The Chamber of Commerce’s effort to beat this site at it’s own game, itsmydumfries.com, seems to have accepted defeat, so now the council are chipping in with goDumfries.co.uk.  It’s nowhere near as good as this site, but it does have quite a good slide show on the front page! If you still wish to view their effort, click on the Site of The Month link in the menu.

There have been a few changes to the site recently. As promised, the Placefinder has now been AJAXed, making it much quicker. This was  my first venture into the world of AJAX, but it was actually quite easy, so there may be more to come!

What used to be the e-mail list is now the Dumfries People Finder.  I hope to make it an easy way for you to find your friends and family from Dumfries on their existing Social Networking Sites, and would urge you to register if you haven’t already.

Finally, you may notice some arrows at the top of certain menus now.  These will allow you to hide certain areas of the site to help make  it easier to read, and let you customise. These can’t be saved yet (future  project) but hopefully you’ll find it useful.

Is it just me, or has anyone else suffered from Hayfever already this year?  I’d swear that what I had on Saturday (15th March) was hayfever.  I have noticed that a lot of the trees are in full bloom already. I have a diary note to start taking my hayfever tablets, and it comes out in the middle of April, so if it was hayfever I had at the weekend, then it’s really early this year. Of course, I could have just had a cold!

My New Years Resolution was to update this blog every Friday with the latest from the local papers, and also to keep the What’s On section up to date. Here I am getting round to the blog on Tuesday, and the What’s On hasn’t been done (and don’t even mention the site of the month!).

 Still, I have a good excuse, as I’ve been doing a lot of work on the Dumfries People Finder of the site, and I hope you’ll agree with me that it has been worth it.

It’s been a pretty quiet week in Dumfries this week, as a lot of people are still off on Christmas and New Year holidays. The front page of the Courier focused on the snow which fell on the region Thursday and Friday, but to be fair, while the rest of the region had quite a bit of snow, most of Dumfries, and certainly the town centre, got away pretty lightly, and it was all gone within a few hours. My kids did manage to get out to build a snow man and have a go on the new plastic sledges we bought them just before Christmas, but let’s just say I’m glad I was at work and it was the wife who had to drag them round the garden!

Speak to you all again next week, when hopefully I’ll have more to say.

Both the Standard and Courier’s lead story this week is on the number of casualties dealt with at the hospital last Saturday as Dumfries was hit by a rare bout of black ice.

It was well advertised in advance that these conditions were likely to apply, and I for one, didn’t even attempt to step foot outside until about 5 o’clock, when I took about 3 steps and went straight back in! So why were all these people down the town? Because it was the last Saturday before Christmas? If memory serves me right, Christmas has been on the 25th December for the last few years, so why not try getting organised instead of leaving everything to the last minute. As for the guy who was banging on about the council doing something about it! They’re the council, not God! OK, they’re not perfect, but they can’t stop the unstoppable. He was complaining that no-one had salted the Vennal.  I don’t suppose it crossed his mind to have some salt at the ready and do it himself.

I’m afraid I have very little sympathy. Fair enough, if you are out because you have no choice in the matter, but people have to use their common sense, and just stay in the house on days like this if they possibly can.

How many of you experience what I call ‘on one days’? What I mean by that is a day when, for no apparent reason, everything is twice as busy as usual, and quite often with ‘bizarre’ things.  Today was an ‘on one day’ although to be fair, while I was twice as busy as normal at work, there weren’t many of the weird and downright crazy requests you normally get on these days. You can usually tell first thing in the morning if it is going to be an on one day, although they can occasionally sneak up mid day, but I find, if they start at 12:00 noon, they finish at about 12 noon the next day, and last almost exactly 24 hours.

Today for instance, I got my usual bus into town, and most days the traffic is fairly consistent. It does get busy in places, but not too bad, and always at the same points. Today however there were cars everywhere (The lay-by outside Noblehill Cafe on the Annan Road is usually quite a good place to gauge on one days, as there are normally loads of cars in there either parked facing the wrong way, trying to do a U Turn on the Annan Road or just generally abandoned in the middle of the road because the lay-by is full), and queues at places you wouldn’t expect them. As I said, at work, there weren’t so many crazy things, but I was there until half past 6 tonight just tidying up and catching up on the day. As I write this, my 2 year old is still up in his room (my 5 year old is sleeping now, a bit later than usual, but she seems to be developing an immunity now to ‘on one ness’).

I’d actually love to do a scientific experiment into it, as I’m sure there is something in the atmosphere, or the phases of the moon, or something which causes it. I remember hearing an article on the news about a police force in England which was making sure it had extra staff on on the night of full moons, and the news program was having a bit of a laugh about it. I however wasn’t in the least surprised, and indeed I’ve heard police officers say that they dread a full moon because they know they are going to be in for a night of it. As my friend once hypothesised!, the human body is about 70% water, and the moon affects tides, so who is to say it doesn’t affect humans?

I’m going to start trying to record ‘on one days’ on here to see if I can detect a pattern!

Do you find that people easily fall into categories?  I must admit, I am quite bad for ‘categorising’ people in a sarcastic way (I’m sure other people must do the same to me!) but they so often prove me right!

This morning, while I was waiting for my bus (go on Mr BMW driver, criticise people who get the bus to work for slowing everyone else down! See, there I go again), in near total darkness, 2 women with small children beside them, drove by with no lights on.  To be fair, only one of them was still putting her seat belt on as she drove (the other one had probably come far enough to complete this particular task!), but how typical is that of the ‘drive the kids to school’ brigade?

It reminded me of the other night when I returned to the car park to see a lady in a parked car pick up her mobile phone, dial in the number, and then drive off while on the phone!  Guess what she was driving?  That’s right, a 4×4.

I hope I don’t fall into any categories (I’m sure I do), but I’m damn sure it’s none of the above!

Why do so many people seem to like being in queues? I was 20 minutes late getting in to work this morning due to long queues of traffic caused by road works at the Annan Road/Brooms Road junction. As I get the bus in, I have very little choice over which route I take (I suppose I could take a different bus, but I wasn’t really expecting such big queues this morning, I will be tomorrow), but there are so many alternatives to heading down the Annan Road for people wanting to get into town, I don’t know why all those cars decided to sit in a queue for half an hour. What was wrong with nipping onto the Lockerbie Road (I know at least one sensible person who did this and encountered no delays), up through Larchfield or over Craigs Road? I think the big mistake they made was advertising the roadworks in advance. People were coming from far and wide to join them!

Got to go now, I’ve to get up early tomorrow to catch an earlier bus to avoid it all! Enjoy your queueing if you’re that way inclined.

I’ve spent the last few nights working on setting up multiple blogs for the site, only to find that it’s not an easy task!Wordpress integrates really well with the rest of the site, but I can’t find a way of setting up multiple blogs (I did find one, but it was way too complicated!), so I had a look at Movable Type, and while it does appear to support multiple blogs, it is damn complicated as a standalone blog, never mind try to integrate it with the rest of the site, so I gave up on that idea.

At the end of the day, the idea of setting up multiple blogs was incase anyone wanted to have their own blog within the MyDumfries community.I’ve decided to leave it for now unless I get any feedback saying you’d like to see this feature. So, click the contact link to your left if you think it would be a good idea to set something up.