But as is often the case with the Express, things aren’t always as they seem. The picture is of the Shell garage on the A59 in Maghull. It’s the cheapest garage in Merseyside and is always busy. I’ve seen 10-15 cars queueing up on the road to get petrol, but the Express didn’t show this, because it simply wasn’t that busy. When I drove past on the way home from work today at 8pm there was one car waiting for a free pump.

So Daily Express Editor, if you happen to be reading, how about you publish a front page story saying PANIC OVER. No? Of course not - you’re a bunch of dirty hacks.

If you hate the Daily Express and Mail as much as I do then check out Mail Watch and rant to your heart’s content!

On Saturday I headed up to Waddecar to work on the new West Lancashire Scout County website. Mark Charlton, Pierre and myself did most of the work in a weekend before the summer but life caught up with us and it never got finished. So in 7 hours it was polished off, and that included accidentally running:

$ symfony propel-build-all

Learnt my lesson now

I’m pretty happy with the site for a first release. The top navigation bar is quite neat - a bit of JavaScript created using sfPJSPlugin which can be included on other sites in the West Lancs “network”. Should hopefully build a bit more cohesion between the various sub sites. Options in the back end allow it to be customised with different colour schemes and functionality. Already Network are interested in having some extra buttons to use across Local Scout Network sites.

My already-infrequent blog entries might be a bit less frequent while I’m updating the Advent Calendar but I’m going to try to post occasionally to the Web Services blog.

My presentation “symfony: PHP doesn’t have to be crap… and how we used it to bring Web 2.0 to Edge Hill University” seemed to go okay from my point of view - I’ll leave the glowing reviews to members of the audience!

Met a bunch of cool people and heard about lots of interesting things that they’re doing. Etap Hotel gave me two rooms that hadn’t been cleaned - I must be unlucky as the same thing happened at IWMW.

Surely it’s not just me that is getting really, really pissed off with the adverts for The IT Room that seem to be at the bottom of every single item in many of the feeds I read. Stop it. Now.

Beijing couples intent on stealing a kiss in public are being warned they could be caught on closed-circuit television — and suspected of committing a crime, a state news agency reported Wednesday.

Xinhua News Agency said “intimate acts of lovers may be initially categorized as ‘kidnapping’ or ‘robbery’ by the computers, which are programmed to be sensitive to violations of safe distances.”

Via Engadget.