A short love note to the Claremont Diner

This place is great and, even better, you can walk to it from our house. The people there are always super friendly, it is cheap and the food is very nice. It has all the good things that a traditional American diner should have, without all the artificial 50's pretensions that most 'Frisco diners have.

The people who run the place must be old radio fans, and the shelves of the Diner are full of vintage radios, makes me miss my four or five old radios that are back in my storage locker in Edinburgh.



Even better, they have a model train that runs around your head when you are eating - great!

And it's next door to this areas only decent pub, the Graduate. Free popcorn, a decent jukebox and Blue Moon on draft- does it get any better than this?

Tom the Website Hermit

Having finally got rid of my cold virus and had a relatively productive week at work last week, I have become a hermit this weekend. I tend to do these things. In the planning stage it seems like a good idea to tackle large website related tasks in one go. I re-created www.kirkcaldybands.com over a weekend or so in April. Having used the most crap website creation tool in the world (Rapidweaver) to do so, I now find I have to re-create the site for the third time.

Having toyed with writing my own code, and having been quite proud of myself that I managed to do a page or two, I decided that life was too short to spend it manually typing out XHTML every time I needed to add a image, etc. It's especially laborious for images, you have to type out the exact pixels you want the image to be, etc. I therefore spent the $400 that I've been putting off spending and have bought a "state of the art" GUI web creation tool, Deamweaver.

It's really not the easiest thing to use in the world either, being pretty complex and most of CSS (cascading style sheets) are still a mystery to me. But I'm delighted to say that, as of 10.30pm local time, the re-born site is happily uploading to the remote server, the result of a weekend and a half's work. There will be some loose ends, but it has been worth it. I think the site looks better, and most importantly, I can update it again without all the aggravation of the mind numbing slowness of Rapidweaver (an inappropriate name if I ever heard one!) and the frequent crashes whilst saving, resulting in lost work.

It's great timing, as the site has uncovered some very interesting finds in the last weeks which I've been able to upload to the new version. Julie Watt of The Amused, who now works for Telstra in Brisbane Australia, was in touch and she e-mailed me some very cool pics of the band, one is above.

My favorite find though, is Davie Brown from the Ghost Train's audio tape, which Ian enhanced, edited and transfered to the above CD, which I got on Saturday. It contains some absolutely cracking material, I now see that it is not just nostalgia, the Ghost Train were a tremendous band - shame they split 17 years ago. There is even a radio interview with some of the Ghost Train members, talking about the local scene and their plans to make it big - amazing.

But, of course you can only sit with an iBook for so long and I'm now going slowly mad and am desperate to do something that does not involve computers for a bit. Not an easy task in 2007! It's almost 11pm now, so time to go to bed. Then I'll get up on Monday morning, get dressed, have a shower, something to eat, then - guess what? Go to the computer to begin work! At least it'll be a different computer.

Back in Edinburgh

I'm back in my former home city of Edinburgh now.

This is one of my favourite views, it is the central Edinburgh taken from a little hill in the centre, Calton Hill. There is a great Victorian folly at the top of the hill, I think that they were trying to do some sort of Athenian thing there in the 19th century, Edinburgh was called the "Athens of the North" after all. It was sadly never finished, but there are some fine looking columns there that are visible all over central Edinburgh.



I've noticed that LRT (Lothian Regional Transport) are now putting slogans on the back of their buses, I wonder if this is helping reduce car miles driven in the city. The old purple buses were, to me, just a symbol of the city. But sparkly service, it seems unlikely. I was on a bus in Edinburgh yesterday, admittedly it was a "rival" green bus, and the service was as grumpy as ever. I used to think that LRT used to have a training course they put their drivers on to make sure they hit the road, having learnt how to be as unhelpful and grumpy as possible. I used to love the way they would deal with tourists. I thought they used to crank up their accents deliberately to be as un-understandable as possible.

I know it can't be an easy job, but I think the fact that there are never any bus bosses around when they are dealing with the public gives the drivers licence to deal with anyone as unpleasantly as they felt like. Or maybe the 44 is different, they only put the pleasant drivers on that one. My only ever UK lottery win was when I lived in Swindon and, partially as a sign of homesickness, I was using the Edinburgh bus numbers that I used to take to work as my lottery numbers. I think the 44 was in that list of numbers. So maybe not "service with a sparkle", but the 44 did help get me an unexpected lottery win once.

I'd love to know if the customer service on the buses has improved though.



I was in one of Edinburgh's many Macdonlalds yesterday, I don't think I've been in a Macdonalds for about three years, I was becoming suspicious of the burgers they were selling me.

Having asked what their vegetarian option was, I found out that it is really only one thing, it's called a "Vegetarian Melt", or something like that.

I think I'll leave it another three years before I go back. It was cheap right enough, but the "melt" was pretty horrible, soggy and nasty. I suppose you have to be a meat eater to appreciate Macdonalds, but it's pretty much a mystery to me why this chain is popular.



Spent a very enjoyable afternoon yesterday, digitising tapes for the Kirkcaldy bands website. It's amazing that these twenty year old tapes still play at all. I think the average recommended life of a cassette tape is meant to be 20 ish years, so I'm glad we are digitising these now.

I had "The Twist"and "The Ghost Train" on my iPod on my way to the pub last night. I'll upload them to the site when I get back to the US. It was great to hear some of this material again, especially the Ghost Train's - "Waiting for Madness", which I'm listening to over and over again. The soundtrack to the happiest days of my life (so far).



Spent the evening here, as I always do at least once when I'm back in Edinburgh. It's right in the heart of Rose Street, but it's a little oasis of calm in the craziness that is Rose Street. An occasional stag or hen party end up entering Robertson's by mistake, but they generally last only one or two beers. It's really more like a local. Very old fashioned, in a nice way, inside. I'm suffering today though, as I'm not used to drinking strong European beer in any quantity any more. I must just drink Scottish stuff when I'm back next.



I'm staying at the Travel Inn at Morrison Street again. I always seem to gravitate back to this area when I'm back in Edinburgh, as I spent most of my 20's in this area. I always seem to enjoy the Travel Inn, I stayed in a Travel Inn in London too.

Most of the Stag and Hen parties that end up in Rose Street, with their identical T shirts made for the occasion seem to stay here too, but I never seem to hear them.

There was a fire alarm today which was a bit of a pain in the arse, but we only had to stay outside the hotel for about 10 mins. I was annoyed I missed taking a picture of the fire engine though!