The McKenzie's Blog…

Over the last few weeks this has come up at my work a few times and I’ve just been watching The Gadget Show on Five when they came up a segment on this exact topic.  I figure it’s all too coincidental to not blog about it.

This won’t work every time, but from my own experiences it has worked each time.  I’ve never personally filled a laptop with liquid or sunk a mobile phone (either I’m just more careful or really lucky), but I know a number of people that have done this.  So here is the advice I’ve given in all the cases an d it’s managed to work.  You must follow the advice closely and NOT try and rush the process!!!  I can’t say that enough, DO NOT RUSH THE PROCESS!!!

Here it goes.

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We’ve now been in Fredericton, NB for nearly a week now.  Only one more day before we pull out and head back to Ontario again.  It’s been a good week here and Nana Shirley has had a great time with the kids.  The kids have been staying with her in her condo while Yuki and I stayed in the guest suite they have in the building.  It’s been so nice for us not to have to wake up to the kids each morning hahah not sure Nana Shirley can say the same thing though   Mind you, she does have “Minnie” her little dog that needs to get up every morning about 5 for a walk outside.

I must get some more pics of the girls with Minnie as well.. but she’s pretty skittish of the kids (and adults too really).

Continue reading to see about the trip to St Andrews…. (photos from the day are in Canada – 2010 – Group 3.

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Well here we are, just about one week on in our holiday back in Canada.  It’s the first time in 6 years that I’ve been back home, and the first time ever for Emma to get over here.  We’ve had a pretty good first week.  Done a lot of shopping and a lot of driving.   We arrived on Saturday May 29th and were met at the airport by my father, from there we went back to his place just outside of Kingston. 

On the Sunday we went for a 90 min boat cruise around Kingston and Wolfe Island.  Here’s a couple of photos from the boat with Emma and Lisa taking turns at the helm (before leaving port haha)

We’d stayed until Monday morning when we packed up the van and headed out for Burlington VT.  We planned to stop here and shop, but clearly we made some wrong shopping choices as we didn’t find much in the way of bargains or much of any thing really.   Here we are crossing the bridges at Cornwall Ontario heading for the US.

Here we are taking the ferry across Lake Champlain that separates New York state and Vermont.

After a good nights sleep, but a stupid early wake up for some reason (still a bit jet lagged I guess), we got an early start on the second leg of the journey to New Brunswick to see Nana Shirley and the family in that part of the country.  We’re pretty well shopped out now I think   The girls have been spending money getting all kitted out for the wedding back in Kingston on the 14th of June.  I still need a shirt and tie but other then that we’re all set haha

When we arrived in New Brunswick it was starting to rain, and it rained for the next couple days.  Today we’ve had dry weather but it’s threatening to rain again for the next couple of days.   Saturday (June 5th, our wedding anniversary) we’re hoping to get an early start to the day and get down to St Andrews for sights and seafood, Yuki is a seafood-a-holic if ever there was one.  However, the weather forecast isn’t looking good for Saturday, so that might get pushed off until Monday.

Tonight we took the kids around to my cousin Gregg’s house to play with their 3 kids (Chanse, Dakota and Kendall), they were great and our girls had an awesome time playing with them.  That Kendall is a real cutie.  The kids had a great time running around and playing games.  I hope their kids sleep as well as I hope ours sleep haha.

Like usual, all the photos from our trip will be on Flickr.  They’ll all be in the Canada 2010 collection.

I’ll try to blog more as the trip goes, I’ve been time sharing the computer with Yuki so I don’t get to use it as much as I’d like

I decided to have a crack at making some Bannock Bread at home tonight.  It seems the time honoured thing to do when camping, so rather then risking a complete and total failure in a camp site (or wild camping) I figured I’d give it a go at home first.

I started with THIS recipe, with a couple of modifications.  Firstly I cut everything half.  The thought of destroying that much raw ingredients didn’t sit well with me, plus it might well have required a super heavy duty rubbish bin liner to dispose of it, let alone whatever the damage to the environment it would do haha

So, my mixture went like this:

Ingredients

• 1 cup flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
• 2 pinches salt
• water, at room temperature

Plus I added some raisins to add to the sweetness and flavour.  The kids loved them, and I thought they were pretty good too.  Didn’t even bother with adding butter or anything to them, they were soft and moist enough without the butter.

I was asked by the good folks over at MobileFun.co.uk to review their Wind Up Mobile Phone Charger w/ Torch. This was in response to a recent blog posting where I mentioned I want to do some Wild Camping, you can read Things I want to do …

Click on the photos to see the full size original photos

What they shipped me was in the box to the right, I’ve used a pen for size reference.  I was quite impressed with the size of the box to say the least.
	Inside the box were two bags, one with the charger/torch in it and the other has all the various bits to fit a multitude of mobile phones.
There is an extension cable that allows you to plug the adapters for the phones into the charger, which is nice, it suggests that perhaps in the future they could simply offer new tips to fit other devices (and not only mobile phones?)  The back page of the manual identifies the tips and the phones they fit.
	You can see how truly small the charger device is in this photo.  I don’t have the biggest hands around it’s fair to say, but I can nearly conceal it in my hand.

Continue reading for my review

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It’s been a nice long weekend with some of it spent in Newcastle Upon Tyne, Gateshead. We drove up on Sunday and returned Wed. It’s a long old drive up there and back, but stupid easy, A14 then A1 and you’re there haha

It was a decent enough few days.. the weather could have been better but at least it didn’t rain the entire time. I did manage to get 3 Geocaches in while i was up there too.  Nice easy ones.

We went to the Metrocentre Shopping Centre in Gateshead, besides just walking around looking at the huge number of shops we also enjoyed the entertainment area there .. they had loads of those “grabber” games where you have get a prize out of the machine plus a number of other games of luck/skill/chance where you get tickets if you win and you can exchange them for crap.. and I use that term in the most loving way possible  

The other thing they had were dodgems (bumper cars) .. Lisa was bugging us to let her go.. being too small to go alone I went with Lisa.. man I tell you, I’ve never seen a kid laugh so much and so hard for so long.. I was dead certain I’d have to be yelling “clean up in dodgem #10′” haha she had a great time.. I had to operate the “gas peddle” as it was out of her reach, but she did most of the steering and the ramming of others out in on the rink or whatever you call it.  Yuki took Emma out as well in another car.. Emma had an OK time but she is just a little too small and got chucked around too much.  Lets just say it’s a good thing the cars are well padded including a 6-8 inch thick patch on the steering wheel haha she hit that a lot.. but she survived.  I think Lisa and I ended up having 3 goes on them.

On Tuesday we’d gone for a walk around the town centre, one of the places we visited was Castle Keep,  Pretty slick place and quite well preserved but it’s not had an easy go in it’s life that’s for sure.   Here are a couple of photos from the place .. check out the rest by clicking on any of the photos..

We also visited The Cathedral Church of St. Nicolas just up the road from Castle Keep.

Check out more photos by clicking on any of the above.

Ok, perhaps not just in your pocket, but backpack/laptop bag, etc. The number of devices we carry really seem to be going up and up these days, despite the fact that devices are converging and doing so much more. My personal “battle load” consists of the following:

Devices that require power

• Dell E6500 Latitude (with 9 and 6 cell batteries)
• Nokia N97 (read my other blog postings for my opinion on this device)
• Zoom 4506-N 3G Travel Router
• Microsoft wireless travel mouse
• Jabber BT3030 headset
• Power adapter for laptop (travel adapter for use with mains, car and air plane (I’ve never been fortunate enough to travel in the right class where I can use it on a plane )

Devices that use power but leech off other sources

• Vodafone K3820 3G/HSDPA modem
• 500GB portable USB drive
• Numerous Flash drives of various capacities, some have bootable OSes on them some just for data

Misc items that I carry that don’t need any power themselves

• A number of 8cm CD’s and DVD’s with bootable OSes on them (all Re-Writable for reuse, and for those machines that can’t boot of USB, WTF?)
• A couple of sets of head phones (in case of loss or damage)
• Various cables to connect devices for data transfer or charging, most use the same USB cables so it keeps these to a minimum

All in all it’s a fair bit of gear slung on my shoulder.   The double batteries for the laptop are really just to make sure I can go for hours and hours..  One question I’m sure many are asking themselves – Is all that gear really necessary?   Of course the answer is NO, BUT it’s just become the norm for so many years now, not just with me but so many people.   I can do just nicely with only my phone in most cases.  I managed quite nicely last year to post very long blog postings while out camping.  However, it wasn’t as convenient as it would have been had I had my laptop with me.  I should put my normal “battle load” into my backpack and weight it.  I’m sure it’s the best part of 8KG, might be a  bit more.

The only reason I decided to write this blog posting now was because while I sit in the Starbucks here in Newmarket Road in Cambridge I pulled out my travel mouse to find the battery was flat in it.  That got me thinking about what else I have in my bag that might need a change of batteries.  Thankfully that’s really the only device that can’t be recharged (however that’s a bad thing too really).  By that I mean I can’t plug the mouse in to charge the battery, it’s just a single AA battery.  That in itself is a good thing really, I can get replacements anywhere for it, that however can’t be said for any of the other power hungry devices I carry.  They all have bespoke batteries, so they require having some sort of charger/power adapter (be it wall wart, USB cable or some such).

So, What do you carry with you on a day to day basis?   What do you wish you could carry with you but choose to leave at home for some reason?