The McKenzies' Blog…

This posting has been inspired by a recent posting (Take control of your notifications) from @sciencebase on his website “sciencetext”.  It does make sense to turn off unwanted notifications from websites, but if you do wish to receive them then you can take some simple steps to take control if your inbox.  Pretty much every mail service and mail client have built in filtering rules that can be used.   I’m going to show you how to configure mail filters in GMail since that’s where my email is hosted.

I’m always amazed at how many people NEVER use filters or have even heard of them.  I see this all the time in the work place as well as with friends.  People I have worked with that used Outlook never ever use rules to filter email out of the inbox and I’ve seen people with 80,000+ emails in their INBOX!!! That is, in a word, retarded!

Right, on to the important stuff …

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I find it rather frustrating that there aren’t any good ole coffee shops anymore. Sure, you can go on down to a Starbucks or a Costa Coffee or some other big name coffee vending place but there’s zero atmosphere in these places. In most cases it’s nearly impossible to just sit and chat in these places because of the noise due to how busy they are.

I remember some great coffee shops back in Canada and the US, the sort of places that comfy chairs and sofa’s with coffee tables, good cheap coffee and sort of atmosphere that allows friends to gather and chat.

Why am I righting about this?  Well, I went in to Cambridge today to meet up with a couple of friends, one of them picked an Italian Café called Café Milano, it’s more of a restaurant then a café but that was fine.  I was the first one there and asked about a table for 3 the bloke asked if we were planning to eat as he didn’t have tables available “just for coffee”.  Now, it was lunch time, but as a coffee shop it really struck me as odd that we wouldn’t be able to just sit and drink coffee.  As it was we’d decided to eat so all was “good” I guess.

That was what got me thinking about why there aren’t any just good ole coffee shops.   I’m sure they must still exist, perhaps the people that know about them keep quiet out of fear of them becoming popular and getting over run, and I suppose I couldn’t blame them for it.

I like the coffee shop in our village at the Cottenham Community Centre, they have a couple of comfy sofa’s which is nice, but they could do with a few more of them.  My only real complaint about the place though is because it’s an old Church, the very high ceilings do nothing for the noise levels in the place.  The coffee there is good and the nibbles are great, but the noise can really do your head in after a while.  They also have free WIFI, which I think these days is a bit of a must in coffee shops.

Anyhow, just a small rant to ask where all the friendly little coffee shops have gone to If you know of any and are willing to share, please let me know.

So, when I bought my Samsung Galaxy SII I’d already read that it can operate the USB port in “USB On-The-Go (OTG)” mode, meaning you could plug in USB devices to the phone to share the data, for example USB Flash Drives, Digital Camera’s, keyboards, mice, etc.  I wouldn’t say the list is endless as it depends on what drivers are required.  However, generally speaking most basic input devices and storage should be supported.  A note about the storage though, Android currently only supports up to 32GB FAT32 partitions, so keep this in mind when shoving storage onto your phone.

Continue reading ..

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This week was Lisa’s 8th birthday.   We only had a small party at home and gift opening since she wanted a birthday sleep over party.

On Friday we had 5 of her friends from school over for the a sleep over.  The party started with a trip to Pizza Hut in Cambridge for dinner.  The girls all picked whatever they liked off the kids menu.  Some had pizza and some had pasta. 

Check out the BIRTHDAY SONG VIDEO here

After making a huge mess at the restaurant (glad it wasn’t my house haha) we brought out the cake for her.  She picked the cake herself, Moshi Monsters.

After dinner, it was back to our house to open the gifts and some movies, snacks and play before “bed time” … that last bit was a lot harder then I’d expected haha. The girls were running and jumping around until nearly 1am before they finally tired themselves out.  This wasn’t for the lack of trying on my part to get them to sleep.  I must have been in and out the room two dozen times before they finally packed it in haha

In the morning they were up by around 7am and it was my turn to to feed them.  I made sausages and buttermilk pancakes (with real buttermilk too ).  They loved them.

There are the left over pancakes .. some got eaten at lunch and some where frozen for another day.

The girls all had fun (so I’ve been told), and Lisa really enjoyed herself and loved having her friends over.  All photos can be seen by CLICKING HERE

As much fun as it was, it won’t be happening again anytime soon   There would be other sleep overs but only 1 child at a time haha

Anyhow, Happy Birthday to Lisa!!  Next up, Emma’s party on the 6th of November… more on that later.

This is the final part to this ‘series’.  The final day with Red Cloud Days Photography course was better then the first day.  We were taken out to Wollaton Hall & Deer Park. The weather had cleared up a little, stopped raining and was even a little warmer then it was on Saturday, much the relief of everyone in the class.  There would be no need for the waterproofs I’d bought the day before

The intrepid explorers in the class and our fearless leader set out into the park

To carry on reading the rest of this post go ahead and click the link .. I’ve split this as it’s gonna be rather big for the front page of the blog. BTW, click on any photo to go to Flickr to see it in a bigger size. I’ve only kept the size down for faster load times.

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