18 Holes - Finally

This afternoon, I went to Halesowen Golf Course with Neil, and we managed to play all 18 holes! It's the first time I have managed to get round 18 holes on any course, never mind one as steep as Halesowen!!

It took us a little over Four and a Quarter hours , but we wern't in any rush, and did let two othe groups play thro'.

The scores were not too hot (Neil 106, Me 110) but we both managed to play some nice golf at times - it's just a lack of consistency that lets us down.

Grand day out

Well yesterday morning we set off for Blackpool at 08:45, picking Amy's friend, Beth, up on the way.

We parked the car up by the "Sandcastle" at just after 11:00, paying £7 for up to 24 hours... After walking over the road to the "Pleasure Beach" we were duly fitted with Wristbands, and waved Amanda off in the direction of "Fleetwood Freeport". We split into two parties (the boys and the girls!) and headed for the rides. The weather was fantastic, dry warm and sunny - to the point where I had to spend £6 just to by a baseball cap to protect my rapidy reddening head!

By the end of the day, Alex had been on 'Infusion', 'The Big One' (twice), 'The Ice Blast' (twice), 'Valhalla', 'The Grand National', 'The Wild Mouse', 'Avalanche' and 'Bling'. The last one was with Amy & Beth - It's the one ride in the park that I just don't like!

We met up with Amanda at about 4 O'Clock and after a couple of large pizza's taken Al-Fresco on the front, we mad our way back into the park for the 'Hot Ice' show, which to be honest, was enjoyed by the girls more than me and Alex, but it was still pretty impressive.

We left the car park at about 9:30, and got back home (after a couple of quick coffee/toilet breaks) at 11:30.

Off to Blackpool

Hope the weather improves for Saturday, we are all off to the Pleasure Beach at Blackpool...
Alex is now tall enough to ride the 'Big One' and is REALLY excited.

Dreamweaver CS4

Well BETA anyway...

It's not actually due for release for another 9 to 12 months, but you can download the beta now, and as long as you have a valid CS3 product key, you can run it in parallel till CS4 is officially launched.

You can find out more on the adobe labs website, but its mainly a radical overhaul of the user interface, along with some very nice new features.  I installed it Thursday, and even in this short time, I really don't want to go back to the old version...

!!Wow Training!!

After a rather length period, I have finally been given not 1 but two training courses over the next few weeks...

On Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday I will be at ITEL's office in Chester to find out all about the new STRATUS 4400 server platform.

Then in July I will be in Central London for 4 days finding out all about the AUDIOCODES Media Gateway. Initial checks of suitable hotels suggest we may be staying just off Trafalgar Square ...!  Sound Ok for a night out (or two) in the city.

Double Figures

Happy Birthday to ALEXANDER STEVEN BRIGHT - 10 years old today...

Delayed Wedding Anniversary

We had to cancel our meal on the 9th May, due to me feeling more that a little rough, but last night we did have a great day out to belatedly celebrate out 16th Wedding Anniversary.

Amanda's mom has the kids for the weekend, so we set off on our own yesterday lunchtime, into Birmingham.  First stop was the Cinema for the latest Indiana Jones film - "The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" Verdict: Taken on it's own a damn fine adventure romp, but when viewed in relation to previous IJ's - Not so good...  The characters are looking a little too old for all that 'swashbuckling action' type of thing.  My opinion is that the same screenplay as a third instalment of the "National Treasure" franchise would have worked much better.

After the film, a pleasant stroll into town, a cup of coffee and a slice of cake in Costa, a walk around the Bullring, before settling down in a bar near St Pauls Square for a nice quiet (but rather expensive) drink.

At 7:15 we took the short walk to 'The Bucklemaker' where we had more drinks and ordered our food.  I couldn't help but smile - top quality restaurant and I have Tomato Soup, and "Steak and Chips"...  Admittedly the soup was Red pepper and Tomato with chili infused something or other and  Caramelised Yellow Cherry Tomatoes, and the steak was an 8oz Aberdeen Angus steak with a coarse grain mustard jus, and the Bucklemaker chips are legendary!  I almost cried when I tasted the steak, I could never of imagined that food could taste that good!  Amanda was equally pleased with her 'Braised Pork Cheeks".

The staff were excellent, helpful and attentive without ever 'being in your face'.

OK, it cast £80 (with tip) for the two of us, but I will definitely go again...

GCSEs - Are they actually any good?

As a parent of a child who is about to start her GSCE studies in the next few months I found this series of articles on the PCPro site rather enlightening, and not a little worrying...

Top of the Class

Back to School With A Bump

Ridiculous Exam Questions

A Little Learning...

MOT Passed

The Bandit has just been for it's first MOT and passed with flying colours...  ;-)

Katherine Jenkins Tour 2008

Tickets on sale this week:

December
1st Sheffield City Hall
2nd Glasgow Clyde Auditorium
4th Newcastle City Hall
5th Preston Guidhall
7th Oxford New Theatre
9th Royal Albert Hall
10th Plymouth Pavillions
12 Birmingham NIA
13 Bournemouth Intl Centre
15 Brighton Center
17 Nottingham Royal Centre
18 Manchester MEN Arena
20 Harrogate Intl Centre
22 Cardiff Arena

Looks like Birmingham NIA on the 12th December it is then, shame it's not at Symphony hall this time.

UPDATE: Two tickets purchased today on the pre-booking fans link... Unfortunately, the location of the seats is not available at this time. I am really waiting with baited breath for my tickets to be delivered so I know where I will be sitting...

Strange Weekend

Well... !

Friday was our 16th wedding anniversary, and I had a table booked at 'The Bucklemaker' in town for 19:30, planning for Carole to look after the kids for us.  Then on Saturday we would be going to Blackpool with Alex and Josh as (an early) 10th birthday treat - He is now tall enough to ride 'The Big One'.

Friday morning started off quite dull, and even rained for a short while, but once it stopped - I nipped off to the golf course (My Monday rota day had been moved to Friday due to the Bank Holiday).

Unfortunately, whilst out on the course the weather really turned, and it was baking hot and sunny - and me without a cap (or any hair!) to protect the top of my head...  Result: By 17:00 I felt really lousy! Spent most of the next two days lying down or sitting on the toilet.

Not all bad tho'

The meal has been re-scheduled to the 23rd (Kids are away that weekend anyway), and Blackpool to the 30th.  Turns out Josh didn't really want to go - he does not like the 'big rides'.

Finally - Man United beat Wigan 2-0 to retain the Premier league title by two points over Chelsea - YES! 

By this morning I was feeling quite a lot better, and yes I was off work again!! So I didn't need to cancel my on the course lesson with Jon. I played four holes under his watchfull eye, and the good this is that I now have a degree of consistency with my wayward shots!  This at least makes it easier to correct them.

In the process I did manage to hit my best ever driver shot - some 200 yards absolutely up the middle of the 2nd fairway.

It was very warm out there again today, but at least this time I took a bottle of water with me, and purchased a new cap to protect my head.  I was wringing wet by the time I got back to the clubhouse, but felt better after a shower and change of clothes.

As I sit here, I am starting to feel a little delicate again, so may go and have a lie down as soon as I have finished.

Another Bank Holiday over

... back to work in the morning.

It was a bit strange today, I have had several Mondays off on the bounce recently, but because a) Amanda and Alex were at home (Amy is away for the weekend), b) Everyone else was off and c) the weather was pretty lousy, it has been a strange day.

What I have managed to do quite a bit of today is: Photoshop CS3 scripting in Javascript.  I am attempting to semi automate my monthly calendar production.

The twp difficulties are 1) I am not too familiar with Javascript syntax and 2) There is not a lot of information about the programming API available.

So far, I can open a dialog box, ask for the Month, Year, Start day and the number of days in the month, and use that information to create a separate document of the same dimensions with the date data printed on it.  This can then be copied over my template with a suitable blending mode, and it sort of works.

I do however need to spend quite a few hours yet working out some of the details.  For example, I can't yet put a drop shadow, of bevel & emboss on the dates etc.

Scout Band

Alex came home from Cubs on Thursday absolutely busting with excitement...  The Halesowen Scout Band had been to his meeting on a recruiting drive for new members, and he wants to join and play his flute in the band.

I spoke to the Band leader, Paul, tonight, and will be taking both Alex and his mate Josh to the induction meeting on Sunday afternoon. At a rate of £1 for a two hour lesson/practice session it seems like an absolute bargain.

He will be taking his DPA flute with him - at least for the first meeting, but he will need to check with DPA if they have any objections when he gets back to school - just in case (tm)

Update your AV for free

If you want a good *free* antivirus, why noy try the latest version 8 of AVG...
http://free.grisoft.com/ww.download?prd=afe

If you go directly to the AVG site, it's quite difficult to find the free version, but WAY too easy to get the paid for version.... hmmmm accident or design??

Nice MacAir parody...

Finally, it's Here...

The new picture arrived yesterday, and now has pride of place above the fireplace...

Before:

After: 

There is of course more to the new look than just the wall shown... new curtains, light fittings, display units, lamp along with a *very* different colour on the other three walls, make for a completely different feel in the room now.

Love It!

Cool Technologies

I have been playing with Dreamweaver CS3 recently, and have completed a couple of training courses on Lynda.com on AJAX and SPRY

My test sites are at

http://ajax-test.rockbox-themes.org/ and

http://spry-test.rockbox-themes.org/

The Ajax one is quite simple to look at, but was a real pain in the but to build - lots of Javascript and PHP code, all to get a page that does exactly the same of the pure HTML version it replaced!
The actual difference is that the AJAX layer makes the web page work more like an application.  When you search on a traditional site, the query is passed in the URL and the results displayed on a separate 'results.html' type page.  With AJAX, the results are posted back to the same page as the query was performed on, making multiple searches much easier.

SPRY is adobes AJAX implementation framework, it is far easier to use than hand coding everything, but at the expense of some flexibility.

One thing I was quite pleased with is the tabbed panels example:

http://spry-test.rockbox-themes.org/Tabbed_Panels.php

But what is particularly interesting on that page is the two RSS feed tabs.  They were built using yet another cool technology: XLST...  You create an XLS file, which is linked to an XML based file.  This XLS is then merged with the HTML file on the server side.  This allows you to embed XML data into your own page.

This is Funny!

New Toys...

Well sort of.

1) New Painting.  As mentioned previously I have just ordered a new Mark Spain artwork for the lounge.  I now have a delivery date of 21st of April, so I have two weeks to ensure that the decoration etc. is complete.

Today we went to the Halcyon gallery in Birmingham, where they were opening their "Figurative Collection" show, and we had chance to meet non other than Mark Spain himself.  A really nice guy, and the free champagne was rather nice too.

2) New HDD for the PC.  Lofty is in the process of reconfiguring his Media Centre PC, and as a result has a couple of 500 GB HDD's going spare.  I have taken one of them off his hands for the princely sum of £40.

I intend to put this new drive (well 12 month old actually) in this PC, and take the opportunity to completely reload Windows Vista.  I currently have C: on a 75 GB drive, and D:, P: and M: on a 240 GB drive.  The plan is to go to a single large C: on the 500 GB, with data, pictures and music in the My Documents, My Pictures and My Music, and use the 240 GB drive as a backup device for those three locations.

Has it really been a month..

... since I last posted here?  Good grief, time flies when you are having fun!

'What's been going on?' I hear you cry, well not a lot actually.  Currently decorating the lounge, in advance of a new painting - 'A Moment of tranquility' by Mark Spain

Ceiling and woodwork has been painted, walls have been re-papered with textured paper, and one wall has actually been emulsion'd to finished colour.  Still not 100% sure on other wall's or curtain colour, so some work left to do yet.

Apart from that, not a lot... Tidied out my CD collection for a recent 'Car Boot' sale, sold about 100 CD's - still *way* too many left really.

Not too much time off from work, but work itself has been pretty quiet.  That's the 'end of financial year' effect - it's either completely mad, or deadly quiet, depending on wether there is any telecom's budget left to be spent before April!

Took a day trip to see Lofty one day, he is now separated from his wife, and filling for divorce.  It's the happiest we have seen him in years!

Have been spending quite a lot of time on Photoshop, working my way thro' the tutorials in Matt Kloskowski's "Layers - The complete guide to Photoshop's most powerful feature', and a couple of online training courses ay Lynda.com.  I have been really interested in the area of 'retouching' and now need to get the camera out and take some good pic's on Amy and Alex so I have some material to work on!

The Beta version of Lightroom 2.0 is now out, and I have taken the opportunity to start from scratch again withLR.  I started importing pictures into LR before I really understood what was going on, and as such - it was always a bit of a mess.  Lets see if I can do better this time!

Golf has been a bit thin on the ground in March, every time I had a day off, the weather was terrible.  Never mind, with the clocks going forwards, evenings are fair game again now ;-) - at least they will be once the decorating is finished...