped for the moment and I’m not pointing fingers at anyone or anything, but I don’t see it getting any better. The team doesn’t have the time, the equipment or money to to compete against structured, experienced teams. We wanted to do well, but we were struggling along and breaking down every weekend. It’s frustrating.

I was just browsing through some photos and uncovered one from the Didcot Adventure that didn’t make it into the post. If you remember, I briefly mentioned that my mother and I did like the section that may or may not have been aimed at children. The bit where you can press buttons and play games, and make things light up. There was also a section where you were confronted with a lot of pieces of wood, and had to construct the bridge according to the instructions in front of you. I dismantled the bridge and challenged my mother to put it back together.

Just one snoozy panda for you today. Credit: Thai Yin/Flickr

The BBC have been bigging up this two-part drama for ages. I read not one but two entries on various Beeb blogs, and it was all over the other TV blogs that I tend to read. I couldn’t sit back and let it pass, so I tuned in. From the very first image, like the one above, it was clear that this wasn’t just a regular drama. It was all about the cinematography, and every single scene was sculpted to perfection. From where the focus was, to framing, to how many extras were in the background, each shot appeared to have been thought out. A lot of time and effort went into storyboarding this.

I recently discovered the new Groceries section on Amazon. It’s in Beta and it sells, well, groceries, obviously. I find this idea so weird, and I’ve been struggling to put my finger on why. I’ve narrowed it down to two things. Firstly, I never really got on board with the third party aspect of Amazon. I’ve actually only used it to buy books from - both physical and now in Kindle form - and they’ve always come direct from Amazon, rather than any third party sellers. I’m sure it works perfectly well, but adding another merchant into the mix confuses me.

The Superleague Formula is back in action this weekend, with the football themed cars taking to the track in Belgium at the Zolder circuit. A brief intro from the official site: The 2.492 mile, 10 turn circuit has remained a staple of the championship since its inception in 2008. Indeed, it is the only venue to have been included on the calendar throughout Superleague Formula’s brief history to date. Don’t rely on my knowledge of timings, but I think the first race starts at 9am BST on Sunday, and the second at midday. Live streaming will be available as ever.

Ah, so that’s it, it’s all over. Done and dusted. The World Cup 2010 is complete. Wait a minute… that was it? I am left feeling slightly confused and bemused by the whole World Cup thing. The first two weeks were brilliant. Football overload. Matches starting all over the place, lots of great teams and fun player names to laugh over. There were barely any tactics, because a draw was okay. None of that hanging around near the goal to make sure you didn’t lose the lead, or bringing your goalie out to strike because you have nothing left to lose.

A few miles to the west of Edinburgh is a hidden gem - the Falkirk Wheel. It’s an incredible one-of-a-kind feat of engineering that lifts a narrowboat from one canal up over 100ft to another one. It also looks like something out of Doctor Who. A bit more about the wheel, then. It replaces 11 locks which joined the Forth & Clyde Canal with the Union Canal. The locks were dismantled, and so they came up with this wheel to take place of nine of the locks, with the remaining two through a short tunnel at the top. The wheel itself is a unique rotating lift, and I can tell you, it is fascinating to watch.

Mr C bought an iPad pretty much the moment he could, and we had fun for a while playing around on it. Mostly, it was in his custody though, and about a week ago, I noticed he really wasn’t getting the most out of it. So, I commandeered it. I have an iPad now! I’m still playing around with it, learning things, figuring out how I’ll use it and where, but here are five awesome things I have noticed so far:

Credit: jikatu/Flickr I was skeptical about watching the 2010 World Cup There was no doubt that England would mess the whole thing up For five long weeks, flags everywhere. Football’s all that matters Inevitably our heroes left the nation’s hopes in tatters The countries kept on playing though, while our boys were sent packing The quality of game increased, goals no longer lacking And there he was, a shining light, a fabulous right foot

I’m currently in the process of sorting out and organising my writing notes. This sounds a lot grander than it really is. When I used to write, I started dozens of notebooks, scribbled on scraps of paper, and created quite a few Word documents. They were saved all over the place, both in terms of hard drives, and boxes. When I started writing again, I began a new system, and now it’s all a bit messed up.

And then, he was gone. Poor Sid! He only just got to take a holiday, went jogging, and poof, he was gone. At least he got to see his daughter one last time, I suppose. I’ve not been listening long enough to know him as anything other than Jamie’s dad that takes him to football sometimes, and that guy behind the bar. Still, he seems to be quite a popular chap, and the party they held in his honour was lovely. I did enjoy this post about him, and highly recommend reading it.

I headed to Edinburgh and decided to make use of the Park & Ride. I’m not a big fan of buses, or any kind of public transport for that matter, but it seemed like a good way to get in to the centre of a city I know nothing about. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The Park & Ride took me three leaflets to figure out, and when I got to the centre, the road I was meant to get off on was closed so I ended up somewhere else. That meant I was the wrong side of the castle, and I walked all the way round the entire thing before I found the door. Gate. Drawbridge. Whatever.

I’m not sporty. Not even slightly. Growing up, I kind of liked netball. Until the other girls started throwing balls at my head. Then I was sort of good at badminton. But the badminton club clashed with the chess club and I preferred the sitting down sort of extra activity. I do like to swim, and was in a swimming club when I was younger, but these days things are different. I have already documented my requirements for that.

Thanks to Leigh, I have found a new panda related site to peruse: Perfect Pandas. The updates are generally cute panda related items, such as Panda Ice Cream and Panda Mahjong. I particularly like the post about the Panda Earbuds. I would not wear these, but still. Cuteness.

David Mitchell’s Soapbox is back! I know you have probably known this for a while, but I have only just caught up with it. I love, love, love these two episodes, because they’re about words and language. I think I actually said “I could care less recently” and I have no idea where it came from or why I said it. I hated myself afterwards because as Mr M points out, it makes no sense!

I’ve been a big supporter of the ebooks movement, but for some reason I haven’t actually been jumping on the wagon with the band until just recently. To start with, I had absolutely no time for reading, I wasn’t buying books, so although I flew the flag for digital novels, I wasn’t consuming them myself. Then I began to find time to read again, and now, I’m pretty much as converted as I knew I would be.

Thank you to everyone who voted in my July Header poll. More than anything, I was blown away by the 40 votes. What lovely people you all are. For a while, three headers had made a break for the lead - with numbers 4, 9 and 10 all on equal footing. Then 4 fell behind, and up until about ten minutes ago, the remaining two were tied for the lead.

This is terribly self-indulgent, and really just an excuse to post a graph, but I wanted to share the Wordpress stats for the last couple of weeks: The big spike at the beginning was my World Cup post, and the second spike in the centre was all about Wimbledon. The two medium spikes on the 19th and the 27th are for the first and second parts of the Doctor Who series finale.

I was listening to a relatively recent episode of the CNET podcast The 404 and they were talking about trends in the 90s. I love it when they reminisce because although some of their references I don’t get, thinking back to the good old days is always fun. They lightly brushed past the topic of those must-have toys that scary parents would run around the shops desperate to get. You know, the Buzz Lightyears and Cabbage Patch Dolls of this world. I pondered for a while and realised that this toy hysteria doesn’t seem to happen any more. Not for kids, anyway. Let’s not talk about the iPad.

Well, I didn’t see it because someone scheduled it the same time as the European GP, but it looks like Franck came second. The report from Superleague says: Earlier in race 2, Alvaro Parente claimed victory for FC Porto after holding off a late-race challenge from Bordeaux’s Franck Montagny. Parente led right from the start after both he and Montagny got past pole-sitter John Martin (Beijing Guoan FC) at the first corner. The Portuguese driver’s lead was up to 2.7 seconds as Montagny pitted for his compulsory stop and the Porto car rejoined from its stop two laps later ahead of the Frenchman, although a stunning lap from Montagny had closed the gap to less than a second.

Wow. Where to start? This entire episode was really well written, beautifully crafted, and swept us all along to the finish. Despite there being a lack of action (not a criticism, I think it’s nice the action was loaded into the first part, and the second was about the consequences), there was nothing lacking. I love, love, loved the bits where the Doctor was flying in and out of time. Figuring out that he had the mop, then he needed to block the door, then he needed his sonic screwdriver, and the drink! Brilliant. Stuff like that makes my day. Time travel, how it works, the intricate things you have to think about, that all makes Doctor Who for me.

Well it was nothing to write home about, was it? Franck started way down the grid, 16th. He stayed out longer than everyone else, which meant he was leading the race for a moment until he came into the pits. He wasn’t about to win the race, but he might have made up a few places. Unfortunately, there was a delay in the pitstop which meant he finished the race in 15th. As ever, the only good news is he starts the next race further up the grid. We’ll hope for better things then.

A while ago, Janna asked if there was going to be a vote on which was the favourite header. I thought that was a good idea, but as it’s an ongoing project, I wasn’t sure how voting would fit in. However, now I have completed the tenth header image, I thought it would be the perfect time to take a break. It’s always good to recharge one’s batteries, sit back and take stock of what you’ve achieved, and more importantly, find inspiration for the future.

I wasn’t quite sure where I was going with this header. I hadn’t found a tutorial that inspired me and I just felt like messing about. It was relatively easy to make the light burst thing, and I accidentally stumbled across the repetition filter. Getting the one Smarter Than Your Average text to stand out was a bit harder, but in the end, I was quite happy with how it turned out.

Before you even have a chance to think about taking a breather, Franck is back in action again this weekend. The Superleague Formula rocks up at the Nurburgring in Germany. The intro on the official site reads: Superleague Formula by Sonangol journeys from central Spain to western Germany this weekend for the football-themed championship’s fifth round of the season at the Nürburgring. Nestled in the spectacular Eifel Mountains alongside its formidable Nordschleife forbearer, the circuit returns to the calendar after hosting the second-ever Superleague Formula round in 2008.

I got an update through for the panda I adopted and the newsletter bore the headline: “Panda rescue drama.” Inside it tells the story of a panda that wandered off and became stranded on a steep hillside. A rescue team had to be dispatched to get it back. It says: To stop the wayward bear becoming frightened, onlookers and other non-essential staff were evacuated from the site. The rescuers then climbed down to where the panda was located, and lured it away from the hillside with sticks of delicious bamboo. They soon managed to coax it back to the safety of the reserve.

The most read item on the BBC as I type this is stunning. TV star Declan Donnelly was amongst hundreds of football fans in London who missed England’s all-important World Cup goal after a power cut. “We were watching the game in a pub in Kew,” Donnelly told the BBC news website. “One minute before the goal, the power went.” Hey, you know what? I didn’t get to see any of the match. Where’s my news item?

As a change of pace to all the football talk, here’s a post about Wimbledon! It seems it’s become an annual thing for me to summarise all the ways I’m trying to keep up with the best tennis tournament around. In 2008, I talked a little about the live commentaries, whilst in 2009 it was all podcasts and apps. This year, I’m going to do more of the same, as the list of ways and means keeps growing!

We all know that when it comes to design, the 2012 Olympics seems to be a big ball of fail. Eh-hem. We’ve had a while to get used to that pink and green disaster, though. The latest addition to the 2012 branding line-up was the mascots. Firstly, I didn’t know there were Olympic mascots anyway. Is this just a host country thing? Why do we need mascots? Secondly, they’re quite scary.

I found a tutorial during the week that I wanted to try out, but I wasn’t sure which picture would work best translated into a pencil drawing. The tutorial is very simple, so I tried it out on a couple of waterfall shaped pictures but it didn’t work. This one I was sure wouldn’t work either, but low and behold, there it was. The font and the rest was easy to choose.

So, I missed out on the first race, and tuned in just in time for the start of Race 2. By all accounts, the first race didn’t go so well. I know Franck started 12th, and he began the second race on the front row. With a reversed grid, that would suggest it wasn’t a result to write home about, and after further research, I learnt they had to retire with a mechanical issue. Boo.

Oh, just wow. I don’t know why but I really wasn’t expecting much from this finale. Even more so for this week, as the first of a two-part story is normally ridiculously over the top or really rather slow. For the most part, this series of Doctor Who has appeared to be quite low budget, and I think that lowered my expectations quite a lot. Well, I think it’s fair to say they saved a whole chunk of the budget for this episode. Roman camps, thousands of starships, Pandorica’s opening, it was all in there.

When I first introduced the concept of the A-Z Adventure to my parents, they instantly knew where I should go for D. They had recently been to the Didcot Railway Centre and suggested it as a potential candidate. My mother is a particular fan of steam trains, so when I decided I would go there, they felt a second visit would be worthwhile. The Didcot Railway Centre is essentially a small stretch of land between two railway lines. They use the existing lines to run steam trains (and Thomas trains!) a short distance, and preserve the memory of such feats of engineering.

With the Le Mans disaster still fresh in our minds, we must turn our attention to the next event for Franck - Superleage Formula at Jarama. This weekend, FKM will be back in the car for Girondins de Bordeaux, and for the first time, the official Superleague site will be offering Qualifying streaming on Saturday, as well as all the racing action on Sunday. More information can be found here (Facebook link).

I think, like many other people, I was dreading this episode. You cannot move a single inch on this planet without encountering James Corden doing something, and whilst it’s probably not his fault, it’s quite easy to be bored with his rather over-enthusiastic manner. You can have too much of a good thing, and that’s supposing you think it was a good thing in the first place.

I tried to avoid it for as long as possible, but eventually I had to write today’s World Cup post over on Sidepodcast. I have watched more of the games than I imagined I would, and enjoyed even more of them. A lot of that has to do with the live comments, as it’s fair to say I have a lot to learn! On that subject, I wanted to note down some of the things I have picked up after just a few days of international football. I will be an absolute expert by the end of this, you mark my words.

Every now and then, I get a bit bored of the name of my website. I’ve been through several iterations, bought lots of domains and moved things around a lot. Not any longer. Smarter Than… is a perfectly acceptable name, if a little long. I have solved this problem, and the one in which I crave new URLs, by purchasing a shortcut for you: mrschristine.com. If you can’t be bothered to type out all 22 letters plus a dot com for STYA, then you can use the super snazzy mrschristine.com instead.

A Q&A with the man himself. On not anticipating any problems: We were not really pushing, we were very focused on the targets, not on qualifying. We just focused on one point, which was the win. We were just so relaxed and peaceful working together. I could sleep very easily this week, and during the race too. I was just checking the lap times and everything we’d said before was done, no problem at all. It was just great.

It wasn’t my intent but looking at the finished product this week, I’ve realised how very Doctor Who it is. I must have been subconsciously influenced by this because I certainly wasn’t aiming for a Doctor Who header. My favourite part was the blur filter to create the light effect. So simple! Anyway, here are the details: Made with: Pixelmator Tutorial: Hexagons Bokeh Font: Gloucester MT Extra Condensed (rasterised and widened)