So I didn’t go for a run this morning and I’ve not uploaded any photos for your delectation. The former was due to a disturbed night’s sleep. The latter is due to a surprising number of acceptable photos that I want to tweak a bit first. Stay tuned.
(Seven posts in seven days — mission accomplished, yay!)
Hopefully you’ll have noticed a decided up-swing in my posts here. To get back in the saddle, I’ve decided to post every day for a week. So far so good but today we’re off to James and Ruth’s wedding, which leaves me with very little time. Consequently you’ll have to make do with this meta-post.
Or perhaps not. As a sweetner, here’s a tip on how to perfectly mitre skirting boards at a corner, no matter the angle.
I’m very glad to see that Mr Watkins is back. With Mr Moore rationing his output I was beginning to feel very lonely. Come back my wayward blogging buddies, all is forgiven!
On the BitTorrent front, I’m very interested to find out about Mininova from Tim. I’ve been using The Pirate Bay so far but the lack of dodgy adverts at Mininova is appealing. Since iPlayer came out at the top of the year we’ve started using it frequently. Having become accustomed to watching programmes on our laptop, I want to be able to access all TV programmes this way. Downloading them with BitTorrent works very well, especially because we get free overnight bandwidth from the nice folks at PlusNet. But that endorsement can wait for another post.
One tip I’d pass on to Mac and Linux (and *nix) users would be to use Transmission. It takes all the insanity out of BitTorrent downloads and just works.
Three years of blogging. It really doesn’t seem that long. Sometimes I blog more, sometimes less, but I don’t see myself stopping any time soon. Hopefully that’s good news, from your perspective…
Whilst looking for a recipe for pumpkin soup, I came across this website. Understandably it is the first hit on Google, but what made me smile was that it appears the site originally was not a lot to do with pumpkin soup at all, but after frequent visitors looking for soup recipes, there are now some on there. How cool is that?
It also made me chuckle that that the busiest time of year for site traffic is around Halloween, and with people looking for recipes. I hate being predictable.
I don’t know why it is but when people blog they can speak with more honesty and do so more directly than they ever would in an email, phone call or even face to face. And that’s why I love it.
I was perusing Facebook the other day, as you do, when I came across a link to James’ blog. Cool! I’m always happy to see friends start blogging, particularly when I don’t get to see them very often. James had a bit of a slow start so I’m hoping if I mention him here it will encourage him to continue.
I’m on the fence about Facebook “friending” of folks I went to junior school with. Of course I’m interested to see what they’re up to now, that’s only natural, but I don’t think I need to keep tabs on them that much. I mean, I’ve wasted more than enough time on that site already and I’ve specifically stayed away from all the Pirates and Zombies and Vampires malarkey. Call me miserable if you like, I’m just trying to use my time wisely; I’m not very good at that as it stands.
And what’s with all this “wall” business? That’s got to be the most ass-backwards form of communication yet invented. Clearly I’m just too old to “get” it. Oh well, I am a dad after all, I suppose I can’t feel too bad about it, it’s my role in life.
Ever feel you’re losing the battle against entropy and chaos? Well, it’s certainly feeling that way around here at the moment. My boss is on leave at work, right when an important client is making a tricky hardware transition, leaving me to do the tidying up. Then I get roped into a sales meeting in the US, so I’m going to be away from home for two days, which will no doubt mess up my body clock nicely.
And at home? Well, the hard drive finally broke so I had to rebuild the PC, which was actually quite painless — thanks Ubuntu! Then the kids managed to break our bed this week by jumping on it too enthusiastically, meaning the mattress is on the floor until the replacement arrives next Tuesday, when, of course, I’m in the US and unable to put it together for Louise.
So, I may be losing the war at the moment but there’s one battle I can win: With some help from the Google Reader Widget for WordPress I’ve added the contents of my news feed to the right-hand side of the blog. Sweet. Hope you find the links interesting.
Also making an attempt for the most categories for a single post here.
A quick pointer: If you read blogs and news sites, which is pretty much a tautology given that you’re reading this, you should take a look at Google Reader. It’s a website that lets you subscribe to your favourite blogs and news sites and puts all the posts in one place — like email for the web.
Google Reader has a few nice features. Firstly, it can order posts such that more “important” posts, i.e. those from less frequently updated sites, are shown before those from more prolific sites. You can also share posts, creating your own news stream, which other people can subscribe to and so on ad infinitum.
Tim, you’re absolutely right and you don’t need to live in a foreign country to feel “the drift”. Moving out of the area or having children seems sufficient to reduce contact with your friends tenfold. It’s this feeling that made me start blogging and I suspect it’s the same with you.
When we met up at the pub I felt exactly as you described. Half the people there I hadn’t seen in 2007 but the instant rapport left me feeling almost elated. Or perhaps that was all the beer I was drinking. Anyway… whatever… good times!
I can’t believe it’s been four years since your wedding! In a blog-worthy tribute (and to follow up my previous post about photo sharing) I bring you a dozen photos of the day in question. Congratulations!