April 25th, 2005

Welcome to Millennium Tower, due for completion in May 2005

The friend who brought to my attention the guide to British pub etiquette reports that Portsmouth’s Millennium Tower, centerpiece of the Millennium Project, is still not finished, due for completion (scroll to the end of the article) in May 2005. To disguise the embarrassment, they’ve renamed it to Spinnaker Tower, thereby—as the Hampshire Area Guitar Orchestra describes it—replacing a name that no-one could quite remember how to spell correctly, with a name that no-one can quite remember how to spell correctly“. If you go back to the original proposal, construction was to begin in Winter 1998 with completion in Autumn 1999. In reality, the project was so badly delayed that construction didn’t even begin until 2003 (I believe). Quite an embarrassment to what was supposed to be “Millennium City”. (At least it’s no longer home to the Tricorn Carpark and Shopping Centre, named Britain’s ugliest building.) If you go to the project’s home page, you can catch up on everything that’s going on, or at least pretend to, because the “News Update” and “The Projects” links are both 404.

But that’s okay, because there’ll be “More Deatils Soon”.

Author

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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