Dave's Blog

Toad in the Hole

2011-12-05T10:17:13Z

Toad in the Hole

I recently picked up a British Cookbook from Past Times, more for the Pease Pudding recipe, but I was thumbing through it last night and found myself inspired to make an old classic that my Nan used to feed us; Toad in the Hole.

I’ve never actually made this before but it didn’t come out too bad, although the Yorkshire pudding was a bit stodgy in the middle, personally I like that, but I wonder if I should have cooked it longer.

Either way, this is a nice cheapo meal that tastes good, so it was very friendly on the budget.

I also served it with Colcannon, which is basically mash with spring onions and a bit of cabbage (traditionally Kale), peas and gravy.

I had some batter left over so I used it to make us pancakes for desert, in spite of the fact that the batter had both salt and pepper, they came out great smothered in lime juice and sugar.

This post was brought to you by the symbol π and the sound ‘nom’.

Dealing with Knee Pain caused by Badminton

2011-11-14T13:01:47Z

Almost a year ago, I started getting back into badminton in a big way. Almost since the beginning, I’ve been getting pain in my knees. At first I shrugged it off as being unfit and overweight, I started wearing a knee support to help the pain, which it did but lately it’s been getting worse even though my fitness has come along leaps and bounds.

Normally, I don’t advocate trying to self diagnose through the internet, you’ll end up convincing yourself that you have some rare disease with 3 weeks to live or something equally unhelpful. But in this case, because the pain is so specific and directly associated with Badminton, I think I’m on fairly safe ground:

I think this sounds like Patellar Tendonitis, AKA “Jumper’s Knee”, the pain is just below my knee cap and I really feel it most when I’m limping up and down stairs.

I brought this up with some of the players at my club and received a number of different suggestions, all of which I’m going to try to follow, working on the principle that a problem is best tackled from many directions at once. Of course this is no good as an empirical study, but I get the impression that I don’t have much time to waste.

About Me
At present I play about 5 hours badminton a week, 2 hours on Tue, 1 hour on Thur and 2 hours on Fri. Additionally, I’m not a light person, I weighed myself this weekend and I come in at 21st 13lb, which funnily enough is exactly how much I weighed in January before I started all of this Badminton malarky.

Knee Support

As I said, I’ve been using a knee support during badminton for the past 10 months, so this alone isn’t ‘fixing’ the problem, although I cannot dispute that it helps. Those rare occasions where I forget the support and play anyway, leave me with a lot more pain the next day.

I’ve been using a Fortuna Neoprene Knee Support (with Open Patella). I’ve also tried both a Boots own version without the open patella (hole in front of the kneecap) and a velcro adjustable one, I went back to the Fortuna as I felt it helped the most. The reasoning behind the open patella is that it takes the pressure off of the kneecap whilst holding it in place and providing tendon support.

I’ve also just bought a Patella strap designed specifically for this problem, I haven’t had a chance to use it yet but I’ve tried it on to walk up and down stairs, which is when I really feel a lot of pain and it seems to make a difference. How much difference it’ll make during and after play, remains to be seen.

Epsom Salts
My coach suggested soaking in a bath with Epsom Salts. Ironically, living in Epsom, I had a really hard time finding any, so instead settled for ‘Dead Sea Salts’ which seem to be pretty much the same thing but three times the expense and ostensibly from the Dead Sea! I’ve used about half of the box now, soaking in a bath for half an hour after badminton, but I can’t discern any difference to my knees.

However, I no longer have dry skin on my elbows! Comparing the results versus the expense, this was a clear bust. I’m going to stick with Radox. I think the heat from the bath helps more than what happens to be in it.

Better Trainers

This should have been a no-brainer, however it still took me until September to splash out on some decent badminton specific trainers, having worn the treads off of the soles of the previous cheap pair I’d picked up from TK Max.

I opted for the Yonex SHB 102MX Men’s Badminton Shoes, which I picked up through Amazon for the kingly sum of £85, but don’t let this put you off, the difference was instant and well worth every penny. The extra cushioning on the sole has also made a big difference and I no longer find lunges and jumps as painful as with other trainers.

There have been other benefits to the trainer upgrade; I used to occasionally turn my ankle when changing direction quickly, never anything serious but painful enough to put me on the floor for a second or two, but the increased lateral support of these trainers have really helped and I haven’t had this problem since.

Gel Heel Cushions

The next logical step (haha!) from trainers was to try a pair of heel cushions. There’s not much to say about these, as we’re all well aware of what they do and how they do it:

Gel Max anti-fatigue heel cushions provide all day comfort for your feet, no matter what level of activity they are put through. The advanced gel and Poron design cushions every step and helps relieve heel, knee and lower back pain associated with foot impact and heel strike.

Use to help:

reduce general heel pain

cushion heel spurs

absorb shock to heel, knee and lower back

help treat bursitis, achilles tendonitis and plantar fasciitis

Again I was surprised that I hadn’t immediately thought of using inserts as part of the solution. I’ve been using these for a week and I’m already happy that they’re helping cushion impacts and reduce the stress on my knees.

I bought these GelMax Heel Cushions from Lloyd’s Pharmacy for £9 and I’m already tempted to get another pair.

Cod Liver Oil Tables
I remember my Nan taking these every day as part of her arthritis care, so I thought I’d give it a go too. I’m not quite man enough to drink a teaspoon of this vile ichor, so I’ve opted for the tablet based solution from Boots. Difficult to tell if they are making a difference really, but the effects are supposedly more widespread than joints from increased brain power, reduced risk of heart disease blah blah blah.

Whatever the reasoning, it’s good enough for my Nan so it’s good enough for me.

Glucosamine & Chondroitin Tablets

This is the big one, people at the club couldn’t quite remember the name of the tablets they were taking, aside from ‘gluco-somethingoranother’, but they came highly recommended as having made a huge difference. A couple of days and a long chat with a Pharmacist later, I was in possession of these tablets. They weren’t exactly cheap at £15 pounds for 20 days supply but I’m willing to give anything a go at this point:

Glucosamine is a naturally occurring substance known to play a role in the health and resiliency of joints. It helps maintain joint mobility and flexibility in conjunction with a healthy diet and lifestyle.

Chondroitin is a compound found in connective tissue that helps attract fluid into joint cartilage.

I’ve been taking 3 a day now for four days now so it’s too early to make any comments about about them. I’m quite put off by the fact that the text on the box is replete with qualifying language like ‘could’ and ‘may’, but the recommendation of others goes a long way with me so I’ll certainly give it a go.

Lose Weight
It always comes down to this, losing weight will reduce the load on my knees. However that’s easier said than done, but I thought I’d mention it as one of the things I’m going to try, although I’ve said this before.

Assessing the results
So those are the steps I’m trying to sort my knees out, I’m going to apply all of the above, with the exception of the Epsom Salts, and see whether my knees improve or not. I’ll report back in at the end of November as to whether any of this has made much of a difference.

Vizualize.Me

2011-09-25T15:50:49Z

I just saw this on BBC Click: “Vizualize.me launched this week with a service that visualises your CV by taking the information you have put into LinkedIN and turning it into a sharable infographic.”

It was quick and easy to do and the results are quite nice, I’m not entirely sure how much use I’ll get out of it as I don’t see myself sending it to a potential employer but it did remind me to update my LinkedIn profile properly at least!

Badminton Blogging

2011-09-23T09:48:15Z

As it looks like this badminton thing is not just a phase, I thought I’d best start a proper category and talk about it more. I was recently reviewing a friend’s blog and she structures things very strictly, making certain posts on certain days, I quite like the idea of this but at the same time I know that I’ll not stick to it with the same rigidity. I’m going to give it a go anyway and start trying to blog more regularly about badminton and what I’m doing and learning, all of this will be filed under the Badminton category.

I’m going to try to make a badminton post on a weekly basis on Wednesdays and see how things go from there.

Using owner draw to customize the TreeView control

2011-09-21T13:33:37Z

I was recently working on a bug found in our software options dialogue, well more of a suggestion really, which involved an interesting fix that I thought I’d share: The problem was that I’d used a Tree View control to display a list of options that the user could check/uncheck, I’d sorted them into sections using Parent and Child nodes and enabled the .CheckBoxes = True This was great and did the job, but I didn’t want the check boxes on the parent nodes, just on the child nodes.

The solution was to use the owner draw functionality exposed by the control to customize the drawing of the root tree nodes and prevent the check boxes from drawing, I’ve also set .ShowLines = False as they didn’t look very good without the checkboxes:

Node.Level 0 Nodes are now Owner-drawn

In order to do this you need to set the .DrawMode property to either .OwnerDrawAll or .OwnerDrawText then handle the DrawNode() event of the control, here’s the code I wrote to handle the DrawNode event:

    Private Sub tvwAvailableFilters_DrawNode(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.DrawTreeNodeEventArgs) _
        Handles tvwAvailableFilters.DrawNode

        'Hide the check box for top level nodes by overrding the draw event and drawing manually
        If e.Node.Level = 0 Then
            'Create a brush and fill the node area
            Using newBrush As New SolidBrush(Me.tvwAvailableFilters.BackColor)
                e.Graphics.FillRectangle(newBrush, e.Node.Bounds)
            End Using

            'Override Control font to Bold and Underline headings
            With e.Node.TreeView.Font
                Dim newFont As New Font(.FontFamily, .Size, FontStyle.Bold + FontStyle.Underline, .Unit)

                'Now draw the text manually
                TextRenderer.DrawText(e.Graphics, e.Node.Text, newFont, _
                                      e.Node.Bounds, Color.Black, Color.White)
            End With

            'Tell the system not to draw the object, we've just done it
            e.DrawDefault = False
        Else
            'System should draw the object
            e.DrawDefault = True
        End If
    End Sub

No Strings Badminton Failure

2011-09-16T19:53:04Z

The No Strings Badminton session tonight at Rainbow Leisure Centre was a complete farce. I don’t know if there’s some big publicity drive on at the moment, but since last week there’s been a lot more people coming, which ordinarily would be a good thing but tonight was so over subscribed that I left after an hour having played only 3 matches. The rest of the time was spent waiting around for courts to become available.

What really made things worse was that the guy organizing the session was pairing people up with massively different abilities, that was when he was there at all. My first game was with two people who had never really played before, which didn’t exactly work up a sweat. Speaking of the organizor, he disappeared for the last 20 mins that I was there, all the while more people were turning up wondering what was going on. There was no queuing system or pegging and people people trying to organize themselves into queues it quickly resulted in dissent.

All this is from an organization that boasts a lot more than it’s actually been delivering. Colour me distinctly unimpressed. I’m going to go again next week but I really hope they get there act together. If they don’t, I think I’ll complain as I was really enjoying playing on Friday night in addition to Monday at Ebbisham.

Quite annoyed.

Trek 2010 FX+ Electric Bike – Follow up

2011-09-15T23:50:57Z

Ok, so I’ve received a few nudges from people who want me to follow up on my post about the Trek FX+.

Since I bought the bike back on May 12th, I’ve clocked up 685 and I’m still impressed with the bike and glad that I bought it, however it’s not been plain sailing. I’ve been dogged by maintenance issues and faulty parts constantly, in fact I feel like I’m only just getting to the point where I’ve ironed out all of the issues.

I’ve been using the bike for my commute into the office which is around 9.1 miles, and I generally take 45mins on average. The route I take is all on road cycling with heavy traffic, passing through Sutton then Croydon. I don’t go into the office every day as I have the luxury of being able to work from home twice a week, so in theory I should be clocking up around 50 miles a week. Obviously it hasn’t worked out like that, but either way, I’ve given the bike some serious road usage since I bought it. In fact, it’s fair to say that I’ve really enjoyed cycling in and prefer it over public transport whenever possible.

I’m going to list some of the main features of the bike and my comments on them before getting down to the maintenance issues I’ve had :

Motor
This is what we’re here for right? I have very little to say about the motor, which in itself speaks volumes. The motor is perfectly quiet at all times, I’ve never heard so much as a peep out of it, yet it’s always there adding a noticeable push to every revolution and on the steepest hills, I can turn the assist up to level 4 and sail up the steepest hills at around 13-15mph.

I’m comfortably averaging around 14-15mph for my commute, which means I can get to the office quicker than the train without the attendant disruption and effort of walking out of my way to go to the nearest station. The motor cuts out at 16mph and gradually reduces its level of assistance as you near the cut off so there’s no jolt from one mode to another, it’s all very smooth indeed.

Whilst this might sound a bit miserly, I find it to be more than enough, the motor lets me quickly build up speed as I have to stop constantly due to traffic and traffic lights, wasting all of the momentum I’ve built up. I’ve seen on the internet that you can put the firmware into ‘Sport Mode’ which will increase the cut out level but whilst I’ve thought about doing it, I don’t really need to so I haven’t tried this out yet.

There is a ‘Generate Mode’, which can be turned on manually, but frankly this is a bit of a gimmick, I don’t go down any hill long enough to make it worth adjusting the settings and I couldn’t honestly say how much power is added back into the battery, it’s certainly not noticeable on the battery charge status. However it does go into generate mode when you pull the rear break, this is much more useful as it’s automatic, but again I can’t really see much measurable difference, but I’m sure every little helps.

Battery Pack
At 2.5kg the weight of the battery pack is noticeable on the bike, in fact, I’d say that with the battery and the motor, the bike is very heavy and I’d have trouble cycling comfortably without any form of assistance so I generally cycle around at assistance level 2 (of 4) and push it up to 3 for hills. This seems to use around 85% of the battery for my journey to and from the office.

This is all important because the charging pack for the battery is a beast, it is heavy and bulky and puts me in mind of 1990s laptop charger units, this means that whilst it’s possible to carry the charger with you, you really wouldn’t want to, given the choice. The charging process is quick though and in spite of the lengthy list of dos and donts in the documentation, it’s easy to use and charges up in 3-4 hours or less.

The paperwork suggest that the battery is only under warranty for 600 charges, I’ve probably done around 60 charges in total and I’ve not noticed any particular reduction in the battery’s capacity nor have I ever been left without charge, which to my mind is the most important thing.

If I’ve had any niggle other than the weight, I’ve noticed that the battery pack tends to rattle around quite a bit when I’m going over poor road surfaces (namely, most of Surrey!), I’m sure it didn’t do this at first but it certainly does so now, I try to keep my bike running silently and it annoys me when there’s a rattle or squeak. I can solve this myself with some rubber and super-glue but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Classic Controller
This is the little computer that sits on the handle bar, it doubles as bike computer and the control mechanism through which you adjust the level of assistance.

As a bike computer it logs Odometer/Trip counter/ Clock/Chronometer/ Average speed, which is all fine, however there doesn’t seem to be a group reset button, if I want to reset trip counter and chronometer I have to reset them separately, I’d be much happier if there was one button that reset all of the counters at once like other CatEye Computers I’ve used but this isn’t the end of the world.

The buttons are easy to use, even through waterproof gloves and the bike is very responsive when making changes. A couple of times, I’ve accidentally turned the bike off, whilst trying to turn the lights on (Hold power button for 3 seconds), which is not great when you’re on the road. It’s a shame they didn’t add another button to switch the lights on and off, but this is only really a minor niggle.

Once during heavy rain the battery indicator showed as empty throughout the whole commute, which was a bit worrying but the motor was working throughout and the lights were on, so I’m assuming that was some kind of short or connection issue, it’s never happened again and generally the battery indication is very accurate.

Puncture proof Tyres
The tyres on this bike are Bontrager Race All Weather Hard-Case, 700x32c, which have been excellent. The route I take is covered with glass and bits of debris from car accidents (nice eh?) and not once have I had a puncture, which is all I really care about, these days I don’t take a puncture repair kit with me and I’ve never looked back.

Maintenance
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve had an uphill struggle with the maintenance of this bike, before I go any further I want to say a huge Thank You to Dave and the team at Fudges Cycles in Epsom, who have bent over backwards to resolve any faults I’ve had. I’d happily recommend them if you’re in the area, their details are below:

Fudges Cycle Store
21-23 Upper High Street
Epsom, Surrey KT17 4QY
01372 744 116
Train: Epsom Rail Station
Open Mon-Thu,Sat 9am-6pm; Fri 9am-5pm;

So here’s a summary of the maintenance issues I’ve had since May, i.e. in the 3 months since I’ve owned the bike:

1 x Saddle Replaced
2 x Pedals Replaced
1 x Lights Rewired
2 x Brake Block Replaced
5 x Spokes Broken

Maintenance Log

09th May 2011 – Test Ride & Purchased

10th May 2011 – Picked Up

14th May 2011 – Taken back to Fudges, next day pickup. Lights not working, problem with wiring fixed, also had kickstand removed, noticed a slight grinding noise on journey home. No charge.

19th May – Constant grinding noise around 15-17mph and on application of rear brake

20th May – Taken back to Fudges, same day pickup. Grinding was due to a faulty brake block, the metal backing was twisted and rubbing against the wheel rim. Block replaced. No charge.

24th May – 100 miles

14th June – 200 miles

24th June – 300 miles

27th June – Taken back to Fudges, next day pickup. Broke the saddle and a spoke on the rear wheel snapped off. Saddle was replaced for free with a generic one, spoke was replaced at the cost of £1 for the spoke and £15 for the servicing. Fudges suggested that I avoid pot holes and bumping up and down the kerb to prevent spoke damage.

Broken Saddle

07th July – 400 miles

14th July – Taken back to Fudges, next day pickup. Snapped a spoke and buckled the rear wheel. Spoke was replaced at the cost fo £1 for the spoke and £15 for straightening the wheel up.

05th August – 500 miles

06th August – Taken back to Fudges, same day pickup. Broken spoke on the rear wheel, spoke was replaced for free and £15 for the servicing. Fudges suggested using a backpack rather than a pannier to try and keep the weight off of the back wheel.

14th August – Taken back to Fudges, same day pickup. Broken spoke on the rear wheel, spoke was replaced at the cost for £1 for the spoke and £15 for the servicing. Fudges suggest that if it happens again, to replace the rear tyre with a wider one to help absorb the impact.

16th August – 600 miles

17th August – Taken back to Fudges, 2 week pickup. Broken spoke on the real wheel. At this point nothing I can do other than lose 2-3 stone overnight can be recommended. After seeing people complain on the internet I’ve asked them to go back to Trek with the issue and see what Trek has to say, I’m starting to lose my patience.

30th August – Picked up from Fudges. Trek sent a completely new set of heavier gauge spokes, the rear wheel was rebuilt using the new spokes with longer reinforced nipples for strength. Also a wider puncture proof tyre (Specialized Infinity Armadillo Tyre 700 x 38) was added to the rear wheel to help cushion impacts. Cost £25 for the new rear wheel, no service or other parts charged.

Broken Spoke

31st August – Taken back to Fudges, same day pickup. A constant ‘pinging’ noise on wheel revolutions didn’t sound quite right. New nipples were too long for the custom spokes provided by trek, reinforced nipples replaced with shorter ones and the wheel was rebuilt. No charge.

09th September – Taken to Evans Cycles Croydon, same day pickup. Pedals replaced with DMR V8 pedals in Black. Cost £28. I used Evans as they are nearby work and the constant grinding and squeaking from the pedals had gotten to the point where I was embarrassed to cycle down the street with such a cacophonous accompaniment.

Conclusion
All in all, the 2010 Trek FX+ has been a brilliant purchase, it’s enabled me to forgo public transport and get back to a more active lifestyle. The commute is now doable, to the point where I don’t really think about ‘having to cycling in’, I just do it and enjoy it. The only times I really grumble is during heavy rain but buying the right clothing has made that less of an issue.

However, whilst the electric components themselves are all I could hope for, some of the other components are not of a high standard in my view, having spent £1,500 this is a little disappointing. You can see that most of the money has gone into the electric components rather than the other aspects of the bike. Pedals, V-brakes, saddle and lights are all from the lower end of the market and it’s a glaring contrast.

These components, combined with the constant issues I’ve had with the spokes of the rear wheel have made this bike a real labour of love, in the last month I’ve ridden the bike a lot less simply because of the time it’s spent in the shop. With the new heavier gauge spokes and the newer components, I finally feel like the bike is now ‘sorted’ and at the point where I can rely on it for my commute to the office. Of course I’ll be happier when I’ve added another 500 miles without breaking any more spokes!

In spite of everything, I’m still a big fan of this bike and I’ll happily recommend it to people who want to get into cycling but aren’t quite fit enough to get away with it yet, but do be aware of the potential maintenance issues, especially if you’re a heavy bloke like myself.

Cocktails at Bar 55

2011-07-16T12:28:07Z

Living in Epsom and working in Croydon means I rarely go into town these days, last night was the exception. Met up with friends in Bar 55 in Camden for Cocktails happy hour and had an absolute blast, at £7.50 for a cocktail it was pretty pricey but happy hour from 6-8 saw two for one which brought the prices down to reasonable levels.

I had to bail early as ever for the long slog back home. I took a few snaps which are up on the gallery, don’t worry, I removed the ones of Scott’s penis, mercifully blurry though they were!

You are here: Gallery · Events and outings · Cocktails at Bar55

Photos in this album (68)

What's Ben looking at?	Reluctant Reveller	Strike a Pose
I Can Still Shoot a Longbow	I'm sure he didn't drink all of that	One Fingered Salute
Present Time	Hugs	Home Sweet Home

Trek 2010 FX+, Electric Bike and my first commute to Work

2011-05-12T13:17:18Z

This morning was my first journey to work on my new bike, a Trek 2010 FX+, electric assist, and I’ve got to say, I think it was worth every penny.

I live in Epsom and work in Croydon, which is about 10miles. I’ve tried cycling this once before and it was a complete disaster, between hills, traffic and traffic lights, I managed to stumble into the office after 1 hour 10 minutes, barely able to stand and even less able to sit comfortably! That evening, I tucked my tail between my legs and got the train home. Not quite my finest hour.

My biggest problem is weight, at ~22 stone, I just can’t throw myself up hills the same as someone half my size and a lot of the time, I’m just happy to have made it to the top without having to push uphill. So whilst the gym warriors amongst you are sitting there thinking “I do 6 miles in the gym every evening and it’s easy.”, consider that you might not do so well in a more practical environment, simulated hills or not!

It looked like my goal of commuting to work by bike was over, and in fact it has been for the past year until last week at work when discussing what we were going to do with our annual bonus, a colleague suggested an electric bike. Until this point, electric bikes hadn’t even been on my radar, and like most people my first thought was that riding something like a bicycle with a lawnmower engine strapped onto it was not only defeating the point, but probably quite dangerous.

At work we have a guy who cycles around all of the offices with a trailer on the back of his bike selling sandwiches, this isn’t a small trailer by any means, and it becomes even more impressive when he said that the shop was based in Richmond, quite some distance away. It turns out that his is an electric bike, which is the only reason why he can manage the journey and the weight. Also his bike didn’t look too bad either, aesthetics*are* important after all.

So I started seriously considering an Electric bike as an option. Turns out that my preconceptions of electric bikes were way off of the mark, firstly you don’t just switch them on then drive to your destination. Everything seems to be ‘Pedal assist’ or ‘Electric assist’, essentially you pedal and the motor adds to the energy you put in, if you don’t pedal, you don’t go anywhere. People have described the technology as ‘flattening’ the route, which sounded like exactly what I needed.

A few days, a lot of Googling and a mountain of text later, I had bought a Trek 2010 FX+ from the Epsom branch of Fudges, for the sum of £1,500. They had asked for £1,700 but when I pointed out that their website was £200 cheaper, they lowered the price. All told they were brilliant though and it seemed more a genuine miscommunication on pricing than an attempt to rip anyone off. Thus had I spent my bonus, some savings and some money on a credit card which I’d been heretofore paying off!

So this morning, I cycled into the office on the Trek and I was blown away by how much of a difference it made, I cycled 10.1 miles, in 41:09 minutes averaging at 13.5 miles per hour, in the process I used up just under half of the battery and whilst my legs felt tired, I wasn’t on the point of collapse.

I’ll make a proper review of the bike after a couple more rides, but I’m planning on using it for the commute every day.

WTS: Kona Dawg 2005 (Upgraded)

2011-05-11T18:17:25Z

I’m selling my Kona Dawg on eBay if anyone might be interested, feel free to pass it on. Price is nominally £550 but I’m happy to accept a lower offer from friends or relations. It’s served me well but in all honesty, I’ve not ridden it enough and I could do with the extra cash to pay for the new bike.

Size
Frame size M(17″)
Colour Platinum/Black
Frame tubing Kona Clump Light 7005 Butted Aluminium/5″ travel

Component List
Note that those parts which have been upgraded are marked with an Asterisk*

Rear shock Fox Float R
Fork Marzocchi EXR Pro 120mm
Headset Aheadset STS
Crankarms MTB Evolve DH Chainset*
Chainrings 44/32/22*
F/D Shimano Deore
R/D Shimano Deore XT
Shifters Shimano Deore
Handlebar TruVativ LE Riser
Stem TruVativ XR 3D Stem (HS-05-XR)
Grips Kona Jackshit
Brakes Hayes Hydraulic HFX-9 XC
Brake Levers Hayes Hydraulic HFX-9 XC
Front Rim Sun DS2-XC
Back Rim Mavic EN 321 Disc Rim*
Specialized BG2 Sport Saddle*
Thompson Elite Seat post*

Mr Chevy

2011-05-07T15:35:39Z

Well it’s been about a fortnight since we picked up Mr Chevy on the way home from my Parents place. Julia had the name ‘Mr Chevy’ picked out for about 3 years so you can imagine her pleasure when we discovered that the kitten was in fact a boy, in spite of what we were told. Although in fairness sexing kittens seems to be a tricky procedure that seems to involve a vet looking up the kittens arse for about 3 minutes!

Anyway, the little mite is settling in fine and hasn’t managed to get into too much trouble yet, I’ve uploaded some pictures to my new gallery:

You are here: Gallery · General · Mr Chevy

Photos in this album (219)

Contortionist at Sleep	One Eye Open	Lounging
Sit Up	Getting Big	What's this then?
Pounce	Sleeping outside the box	Cat in a Hat
Dappled	Gravel Searching	Sleepy Kitten
Pavement	Undergrowth	Garden
Yawning	Stalking	Whiskers
What's This?	Stretching	Sleepy
Window Gazing	Mr Chevy	NomTime
Kitten Silhouette	Content	Recycled Kitten
Chevy Sleeping	Mr Chevy Kitten

Upgrade from Gallery2 to Gallery3

2011-05-05T10:45:44Z

I’ve just finished upgrading my Gallery software from v2 to v3. In spite of all the URL re-writes it appears to have broken all of the image links that were previously on the site, I’ll have to go back and fix all of these in time.

Gallery3 is a massive leap forwards in terms of UI and ease of use, certainly from the admin side of things, hopefully you shouldn’t see too much difference in the site once I finish configuring everything.

Anyway, new gallery is here

Next on the upgrade list is MediaWiki but last time was such a pain to do that it’s really put me off :/

Coffee Machine and Sleep

2011-01-08T12:29:07Z

I finished my first beginners game of Civilization V at about 2am this morning, and my first thought wasn’t “Yay me!”, it was: “Oh shit, I’m supposed to be getting back to a normal sleeping pattern for work next week!”.

So I headed more of less straight to bed, only to lay wide awake for the next thirty minutes contemplating my recent change in sleeping patterns. You see, it’s quite unusual for me to go to bed and not be instantly asleep, in fact, if there’s one thing I do very well it’s sleep. Yet since Christmas, I’ve had a lot of trouble falling asleep normally.

Then it suddenly occurred to me that my main Christmas Present from Julia, was a Senseo Coffee machine, which in common with all children with new toys, I’m using a LOT. I do normally drink a lot of coffee anyway, but I think lately my caffeine intake has probably quadrupled.

On the plus side, I’m getting a lot of use out of my new toy! On the downside, the chances of me getting my sleeping patterns ironed out before work on Tuesday are not good. I sense a rough transition back to the real world coming up in the near future!

Bill Bailey

2011-05-07T14:36:09Z

Thanks to Dan and Tarah, I went to see Bill Bailey on Sunday night in Greenwich. No thanks to all of the engineering works, which seemed specifically designed to prevent me from getting into town from Epsom. But still, thanks to no less than two cab journeys, trains and tubes, I eventually arrived.

I was racking my brain to think where the venue was, but as it turned out, they’d just slung up a marquee in the National Maritime Museum, which seemed to do the trick, I was quite surprised at how small the gig was, it’s difficult to judge but there can’t have been more than 1000 people there.

Here’s the tour spiel which sums up the content quite nicely :

Dandelion Mind

Featuring Bill’s trademark musical interludes, observations and stories of the road, Dandelion Mind will be based loosely on the theme of doubt (or will it?), as we follow Bill from his real-life saga of being trapped by the ash cloud, to his barely contained rants about celebrity, TV, creationism and Michael Winner. He demonstrates new instruments, both ancient and modern, he sings an internet love song, a lament about punk heroes, Iranian hip-hop, and plays a mean folk-bouzouki.

Thomas the Doubter gets a new look, and Darwin’s curious obsessions and the myth of intelligent design are all worked over in Bailey’s own surreal style. He revisits the music of his youth, with a brand-new French Disco re-working of Gary Numan’s hit, Cars, played in his own inimitable way, and maybe some Wurzels-based remixes of classic German techno. Just your normal Bill Bailey gig, then.”

I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though the man himself looked about as stiff as a wooden board thanks to a slipped disc, he didn’t hold back and will probably regret some of the more enthusiastic jumping around.

Unfortunately I ended up with a restricted view thanks to a support girder which seemed to be in the exact spot that would hide Bill Bailey for 85% of the time, but we chose those seats, so there’s a lesson for the future.

One thing that bugs me every single time I go to a show or gig or just about any performance is the whole charade of the encore. This isn’t anything against Mr Bailey in particular, it happens all the time. Just do the show, without all of the marching on and off stage to riotous applause. It’s either unthinking slavery to tradition at best, or extreme vanity at worst and I wish people would do away with it.

Seriously, what is the point of the encore? Why not just start and finish as planned without the sophistry of marching off and on the stage 5 times.

But yeah, my normal grumblings about encores aside, brilliant night. We walked Jules back to the high street to admire his new shiny car, then after seeing him off, ambled down to the riverside to catch the boat back to Woolwich. On the way we happened past Bill Bailey himself on his way to the pub, I can’t say I had the courage to say anything to him but Tarah thanked him for a great night, and indeed it was.

I didn’t take any pictures really, but there was a blue spotlight that caught my attention and I couldn’t help but snap Jules and Tarah, it came out quite nicely considering it was using my HTC Desire.

Starcraft2

2011-05-05T14:40:03Z

It’s been ages since I’ve blogged anything so I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing, sadly for everyone else, I find it easier to write about what’s enthusing me at the present, and that’s a computer game called StarCraft2.

I seem to have spent most of this weekend playing Starcraft2, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. I’ve played around 20 missions so far and I think I’m down to the last few and I *still* haven’t unlocked all of the technology.

I’ve always found that really annoying with RTS games in general, the whole restricted development during a campaign. In many games it’s used as a sort of tutorial, get players used to one set of units and gradually introduce more. But Starcraft seem to have gone to the Nth degree with this where I’m at the point of completing the game but there are units I still haven’t been able to use, I find that annoying as hell.

This means that while you’re plodding through learning various units, the tactics that you’re employing are liable to change or become obsolete in a full game without any restrictions. To my mind this always separates things out so that you have the campaign game and then the completely different multi-player game. I guess this is why with games like Supreme Commander, I’ve always preferred playing skirmishes against the AI lacking anyone else to play against.

Another thing that’s been annoying me is the lack of unit formation. I think I’ve been spoiled with ‘Sins of a Solar Empire’, where your fleets would automatically form themselves in the most optimal way, with heavier units and capital ships to the front of the fleet and the more support oriented units to the rear. There’s nothing like this in Starcraft2. If I want my medics to the rear, I need to put them in a separate group and micro manage them away from the slaughter. I’d love it if you grouped multiple units, gave them a move order and then they turned up in a sensible order. I’m sure some people would say this is about the skill of the player, but then I’m used to more strategic games with a much higher level of view. SC2 seems to be more about close view, skirmish fighting.

So yeah, that all said, I’m really enjoying the game, the campaign missions are really quite varied with gameplay devices that I’ve not come across before, like lava flooding low level areas every time interval, and playing missions as an alternate race through the narrative device of an Elan crystal which allows you to relive your alien buddy’s experiences.

I’ve also quite liked the Wing Commander style of intermissions where you wander around the ship and interact with various people and objects by clicking on them, which feels particularly old school. And of course the general plot and story line are very entertaining and the rendered video cut scenes are of a breathtaking quality, just like Warcraft3.

Hopefully I’ll be able to finish off the campaign soon and get down to some AI skirmishes so that I get a feel of the real game.

Moon Photos

2011-05-05T14:44:42Z

I’ve been trying to take photos of the Moon on and off for ages, with predictably terrible results. Finally with my new camera, I have a chance of getting it right, so I’ve been out snapping whenever I see a particularly good Moon and I’ve been pestering James endlessly for tips on getting it right.

Last night was a particularly bright moon and clear sky so I was out again at midnight, no doubt looking a bit creepy. Below are a couple of the pictures. They’re not as stunning as every other picture of the Moon, but they’re the best I’ve managed to take thus far. Tips for improvements certainly welcome.

Moving around furniture

2011-05-05T17:22:06Z

This weekend I’ve mostly been moving furniture around in the study. I don’t know why I feel the need to shift everything about every now and then, maybe the ongoing need to get the most of out space? Maybe I just need the change. Either way, with some help from Julia, I’ve been shifting everything about, partly to accommodate a new Futon that hasn’t been pancaked into a single layer a single atom wide by years of use (I’m looking at you Dan!). Personally I could still sleep on the old one without much discomfort but at the same time when you can count the slats through the mattress, it’s time to go!

So with my bonus, I bought a newer and slightly more expensive futon from Argos which should be a lot better for people staying over. Unfortunately it’s bigger than the old one which has made space a bit tighter.

Unable to resist the temptation to geek-up even the most mundane of tasks, I used Autodesk Homestyler to plan and move things around. It’s entirely flash based and is free, but to be frank is a bit limited as you can’t precisely size their 3d models so where my desk is 205cm I’ve had to settle for 200cm and such. Which means that the bookshelves are not quite as cramped on the plans as they are in real life, but I’ve used it before and for the minor task of moving stuff around, it’s perfectly adequate. Especially handy for avoiding that last minute problem of stuff not fitting right, but I wouldn’t use it for micro-millimetre precision.

Here’s the finished product both in 2D and 3D.

Politics, the Election and the erosion of personal freedom

2010-05-12T09:13:17Z

I’ve always held the view that if you don’t bother to vote, you can’t really comment. In that I’ve never voted before now, I’ve tried to keep up that ideal, I doubt I’ve been 100% successful but I’m only human

But as I said, this time I’ve been much more interested in politics, even though I’ve felt that my vote wouldn’t actually count. So not only have I kept up with the election and the various party policies, but I even went to the polling station for the first time with Julia, who was also voting for the first time.

I think it’s a measure of how disappointed we were with the current government and all of the mistakes the government has made that we actually felt that we needed to register our disgruntlement. I can’t comment on why Julia wanted to vote by from my point in my opinion in the last 10 years our personal freedoms have been eroded to the point of non-existence by the laws over which the Labour government has presided.

Personal Freedoms (Rant)
People taking photographs are now regularly stopped on the streets of London by zealous officials demanding that they delete their snaps, be they professional photographers or just tourists who are clearly on holiday. Even now there’s a general undercurrent of worry when I’m using my camera.

If the police want to search through my files and find that I’ve encrypted just about every piece of data I own, they have the right under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to compel me to reveal my encryption keys with the threat of Gaol if I refuse. I would of course refuse on principle. Even worse, even if I did capitulate and want to provide keys, there’s a couple of encrypted archives whose passwords I’ve forgotten but I keep around in case I suddenly remember the keys! I couldn’t reveal those if I wanted to. The only saving grace here is that the authorities have only sent one person to prison for this thus far.

Thanks to decency laws, some of the pornography which I downloaded in my youth is almost certainly illegal! I say almost certainly, there’s still a lack of guidance to police forces on what actually constitutes an ‘extreme image’ but rest assured that if you’ve even briefly browsed the darker side of the web you could have something nasty in your web cache. Personally, I’m reluctant to purge the gigs of pr0n I worked hard to download, even though I’ve only even looked at the tiniest percentage of it, just on the off chance that some parts of it may be ‘extreme’. I’m sure you could arrest most of the men in the country on this one!

And for Christ’s sake don’t get me started on the Digital Economy Act which was most recently rushed through the parliamentary wash-up.

You may think that none of this really applies unless the police kick my door in and confiscate all of my computers, but that’s not as unlikely as you may think.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine had all of his computer equipment confiscated and was arrested by the police based entirely on a false accusation by a former employer that he had stolen some hardware off of them when they fired him.

Totally untrue and in recent months it was thrown out by a court. But that didn’t stop the police from holding onto all of his computer equipment for two years and no doubt searching through everything they could find. Luckily he’d just rebuilt and formatted his main machine but that didn’t stop them trying to pin other charges on him based on what they’d found on his kit! Innocent until proven guilty indeed!

All it took was a petty minded company man and a burned bridge to kick things off, how many of us have stormed out of a job in the past with a two fingered salute? Probably more than one of two of us.

So welcome to the UK where now live, where the spectre of terrorism has criminalized most of us without any of us being the wiser. The only reason we haven’t all been carted away is because the police haven’t focused on us, yet.

The Election
So I voted, for all of the reasons above and more. Even though, I already knew that my vote would make very little difference. Thanks to all the great online tools I knew well in advance that Epsom was going to be Conservative in spite of my MP’s homophobic comments just before the election.

Here’s a list of those tools I’ve used recently :

When trying to work out who to vote for, I was actually torn between Conservative and Liberal Democrats. Conservative policies closely matched my own opinions but frankly I find it very difficult to trust them and I worry about the undercurrent of racism and homophobia that seems to rear it’s head every now and then.

Whereas I find the LibDems seemingly more trustworthy and some of their policies to be sensible, I was quite put off by large parts of of their policies, such as on Trident and the immigration amnesty to name a few.

What we’ve actually seen, play out with the Conservative/Liberal coalition to me seems the best of both worlds. The bulk of the Tory manifesto and some of the better ideas from the Liberals bound up with the integrity of the LibDems and the appeal of Nick Clegg.

Realistically I know they’re not going to repeal all of the laws mentioned above but I fervently hope they’ll start moderating them when they can, given the importance of all of the other problems we’re faced with.

Obviously we’ll see what actually happens, but I can’t help but be both pleased and optimistic. This is the first time I’ve ever given a shit and I hope it’s not all wasted effort.

Goodbye Eve

2011-05-05T17:28:36Z

The time has come to face facts, it’s been well over a year since I played Eve properly. Sure, I’ve logged in. Set some factories building and placed a few sale orders, but I’ve not actually played in any real sense. The last time I even killed any one was 28th of July 2009 and before that, was in May. That says it all really.

For all that time I’ve been paying 14.95 EUR times three accounts, about £39. It’s about time to do something else with that money. Like put it towards paying of credit cards or suchlike.

So, as of today, I’ve cancelled all of my Eve accounts. They won’t disappear into the ether and one day I might reactivate them but for now it’s a sad goodbye.

I’ve had a brilliant time in eve ever since I first subscribed on 11th January 2004, the high point was flying with the Mercenary Coalition as members of both Sharks with Frickin’ Laser Beams [FRICK] and Body Count Inc [BDCI] and I’ll never forget the fun I had flying with Millennium [MLM] both in game and in Amsterdam. Ahh happy days.

Hygelac
Total Skill Points: 87.9 million
Kills ~918, Losses ~34
[Character Sheet]

Brynhild
Total Skill Points: 64.0 million
Kills n/a, Losses n/a
[Character Sheet]

Hrethel
Total Skill Points: 47.0 million
Kills n/a, Losses n/a
[Character Sheet]

Contact Details Update

2010-04-16T12:47:39Z

I’m making my primary domain the DaveSpace.org.uk domain which I’ve owned for a few years now.

As part of this, I have a new GoogleTalk account at : Dave at DaveSpace dot Org dot Uk.

If any of you use GoogleTalk then feel free to add me.

Protected: Incompetency at work

2010-04-01T16:40:08Z

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

2011-05-05T17:30:57Z

My girlfriend always get’s annoyed with me when I tell her to turn things off and on again: “That’s your answer to everything!”, she grumbles, but I don’t just parrot this from a script. It’s the way I resolve 90% of all problems because this is usually the first thing I’ll try in any situation involving electronics or computers.

This morning I had cause to chuckle, as I sat on the train to work. At Waddon the train stopped for a while and the driver announced that he wasn’t able to open the doors on the train and was seeking technical help. After a 10 minute pause, he announced that it was a problem with the on-board computers and that he was going to power down the train to reset it.

The lights went off and the persistent hum of the air conditioning rattled into silence for a few minutes. I sat there in gloom and wondered if that was really going to do the trick or whether we’d all be manually overriding the doors to escape. The train once again whirred into life and slowly we could see the various systems come back to life. The displays on the train train all announced that this was an Electrostar model then started displaying normal information.

So there you go, take a leaf out of my book, next time you have a problem, try turning it off and on again. You never know

Jorvik Viking Festival 25th Anniversary in York

2011-05-05T17:33:55Z

We got back from York at around half past three today after what was a considerably better journey than the one on the way up. It snowed a bit through East Anglia which turned to rain by the time we returned to London.

We had a brilliant weekend and really enjoyed making new friends and catching up with old ones. Amusingly the weekend was a bit light on the Viking side of things, as we chose to spend a lot of it drinking and pillaging instead.

I’ve uploaded the photos to my gallery, I really should have taken some more! I might steal Julia’s at some point and upload those too.

Trillian Astra

2010-02-15T12:33:26Z

I recently read on Lifehacker that Trillian, has been released as Trillian Astra, a newer spiffier version. I felt that I should test this out and here I am a month later, hitting the ‘Uninstall’ button. This isn’t a comprehensive review or anything, just my user experience.

Many years ago, I was a proselyte of Trillian. It was a fairly unique piece of software back then that through developer APIs and some slightly dubious channels, would wrap all of the different Instant Messenger protocols into one client which would jointly manage all of those protocols. After a year or two of use, I even bought it.

Over the years though, it proved to be heavy on resources and was actively disliked by people like Yahoo and Microsoft who would continually change (Upgrade!) their protocols breaking Trillian on a few occasions. The File transfers rarely worked properly, the Video was awful and it became pretty apparent after a while, that it was only going to be going downhill. So I stopped using it and switched to Pidgin and then later the portable version for my USB stick.

I was curious to see what the new Trillian would bring, unfortunately, it hasn’t been a revelation on any front. I’ve been using it to wrap MSN, AIM, GoogleTalk and Skype. Additionally there were plug-ins for my email and twitter so I’ve been using those too.

The basics are pretty simple to work out with the usual contact list, double-click to talk kind of options but the actual setting up was a bit of a struggle, I found a lot of the interface to be counter-intuitive and it took a good hour to get everything the way I wanted. Once I had it all setup, it seemed to run fine for the basics, chatting on different protocols works fine although the display options are a bit too much for my tastes so I had to switch everything to a minimum setting.

At first I was impressed with the fact that there was a Skype interface, Pidgin doesn’t offer Skype, nor does anyone else to my knowledge because of the way Skype works. However actually trying to use it was a joke, in order to use Skype, Trillian fires up a Skype client in the background and hooks all the messages, I wouldn’t mind this too much if it wasn’t for the fact that all of the sounds still play, and you can see the skype client sitting in your system tray. The final let down with this is that it crashes Trillian every single time it closes. Wonderful.

There are plenty of little bits of added value with trillian, although when you think about it these are just perks rather than good reasons to be using it. Things like setting an away status sets custom text like “Away since 16:34 (GMT)”, or chat windows which show you details and timings about when the other person responded last and how long they’ve been online for. There’s also little notification windows showing what the actual message is (like googletalk). But really whilst these are nice, they haven’t changed my life for the better.

The mail and twitter feeds are pretty pointless. The mail client has a slow rate of update and offers very little options once it has decided to recognize the new mail. With mail if you want to do anything other than preview your mail (Good for Plain-text only), it simply shells your client/browser. Although you do get a delete and mark as read option which is nice, but I still found that I had to open up a proper mail client if I wanted to do anything more.

The twitter feed is clunky and not a patch on even the most basic of browser clients, offering a poor list of the top N tweets and telling you when there are new tweets but the functionality is pretty restricted. It’s more useful than the mail client in that you can reply and even post your own tweets but the whole thing is very uninspired and I found myself using the twitter extension in googlemail more often than not.

All told Trillian Astra doesn’t offer anything on top of Pidgin other than a swishier interface and an attempt at Skype interfacing. It stretches for some big things but those are implemented badly or with such limited functionality that you’ll be opening a different tool to do the job within five frustrated minutes. It’s not portable requiring a number of runtimes to be installed alongside it and there’s a memory leak in it somewhere which was chewing up about 1mb a minute on my system.

In summary, I’ll be going back to Portable Pidgin all is forgiven!

A photo a day

2011-05-05T17:42:28Z

I might have to rename this to ‘A photo every few days’, I’m still not consistently taking a photo every day, but I’m getting better at remembering and my camera is usually with me now. As I’m enjoying taking photographs more, I’m coming up against the limits of what I can do with my little Canon IXUS 60.

Last week, there was an amazing full moon, which I’d had a go at snapping. Alas, like all of my attempts at photographing things in low light, it was crap. A mostly black image in which a tiny white blur could be seen. As it turned out, my mate James had also been snapping the moon so I was eager to see how a ‘professional’ did it (well, sort of professional!). I was both disappointed with myself and impressed with him, as I saw his photo which is quite stunning. I asked him how he did it only to hear the sound of my bank balance cringing in terror at the requirements, his camera uses 18m mega-pixels, can spot meter and was using a long lens.

So yeah, just goes to show what you can do when you have the right gear and some know-how. I’ll have to be content with taking crap photos in the meantime!

(Left) This is the front of a house-warming card we got from Julia’s friends Sarah and Richard. I couldn’t get the lighting right with or without a flash so it’s a lot darker than I would have liked. I think if I’d have taken this during the day than the evening, it would have come out better.

(Right) Some random gravestones that I’ve puzzled over since moving to Epsom. Again, this looks really dark in the Winter morning.

(Left) I’ve really enjoyed messing around with the digital macro mode on the camera, since starting this project I’ve come to realize that there’s not much beauty in my life, in terms of the big stuff, so I’ve been photographing a lot of the smaller stuff. Needless to say, this is my fingerprint. Who say’s there’s too much personal data on the web?

(Right) I spent a lot of time at home last week and a lot of time staring out of the window. This is one of the sunsets I watched. I really like the ruddy glow, but the view from my window isn’t exactly exciting.

(Left) Yesterday, we walked around Nonsuch Park, in the gardens we found a shady little grove at the centre of which stood this pine tree.

Dreams

2011-05-05T17:43:40Z

I has some really weird dreams this morning, I dreamt that I was on the team in NCIS and we were investigating something near my Nan’s house in Essex. It was snowing and Gibbs managed to crash the Land Rover he was driving. Then I dreamt about mice, then I dreamt about frying the little dead mice but having to puncture their bodies because of the build up of gases inside their bodies while they were cooking.

It all seemed perfectly normal at the time, but now that I recall these memories to writing, I can’t help but feel a little disturbed. I can very clearly remember the mice, although mercifully there was no smell. Now that I think of it, I’m not sure if I ever remember smells in dreams.

A Photo a day

2011-05-05T17:48:25Z

One of my friends on Facebook, Mr Sutherland, has been taking a photo a day. I’ve heard of this sort of thing before, taking a photo of yourself every day or various photo projects, but I can’t say that it ever interested me until now. I have no idea why but suddenly it just seemed worthwhile doing.So as of last week, I’ve been trying to take at least one photograph a day.

Unlike my peers, a few of whom are fairly keen amateur photographers, I’m not trying for anything clever or different. I’ve not got the equipment nor am I really interested in spending thousands of pounds on lenses or lugging heavy dSLR kit around. It’s just me and my little Canon IXUS 60 taking snaps of things that either caught my eye, or just playing around with different settings or ideas. Maybe in time I’ll get into photography but this will do for now.

Anyway, last week was a bit of a mixed bag, work was attempting to drive me into an early grave and I spend enough time in the office that I hardly saw daylight that wasn’t filtered through the blinds in front of my desk! Also, I wasn’t entirely sure what to photograph as I hadn’t decided what I was going to get out of this process. The end result was that I’d missed a few days, although I’m enjoying the attempt.

Find below the few snaps I’d managed to take :

(Left) This is a Pin which was custom made for my old Eve Corporation, I finally realized that ‘Macro’ on my camera means ‘close-up’ and decided to try it out! I’d always looked at it through a programmer’s view-point, ah well this is all about learning.

(Right) This is the point where I realized that my life is visually quite boring, having spent most of my time working. Lacking anything more interesting I decided to see how bloodshot my eyes were, as it turned out I really like this picture, especially that you can see my screens in the reflection.

(Left) Chemicals in a puddle which I noticed on the way to work. I’ve always thought this was quite pretty, although depressing when you really think about it.

(Right) Yesterday we wandered to Epsom Downs for a walk, despite being quite unimpressed that we could walk around it all in less than an hour, it was good camera fodder. Just as we were leaving we stopped so I could snap the sunset, because of the lower light levels it looks a lot darker than it actually is but I loved the clouds, this type of cloud is called Altocumulus.

So there you go, my attempts. I’m quite happy with how this is going so far, but if you want to see some serious photographers in action, have a look at some of my friends’ work:

Snow

2011-05-05T17:51:06Z

This morning I woke up at around half six, why would I do this when I’m still on holiday? We’ll, last night I made an off-hand comment to Julia saying that I would walk her to the station today if the snow was bad. Ostensibly this is rather gallant of me, but in actual fact, it served to excuse me to play in the snow. Everyone’s a winner! So it was that I wrapped up snug and we trudged to Epsom station in virgin snow, all the while more snow fell in reassuringly large clumps.

When we got there, at around 7:15 everything was disappointingly chaotic, all of the information boards were blank, nobody knew anything and people were milling around in confusion. Eventually I managed to collar an employee who said that there was a London Bridge train outside of the station, but he’d been trying to get into Epsom for 20mins without luck. The snow on the rails a clear testament to the truth of this statement.

Just as I’d convinced Julia to abandon all hope, and come to the greasy spoon, the train in question managed to pull into the station so in spite of my arguments, she got on the train and I headed to the cafe alone. After a warming full English breakfast, I was watching the world go by when Julia called to tell me that the train was stuck outside of Ewell … yup, in all of that time, her train had made it one stop.

I sauntered home snapping pictures of the snow-clad streets and sat down to read some LJ and other correspondence, another call from Julia, this time much less stalwart she admitted that it might have been better to stay at home, the train had stuck outside of Cheam and the power was off and they were all pretty cold. It seemed that the driver was considering evacuating the train at one point. By this point Julia admitted it wasn’t going to work and was trying to get home. I made a bet that she wouldn’t get here until 11:30am. The train eventually managed to get to the station and Julia caught a bus back home. As it turned out, I was wrong, but only by an hour.

Personally I would love to see the country shrouded in snow and mist for a good 3 months every year, but I imagine I’m in the minority. So I’ll be enjoying this week to the full. I might bust out my bike tomorrow and go for a little tour around.

I snapped plenty of pictures, which I’ve added to the gallery.

1006

Good News / Bad News

2011-05-05T18:01:32Z

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here other than through Twitter, but last month Julia decided that it was time to move on and gave her notice at her job as a Recruitment Consultant at Crone Corkill. Well the good news is that yesterday, she got offered a new job for an interview she went for last week. More money, better environment and all that good stuff, so Hooray! Apparently the interviewers said that “She knocked our socks off!” in the interview, how good is that? I don’t think I’ve ever had that kind of feed back.

The bad news (there’s always bad news) is that it doesn’t start until the end of November. So December’s rent is still looking a bit iffy in my mind, but she’s going to pick up some temp work this month to cover it. So it could still be a budget Chrimbo, depending on how things pan out, but I’m sure we’ll cope.

Speaking of Chrimbo, we’re off to my Parent’s this year, up in their Bungalow in Suffolk. Should be a really nice relaxed time, involving pie and lounging. Also, I’m doing the Christmas dinner to give my Mum a break, I’ve been practicing roast dinners for a couple of years and I think I’ve finally got it down. I’ve booked Christmas Holiday from 15th of December to 11th of January so I’m going to seriously relax and work on some projects I’ve been meaning to get done for a long time.

Dollhouse

2011-05-05T18:05:10Z

I’m seeing series 2 of Dollhouse starting to appear on the internet, it’s a sign of how bad that program was that even though I could download it, I really can’t be bothered.

I’m not saying I haven’t tried, we watched the whole of the first series begging for it to get better but we just couldn’t get into it properly, I think we only really made it to the end of the first series because we had nothing else to watch.

I can’t quite put my finger on why it was so bad, but the whole thing just seemed to strike a discordant note with me. The story was interesting as was the concept and the actors were hardly green. I think it might have been the lack of empathy I had with any of the characters, the character archetypes were dull and lacking any depth which made them all just seem like poorly drawn caricatures of real people. Maybe because there was less banter about it, or maybe it was because when there was any, it seemed so artificial.

Julia is an avid Buffy/Angel fan and we both loved Firefly, so you’d have thought that one of us might like it! This makes me wonder if any of you managed to get along with it?

Either way, I don’t think I’ll bother with the second series, not unless there’s a serious drought in terms of anything to watch!

Central Heating Day

2009-10-01T11:08:05Z

I thought I’d share this article from the Beeb about central heating and how it’s impacted society:

The first of October is “central heating day”, when many people switch on their radiators for the winter. Central heating is just another mod-con of contemporary living, but it’s done much more than warm us up.

…

“People don’t wear clothing to keep warm any more. One of the social norms is that people can go around in shirt sleeves at home or in the office. So central heating has changed the way people think about clothing.

“Rather than put extra clothes on, they put the heating on. It used to be that if it got cold, you put a jersey on and if it got warm you opened a window. People don’t have an expectation that they will have to change the way they behave in cold weather.”

[Link]

Camping in Devon

2011-05-05T18:10:56Z

Weekend before last Julia and I, along with Julia’s sister Laura, took a long weekend to go and visit their Aunt Denise new Tavistock in Devon. Due to a shortage of guest space in her Cottage, Julia and I camped out whilst Laura stayed indoors.

I’ve still not managed to sell Julia on camping and this was about as good as camping was likely to get, amenities such as a nice shower and loo in the Cottage, pleasant weather, wood fire, lovely views and about as private as you can get. At this point I think I’ll give up. Of course this means I need some camping buddies so if any of you fancy going camping at some point, let me know.

Our ‘Holiday’ wasn’t entirely a selfish endeavour though. Julia’s Aunt became a widow this year and we were partly there to help out around the house and get stuff done that she couldn’t do easily on her own. This mostly consisted of moving slabs of rock from one end of the garden to the other and attempting a sort of poor man’s crazy paving. It didn’t turn out great but it was an improvement which is about as much as you can ask for, we’re not exactly builders after all!

All told it was a lovely break and really nice to have a fire, it’s been a long time since I had a camp-fire going. Coming back to work on Monday was a bit of a shock to the system.

I’ve uploaded the pictures to my gallery.

Random Pubbing from 12th September

2009-09-23T09:00:55Z

Ok so I’m very behind on this, but I’ve just uploaded the photos from the 12th of September when we went to the pub. Why? Well, because we can and we hadn’t been to the pub with Julia’s friends for a while.

We started off in the Fitzroy Tavern then sauntered down to the Intrepid Fox, many many many beers were drank, in the end we bailed at 10pm … 8 hours in the pub is enough for anyone!

Pictures from the evening :

765

Zombie State!

2011-09-21T17:05:06Z

Tom, one of the developers here has been working on some Silverlight stuff recently and has just hit the most amusing error message we’ve seen, I thought I’d share :

It’s quite appropriate for Monday when most of us feel like zombies

Using Reserved Words in VB.Net

2011-09-21T17:07:35Z

Normally when declaring variables in a programming language there are certain reserved keywords that can’t be used as variable names because they are part of the language syntax. This never really caused a problem when I was coding Amstrad BASIC as a teenager, but as language complexity increased, the amount of reserved words can start to get irksome. In fact one of the little mentioned advantages of using Hungarian Notation in variable naming was not needing to worry about hitting any reserved words. e.g

sData
iType
dDate

These days .Net standards seem to be moving away from Hungarian, or at least there are very vocal advocates for doing so, this has lead me back down the path of hitting reserved words again.

Well it turns out that there’s a solution that’s been around forever and I’ve only just stumbled across it. Closing something in square brackets in VB will allow you to escape the reserved word, following the same standard you see in SQL Server.

So now I can say :

Dim [Type] as String

Dim [Object] as Integer

all without the compiler exploding. Great eh? Well, I’m not so sure really. Whilst this is a nice little work around that I might use once in a while, I think that overuse could turn your code into a maintenance nightmare. If you’re trying to debug a Sub or Function, the first thing you need to do read it and understand what it’s doing, by making your code less readable and more difficult for another programmer to intuit, you’re reducing the maintainability of your code. And it’s not just another programmer you need to worry about, let’s face it, it’s probably going to be you sitting there 12 months later, wondering WTF you were thinking when you wrote the code. Here’s an extreme :

    Public Sub Main()
        Dim [Dim], [If], [Then], [Next], [For], [Public] As Integer

        For [Then] = 0 To [If] Step +[For]
            If [If] > [Public] Then
                [Next] = [If] + [Then]
                [Dim] = [Then]
            End If
        Next [Then]
    End Sub

Great for code obfuscation, not so good for making your own life easier. In fact, I wonder how the .Net Reflector would deal with the above? Not very well it seems :

Public Sub Main()
    Dim For As Integer
    Dim If As Integer
    Dim VB$t_i4$L1 As Integer = [For]
    Dim VB$t_i4$L0 As Integer = [If]
    Dim Then As Integer = 0
    Do While (((VB$t_i4$L1 >> &H1F) Xor [Then]) <= ((VB$t_i4$L1 >> &H1F) Xor VB$t_i4$L0))
        Dim Public As Integer
        If ([If] > [Public]) Then
            Dim Next As Integer = ([If] + [Then])
            Dim Dim As Integer = [Then]
        End If
        [Then] = ([Then] + VB$t_i4$L1)
    Loop
End Sub

Well there you go, if you want to write an Obfuscation program, reserved words are the way to do it. But let’s face it, I really don’t see myself using this very often. I might define the odd variable [Type] for my classes but that’s probably going too far when ‘MyClassType’ would work just as well for naming.

Busy Week at work

2011-05-06T10:09:06Z

I’ve promised myself that I’ll be blogging a bit more, but frankly this week has killed me. I’ve barely had time to eat and sleep, let alone blog. But on the other hand, that does make for a good topic!

I can’t go into too much detail about work as this is a public post, but I think I do need to vent at some point so I think I’ll make a protected post here so I can unload without fear of losing my job or breaching any NDAs. Not that I really have anything bad to say, but I do need to be more careful these days. Bloggers are getting themselves into trouble over all sorts lately.

Basically, this week has been the final week before our next software build at Mortgage Brain. It’s now public knowledge that we’ve been working on a complete re-write of our sourcing system, called ‘Broker’. When I came back to MBL it was to work on the .Net team and that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing for the last 6 months and it’s all coming to a head because this is the last build before we start giving it to real users to test.

So it’s all systems go. Everyone on the .Net team is working 24/7 to get everything ready and the pressure is on. But frankly, I love times like this, I’ve always said on my CV that I work well under pressure and whilst it sounds like one of those throw-away statements, it’s completely true with me. I’ve been working like a demon and thoroughly enjoying it, smoothing off the rough edges of the products I’ve been working on.

It’s not without toll though, there’s only so hard you can work before you hit the point of diminishing returns. Sure you can work for 3 days solid without sleep, but the code you produce at the end of it is going to be the worst thing you’ve ever written and it’s not likely to work. Over the years I’ve gotten better at spotting those moments, when you should just call it a day.

Anyway, this weekend is one of those moments, I must admit I did work again yesterday for most of the day, in between some shopping, but the rest of this weekend is now pure relaxation. I’m off to Greenwich this afternoon for a picnic with friends, then we’re hitting the pub for the pub quiz, then back to Royal Arsenal for all night movies until we pass out.

Next week is going to be busy again as the Thursday deadline approaches, but that’s next week, Carpe Diem

Digital Measuring Cup

2009-08-13T10:36:21Z

How cool is this?

I’m totally going to buy one of these when they’re released. I’m all about the kitchen gadgets!

(Link via Snesgirl)

Twitter

2009-08-04T13:08:51Z

One of the reasons I moved over to using WordPress was that I could better manage my content, especially as it seemed that people on LJ were getting annoyed with the Daily-Tweets thing. Having moved over, I’ve used a number of plugins to both post a summary of Twitter entries and synchronize actual blog entries with more content back to Livejournal.

All of this has been working well, but I was looking at my WordPress today and again, it’s just a long list of cloned entries “Today in bullet points …” ad nausea. This looks rubbish if you’re visiting my blog directly (rather than you LJ people who are spared!), so I’ve decided to change it again.

My Twitter tool is now in Weekly Digest mode rather than in Daily mode, which should coincide better with my posting frequency and reduce the signal:noise that’s going on here.

If you’re thinking “Why import tweets at all?”, then the answer is simple: As I don’t blog as much as I used to, I would like to keep at least some method of logging my day-to-day drudgery for reference. So whilst it’s not incredibly important by it’s very nature, it still might be something that I would want to look back on a few years down the road. So I want to archive this stuff somewhere in my control at least. I just don’t want to bore people with it

Of course if you do use Twitter then feel free to follow me (user: Fluffydave), but hopefully it’ll be less intrusive on this blog in the future.

My Life According to Manowar!

2009-07-30T10:13:09Z

It’s been forever since I’ve written a meme, this one has been doing the rounds and it appealed :

Instructions
Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to 15 people, including me. You can’t use the band I used. Try not to repeat a song title. It’s a lot harder than you think! Repost as “my life according to (band name)”

Pick your Artist: Manowar

Are you a male or female:
Manowar

Describe yourself:
Heart of Steel

How do you feel:
Nessun Dorma (Seriously, they covered it!)

Describe where you currently live:
Hail to England

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?
Valhalla

Your favourite form of transportation:
Wheels of Fire
Your best friend:
Defender

You and your best friends are:
Brothers of Metal

What’s the weather like:
Master of the Wind

Favourite time of day:
Each Dawn I Die

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:
Fighting the World

What is life to you:
Fight Until We Die

Your relationship:
Glory Majesty Unity

Your fear:
Bridge of Death

What is the best advice you have to give:
Carry On

Thought for the Day:
Blow Your Speakers

How would you Like to Die:
Violence and Bloodshed

Your soul’s present condition:
My Spirit Lives On

Your motto:
Today Is a Good Day to Die

Touristy stuff in London

2009-07-27T16:31:17Z

On Saturday, a friend of mine from Eve, Schempazoid Jones, stopped over in London for an afternoon. In that he normally resides in San Jose, I made the effort to hook up with him and drag him around the capital sight-seeing. I’ve ‘known’ Schemp for years now, almost since I’d started playing Eve, this is mainly because when I first started playing, I would be up all night obsessing over the game. So in spite of the fact that he’s in the time zone where I should be asleep namely: midnight to eight in the morning, we were still online at much the same times.

Anyhow, we met up on Saturday in the City at around five in the afternoon and proceeded to attempt to cram as much touristy stuff in as a humanly possible and the Summer Sun would allow. Even though just about everything was closed we still managed to stroll around the Lloydds Building, then the Tower of London, over Tower Bridge, down past City Hall, then Southwark Cathedral, The Golden Hind Replica, back over the Thames via London Bridge to the Monument, past the London Stone down to St Paul’s Cathedral, across the Millennium Bridge, then further downstream to the London Eye and the Houses of Parliament.

Out of all of this the only attraction that was open late enough was the London Eye, so we forked up the princely sum of £17 quid and proceeded to queue for half an hour, which was surprisingly fast considering how crowded the whole area was with tourists. Our timing was great and we managed to get on the Wheel during Sunset, I’d been on the Wheel once before but I’d forgotten that it’s actually quite good, if over-priced.

By this point it was nine O’clock and we were deservedly knackered, so we grabbed a pub up to Tottenham Court Road to a quiet Fuller’s pub called the Jack Horner, it’s not an amazing pub but they do some nice ales and it’s one of the few places near Oxford Street on a Saturday night that’s guaranteed to be quiet. I ended up drinking discovery, having worked up a powerful thirst, I managed to evaporate the first pint in about 60 seconds without realizing.

We hung out for the rest of the night, at one point a pair of wrecked Spanish looking guys came into the pub and were asking as directions to St James’s Park, pointing at a tube map that they were holding upside down. I remember telling them that it’s better to get a bus down there and they stumbled out, clearly not having listened to a word I said.

I didn’t think anything of it until closing time when we were politely ushered out of the pub and Schemp said he couldn’t find his iPod Touch. We searched in vain for 15 mins before coming to the conclusion that it must have been the Spanish guys, using the old “wave a map in your face, nick your mobile” con. With the variant of a third member leaning over the back of the bench and nicking it whilst we were being distracted by the map-wielding ‘drunkards’. It’s annoying because we both knew about this con and yet still fell for it, damn you beer, damn you and your soothing, foamy embrace.

So we left things on a bit of a downer and a lesson learned in leaving stuff on the pub table, I hadn’t lost anything personally but I still felt guilty as hell that I’d managed to get a mate robbed.

Sunday was mostly spent feeling a bit hungover not achieving anything other than the washing.

I’ll throw up some pictures in a bit but they’re nothing to shout about.

Beers Tonight in London

2009-07-25T09:54:22Z

An Eve friend of mine is over from California tonight and we’re heading into London to grab a few beers, I’ve not particularly decided on where, depends on his priorities really, if he fancies good beers then we might find a Fuller’s pub somewhere, maybe the Jack Horner off of Tottenham Court Road, or we might head to the Fox.

If you fancy meeting up tonight then gimme a call on my mobile, the number is in my bio on this blog, or on the first post on my LJ.

Google Latitude

2009-07-24T11:44:13Z

I’ve been using Latitude now since it was released and to be honest it seems very much like a social network thing. I.e. you get more out of it when more of your friends use it, until then it’s just a bit of show off tech that has no massive use.

Right now I only have a few friends using it but I’ve seen a glimmer of it being useful on two occasions:

The first was meeting one of these friends in the pub. Said friend was late and I could see exactly where they were and work out how long it would take to get there. The other time was a reversal of this, they were already at the pub and I used it to hone in on exactly where the pub was located.

The other time I found it useful was when I was in London for the day and noticed I happened to be nearby someone, so I messaged them and asked if they were free for lunch, seeing as we were a stone’s throw away.

So kinda useful but I’m not blown away yet. Is there anyone else out there using latitude? If so, then feel free to add me to your friends list using my google mail account (See the Contact details on this blog or the first post on my LJ) or throw me a message.

Also if you are a latitude user have you found any real uses for it that I’m missing?

Freedom to Photograph

2011-05-06T10:10:58Z

I don’t normally bang on about this sort of stuff, but for the last couple of years the harassment of ordinary people taking photographs has been something that was on my radar as a worrying trend on which to keep an eye.

During this time I’ve read numerous articles describing how the police have been misusing their powers to delete people’s photographs and interfere with them under the blanket of the Terrorism Act, train-spotters and plane spotters, even tourists having their holiday snaps removed. The fact that they aren’t allowed to do this doesn’t seem to matter when social compliance gets involved in the issue, people just see the uniform and get intimidated into doing whatever the police want them to do.

Why does this bother me? Well I’m certainly not a hippy type nor am I really fussed about public protest and all that malarky, but I’m certainly the type to whip out a camera and take photographs of things, mostly for this blog and sometimes just for general amusement. I generally have a digital camera with me or at least my mobile phone and I don’t want to get into the situation where I have to have an argument with a police officer because I want to photograph the late trains or whatever.

Anyway the good news is that some sense seems to be finally prevailing. The Met have just published more guidance to their officers basically explaining what they can and can’t do, it’s well worth reading through and knowing your rights. Personally I’ve only had good experiences with the police but it never hurts to know your rights.

Here’s a copy of the Met’s Photography advice taken from Here :

Guidance around the issue has been made clear to officers and PCSOs through briefings and internal communications. The following advice is available to all officers and provides a summary of the Metropolitan Police Service’s guidance around photography in public places.
Freedom to photograph/film

Members of the public and the media do not need a permit to film or photograph in public places and police have no power to stop them filming or photographing incidents or police personnel.

Photography and Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000

The Terrorism Act 2000 does not prohibit people from taking photographs or digital images in an area where an authority under section 44 is in place.

Officers have the power to view digital images contained in mobile telephones or cameras carried by a person searched under S44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, provided that the viewing is to determine whether the images contained in the camera or mobile telephone are of a kind, which could be used in connection with terrorism. Officers also have the power to seize and retain any article found during the search which the officer reasonably suspects is intended to be used in connection with terrorism.

Photography and Section 43 of the Terrorism Act 2000

Officers have the power to view digital images contained in mobile telephones or cameras carried by a person searched under S43 of the Terrorism Act 2000 to discover whether they have in their possession anything which may constitute evidence that they are involved in terrorism. Officers also have the power to seize and retain any article found during the search which the officer reasonably suspects may constitute evidence that the person is involved in terrorism.

Section 58a of the Terrorism Act 2000

Section 58a of the Terrorism Act 2000 covers the offence of eliciting, publishing or communicating information about members of the armed forces, intelligence services or police.

Any officer making an arrest for an offence under Section 58a must be able to demonstrate a reasonable suspicion that the information was of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.

It should ordinarily be considered inappropriate to use Section 58a to arrest people photographing police officers in the course of normal policing activities, including protests, as without more, there is no link to terrorism.

There is however nothing preventing officers asking questions of an individual who appears to be taking photographs of someone who is or has been a member of Her Majesty’s Forces (HMF), Intelligence Services or a constable.

Broadband

2009-07-03T16:19:57Z

Thanks to people who mentioned various providers, after having a good look around this morning and checking out a few people who I wouldn’t have really thought to look at, I opted to go back to Be.

‘Be’ get a lot of stick from some people, mainly the whole ‘up to 24mb’ thing that every ISP is guilty of, but when I was with them a couple of years ago I found their service to be brilliant, especially when you complain to them that your ADSL isn’t fast enough, they take that sort of thing very seriously. My only real gripe with ‘Be’ was that they were pricey.

Previously I was paying 24 pounds a month but due to the quality of of the wiring in my old flat, I only got around 8-9mb down and that was really pushing the modem to the point of desyncing, so it was paying a lot for not much. However ‘Be’ introduced a scaled down deal of 8mb for £13.50 a month which is much easier on the wallet especially for those of us who are stuck paying tax to BT for the privilege of having a wire in our house.

Anyhow, decision made, I sorted it all out on the internet this afternoon. About 3 hours later I got an email saying that my activation date is 9th of July. This time next week, I’ll be back in the digital age.

Home Phone

2011-05-06T10:12:26Z

BT connected our home phone yesterday, so I can finally sort out broadband. For those interested, I’ve updated my contact details which you can find as one of the links on the top of this blog. Either email me for the password, or you can find it in the first post on my livejournal.

The good news is that this means I can get broadband rolling. I’ve got a strong leaning towards Tiscali right now, for the past year they’ve not only been the cheapest provider but have given us 100% uptime (seriously) and a solid 8mb connection, I’ve also downloaded about 1.5Tb through them without even a hint of complaint!

I’m open to any suggestions on broadband provider though, they need to be cheap and not quibble about lots of data usage. Any thoughts?

Moving House

2011-05-06T10:16:54Z

If you’ve been keeping track of my micro-blogging on the subject, you’re probably well aware of the fact that we’ve just moved house, we actually did the moving on Thur 25th last week, but it’s only now that I’ve had a chance to sit down and blog a bit.

I’m currently sitting in our new garden today, working from home. We don’t have broadband set up at the moment but I can connect to the internet using my Nokia E71 as a modem, which isn’t too bad. For once we get excellent mobile signal in this house including 3G. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the speeds I’m getting, it’s certainly possible to VPN to the office network and get stuff done.

The house move was horrible but went as smoothly as I could have hoped, just very hard work in some serious heat. Although compared to this week’s heat, I guess you can say it was merely hot, rather than the current eye melting inferno. The main problem was the distance, getting from Finchley Central to Epsom is not a pleasant journey, you either choose to wend your way through some of the most congest parts of London, i.e. the North and South Circulars or you double the distance travelled and spin out via the M25, which is currently undergoing road works in that area.

So as some of you guessed, my estimates were waaaay out. It took us 2.5 hours to get to Epsom in the car to pick up the van so we were already an hour behind schedule by the time we put our bottoms in the Luton. At this point we decided that the really important part was the contents of the house rather than the sofas at my Aunt’s so we postponed the Romford leg of the operation until the evening and concentrated on the actual moving of everything else.

Julia was pretty nervous about driving a Luton, being used to the Honda and an Automatic no less, so we opted for the M25 which we reckoned would be more van friendly and Julia would be less likely to kill us both But it was all fine in the end, the Van we’d rented was a Ford Transit type and was both more comfy and had more power than Julia’s car so was quite pleasant.

When it came to filling up the van, Julia mostly loaded and I mostly brought stuff out of the house. Thanks to the awesome job of packing we’d done, it was a smooth operation although we were getting VERY tight on space, it took 2 hours to load the van and when we were done we could barely roll down the door because we’d crammed so much in. Yes that’s right, between the two of us we have so much crap that we’re probably a two Luton trip!!

We managed to get back to Epsom with the fully loaded van at around 4pm, having made some seriously good time coming back. Unloading proved to be a lot harder. Mainly because I’d spent myself loading the van, so I was feeling pretty tired already, couple that with stairs, up which virtually all of our stuff and furniture needed to go and a front door that doesn’t quite open up all the way and we were both seriously exhausted by the time we’d unloaded. It didn’t help that we couldn’t get the Wardrobes up the stairs thanks to a seriously awkward banister/handrail layout on the stairs. So we ended up throwing most stuff in the living room.

Shattered and having been on the go since around 6:30am, we sat down and snacked on some pasta I’d made earlier in the week, then had a little power nap on the bean bags. Bean bags are amazing for this and we have two fun-fur covered giant bean bags which were a present from Dan and Tarah last year. They are like sleeping on a big monster’s belly. Think Sully from Monsters Inc.

With the evening’s rush hour out of the way we shambled back to the van and sped anti-clockwise around the M25 to Romford and the sofas which we’d bought off of my little brother, sofas which neither of us had seen. All we knew is that they were black, huge and originally cost about 1700 quid. With help from my aunt and uncle we managed to get them out of her dinning room and into the van. I say we, but I played very little part in this, as soon as I tried to pick up my end of the first sofa, I realized that I’d over done it and strained my forearms, my fingers were all locking into my palms and had to be forcibly straightened out. So I valiantly let Julia do the hard work!

Then back around a mostly deserted M25 to Epsom. It was around 10:30/11:00 when we made it back. At this point we could barely stand let alone try to unload, so we called it a night and left the sofas in there, we didn’t have to return the van until 9am the next day.

Life took a turn for the worst when we tried to have showers before bed, the mixer tap came off in Julia’s hand, meaning we could barely work the taps and couldn’t get more than a trickle of water. Filthy, we had no option but to wash as best we could at the sink then collapse into bed.

Friday morning brought the anticipated revelation that we couldn’t fit the sofas through the front door. If the door was able to open fully, we’d have done it, but alas the door being mobility challenged was a no go. Luckily our new place has a path around to the rear of the house, we manhandled the sofas around the back and got them in through the back door instead.

We returned the van without incident, we’d done well over 200 miles, and it only cost 40 quid to fill the van’s tank up to full again, so it turned out to be a great cost saver. The rental cost 90 pounds for 24 hours, so this aspect of the move cost £130, waaay cheaper than hiring people, which is usually in the order of 200-300 quid. In fact it wouldn’t have been possible to hire anyone for this move, we’d have paid a fortune just sitting in traffic, let alone picking up stuff from different parts of Greater London.

The rest of Friday was spent feeling sorry for ourselves and unpacking. To our chagrin, the wardrobes couldn’t fit up the stairs no matter what angle or approach we took. There was nothing left to do but bust out the electric screwdriver and dismantle them to get them up the stairs. These wardrobes haven’t been disassembled since 1992 when my mother bought them, so this was a challenge and a half, and I was worried that they wouldn’t go back together. Mercifully they did, but I don’t think I can get away with doing that more than a couple of times.

We managed to get most of the living room and the kitchen unpacked on Friday. We at least got all the right boxes in the right rooms. By 6pm we had lost the will to do anything other than sit on the new sofas and get a kebab for dinner.

On Saturday we had to traipse all the way back to North London again for the cleaning marathon. The problem with renting a big, old, garden flat is that there is a LOT to clean and it’s the sort of cleaning that takes a long time. We started at 9 and didn’t finish until around 3-4pm. By which point we’d gardened, washed, hoovered, polished and scrubbed the place to an immaculate shine. Cleaning the extractor fan filter is something that will stay with me for a long time, I gagged as I peeled the yellow, fat encrusted material out of the hood. *shudder*

And on Sunday we rested (haha). I did unpack one box of DVDs, and one of Julia’s friends popped around for lunch, but that was the extent of our efforts and the rest was well needed, we’d been on the go for about 4 days solid and frankly, hard work scares the both of us so we were physical wrecks at this point.

So that’s about that, I’ve still got to unpack my study but I can’t really do anything until I buy a new desk. Pog’s old desk finally gave up the ghost last week when I tried to dismantle it to find that most of the screws were threaded and the whole thing was no longer stable, so I kicked it to pieces and we took it to the dump. Alas this means I have nothing to put any of my computer equipment on, so there’s no point in even trying to do anything with it. Hopefully we can find a nice desk somewhere locally for less than a million pounds. I can live another week without PCs though, especially seeing as we have no broadband so it’s a little pointless anyway.

I’ll post up some pictures of the new place as soon as I can find the bloody charger for my camera.

My updated contact details are on this blog, the usual password.

Today in bullet points

2009-06-24T11:51:00Z

On our way to Epsom to do the inventory and sign contracts. I get to see the house for the first time. W00t! #

Moving Day Plans

2009-06-23T12:34:47Z

We’ve been making plans for moving house on Thursday, looks like it’s going to be a busy day :

07:00 – Finchley -> Epsom (1hr 9mins via A406 + Rush Hour)
09:00 – Pick up Keys from Estate Agent (10mins)
09:10 – Pick up rental van (20mins)
09:30 – Epsom -> Romford (1hr 23mins via M25)
11:00 – Pick up New Sofas from Aunt’s (30mins)
11:30 – Romford -> Epsom (1hr 23mins via M25)
13:00 – Unload Sofas to new house (30mins)
13:30 – Epsom -> Finchley (1hr 9mins via A406)
15:00 – Load Van (1hr)
16:00 – Finchley -> Highgate (15mins)
16:15 – Unload Cabinet + Stuff at Julia’s Mums (15mins)
16:30 – Highgate -> Epsom (1hr 9mins via A406 + Rush Hour)
18:00 – Unload Van (1hr)
19:00 – Begin unpacking
01:00 – Collapse
09:00 – Return Van Rental

*Note that I’ve assumed an extra half hour on top of the journey time at each journey for traffic.

Red Cliff

2009-06-22T10:13:53Z

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I went into this film, not knowing much about it or what to expect, but on the back of films such as Hero, House of Flying Daggers and Crouching Tiger, I was expecting amazingly artistic visuals, plenty of wire work and some brilliant fight scenes.

These elements were certainly present in the film, but John Woo was completely unable to pull it off. The CGI scenes were flawless, with seamless transitions that you knew must have happened but can’t spot. There’s one continuous shot where a dove flies from the Red Cliff fortress, through the defending armada, across the water, through the opposing armada, into the enemy camp which is a stunning example.

Sadly the rest of the film is a bit of a let down. Within 15 minutes Julia had called it, but I wanted to press on in the hope that somewhere in the next 2 hours, the film would pick up, I was mistaken.

The problem is content and pace. They introduce no less than 9 main characters in the film, the various heroes and leaders of the various armies, and it takes a while to mentally sort them all out into who is who and where they fit into the plot. This costs plenty of time and it’s easy to see why the film is two hours long as each hero gets his character developed. This all adds to the glacial pace, with long scenes where nothing really happens except for heavily veiled conversations around the plot. In some other films this would be touching and artistic, but here it seems laboured and self-indulgent. It’s almost like John Woo is an American trying to imitate a Chinese high fantasy film whilst wanting to make an action film and they really don’t mix.

By the time I got to the ‘To be continued‘, I wasn’t entirely sure if I could be bothered to sit through another two hours of boredom. Watching Red Cliff was like watching John Woo masturbate for 2 hours, like many other of his films without the exciting pace.

Russell and Sarah’s Wedding

2011-05-06T10:22:01Z

Saturday we headed to rural Surrey for Russ and Sarah’s wedding.

We were up early, on an emergency mission to Brent Cross shopping centre for both wedding presents and a dress for Julia. We bottled out on the wedding present and just got vouchers rather than anything bulkier and Julia managed to find a nice green dress in M&S, so success on all fronts.

The wedding was at 3:30 so we were feeling confident when we stepped out of the door at 1:30, after all Google Maps indicated that the journey was an hour and a half. It turns out that in spite of streetview, Google have clearly never been to London before and we smacked straight into traffic getting onto the A406, then onto the M4 then onto the M25 and then again in Dorking.

At one point whilst sat stationary on the M25, we gave up all hopes of turning up on time and sent a text to Spencer, Russ’s brother and best man, to tell him that we were going to miss the church. Amazingly though and thanks to some speedy driving by Julia we managed to hit the church at around 3:40, driving past just as the Bridal procession entered. We parked with haste and stealthily entered the crowded church just in time to see Sarah walk the aisle.

The wedding itself proceeded without hitch in spite of some temperamental children and possibly the worse organist I’ve ever heard, she even managed to mess up the Wedding March in places.

Then it was back to Russ’s parents house down the road where they had set up a huge marquee in the garden. We mingled whilst sipping Pimm’s and Champaign and caught up with Ian and Laurelei who I’ve pretty much fallen out of touch with over the years. It was nice to see their kids playing around and see how they’ve turned into parents over the years. We were also handily positioned for the canope’s which were really nice, particular favourites were the goat’s cheese and char grilled vetetables and the baked Camembert wrapped in Black Forrest ham. YUM!

All of this took place whilst a steel drum band played. Now when I first heard there’d be a steel drum band, I didn’t think I’d be overly keen on it, but these guys were brilliant and for an hour, they busted out many family favourite tunes from Abba to Lionel Richie, they were brilliant.

It was time for the wedding breakfast and we were all ushered into the marquee and took our places. People were mixed up from their normal cliques which went down fine by me but some of the people on our table were clearly uncomfortable at being with strangers and no amount of coaxing would get them to open up. I thought that was a nice touch to help people mingle a bit.

Another minor break in tradition was cutting the cake before the meal and speeches. I’m not 100% sure why but I think it was so the cake could be served with the coffee after dessert. The cake was a really nice sponge with strawberry and cream wrapped in icing and marzipan, anyway I’m getting ahead of myself.

The meal started with dressed crab and for main was a bbq consisting of spit roast lamb, chicken, sweetcorn and salad and was really nice and we ate with gusto and drunk as though wine was water. Alas wine is not water and it wasn’t long before we were a bit tipsy, Julia was especially merry and in danger of being unable to form coherent sentences, so we switched to emergency water and started pacing ourselves. In time for the desert of Eton mess which was sadly more glass than mess but was still very nice.

The speeches were great, but the star of the speeches was Spencer. His best man’s speech was a triumph demonstrating ‘how things should be done’, involving props and a reading from Russ’s autobiography written when he was 12.

After some much needed coffee and the wedding cake, the reception moved into disco mode. Sadly we don’t have many pictures from the evening as the camera wasn’t coping well with the low light conditions and the huge size of the marquee. By this point we were flagging having peaked a bit early, and after a couple of beers we were feeling that it was time to head to the hotel. I was feeling guilty about sloping off early, but when I realized that it was after 11, I felt a better.

A shuttle service had been arranged with the local cab company, which was really appreciated at we were out in the middle of nowhere with virtually no phone reception, cash points or street lights. After pitch-black foray to the car and back to get our overnight bags we were on our way to the hotel which I’d booked.

It turned out to be one of the worst hotels which I’d ever stayed in and I say that as someone who spent the first year of his career travelling around Europe, in a different city every week at one point. The front of house was all old wood and very 5 star looking but our room was at the back of the hotel in a courtyard comprised of the most cheaply built chalets since portakabins were invented. The rooms were tiny, without ventilation but they were clean. In short I wouldn’t recommend the Russ Hill Hotel, ever. The breakfast was ok though and much needed.

We popped in to Russ’s parents this morning who were having an open house brunch, but we only really stayed to drop off our Wedding gift and say out congratulations in a more relaxed environment. Then it was back on the road again.

All in all it was a lovely day and I’m really happy for the both of them. I’ve uploaded our photos to my gallery, sadly they aren’t great. I blame the alcohol and low light Just click on any of the pictures