Wow, I’ve just looked at my blog and haven’t posted anything since Nov 2009?! ? WTF is that all about anyhow? Lets see, what’s happened since my last posting? Well, I’ve returned from South Africa It was a great trip, ran longer then originally planned but it was good.
We’ve all suffered through Christmas and of course New Years, so Happy New Year eh?
Well, that brings us to today now. I’ve converted back to Windows (it was a sad day yesterday). I’d finally had enough of Ubuntu. It was a series of issues that forced me back to Windows … apps that stopped working, funny things happening since upgrading from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10, that was a mistake for sure and generally speaking I just grew tired of missing functionality in Ubuntu when everyone you deal with uses Windows. Oh well. I’m not running Windows 7, 64-Bit, finally making full use of the hardware in my laptop. The only “issue” I have right now is Win 7 doesn’t seem to support the ACPI power management stuff.. so, as a result when I pull the power and run on battery the only performance tuning that happens is the screen dims but the CPU’s run full out and thus drain the battery at an alarming rate. I’m sure I’ll find the correct drivers for that issue at some point.
There’s not really much else to report I suppose. As usual, check out the photos on our flickr account for new photos and videos. Such as this one, Lisa playing her piano..
I hope I’ll have some more interesting things to blog about in the future.. just sort of lost the desire to blog.. hoping it comes back.
We are back home now and glad we decided to not to stay an extra night. The threat of possible bad weather (rain) was enough to send us packing today as was originally planned. On the way home we drove through a hell of a rain storm that brought along with it a 10 or 11 degree drop in temperature. It went from 22C to 11C in about 5 mins.
I’ve finally got the photos posted on Flickr now. The easiest way to see them all is by going to the Camping 2009 Collection. You can see we had a great time
While we were away I was blogging using my Nokia N97 phone with the use of Wordmobi (Wordpress Blogging Tool) and QuickOffice 6. Entering text into Wordmobi is fine but there’s no spell check available in the tool. So, the process I used was to write up the posting content in QuickOffice and saved as a Word Document. Once it was complete and spell checked I’d copy the text and paste it into Wordmobi. This then allowed me to post direct to the blog and add the tags and whatever I wanted. All in all this process was very good and worked well for me. I had my laptop with me including my datacard and power source but never once turned it on during the week we were away. I was able to do everything I needed to using my phone. Other apps I used were the Facebook App that came installed on the phone and my favorite Twitter App – Gravity. I would have been online using Nimbuzz, but for some reason I just couldn’t get authenticated, but it worked fine from home, not sure what happened there.
I’ve received a lot of positive comments from people via various paths about my blog postings while away. Thanks for the comments and thanks for reading them too!
I really must try to blog more often… perhaps with the new found process using my phone I will feel more like it. Since moving from Windows to Linux full time on my laptop it’s not as convienent to use my one beloved Windows too, Windows Live Writer … truely a great application for blogging on Wordpress sites.
Thank again for following our holiday and reading the site.
Right, well Easter is actually over, but I’m doing a blog posting now really just to put the pics of the kids online more then anything. The day was good, it started way to early though. Man the kids were up at the crack of dawn, if only it were the crack of dawn in the UK and not for say India .. shesh.
Thankfully, Yuki’s dad is here staying with us and he was looking after the kids.. Yuki and I managed to sleep in until nearly 9am, which was nice. In fact, we managed to sleep in until nearly 10am Friday and Saturday. I can’t even begin to recall sleeping in that late when vast amounts of alcohol was the direct cause of it. So can’t really complain much.
Anyhow, the day started with breakfast as usual.. then we sent the kids up stairs with their lao ye (grandfather in Chinese, it’s more specific then that, but trust me, you don’t want me to open that can of worms here and now ). Yuki and I took to hiding all the stuff for the kids.. candy, chocolate eggs, bunny’s, all sorts of rubbish haha. Then it was time to unleash the kids..
First, here is a quick tour of the hiding places of all the candy
Here’s a video of the “hunt” under way .. I love Emma’s comment at one point “I’ve got so many…”
Here are a few pics…
You can see all the pics and videos taken today by CLICKING HERE.
Enjoy the pics and videos. I hope to do more blogging in the future.. I’ve been pretty slack at getting out updates, but life has been full of upheavals that… well… frankly made blogging a chore.
Besides, I’m booked to attend WordCamp UK in July. It’s the second year for the event and the first year I’m going … it’s a weekend full of meeting other bloggers, some who do it for a living but most because they enjoy it (I assume anyhow). With enjoy luck this event will encourage me to blog more, or even just give me loads of ideas to make my blogging better (which frankly wouldn’t take much, I know I suck at blogging).
Looking for a change in where we take the girls to play, I got on Google and starting searching for alternative indoor play areas for kids in Cambridgeshire. Normally we go to either Funky Fun House or Cheeky Monkeys. They’re both great fun the kids love them, but sometimes you just want to mix it up a little bit. So while searching for places I came across Activity World in Peterborough. It’s not too far and was a nice day so the drive was pleasant.
This place was an incredible size! The actual play area was easily 5 times bigger then Funky Fun House .. And so much more to do there. You can see from clicking on the link for Activity World they have more pics and videos on their site which is why I decided to go there and check it out.
Here are some pics I took on the day, there are more in our Flickr Gallery ..
So, while looking for a small and light weight stove for hiking / SOTA whatever I decided to pick up a Hexamine pocket stove and give it a try. I usually have a Camping Gaz type stove but it’s big, bulky and you need to carry compressed gas cartridges with it. These themselves are big, bulky and can’t really just be chucked in a bin when they are finished as they are still a risk of exploding.
I’d really like a MSR Whisperlite but they aren’t cheap, however, they are very versatile.. best you read about them on the manufactures website (click the link back there). At some point I’ll likely get one of these, but not right now.
For now I’ll have a go with this Hexamine stove. This the very same one I have picked up for £4.00
To night I decided to do some timing experiments to see how long it takes to boil water in both my crusader cup and a small aluminium kettle. The Crusader cup took 6m20sec to bring 1L of water to a boil and the Hexamine cube held the boil for 3 minutes. Might want it to boil longer if you were sterilizing water, but just pop another cube of Hexamine and it would be good for another 9 mins of burn time. The kettle, which has a lid, only took 4m30sec and the same 9 min burn time on the cube so that means 4m30sec of the water being held at a boil.
A couple of pics and a couple of videos can be seen below.. click to enlarge or see the videos.
Well, now just have to try it out in anger one day in the field
Well, that is to quote a line from 99 Luftballons (99 Red Balloons – English) by Nena. The fireworks held at Cottenham Primary School this year were great. The kids had a great time as well. It sure was cold though, only 9C but with the wind and being mostly exposed to the wind in the school grounds it was quite chilling and everyone was well cold by the end of the show.
You can see all the pics and the videos from the night by CLICKING HERE.
Well, Lisa had finally had her 5th birthday. We’ve been hearing about this since her 4th party ended, and no doubt we’ll be spending the next year listening to how soon her 6th birthday party will be coming along.
The kids both had a great day today. Lisa had to wait until about 1130 or so to open her gifts because we wanted to have the webcam on so Nana Shirley, Nana Carol and Grandpa Bob in Canada could watch the opening of the gifts. The web cast went ok but next year I really must try something better, a proper Vlog sort of thing.
Some pics of the main gift opening from this morning
At around 5pm our friends all came around with their kids (Yang with Oliver and Olivia, followed by Stuart (her partner), plus Sam and Liz with their kids Tabbie, Ted and the as yet unborn baby to be ). Yang and Stuart gave both Lisa and Emma a “Red Pack” a typical Chinese gift, a red pack with £10 for each of them. Liz and Sam brought over a pair of Groovy Girls dolls. We put Emma’s away until her birthday though.
Here are some pics from the party in the afternoon
You can see all the photos including a short video by going directly to the Flickr Photo Gallery.
Thanks to everyone that sent gifts for the kids. Lisa really enjoyed them all and I’m sure Emma will when she gets to open hers too! Watch this space for Emma’s birthday party results
It was a great trip, ran longer then originally planned but it was good.
Cambridge, UNITED KINGDOM
Entries (RSS)