Both Anton and Erin are from The BBC's Saturday night favourite show 'Strictly Come Dancing' who will dazzle the audience with their new Choreography and ballroom magic. They will be joined on stage by other fantastic dancers and Richard Balcombe is conducting the renowned London Concert Orchestra. West End guest star Graham Bicley will complete the night with his dreamy vocals.

Classic Anthems such as:

• George Gershwin
• Irving Berlin
• Kander & Ebb
• Cole Porter

featuring classic hits such as

• An American in Paris
• Fascinating Rhythm
• It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)
• Cavatina
• The Blue Danube Waltz
• Don’t Rain on My Parade

After working with Anton Du Beke on his new web design and setting his new Website live in December 2011, just in time to advertise his Christmas Cracker at the Albert Hall and the Christmas edition of 'Strictly Come Dancing' we our proud to announce Anton and Erin decided to kick off their 'Let's Do it Tour'  in our hometown of Northampton at the Royal & Derngate Theatre.

More Details can be found on the Royal and Derngate Website.

Food is one of lifes pleasures especially if you, a friend, family member or partner can cook well, or you dine at some of the best restaurants. I personally love cooking and eating out or even ordering in. Depending on the mood either cooking a romantic meal for my girlfriend and I, or a big family meal either cooked by my mother or myself, they are always a good event where we can catch up and have a few slurps of the Vino. Every Saturday I wake up to a coffee, and a croissant while relaxing to Saturday Kitchen on BBC One. I enjoy watching James Martin present the show, with his celebrity guest and celebrity chefs as well as the classic episodes form Keith Floyd, Rick Stein, Master Chef, Jamie Oliver, Nigella, Antonio Colucci and many more varying throughout the year.

Keith Floyd on BBC Saturday Kitchen

Saturday Kitchen is where I fell in love watching Keith Floyd cooking meals in various locations from on the top of a mountain to cooking freshly caught fish on a boat in the middle of the see, from various locations in the world such as France, Italy, Spain, India, China, USA, Australia and many more, all the time having a slurp of the local red stuff and if that was not available then a glass of the local alcoholic beverage. Keith Floyds autobiography is a good insight to his personal life and how he started out forming his empire to losing it all.

Keith Floyd had three restaurants in Bristol by 1971, Floyd's Restaurant in Alma Vale Road, Floyd's Chop House in Chandos Road, and Floyd's Bistro in Princess Victoria Street, Clifton. All three of the restaurants Floyd had opened had financial difficulties so he sold them and the rights to use the name "Floyd's Restaurant" and decided to move to the South of France selling Wine to restaurants in Bristol and opening a restaurant L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse. Again due to financial problems he moved back to England, managing to get his friends to give him loans he opened another restaurant in Chandos Road, as he had sold the rights to use his own name he simply called it "Restaurant".

The new restaurant was popular with local actors and many people working at BBC bristol. Late one night when a waitress came into the kitchen and said to Floyd 'There's a Gentlemen on table five who wants to have a quick word with you." changed his life forever as this was David Pritchard, who explained a programme he was making for BBC Bristol called RPM, a sort of arty-crafty programmed which was broadcasted early evenings. This led to Floyd being offered his first BBC TV series in 1984 'Floyd on Fish', which was the begining of his rapid rise to his popularity. Floyd would never describe himself as a chef as he was self-trained and had not been to a chef school.

Keith Floyd had and still has a following of millions of viewers worldwide.

During the late 1980s he purchased and ran the Maltsters Arms in Tucknhay, Devon. He was know for spending more time at the bar than in the kitchen. This led to his bankruptcy in 1996, after he accepted a £36,000 cheque for a drinks order which bounced.

In 2008 he set up a restaurant at the Burasari Resort on the popular Thai island of Phuket. This was his first Asain restaurant and the fist celebrity restaurant to be opened in Phuket, where Keith Floyds followers would pay him a visit, right up untill Keith Floyds death in 2009 he was actively involved in running his restraunt 'Floyds Brasserie'.

On 29th July 2009, Keith Floyd was diagnosed with Bowel Cancer. He had a total of five operations which removed 90% of the cancer, despite his illness and constant drinking, he was told by the doctor his liver was working at 100% and was like a non-drinkers. Sadly on 14th September 2009 he died of a heart attack aged 65. But still lives on most Saturday mornings, in his cookery books and on DVD.

Keith Floyd Recipes

To celebrate the life of Keith Floyd and for Blog Action Day here are a couple of my favourite recipes by Keith Floyd:

Tomatoes Stuffed A La Nicoise

Ingredients:

Fatty pork mince

Veal mince

Finely chopped parsley

Finely chopped shallots

Finely chopped garlic

Egg

Vine tomatoes – deseeded and de-topped

Method:

In a large bowl mix together the pork mince and the veal mince

Add the finely chopped parsley, shallots and garlic

To this mixture add the egg and mix well

Stuff the deseeded and de-topped vine tomatoes with the mixture

Top with garlic butter

Roast in the oven for 20 minutes

Italian Risotto With Wild Mushrooms

Ingredients:

Finely chopped shallots

Finely chopped garlic

White wine

Butter

Risotto rice

Wild mushrooms

Olive oil

Method:

In a large pan add a generous amount of olive oil and allow the finely chopped garlic and

shallots to sweat until see through

Add the risotto rice

Cover the ingredients with the remaining oil and add 1/2 a bottle of white wine

Over the heat allow the mixture to ‘cook out’

In another pan sweat the wild mushrooms in some olive oil

Add the butter to the mushrooms

Finish the risotto by adding small amounts of water to the pan and allowing this to cook

through

Add the wild mushrooms

Allow to cook out

Season to taste and serve with a little double cream

Chicken Tagine With Couscous

Ingredients:

Diced chicken

Bay leaf

Cinnamon sticks

Honey

Ground cumin

Cumin seeds

Ground coriander

Olive oil

Chicken stock

Dry sherry

Diced garlic

Diced shallots Fresh coriander

Method:

Add the olive oil into a large roasting pot

Colour the chicken all over in the oil

Add the diced garlic and shallots and allow to sweat down

Add the cinnamon sticks, cumin seeds and ground cumin

Allow to cook out for 10 minutes

Add the dry sherry, honey, bay leaf and cover with the chicken stock

Bring to the boil

Cover the pot and roast in the oven for 30-35 minutes

@ 200 degrees Celsius

Serve with fresh coriander

Recipes are Copyright Linthwaite House Hotel & Keith Floyd © 2007 – www.floydonline.co.uk

During the late 1970s, Steve Jobs alongside Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Mike Markkula and a small team designed and developed a mouse driven computer, this was also marketed by them which led to the birth of the Macintosh computer. In 1985 Steve Jobs resigned from Apple and set up a company name NeXT, specialising in higher education and the business markets.

In 1986 Steve Jobs purchased the computer graphics dvision of Lucasfilm, which became Pixar Animation Studios. He remained CEO and a 50.1 percent shareholder of Pixar until it was purchased by The Walt Disney Company.  However, in 2006 Steve Jobs became Disney's largest individual shareholder owning 7% and a member of the board of directors at Disney.

In 1996 Apple purchased NeXT bringing Steve Jobs back to Apple, the company he had co-founded serving as CEO from 1997 until August 24th this year when he resigned due to ill health staying on as chairman of Apples board of directors.

Steve jobs designed and developed the best computers for both style and spec. Not only are they very good computers used by graphic designers, web designers, photographers, film editors and journalists, but they are all style icons of their time. The iPhone and iPad are devices every other company has tried to copy with their own version of touch screen smart phones, tablets and apps.

Steve Jobs will truly be missed, lets hope he left enough ideas for Apple to carry on the legacy.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Modern blogging has become, for some, a perosnal online diary, in which people keep a running account of their lives, companies also use blogs sometimes titled 'news' to keep their clients up to date with what they are doing, or blogging about relevant information to their company which is very good for their SEO. People can view blogs, leave comments giving them the opportunity to interact. It is the interactivity that differentiates a blog from a static website.

Did you know that there is a day dedicated to blogging? Blog Day was created in order to discover previously unknown blogs. Each blogger reccomends 5 new blogs to visitors of their blog. The idea is to find 5 new, interesting blogs and advertise them to others. Blog Day is celebrated on 31st August, this date was chosen as the numbers can be read as blog when written down as 3108.

Another Day dedicated to the art of blogging is Blog Action Day. This is an annual worldworld event, in which one topic is chosen and bloggers write about it. The day is held on October 15th each annually and first started in 2007. Last year bloggers from around the world united to discuss a wide range of topics relating to water. This year Blog action Day is on the 16th October and as it coincides with World Food Day the topic will be food - Click here to take part.

Blogs can easily be incorporated into a web design, at MGT Design we favour the wordpress platform for both blogging and content management systems.

The phenomenon of social networking has taken over modern society. It has become the letter writing of the digital age. In just a few clicks of a button and the frantic tapping of keys, messages are passed instantaneously. Long gone are the days in which people would write their thoughts down on paper, instead they are published on websites for the majority to see. As technologies have developed and become more advanced, it is now increasingly easier to keep in touch with the people who may live halfway around the world, or old school friends that we haven't seen in years. The majority of people would have joined a social networking site such as facebook in order to socialise virtually. Whilst sat at your desk at work its very easy to log in and converse with colleagues or friends. Conversations that simply would not have been possible before social networking took hold.

But how much of your life has the phenomenon taken over? Social networking can be hugely addictive. Ever logged on just to contact one person and become engrossed in the status updates of Facebook or the hundreds of tweets on Twitter. Its not just the ability to tell the whole of your Facebook  circle of friends what you are doing or "what is on your mind?" It is possible to tag people in photos, give them virtual gifts or poke them. I mean what is poking? First you receive a message saying you have been poked by ....... Then you find yourslef poking them back, then before you know it you have a full out poke war on your hands. Checking your facebook account every half an hour just so you can see if you have been poked. It is very annoying being physically poked by somebody, yet it can be fun and addictive in the world of social networking. It can be very easy to get carried away in constantly updating Facebook Status's. But does everybody really need to know what you ate for breakfast or what television programme you are watching. Yet it has become the socially accepted thing to do.

So with the majority of people out there logging on to social networking sites on a regular basis, what a great medium for advertising. It is a very clever way to capture the attention of millions with a few carefully placed adverts. Businesses have the ability to take full advantage of using social media in order to promote their product or service and build their Brand image. Social Media Optimisation (SMO) makes it possible to increase an advertising campaign capturing a much wider audience by using these social networking sites as a platform. It is not just brand building and marketing that businesses can now use SMO for. Increasingly smart businesses are using social media in order to increase employee engagement, to help recruitment and building customer relations. So with such powerful tools it would seem stupid not to use them.

Another drawback in social networking is it's misuse. Personal details are often required in order to build profiles. If a person is unfamiliar with the levels of privacy settings and the restrictions they can place on who can view their profiles they can often leave themselves open to identity theft. A social network is essentially a massive database that can be accessed by vast amounts of individulas. This therefore increases the risks of exploiting information. There are always risks that employees may involuntary leak information by posting information on a social networking website. Extending from this there is always the danger that a brand can be damaged through the use of social networking. In the same way that social networking can be used to build brand image, it can just as easily be used to attack a brand. By distorting information and displaying it for the masses to see, reputations can ultimately be destroyed.

As with most things in life, there are benefits and drawbacks to social networking. The convenience and ease of keeping in touch with people, the platform it provides for marketing and building brand image are just a couple of reasons that the phenomenon of social networking has taken such a powerful hold in today's society. There will always be dangers with such large information databases. But so long as the right controls are in place then there is no reason it shouldn't be used to it's full capacity. So to answer the question should I delete my Facebook account, the answer is no. The possibilities are just endless.

If you like our textures please link back to us by copying and pasting this into your HTML code.

<p><a href="http://www.mgtdesign.co.uk" title="web design">Web Design </a>Resources from MGT Design</p>

Our fist set of textures are Medieval doors, when I was visiting Medieval towns in the Catalan region of Spain this year I knew they would come in useful one day in my work and had to capture them. Enjoy!!

If you like our textures please link back to us by copying and pasting this into your HTML code.

<p><a href="http://www.mgtdesign.co.uk" title="web design">Web Design </a>Resources from MGT Design</p>