Author Archive

Full Steam Ahead

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

736Looking for something to do today we decided to pedal over to Lakeside Country Park in Eastleigh. There’s a pleasant enough cycle path most of the way from our house and we could take a look at that endangered species, the Eastleigh golfer (the course at Fleming Park is due to close at the end of the month). What we hadn’t bargained on was the Spring Gala for the miniature railway with 10+ locomotives in full steam. Christine seemed to think it was my duty to take Emma for a ride. Emma wasn’t entirely impressed by all of the smoke and noise and wanted to get off the train before we had even started. She survived the 1.25 mile round trip including the tunnel although I’m not sure she (nor I) will be in a rush to have another go!

Week in the Peaks

Saturday, March 21st, 2009

724From Ludlow we move to the Peak District for a short break. The location was mainly chosen so that we could make a day trip to visit Christine’s cousin Cath’s new baby. We’d made a last minute booking at a cottage in Tideswell. The cottage was homely enough but could do with a bit of touching up here and there. It did have an excellent collection of children’s books which kept Emma happy for the week. She might have enjoyed the videos as well but I could only get the DVD player to work!

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Weekend in Ludlow

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

721We’ve spent a very relaxing weekend in Ludlow with Christine’s old boss Russell Cheng. They have retired to a lovely old listed building in the centre of Ludlow from where we could make short forays out in to the town. I last visited Ludlow as a scout when, as a group of patrol leaders, we were remarkably allowed to find our own way to Ludlow from Hertfordshire and then walk from there to Shrewsbury, staying at hostels on the way. I have to confess to remembering nothing of the place! Particularly exciting for Emma was spending the weekend with Truffle and May (a dog and cat respectively). Emma perfected her ‘lie down Truffle’ which was needed frequently during mealtimes (perhaps related to Ann’s excellent cooking!). A small selection of photos are on Flickr.

User Group Presentation

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Yesterday I headed down to Bedfont with a  car load of IBMers to present at the WebSphere User Group meeting. I was presenting an update covering new function in WebSphere ESB and Process Server 6.2. After days of pulling together slides from all the various product architects I ditched my pitch in favour of a few minor modifications to an excellent presentation from one of the worldwide tech sales team. Obviously I know the WebSphere ESB material well enough but this was a good opportunity to brush up my knowledge of the new function in Process Server. I also went to a couple of interesting presentations on OSGI, JAX-RS and JPA as well as my colleague Brian Hulse’s detailed presentation on the Service Gateway and Policy support in 6.2. With attendance down on usual, I felt the large number of parallel tracks led to smaller than desirable audiences for many of the presentations. It was also a horrendous drive back home along the M3 through torrential rain.

New Forest hosts British Champs

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

718Last weekend saw the British Orienteering Champs come to the New Forest. Things didn’t get off to a good start for us – Emma started to develop spots on Friday which by Saturday morning looked very like chicken pox. In the end Emma did come to Hampton Ridge (where there were at least two other children in a similar predicament!) but Christine had missed her run by this point. I may as well have missed mine. I was off as first starter on M21L but certainly wasn’t the first to find number one on my course! You can read the gory details in my comments on RouteGadget (Course 8). Mercifully our shift helping didn’t prove too onerous (although we have been jointly responsible for creating all of the information material for the event).

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For Sale

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

After much indecision and procrastination we finally put our house on the market this week. Currently the plan is simply to make the most of the current downturn and upsize locally. That relies on us finding somewhere we want to move to though! At the moment I’m paranoid about getting a decent offer on our current place and being nowhere near finding somewhere we like. Our main problem is that we don’t need a massive house but we would like a decent sized garden. These days, if a property had some space around it, someone has invariably built an ugly extension on it! (Having viewed a few properties now we’ve seen a couple of those!) Anyway, if you’d like to buy a three bedroom house in Chandler’s Ford with a great outlook (or would just like a nose at where we live now!) then you can find the details on rightmove.

Burnham Blunders

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

I’ve now uploaded my route for Sunday’s National Event at Burnham Beeches. I think my winning of M21L can only be attributed to the fact that nearly everyone else was running the Elite course (I baulked at running 15km).  Due to the low numbers, M21L was on the same course as M18E, M20E, M35L and M40L and I had the pleasure of being soundly beaten by the winners on all of those courses.

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Lightroom import finally fixed

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Having obtained Lightroom about 2 months ago our usage has been severly limited by the fact that an import of our existing Photoshop Elements 5 catalog only brought in about two-thirds of the images. You can read the gory details on one of the many forums I posted trying to find an answer. It then dawned on me that, having paid good money for the product, we might actually be entitled to some proper support from Adobe! Sadly their promised 24 hour response time turned out to be more like 2 weeks and the first set of suggestions (relinking photos, deleting cache files and a recover) didn’t work. They then suggested using the File > Move option in Elements to relocate all of our photos from the USB hard disk to the local disk. This seemed to do the trick (although I suspect moving them anywhere may have been sufficient) and we finally have all of our photos reunited in one product. Now I just need to find the time to get to the end of the Lightroom book that my brother bought me for Xmas!