Personal – Page 4

New Skills

Long time no blog. Seems to be the way at the moment. Between DigitalOutbox and Twitter I’m kind off all blogged out. The podcast is going OK. It’s been good getting to grips with it and trying something new. We aren’t seeing massive downloads which is nothing we didn’t expect but we are seeing small increases each week which is nice. Where will it go – we still don’t know but hopefully we’ll still enjoy the journey.

I’m also on the first part of a training course at the moment – ASP .Net but more importantly, SharePoint. Interesting to learn and see things from the MS side of the fence. Visual Studio has come on a long way since I last used it (many years ago) so who knows how much we’ll be using it over the next few months – always good to learn something new though.

The course is down in Bath which looks to be very nice but the weather’s been a bit pooh. I’m back down in August so hopefully it’ll be a bit nicer as I’d like to have a stroll around. What isn’t nice is the flights at this time of year. Easyjet can’t keep their services on time which meant a really late night last night. I’m not looking forward to tomorrow night at Bristol as the queue’s at security have been shit all week. What’s really annoying is the queue is massive and at the same time they are announcing that you can pay to skip the queue. Dirty sneaky bastards. Really winds me up every time.

However once the flight is out of the way I’m out hill walking again, this time up in Perth – Schiehallion . Hopefully the weather will be good as by all accounts the views are stunning – looking showery and windy at the moment. Hey ho. I’ll be knackered though – late back Friday, up early for walk on Saturday. After that I’ve a week of work then I’m off for two weeks. Chance to relax a bit and catch up on a few jobs that need doing around the house. Might even unplug for a bit. Although one thing I really want to get my teeth into is some iPhone programming. Tried and failed so far this year. pathetic.

Anyway. That’s enough for now. Just watching some Big Brother (bored in hotel room). It’s unbelievably bad. Thank goodness I’ve not been watching much this year. One more thing – avoid Worms on the iPhone. Terrible controls. Touch doesn’t work for everything.

Keeping Busy

What a glorious weekend. Friday past was another work trip down to Roodlea. All week the forecast was for a warm day but it still came as a really nice surprise when it actually turned out to be true. It was great weather and another thoroughly enjoyable day.

I’m glad I put on some sun cream though – I expect a few red faces at work tomorrow and that’s not form the quality of golf on show. The rest of the weekend has been really busy. Lot’s of gardening – grass cutting, hedge cutting, weeding, planting etc etc. All worth it as it’s looking pretty tidy even if I do say so myself. I’ll never make a gardener but at least it’s looking presentable.

I’ve also had a lot to do in setting up a new project. Can’t say too much more at the moment. Well, can’t is the wrong word. I don’t want to say too much more at the moment but all will hopefully be revealed soon enough. Can’t promise it will be good but it will at least be….interesting. Still a lot to-do to get it off the ground but made a lot of progress over the weekend.

One thing not going so well is my broadband connection and/or router. Warm resetting every day now. Complete pain in the tits – must get on to O2 tomorrow and get it looked at. Doesn’t matter what broadband firm or technology I use – after 6 months to a year I always run into some sort of trouble. Frustrating.

Anyway, that’s for tomorrow. Hope you had a good weekend too. What a difference a bit of sun makes.

Busy Busy Busy

I’ve had quite a bit on over the past few weeks. So much so that I’m taking a week off work starting this Friday. It will be good to take a break from the day to day’s at work and focus elsewhere. Lot’s of bit’s and piece’s around the house to take care off. I also want to put in some quality time on Cocoa and iPhone development. I’ve a simple app that I hope to build over the week I’m off. More on that later.

This weekend has been mostly cleaning up around the house and also on the computers. Freed up around 40GB on the iMac in 10 minutes – just been lazy recently keeping my disks tidy. Also got Delicious Library 2 syncing well between desktop and laptop via Dropbox. I moved the Delicious Library file from /Library/Application Support/Delicious Library 2/ to my Dropbox, creating an alias in the original directory to the file in my Dropbox folder. Works a treat. Just make sure the alias is the same name as the original file. I also updated my library with my latest purchases and also published the library on iand.net rather than on MobileMe. You can see the library here.

Dropbox has been working so well for me. So much so that I won’t be renewing MobileMe this year unless it goes through a serious upgrade which I just can’t see. Dropbox is a far superior file syncing tool – and quicker. I use Busysync to keep calendars in sync. I can sync contacts via Google for free. That leaves…and e-mail address that I don’t really use? I’ve turned off push on the iPhone to save on battery life and my calendar and contacts don’t change enough to justify over the air updating. I just don’t need it. If you are interested in Dropbox this is my referral link which gets me extra disk space if you sign up.

Anyway, back on topic. One of the reasons I’ve been busy is I’ve been helping set-up a website for a friend. So if your in need of a personal trainer in the Glasgow area I highly recommend Tangerine13. I’ve spent a few years working with Caroline but she’s moving on to pursue life as a full time personal trainer so hopefully Tangerine13 will work out for her. Eagle eyed readers (i.e. those that can be arsed to visit the site) will notice a small link at the bottom of Tangerine13 to pixlcode.com. That was the name I was going to use if/when I release iPhone app’s. Long way off but thought it was worthwhile linking to it in case the web site design goes anywhere. Not something I intend to pursue but you never know.

One other thing form the weekend that really pissed me off. Some dirty swine was trying to rip off my credit card. Again. Just over two years since my bank account was emptied, this time Egg were onto it straight away. No money lost, card stopped. Attempt to use my card was in London – trying to buy some Cellnet pre-pay card. I just don’t understand where they get the details from. I do use the card a lot online but make sure it’s always a secure purchase. Then again, there’s nothing to stop a site passing on card details. Or some back room staff doing the dirty I guess. Bloody annoying and it’s put me on edge again about my finances.

Anyway. iPhone app. I’ve a few idea’s for app’s actually. The problem is so do lot’s of other people. Already two of my idea’s, which 4 weeks ago were original and didn’t exist in the app store now do. Time moves fast unlike me at the moment. Too busy. Or busy doing the wrong things. So for my first app, screen’s have been mocked up. Usage has been thought through. Functionality has been locked down to a minimum. Keeping things simple. Just need to start coding. Should be fun. If I find the time.

Victory

I was down in Portsmouth yesterday on work business. It finished earlier than expected so I took the chance to visit HMS Victory. This is the oldest ship currently still in service although it won’t be going anywhere soon.

After working on the newest ship in the fleet just an hour earlier it was quite a shock to see the conditions on board Victory. It was cramp, dark and I’m assuming people were a lot smaller back then as there was no head room at all. It also carried so much firepower. It must have been an impressive and fearsome sight.

It was quite difficult to photograph inside due to the lights as you can see in the full set. What’s also surprising is that as it’s a serving ship it has a full time crew of 12. If your ever got some time to kill in Portsmouth it’s well worth a visit.

Downside of yesterdays trip wasn’t just working on a Saturday. I woke up with a migraine today which I think is a knock on from lack of sleep or altered sleep pattern. Friends were supposed to visit today but that got knocked on the head. A lost weekend.

Balance

I like my work. I really do. It’s been a year now since moving jobs and it’s worked out well. I enjoy the variety in my job and the challenges it brings. However I’ve been doing some pretty dumb things recently and I need to make some changes.

Now it isn’t as drastic as the Dilbert above but recently I’ve felt like I’ve no time to myself. I’m over committing and not allowing myself enough time to complete tasks. I’m not saying no!

That’s really the issue.

I’m not saying no and over committing. To such an extent that I assume my weekends as normal work time. Sure, I can get that done by Monday knowing fine well that the task requires a full 2 days. No problem, I’ve got the weekend coming up. As I said I do like my work so at the time it makes sense. But it’s crazy. My own time for doing what I want to do has fell away in the last month. Game playing has slowed, blog updating non existent, exercise has fell away, I’ve knocked back a hill walk as I felt too tired (really I had work to do) and I’ve fell behind on a few other things I’ve supposed to have done around the house. I’ve not even got near doing any iPhone programming either.

Time to change. Time to take on tasks and set realistic time-scales and claw back some me time. Hopefully that will help the sore heads which have been more frequent in the last three weeks and also help with the weight loss which has stagnated. Not getting worse but not getting better.

This is just common sense and something I’ve been saying for a while but not actually doing so I’m posting here to act as a kick for me. To get things back in proportion. To find a balance.

London Calling

While down in Peterborough over New Year visiting Shakeel instead of the usual spend on gadgets and playing of games we took a trip down to London, booking the London Eye and taking advantage of a cold but sunny winters day. It was also a chance to get some photography done – we were tourists for the day!

First stop was St Pancras station which has been newly redeveloped. It really is quite magnificent. There’s something about glass roofs that I really like. There’s also a nice mix of old and new architecture and the restoration is pretty faultless. I guess we were lucky as when we were there the station was very quiet so we got to take our photo’s without too much hassle. Full set can be viewed on Flickr.

After some pictures around Westminster it was on to the London Eye. After lot’s of queueing we finally got on, although we did manage to ‘jump’ about half of the queue which was nice – it was too cold to feel embarrassed. The hazy winters sun started to clear as we ascended and we got quite a lot of good pictures. The view in the summer must look amazing on a clear day. What was strange was there was no real sense of motion – it moved so slowly that you didn’t feel it at all. The full set of photos can be seen here. One shot I really wanted to get was a panoramic – stitching together lots of photo’s to get a wrap around view of London. It didn’t quite work out due to the low sun and the ever changing perspective but the result isn’t too bad as long as you don’t look to close – it’s also pretty wide at 18702 x 1614 pixels!

After that it was a walk around Horse Guards parade, St James’s park and Buckingham Palace. All very nice but by this time I was getting extremely cold. I really should have wrapped up a bit better than I did. It was a great day though and really enjoyable. It took quite a while to get the photo’s sorted and uploaded. I initially took over 600 photo’s but ended up with 140 published on Flickr. I also used Lightroom for the first time and I’m now hooked. So much more control over the image than in iPhoto. Just a shame that iPhoto 09 is coming with really nice albums and iPhone syncing. If only iPhoto worked like Picasa and managed photo’s in there own locations without having to suck/copy them into iPhoto’s library. I hate duplication.

Couple of things I need to remember when taking a photo. I don’t spend enough time watching where I’m taking a photo from. Lot’s of photo’s were slightly off centre from what I wanted to or were from a bad angle just because I didn’t think the photo through. I also need to work on not shaking as much – even with image stabilisation switched on I had a couple of disappointing photo’s. My favourite photo from the day though is the one below of Shakeel in the London Eye capsule. Just captures him really well. His full set of photo’s from London are also up at Flickr – he took some really great shots, even some of the ones without me in the picture are good. Hopefully this is the start of a lot more photo’s this year as is something I really enjoy doing.

Roundup

Busy weekend that was mainly indoors due to the quite lovely weather outside. Give me cold and dry any day over this wet and windy nonsense. It did get off to a great start when four parcels arrived Friday/Saturday. While not quite as good as the instant gratification of buying form a shop the fact I’d saved some cash with these purchases made it all seem a little sweeter.

First parcels were the rest of my hill walking gear. That’s me pretty well set now for the first walk 2 weeks today, a 6 mile jaunt to break everything in. The following weekend is a 12 mile walk which will be slightly more challenging. I can’t wait! Really looking forward to getting out and about. To help I’ve also picked up a couple of books including a cracking little pocket book of 40 walks close to Glasgow.

A new piece of tech was also in one of the parcels – a Bamboo Fun graphics tablet. One of my work colleagues has used one for years and I’d always been tempted. Seeing Shakeel use one over Christmas convinced me of their value. I’ve been using it today to process my London Eye photo’s in Lightroom and it is so much easier, offering far more precision than the mouse. While not essential I’m really pleased with the purchase.

More tech geekery – I’ve switched back to Windows 7. Can’t believe how much improvement over Vista and XP this is. So much so I…..nah – I won’t be switching back 😉 But I was impressed with it once I had it installed using Parallels 4. Quick to boot and shutdown compared to XP never mind Vista. It also looks pretty sweet. Not done to much more with it but will probably remove my XP virtual machine and use this instead.

Apart from that I started a nice new project for work that hopefully won’t take too long to finish off and I’ve caught up with the Screenwipe review of the year which was class. 24’s back tomorrow, Battlestar next week, Lost at the end of the month and FX is showing The Wire from Feb 23rd which if you haven’t caught yet should be added to your diary. Unmissable.

Oh, almost forgot. Tried Spotify today. Very impressive. Reminds me of Pandora before it stopped working in the UK.

And finally, I think. Macworld. Kind of quiet but iPhoto and iMovie 09 look to be very good upgrades so I’ll probably be upgrading at the end of the month. DRM free iTunes is good but it’s been a long time coming so doesn’t seem such a big deal. Even the Macbook Pro was fairly tame except for the non replacable battery. If that option plus the matte screen was available for the 15inch Macbook Pro I’d really consider upgrading. Thankfully it’s not!

Next Year

Looking back is never usually a good thing. Last year’s resolutions surrounded two main targets – lose more weight and getting more hands on with programming. Well, one out of two ain’t bad.

A picture saves a thousand words:

After my last weight update I wanted to lose five stones in total. Unfortunately I didn’t make that target. Since Sep 07 I’ve lost four stones and 13 pounds. One lousy pound short of my target. Grrrrrrr. Never mind, I’m pretty pleased with the weight I’ve lost and I’ve done better than I thought I would when I started back in 07. I’ve not done the same amount of exercise in the later half of 08 as I did in the first six months but something that’s obvious to me (and everyone else!) is that without further diet changes I will put the weight back on slowly but surely which is obviously not what I want to do.

So the year ahead will see some more work on the weight and another target – get another stone off. That will take me down to around 13 and a half stones which I think is good for my height/frame and make a total loss of six stones from when I started in Sept 07. BMI will still be higher than recommended but that’s a guide only and not something I’m going to treat as a hard and fast target.

I’m also taking up hill walking. Got most of the gear now (waterproofs to buy – maybe I don’t need them for hill walking in Scotland ;-)) and first proper walk should be in the next four weeks or so with one taking place each month. Should also help with another thing I need to work on – taking more photographs. I know what I need to do but like most peoples resolutions that’s not the issue – it’s getting my ass in gear – that’s the issue.

Last year also had a ‘must get into programming more’ statement. That worked, not! Don’t know how yet but I want to set aside some time, regular time at that, to program for the iPhone.

Written down it all looks pretty simple. Happy new year folks! Hope you have a good 2009.

British Design Classics

I used to love collecting stamps when I was a kid and this new set of British Design Classics which is out next year from the Royal Mail is just lovely and brought back some nice memories.

More stamps from the collection can be seen on the CR Blog.

I’m Walking

Following on from the weight loss (continuing but slowing down) I’m trying something new. Hill walking. I’ve always fancied doing it but always had the excuse of ‘I don’t have the proper gear’ or people who were doing it were pretty experienced and I definitely was too out of shape to try it. However one of the guys that I play badminton with is trying to get a monthly hill walking group started…and I hope to join them.

I picked up a proper pair of walking boots last week and went out for a trial walk on Friday. Just a couple of miles to try out the boots. Thankfully they are spot on and very comfy thanks to Cotswold Outdoor who were very helpful and spent quite a bit of time helping me choose the boots. Next I need to get some waterproof gear and also something to keep me a bit warmer. It’s quite a steep initial outlay to be honest but I hope to make good use of it. The first walk should be on Sunday 9th November. Probably not the best time of year to start something like this but beggars can’t be choosers.

Even the short walk on Friday was very enjoyable. Walking through the autumn leaves brought back memories of Glasgow Uni. Walking down Kelvin Way was always nice when the leaves had fell until the rain kicked in and it turned into a nice muddy mix. Thinking back to Uni, me and Hamid walked everywhere. Walked to town, then into The Barras for some, erm, software, then walking back home. Walked to each others houses no matter what the weather. Those were the days.

The walk on Friday was also a first test for some geo mapping iPohne app’s. First up was Runkeeper. It tracked the walk with great accuracy as can be seen in the screenshot below. The other app that I’ll try this weekend coming is TrailGuru. Want to do around double the distance as the first hill walk is around 8 miles. One thing that won’t last though is the iPhone battery life. To use one of these app’s over a walk will need a battery pack of some sort. A Kensington option is looking favourite at the moment if I can find it in stock. Really looking forward to the first walk though. Don’t get out and about enough around Scotland but this should certainly help.