I’m not clear on the point. The West Pier Trust says that it’s a requirement of the planning permission granted for the huge, elongated sex toy that will be the i360. Given that they’re not building this in the sea and that the wreckage has been quietly minding its own business for the last few years, I’m not sure why the mangled, barnacled beams can’t just be left there – surely after 144 years they’ve earned the right to rust away quietly?
I got some unremarkable photos of the work on Tuesday, when I felt fairly ambivalent about the recovery, but last night in the dark, without the familiar semi-submerged skeleton guarding its patch of the beach, the seascape looked miserably sanitised.
From Hove Lawns I found myself looking back along the front, imagining how it will look when a 150-metre dildo marks the spot. I’m actually reasonably in favour of the i360, but for the first time I found myself resenting it, and wondering why we needed a second tourist attraction at all.
I believe the plan is still that it will help fund the restoration and recovery of the pavilion island, which remains standing in the sea.
Let’s hope that, for the first time since 1975, they don’t fuck it up.
I got a worrying email last night from a friend and ex-colleague, letting me know that he’d had a phishing message purportedly from my Last.FM account.
Oops, we both thought – I’d been hacked. I went in and changed my password.
I subsequently discovered an email to me ‘from’ another colleague that also looks very much like a phishing attempt. Interestingly, this email refers to a new Shoutbox message that doesn’t appear in my Shoutbox on the site itself.
It’s quite possible I was phished or that someone guessed my rather weak password, but the fact that there’s no message on the site when the email says there is suggests that something more sinister may be afoot – if the email isn’t from Last.FM, how would the phishers know my email address, which isn’t published on my profile page?
And although they could easily use my profile to find the people I know, these things don’t tend to rely on someone actually sat at a computer spending time on stuff like that – they’re normally automated.
So what’s going on here? Has somebody got hold of Last’s email database yet they’re unable to read the passwords? Was I phished? Or is there simply an easy way of finding someone’s email address from their Last profile?
**Update**
OK, I had to write this in a hurry and have now had time to take a better look. It is a straightforward case of my account being hacked or me having been phished. Working on a couple of theories…
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always thought that the BBC News website could do with a lift in the search engines. After all, the site just never appears in the search results and hardly seems to get any traffic.
Anyway, as editor Steve Herrmann explained in November, the BBC is finally embracing some basic SEO practices in a bid to “make it easier to find our stories if you are somewhere else”. God help the competition.
Steve’s post is entirely reasonable, of course, as is the corporation’s move. The examples he highlights are all cases where the longer headline is useful, or at least inoffensive, but I wondered when I read it how it would play out in practice.
To be honest, I’d forgotten all about it until last night, when I discovered a story where the new practice jarred: “Man charged over James Murray Belfast balcony death”. It’s not hateful, but it’s an example of what happens when keywords make their presence felt.
Interestingly, the BBC’s URL structure still doesn’t include keywords. Introducing them would also help the stories rank, and nobody would ever notice or care.
You know when something odd or remarkable or weird or painful happens and you end up remembering it for life; boring people with an anecdote about it at Christmas parties?
This is one of those times.
In short, after 2 1/2 years of fund-raising, discussions with neighbours, and battles with rubbish – possibly corrupt – managing agents, my leaking roof is being replaced. Only before they can put a new one on, they have to take the old one off, see?
Things started out well in yesterday’s sunshine, but rain showers have brought a slow trickle of water in the communal hallway, followed by drips in my sitting room, followed by a trickle of water falling on the kitchen floor. This evening, as buckets caught the water in the kitchen, the light fitting started fizzing and arcing and I’ve had to pull the lighting fuse.
So I’m here in the semi-dark, listening to the far-from-weathertight tarpaulin flapping in the breeze above me, and wishing I could just sleep.
I don’t want to be awake to find out whether the Met Office’s severe weather warning is accurate.
Brighton’s just getting started on a proper coastal gale. The clouds are scudding across the sky, TV aerials are waggling about and I just saw a very sorry pair of pigeons try to fly side-on to the winds.
We’re forecast 60mph gusts, which isn’t the worst we’ve had, but as usual I worry about the roof.
