January 23rd 2010 was the centenary of the birth of Django Reinhardt. Django's music has been part of my life for over 55 years and I can't imagine how that time would have been without him, so Happy Birthday Django ! Here's a wonderful clip from UTube showing him in action (with Stefan Grappelli on violin) with the Hot Club de France. The song - J'Attendrai - is one of my all time favourites. I first heard it about 25 years ago (though it's much older than that) watching the movie aboout WW2 German U-boats: 'Das Boot'. In the movie it's sung by Rina Ketty, but my preferred version is by Jean Sablon. Download my mp3 of this song and enjoy it. If you like Django you'll also like Oscar Aleman, who was a contemporary of Django's and was in Paris at the same time as the Hot Club. They were good friends, but never recorded together. Here he is playing Hoagy Carmichael's Stardust. And if you are still with me, you'll love "Spats" Langham. He brilliantly re-creates this music and being at one of his gigs will bring tears to your eyes if you like this sort of thing.
What with one thing and another I have not done anything to the site since January 2010, so much so that it was virtually broken. What follows is geeky stuff....Because of the large number of pictures I use, the site was split up between 4 different hosts. It was getting very complicated ! I looked at the logic of it and decided it was better to have one host with a 25Gb storage limit rather than 3 or 4 of 5Gb each. So that's what I have done. Everything is now on the one server. Moving everything was a big task, and to make it even more tedious, the new server is a Unix machine, whereas some of the previous ones were Windows. The Unix box has case sensitive file names. If the script asks for myPicture.jpg but it's on the machine as mypicture.jpg you won't get it. Well I've finally bit the bullet and I think I've sorted it all out. All those broken links are now fixed. There's one bit that remains to be fixed - the News page. The old version had Windows SQLServer and ASP scripting. The new one is mySQL and PHP. It will take a little more time to fix the one remaining broken bit, but it WILL get fixed !
And expect some content update very soon !
Our allotment page is receiving a bit of attention at last. I'm going to try and do at least one update
per month from February onwards (nothing happened in January !) and group the pictures such that it will be possible to see the changes taking place throughout the year. You too can see the slugs crawling out of
the potatoes and watch the brassicas wilt and die as clubroot takes hold. But there should be some happy news as well.
Have a look at my page about photo albums I have just bought( yes you heard right - bought) a licence for a
really cool piece of Flash software called SlideShowPro. I think this one and JAlbum (also used on this site) are probably all I'll ever use.
Fed up with waiting for Adobe to call home yet again to see if there's another update for it's amazingly bloated PDF reader ? Try
Foxit Reader. It loads PDFs in the twinkling of an eye. It's free.
Have you seen Panoramio? It's a YAGS (yet another Google site). You can post your pictures and have them located on a Google Earth map or photo. Search for Warsash on the home page of Panoramio and see Tumbleweeds ! And here's one I did featuring our allotment,
which is on the Warsash site of the Western Wards Allotment Association.
Check out our list of attractions. These are all within an hour's drive of Warsash. Many can be reached on public transport. Portsmouth and Southampton both
have rich maritime histories. Many sites mark our (ongoing) battles with the French. RMS Titanic sailed from Southampton on her only voyage. The D Day invasion was controlled from bunkers built
deep into the chalk cliffs above Portsmouth. I think NATO still keep a presence there, so no vists for this last attraction.
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