Watch out for the fondue this christmas

This happened down the road from us!

You do wonder how these things happen in the era of health and safety we find ourselves in! I'm sure these fondue sets will now come with a risk assessment as part of the packaging next year!

All i can say is I'm glad Santa did not deliver anything dangerous to our house this year!

Sunday morning ride!

So decided on a test - a 120mile route over towards ZigZag hill (vote best road in UK via continental tyre customers), over Salisbury plain, back towards Winchester then home. Idea was to see as many B or unclassified roads as possible - thanks to offline planning!

My day pass was stamped and I set off just after doing breakfast duties for the kids.

You know your in trouble, when (a) the bike complains about the weather - those pesky Germans like to remind you how cold it is by flashing various warnings on the dash - the actual temperature is displayed and an annoying flashing snowflake. (b) every time i went into a slight covered area and the temperature dropped the wing mirrors and front screen misted up (ON A BIKE FOR GOD's sake!) Never seen that before. Little unnerving as your blind to the rear, the roads are damp - or was it black ice, not sure!

Good news is that you know the sun's going to rise sooner or later and it will dry out. Also good to test the olde riding skills. Good to say that i kept it upright, got over 120 miles done, and a nice hot mug of tea and a sausage bap at half-time. Good morning's riding!

Now who wants to come around and wash the road salt off the bike? ;-)

Now we know where were going!

So the land rover has built in sat-nav so it was bye bye to the old TomTom and i spent the money on a new SatNav for the motorbike! Ruggerised, can be submersed in water and is impervious to petrol! So this means I'm bound to break it in the first 3 months!

Managed to mount the display inside screen of the bike! Just waiting for some bits from an off road company to wire the unit into the bike battery permanently!

Great features include being able to plan route on PC and upload to garmin unit. also have the ability to upload pre-planned routes or even load the route log into Google Earth! Cool!

Some things in life are free!

Last week i had to travel to see clients + do some training in the evening with my US counterparts via live meeting. Options were (a) stay at home and do training from home office and get up the next day at 4am to get to client (b) get to hotel near client and do training from there with a 7am start. So it was option B the family favoured!

So how do i watch training + connect to the audio bridge. Easy. Connect using free Internet at hotel, connect over Internet to live meeting server. Audio? I know - use Sony Skype mouse which also acts as phone/speakerphone. Dial freephone access number from skype and open up speakerphone. Hey presto - good audio and video capabilities and the best thing? I didn't get stitched for a 2hr phone call at hotel rates or for dialing a freephone number :) When the technology works it's great!

An afternoon in london

Had a few hours to myself so was at a loose end. What shall i do? Really want to get out on the bike but where shall i go? I know - quick blast up to London.

So left just before noon, legged it up M3 in the pouring rain, through chiswick, hammersmith, kensington, under hyde park, Piccadilly, around eros, down past design museum, IOD, Trafalgar square, down towards Buckingham palace (road shut), left into back of horse guards parade, into Parliament square, Whitehall, embankment towards the city, quick blat (avoiding traffic cops!), then over Waterloo bridge, stop for a quick photo at London eye, past st thomas's back over Thames and southwark bridge, left onto embankment and then a quick stop at Albert Bridge for a quick photo! Hop on bike, head past earls court, past twickenham etc to pick up M3. Didn't fancy the motorway so came off at bagshot, down through camberley, blackbushe airport, hook, odiham, Alton, then some single track country lanes before getting home 4hrs later, knackered, wet but grinning from ear-to-ear.

Air Ambulance

We had the Hampshire air ambulance drop into the field next door the other day. All very exciting!

Seems the calor gas man was delivering canisters and somehow managed to puncture a lung. Land ambulance, police cars,etc. After 45 Min's the helicopter landed! You can't see it, bit it landed in a small boggy field surrounded by overhead phone lines, local power as well as a high voltage power line as well. All four sides in fact. Allot of skill was needed to get the 'copter up and above the cables.

Mac Vs PC - decided

I took what i thought was path of least resistance!

I specced up a Mac - £4000. Gulp.Then i looked at the hassle of moving apps - such as Photoshop - from the PC to the Mac (a paid platform upgrade) and then the hassle of all the other bits and pieces.

In the end I bought a 250GB extra drive for the existing PC for £112 to go with the 80Gb one already resident in chez PC!

I have forgotten what a pain putting extra bits of hw into an existing chassis can be:

- remove existing drive

- remove rails on side of new drive

- mount new drive into internal pc chassis

- make sure the jumper settings are right

-get ribbon cable right sequence (grey before black apparently)

- mount drives in chassis properly and remover to put all the other bits back you had to take off to get to the drives in the first place.

- update BIOS to look for SLAVE drive

- get windows xp to recognise new drive (using disk manager - which is difficult to find!)

- format drive to be NTFS (took over an 1hr)

- take backup

- move data between drives

And here's me thinking it would be a 10-15 min job!

New UK VOD service.

A new digital download services was announced by the three big TV companies in the UK- BBC, ITV and C4. Believe me - this is going to be a great service. C4 have been winning many awards for their 4OD service as well as being popular with "da youf" market. See. I have not lost my ability to talk with the younger generation.

Mac vs PC

So the old PC is filling up. Now have 30Gb of music, music videos and the old bit of TV on it and its growing everyday. We have a new Apple Store in the local town and i spent 30 mins yesterday playing with an iMac, MacPro and iphone!

24" imac with 2GB of RAM and 500Gb of disk space looks good. Got to think about the migration - most things are platform independent - JPEG's, MP3 files, but its the apps - Adobe tells me i have to purchase a "platform upgrade" to move from PC to Mac, plus need to look at all the other things that need to migrate and figure out the true cost. Alternative is to dual boot the iMAC of course! Mmm.... Choices to make

Not keen on the iphone. Bit slow and a bit fiddly for my fat fingers!

3 go mad in wales!

Great night Monday. Stereophonics live in wales. Legged it from work down the M4, picking up two friends on way, then quick meal + few beers, walk to venue, then queued with a bunch of mad welsh nutters for more beer!

Support band - the enemy - made good noise for a 3 piece guitar band. Sounded a bit like the Jam we thought.

Main act great. 90 minutes of loud rock 'n' roll stuff. Didn't just play their new stuff but wove in a number of their classic tracks to get the audience going

Loud music, beer, whisky, hot sweaty bodies....what a great night. Yep we stood in the main part in front of stage as we are proper gig goers! Stayed up in Cardiff in hotel so we spent time in the hotel bar....well till about 1am.

Only downside - had to get up early to go to work Tuesday morning.