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March, 2011:

Swindon Works 25 Years Later

Saturday 25 March, 2011 was the 25th anniversary of the closing of the Railway Workshops in Swindon. Over night 1,100 workers were out of work, and 143 years of railway history came to an end. No more would the works hooter mark the time throughout the town, no-one would be going back “inside” again.

Swindon Final Hooter

It seems to be a little marked date on the internet, the “Mayor’s Memories 25 Years On” on SwindonWeb is the best that I have seen so far. There were also two little mentions on the Swindon Advertiser website: “The day the hooter sounded for the final time” and “Send us your memories of the railway works”.

I guess there is little to celebrate, but it is worth commemorating. Swindon Railway Workshop – Gone With Regret.

Nested Model Railways

Web-comic XKCD have just posted a comic about the limitations of making a model railway of the town you are in. A model of your town includes your house and so a model of the model … That’s going to get small quickly.

model_rail

Excel Table of Contents

Sometimes I find that I really need to torture Excel in the name of work. At the moment I am working on an Excel file with about 40 worksheets, and multiple pages on each sheet; all up it will weigh in at about 200 page mark.

One of the things that I was asked to do was to create a table of contents for this monster. That’s not something that I’m keen on doing manually – especially as I still need to play with the page formatting!

Anyway a bit of googling turned-up a macro that creates and updates an Excel table of contents [^]. The results aren’t pretty, but it is something that I work with and it sure beats keying in the numbers each month.

Excel Table of Contents

Lunar Perigee

The moon has come as close as it gets to the Earth tonight (19th March 2011) Perigee. This means that the full moon appears 14% larger [^] and 30% brighter than normal, the largest full moon we have had since March 1993. Luckily here in Melbourne we were blessed with a clear sky, but the mosquitoes were biting well!

Click through for a bigger version of the photo.

Moon Perigree 1