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Playing with light

January 2, 2011 in General, Photography | No comments

The blog has been a bit quiet of late again, but I’m hoping to make more and shorter posts this year.

The world has gone mad on a couple of things:

  1. End-to-End Cycle Challenges – loads of people I know are planning cycling either John O’ Groats to Land’s End or vice versa this year.  I’d love to have a go myself but I’m behind on cycling and exercise in general, and with current circumstances can’t really commit to it…but it’s very tempting to join this trend.
  2. Photography – I got lovely wife a Nikon D5000 DSLR for Christmas so the last few days have involved a lot of photography.  In fact, lots of people seem to have got cameras, or just the photography bug, over the Christmas period, including, to my pleasant surprise, a very good friend of mine who’s attempting a photo a day this year – if you’re a photographer, do pop by and offer Dave your tips!

We headed to London to see in the New Year with some good friends there.  New Year’s Eve was no exception.  The Nikon is really good in low light and she got some great shots of me juggling with rings of light-sticks. Here’s a sample for you.

I hope you had a very happy Christmas and that you have a blessed, happy, and joyful year in 2011!!

Playing with Light

Playing with Light

Coffee!

July 22, 2010 in General | No comments

I like my coffee – it’s widely known that I despise that dirty water some call “tea” – and over time it’s become clear that espresso, and espresso-based coffees – are by far my favourite.

So when I got some nice birthday money, I decided that now was the time, and a shiny new espresso machine now sits on our kitchen worktop.

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Hello!

July 21, 2010 in General | No comments

Hello! It’s been a while (nearly two months) so I thought I ought to let you know I’m still here.

I’ve been up to all sorts of things and hope to be doing some blogging again soon as lots of it has been interesting.

Watch this space!

A Little Re-branding

May 22, 2010 in General | No comments

We are now, hopefully, post-identity-crisis, and if you follow me on Twitter you’ll have picked up on that, but a few other things are changing as a result of that too.

I do like my “magicroundabout” identity, but this Blog’s title is (was!) a bit cumbersome and…well…I’ve not been happy with it for a long time.  It suited the first few years of life here in Swindon but we’re pretty settled now and, while I still discover new things often, my writing is less about “discovering new things in an old home”.

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Downtime

April 10, 2010 in General | No comments

Well, sorry folks, it’s been over a month. Which kinda counts as downtime for me I suppose. There was also…shock!!…downtime on the Blog caused by me fiddling with subdomains. 1

I’ve not been completely anti-social-networking, in fact, I’ve been pretty busy building WordPress blogs/sites and doing some web/communications/social media consultancy, and that’s been taking up a lot of my ‘spare’ time.

I’ve been deliberately cryptic about some stuff that’s been going on, and I know I keep promising some news, but it’s hard to know what to make public and when…I’m getting there…honest.

In the meantime, there will be some posts about the garden, which is springing to life, and about politics…there’s some big vote or something happening soon and it’s being thought and talked about quite a bit.

Exciting times!!!

  1. I should point out that I don’t consider my blog that important, so I don’t monitor it…maybe I should?! ↩

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Something’s Brewing

March 4, 2010 in General | No comments

Ginger Beer Plant - Feb 2010No, this isn’t revealing anything about the interesting things that have been going on that I’ve been keeping under my hat.  But I WILL say something about those soon, just as soon as I’ve worked out what to say about them and have time to say something about them.

No.  I actually have something literally brewing.

Last Christmas (2008!) I got given, by one of my Godsons, a Ginger Beer kit.  It’s been sat in a cupboard doing nothing for ages, even though I love Ginger Beer.

During a recent tidy-up it came out of the cupboard and I decided to get it started.

I sterilised a nice old wide-necked wine bottle, boiled and cooled some water and added the yeast, sugar and ginger.  I’ve been nurturing the plant quite zealously, but needed some additional equipment to finish the job.

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Now analysing

January 23, 2010 in General, Techie | No comments

Hello

Just a wee note to say that if you’re reading this on the actual blog website, or you’re directly consuming the RSS feed, then you’re now being tracked by Google Analytics and are subject to Google’s standard privacy policy and stuff.  I’ll post this up properly on the site when I get a mo.

Thank, as always, for reading!

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Flying

January 19, 2010 in Climate Change, General | No comments

My employer has another office in…well, let’s undo a joke from The Office and say it’s in Slough (it’s not, it’s up North!).

It costs me anything from £80 to £250 to get the train to “Slough” depending on when I go and which route I take.  Regardless of route it takes me around 4 hours.

The other day I saw, on the printer in our office, that someone had booked a flight from Southampton to “Slough” and back.  It would take an hour, which I confess is hugely convenient.  And it would cost less than £60!  All in!

This is stupid for an almost innumerable number of reasons.  How can it cost £60?

I confess, I’ve not researched the facts below but I believe them to be true. (Correct me in the comments if I’m wrong).

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Shiny Windows

January 15, 2010 in General, Techie | No comments

Windows7 by Mendhak - http://flickr.com/mendhakLast week our main computer was a circa 10-year old, occasionally upgraded, Tiny Computers tower, 768MB RAM, 160GB disk, USB1 built-in with a USB2 card, Wifi-card, Soundblaster card, external USB2 hub, external webcam, external speakers, external microphone,  keyboard, mouse, 15″ LCD monitor, about 4 power bricks, a whole spaghetti of cables oh, and an extra fan to keep it cool!  It ran Windows XP…just!

We have a NetBook for travel and simple web browsing (must write about that sometime), but the other option, if you wanted to do any serious work, was a 6-or-7 year old Sony Vaio laptop with, I think, 256MB RAM, no built-in Wifi, no webcam, no microphone, a battery that lasted 60 seconds – if you were lucky (i.e. it was tethered) and only 1 working USB1 port.

Err…yeah, I said serious work.

As a fairly major geek who works in IT and does little web development projects at home it’s kinda unbelievable that I’ve waited to long to upgrade.  It was part frugality, part stubbornness, part not-wanting-to-buy-anything running-Vista, but with the release of Windows 7, the Christmas sales and the approaching rise in VAT we finally decided that the time had come.

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Pro-bus, anti-bus

January 15, 2010 in General | 1 comment

Bus Stop by Slattner (http://flickr.com/slattner)Wow, what with health and weather I’ve probably not cycled for a month!  I’m going stir crazy.

I’ve also been using the buses a lot.  Partly because I feel I should, and partly because the brakes on the car seem a bit dodgy (maybe just cold weather?).

I mentioned buses before, back in May, but after a prolonged exposure to them I have more thoughts.

Buses are good!

Yeah, I really think this!  They kept running through the snow, they were quick, mostly on time, the journey planner, realtime information system (and the mobile version) works really well.  I even found them tidy, convenient and enjoyable!

We are fortunate to live near a fairly major bus artery out of the town centre – I’m probably commuting against the flow and have plenty of route options with no changes, but even so, I was impressed.

And I’ve loved having a deadline by which I must be out of the office.  I’ve mostly worked my contracted hours this week, and that feels right!

But…

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