What I Did On My Day Off

Some days you take off to fulfill some long held plan. Other days you take off to recover from the execution of some long held plan. Some days, though, you just take off to chill out and relax and see where the day takes you.
In this case it took me up Ivinghoe Beacon with a picnic largely consisting of cheesy biscuits, carrots and cake. Given the alliterative nature of lunch, you probably think we should have been drinking cherry coke, but in fact we had ginger beer. The weather was yet again unseasonably warm and beautiful. So we took a few photos of the views from the top.

Do I need an ebook reader?

With the recent news about Amazon's new ebook readers I got to thinking.
I love reading. Admittedly I don't get as much time as I used to but getting lost in a good book is still one of life's greatest pleasures.
The aforementioned lack of time means that there is a backlog of books to read. A couple of large volumes are awaiting my attention and there are a handful of second hand books I also would like to peruse in time.
I am hoping to catch up with these books over Christmas. A couple of flights and some sitting around in the sun should be extremely conducive to reading. But as already pointed out some of these books are large and heavy. Wouldn't it make a lot of sense to buy some form of ebook reader and read them on that?
However I have the books to read already. So using an ebook reader would involve me purchasing them yet again. Not to mention the more than eighty feet of shelf space in my house, full of books I have read and will sometimes read again.
How, also, would I share books within my family as I can with a bookcase where everyone can freely help themselves? Would it mean too, giving up browsing in second hand bookshops for books you might never have read if they had been full price? What of flicking through the pages to determine whether a book is worth buying, whether it catches the imagination in a few paragraphs or pages?
To be fair I can imagine some technical solutions to these challenges but I wonder if they will ever be implemented in a way that feels natural and easy to use.
And, anyway, sometimes it's just nice to touch the paper.

Opening A Banana

How do you open a banana?
I'm sure most people will say that they hold it in their (non dominant) hand, take hold of the stalk with the other hand and bend it backwards. If this action fails to succeed in opening the banana they may then resort to a knife or even teeth. Eventually though the banana will be opened.
Now the next question is why do you open it like that? The answer is again, almost certainly, because your mother taught you to.
In a recent conversation somebody pointed out that monkeys open bananas from the other end. The initial suspicion was that this involved wasting a chunk of fruit but a further question exists too. Why on earth would they do open them that way? Well probably because their mothers taught them to!
But this then raised the additional question, what is the best way to open a banana? So in the spirit of investigation I gave it a try and this is what I found. If you take hold of a banana upside down, and place your thumb and forefinger either side of the black spiky bit at the end and roll your fingers against it then the end will split neatly leaving you to easily remove the slightly woody bit if required and enjoy your banana. No mess, no fuss.
In a similar vein I taught myself as a child to do my ticks backwards. Why? Well I realised that ticks were used because they were a quick, easy to make mark - for right handers. Turn it round and suddenly ticks flow easily across the page for a left handed writer.
Sometimes we do things in a particular way because they've been taught like that and we assume that this must be a long optimised solution. Sometimes this is true. On the other hand, sometimes it's worth trying a different way of doing things.
Why not start with your banana?

Lightsaber - BT Tower

So somebody thought that it would be a good idea to turn the BT tower into a giant lightsaber for a night. Luckily we were there to get a picture of it.

It's Been a While

It's certainly been a while since I blogged here. It's not that nothing has happened in the past two years; on the contrary lots of things have happened and that's largely the problem. First you get busy actually doing things and forget to write them up and then, well, you just forget the blog entirely!
So having rediscovered it I shall try and write in here a little more often from now on.
Let's see how I do.

Javascripting and spelling

Well this week I've been busy working on websites.

The first is the local CAMRA branch website (for those of you who can't spell, that's Campaign for Real Ale, not anything to do with photography). I've been having a lot of fun creating a map which shows all the pubs in the branch. Google provide a lot of libraries to help with this, but it does mean creating rather a lot of javascript. Then of course, two hundred odd pubs looks rather cluttered so I turned to the MarkerClusterer library to help. This is absolutely fantastic, and magically clusters all the pubs nicely. However, it did rather annoyingly draw the cluster markers under the branch outline. A little hacking later and the clusters are now above the map. I've even added the local breweries too.

The second website I've been working on is for my daughter. The original idea came from the fact that her school appears to believe that they've taught 'times tables'; and certainly Louisa can count her way slowly through any times table given enough time and fingers. What she can't do is answer a multiplication question without resorting to her fingers, so to help her we figure she needs to keep practising.

Naturally, she enjoys playing games on the computer (check out the millions on the BBC website) so this is an easy way to help her practice.
This thought was still developing when we went to a school meeting where they told us the plans for the year. Apart from general homework, they're also giving the children spellings to learn each week. Obviously another opportunity for an online game.

For me, this feels slightly surreal, as some of the earliest games my mother wrote on our BBC computer, were a spelling game and a tables game to help my sister practice!

Still, I've put something together and it's met with an enthusiastic response so far. So lets see if it helps her to learn to spell 'germination'.

Yes, that really is one of her spelling words this week!

Lucy got Married (so did Ben obviously)

Ok, the being busy thing...

Well in the week since Easter, we have been ill (yuk) while simultaneously making service sheets, bookmarks and writing a speech.

All of which was more than worth it, to watch my sister get married yesterday.

The bride had the most gorgeous dark blue dress, while the bridesmaids were resplendent in light blue (that means Louisa and me). As Herring was the best man (hey, family wedding!), he didn't get to take a single picture, so nothing to show yet.

The sun shone, the children (there were lots) were all adorable and everyone had a good time.

Congratulations to Lucy & Ben!

Louisa got Baptised

Ok, so this is a bit delayed, but we've been busy (I'll get to that later) since Easter. Anyway Louisa got baptised at the Easter Vigil.

She was beautifully behaved despite the lateness of the hour. And I thought I should post a picture of her looking all angelic.

The dress was originally her Aunty's First Communion dress, which her Grandma (that's Louisa's - which means her Aunty's mother - are you keeping up at the back?) made.

Haggling

Well we've not mentioned our blue car for a while, and while all is well with it; it is admittedly a little old.

Anyway we sort of decided to take a serious look at replacing it. We found a rather nice Skoda Octavia, all in silver and lovely. The price however was (as with all cars from dealers) rather more than we figured it was worth. We had a bit of a look, and walked away suggesting that we were prepared to buy it, but not at the advertised price.

Anyway, while I was away in London today my husband has completed his haggling with the dealer and we will soon have a shiny new silver car.

Anyone want to buy a 306?

Connected

It always seems to be a challenge to get techy things to work the way you want. For some time now, I've been increasingly annoyed that my contacts on my phone were getting more and more different from the ones on my desktop. Not to mention that somehow the desktop ones weren't being updated correctly.

Recently I tried out ScheduleWorld, and after a certain amount of experimentation I have finally got the two back in sync and receiving updates.

I've got a new shiny google calendar that I haven't yet sync'd to my phone but will (either through ScheduleWorld again, or another service) soon.

And I've just signed up to Twitter for micro blogging fun - and yes, I can do that on my phone too.

Happy Paws!

Drinks Cabinet!

We have a drinks cabinet.

That probably doesn't sound hugely exciting; but for the past ten years we've been storing our (extensive) drinks collection in a huge bookcase.
We have now assembled a rather nice drinks cabinet. Narrower, taller and deeper than the bookcase it replaces, everything is now hidden behind doors, making us look slightly less alcoholic. But the best bit, is the centre section, with its drop down flap enabling easy making of drinks.

I've tested it, making a couple of G&Ts. It works brilliantly!

All praise to Herring, who modded the original cabinet so beautifully, adding the drop down flap, with braking action stays, in a way Ikea never intended!

Finally

Parents finally returned to Heathrow last night, after a week holed up in a luxury five star hotel and becoming media celebrities (BBC Breakfast!). Doesn't seem too bad does it.

We're very glad they're back safely though.

Our Parents in Bangkok

My parents have spent the last month visiting Singapore, Australia and Thailand.

Guess where their last stop was...

Imaginary fruit

So is it wrong to be teaching my daughter about imaginary numbers?

Mind you, the fact that e^iℼ = -1 still blows me away...

Excited Arr!

Conveniently, this Thursday was not only the tenth (gosh!) anniversary of Herring and I getting together it was also the night Jonathan Coulton played in London.

Thus, having arranged for a small girl to stay with Grandma (Thanks!), we went off to London for some fun.

Firstly we managed a briefish look at the new (opened that day!) Westfield shopping centre. Boy, is it big! And then it was off to Shepherd's Bush Empire for our concert. We were very amused while queueing outside. People fell very quickly into two categories. One, the geeks (easily recognisable) who joined the back of the queue. Two the non geeks, who looked at the queue, and then at Jonathan Coulton's name with complete confusion!

JC was supported by Paul & Storm. If you've never heard of either of these - go look at their websites now (ok, read this first!). What a fantastic combination. It started well with a song - 'We are the opening Band'! And really got better and better. There was lots of audience participation, particular highlights being all of the audience being pirates - 'Arr', which became the cry at random points throughout the evening. All geeks being (naturally) pirates.

Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm shared the stage at several points, which worked brilliantly. The three of them making a great combination, and playing up to the (extremely!) geeky audience throughout.

Finally a chance to be zombies (All we want to do is eat your braiiins...), and more singing before it was time to go home (or in our case back to our hotel).

Wow! There really was too much great stuff to describe; but it was great to see so many geeks, and have such a good time (and how often do you get to sing about the Mandelbrot set?!).

*sings* 'Take a point called z in the complex plane...' ;-)

Only Contains Natural Ingredients

I'm always amused by products that “Only contain natural ingredients”. While I think this is a good thing in general, its also a little misleading.

After all, asbestos, deadly nightshade and snake venom are all natural ingredients, just not very good for you.

Calamansi Crazy

As Herring said; we have some calamansi cordial (mostly calamansi juice and honey) and it is very nice.

So here we are, in the cold British evening. It really is cold, because I'm resisting turning the heating on; and don't get me started on the current cost of heating!
Anyway, we want a nice warming drink, so hot toddy seems like a good idea. What do we need? Well honey, lemon... Ah!
*lightbulb goes on*

So here I am sipping a Calamansi Toddy. Whether that's a taste of summer or winter I'm not quite sure, but I'm pretty sure there's going to be a lot more of these.

Ube, Ube, Ube! Oi, Oi, Oi!!

Ever since our trip to the Philippines this summer, there are three things we have really missed:

1. Calamansi
2. Ube ice cream
   
3. Cerveza Negra
4. And the lovely warm weather

Umm. The four things we have missed are:

1. Calamansi
2. Ube ice cream
   
3. Cerveza Negra
4. Buko Juice
5. And the lovely warm weather

The five things we have ... well, you get the idea.

Calamansi is a small green citrus fruit, about the size of a large cherry, that tastes like a curious mixture of lemon and lime. A half calamansi is absolutely fantastic in gin.

Ube is a sort of yam, that has a fantastic purple colour. In the philippines, it's traditionally cooked with lots of sugar and used as a dessert. We have a particular fondness for Ube ice cream.

Well, the reason I'm bringing this up is that a Philippino shop has just opened in Aylesbury and is selling, amongst other things, ube, in lots of forms, including ice cream, and calamansi squash! Sadly no whole calamansi, though I will try asking them next time we're in.

On a cold autumnal day, ube ice cream is like a little bit of (purple) summer and a reminder of the ones we love that are so far away. See you soon!

I got promoted!

For some time now I've been in the odd position of being a system architect on my project but not the system architect. And then the system architect left (the company).

As I'd already been doing some of his job for a while, I simply started picking up more of it, however this was all unofficial at this point. Anyway they offically advertised the post, and I was interviewed on Tuesday. It's been a long week since then, but this lunchtime, I finally got told I've officially got the job.

This is actually quite a big challenge, but it's the chance to do a lot of good stuff, and I'm really looking forward to it. It's a bit scary too, but I guess that's a good thing!

Words

Is it wrong to teach your 5 year old how to say “antidisestablishmentarianism”?

No?

How about telling them to ask their teacher what it means?