Surrey Street, Croydon

Since we moved to Croydon in July I have grown particularly fond of our Saturday morning food shopping. Surrey street is not very far from our place and hosts a farmers market every day, except Sunday. There are a great variety of fruit and vegetables available, plus a fishmonger that sells freh fish everyday. I got my Sony Ericsson W850i phone last week (will write a review soon!) and decided to see how good its camera is by taking some pictures of Surrey Street and the fishmongers. I’ve put a few pictures below and you can see the rest by going to my Flickr page. Enjoy

London Marathon 2003

Yay! The London Marathon is about to start in about 5 minutes, I’m watching it live on TV. I’ve been interested in the Marathon and running in general since I started running about 2 months ago. I’ve gone slack in the past 2-3 weeks but I hope to go running today, as the marathon has given me some inspiration

Information about the marathon can be found on the official London Marathon website. For anyone who wants information on running, how to start, how to avoid injury, etc, runnersworld.com is an excellent site. For UK-specific information, there’s runnersworld.co.uk.

There’s a great interview here with Paula Radcliffe, Paul Tergat, and Sebastian Coe. The questions were asked by runnersworld.co.uk members. A choice quote from Paula:

>>From Monique: Do you feel nervous?
>>Paula Radcliffe:Definitely. I think if you don’t feel nervous, then what are you doing it for? Because it’s only when something is really important to you that you get those nerves. And I think that when you’ve worked and prepared and done all the training, everybody’s going to be nervous, and crossing fingers with all that anticipation that it’s going to go right on the day.

And Paula had a brilliant victory, putting her name firmly into the annals of athletics. She has smashed the women’s world record by crossing the finish line in 2h, 15mins, and 25secs. Her time was 1min 53 secs better than her previous performance in Chicago. Catherine Ndereba of Kenya finished second, with America’s Deena Drossin in third. Gezahegne Abera of Ethiopia won the men’s race, with Italy’s Stefano Baldini and Joseph Ngolepus of Kenya in second and third place.

SARS

We temporarily have a second modem now, still waiting for DSL. It should already be set-up now, we just need to set-up our network for it (gateways, firewalls, etc).

Dan gillmor has an interesting piece on how news about the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) virus initially spread:

It wasn’t newspapers or television or radio that originally spread the word about the outbreak of a serious respiratory illness, now known as SARS, in southeast China. It was SMS — text messages on mobile phones.

It seems that the fear of the virus is adversely affecting the lives of people in the countries where the virus is more widespread. Currently this includes Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, Taiwan and Singapore. Horror stories include taxis not stopping for certain customers, nurses being told to avoid using the elevators, and people being sent home from work if suspected of being in contact with anyone who may have themselves come in contact with the virus. This Channel Asia piece sums it up well.