…. and a belated Happy Christmas. Late on the Friday before Christmas my PC died. Why do these things happen just a few hours before a 4 day shutdown? Investigation showed that PSU had blown so I fitted a new PSU. After that the PC would start but shutdown before Windows had been loaded. On closer examination I spotted several capacitors on the motherboard which had swollen! So it also needs a new motherboard as well. This is being written on my wife’s laptop which suddenly doesn’t seem to like talking to our wireless router – I can’t check the router settings without my my (still not working) PC’s ethernet connection to it. So our internet connection is currently my mobile acting as WiFi hotspot which, surprisingly, is working very well. The same day my PC died my car had been in the garage because there had been a loud bang after which it began to bounce and roll like a barrel at sea :-( Both front shock absorbers had snapped. Christmas is always expensive but this one seems to be beating all previous records!

Now the statistics for ‘another day on the buses’ 2011

Top Referers:
Omnibuses
Bus Driving
Phil Stockley
Driving a bus?
Bumpy Highway

Top Search Terms (which seem to confirm that this blog is an eclectic mix):
bus blog
black pheasant
another day on the buses
abaco palma
erg ticket machines

Most Read Posts:
Magabus promotion codes
New ticket machines
Megabus luggage policy
The new kebab shop style BBC homepage
Be careful what you wish for ….

Top clicks to other bus blogs:
Omnibuses
Bumpy Highway
Bus Driving
Phil Stockley
Island buses

Greatest number of visitors online at one time:
45 on 12 July at 21:36

It may not be the same sparrowhawk but if it is it’s 3 years older. We last had a sparrowhawk trying to take a pigeon in the garden in March 2009, I wrote about here.

This time it was my wife who on passing through the kitchen heard the chickens again making lots of noise. So she opened the back door in order to investigate what was happening only to jump back in surprise. The sparrowhawk was starting to eat the pigeon about 1 metre away from her! As she jumped the sparrowhawk took off trying to take the pigeon with it, it failed to do so and dropped the pigeon immediately.

Here’s a picture of the pigeon. You can see how close it is to the house, the edge of the drain you see is from the kitchen sink and the back door is next to the sink.

….. I post a link for this but now I’ve been able to embed it in the posting. I think it’s great.

This is the 500th posting since ‘another day on the buses’ was born on the 7th February 2007. The very first posting may be read here. In that first post I wrote “How long will this blog last”. The answer seems to be nearly 5 years at the least.

The previous posting to this is the one about the new BBC homepage. Within a couple of hours of posting it I suddenly saw a huge rise in visitor numbers, a closer look at my analytics showed an incoming link from the BBC itself!

The link appeared on the BBC web page until yesterday evening when it finally scrolled off the bottom as they selected newer stuff to link to. However, I’m still getting a significant number of visitors from google.co.uk who have used the search term ‘bbc homepage’ on which this site is currently in position 13 out 67.5 million results. It just shows how powerful a link from a site such as the BBC is for google positioning. It’s been fun for a couple of days, I hope those who got here spent at least a few minutes having a look at other things, but I doubt they have much real interest in buses and my life.