Archive for 2007

Holiday at Home – Monday

Posted by on August 8th 2007 in Great Escapes

After a later-than-planned start to the day, we abandoned the original plan and did something that we never envisaged... we all went swimming.

Now this might not seem to be much of a big deal to most people, but it was one of those milestone events for us. We take the kids for weekly lessons and they can swim really well and they enjoy the water. Me and Chris hate the stuff - we can swim a bit, but there's no enjoyment in it for us. This was the first time I've been in a swimming pool since 1978, and I'll be happy if I manage to spend another 29 years without having to do it again.

For obvious reasons, there is no album of pics of this momentous event.

Holiday at Home – Sunday 1

Posted by on August 8th 2007 in Great Escapes

Bradgate Park.

We parked up in the Hunts Hill car-park and walked up to the Old John folly. The route then took us to the war memorial, where the kids spent an hour or so kite-flying while I went in search of the elusive Precambrian fossils that I had been shown when I was a geology undergrad.

While clambering about on the outcrops I met three geo-academics (two from Leicester University and the other visiting from South Africa) and we ended up discussing matters such as the scanning and preservation of the site, and the staff from my days at The University of Birmingham - it turned out that we had some mutual friends, I think that the guy that I was chatting to was amused to get some idea of the undergrad opinions of the staff at Brum back in the early Eighties.

Anyway, we were off again soon, after the kids had done some climbing up the easy rock faces. We walked for a few miles, saw some frogs, some grasshoppers and a magnificent stag, then we went back to the entrance to pick up our picnic, which we carried back up to Old John. After eats, we flew kites again until the sun went down, then we had to leave before the warden could evict us. The only downer on the day came later when I had to remove four ticks from the back of my leg.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peewiglet returns!

Posted by on August 7th 2007 in Blog on Blog
That Alan Sloman bloke's tracked down Peewiglet. She's blogging at http://peewiglet.wordpress.com - if her blog's anywhere near as good as her website, it'll be one to keep going back to time and again. Nice one, PW!  

Thanks, Jamie

Posted by on August 6th 2007 in Blog on Blog, Thanks

Jamie at http://hikingblogs.thesocksite.com has been kind enough to feature my blog, and some others that you may have heard of, on his site. It makes a pleasant change to have a good look at what's going on in the rest of the world - have a look yourself and see if there's anything there to pique your interest.

 

It’s our “Holiday at Home” Week – Saturday 1

Posted by on August 6th 2007 in Great Escapes

SWMBO's got the week off work so we thought that we would try having a week holidaying from home, i.e. get out and about all week, but with the advantage of not paying to stay elsewhere.

Initially I wasn't keen on the idea - I thought that we had exhausted our "days out" options long ago, we've lived here for over 13 years and tend to struggle for any agreement when it comes to finding a weekend activity. Anyway, we sat down and brainstormed the idea, and the list just kept growing and growing, we had to call a halt to the process when the kids had added over 30 activities to the list! Some are new, some are do-agains, some are old favourites that we thought were wearing a bit thin but which seem to have become popular again. Anyway, we decided to give it a shot, here's what's been going down...

Saturday: Bosworth Water Trust. We started with a short session in the kids' play area and then went for a walk around the main lake. There was a lot of activity on the lake (sailing, windsurfing, rowing, fishing) and plenty of wildlife around the margins, so plenty of opportunities to use the camera. This was followed by the traditional ice-cream session and then an hour in a rowing-boat paddling furiously against a strengthening breeze. After this it was back to the play area for a while, then a couple of hours kite-flying until it was chucking-out time. The day was rounded-off nicely with fish and chips for tea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zoto Photo Sharing – my preliminary verdict

Posted by on August 2nd 2007 in Photo hosting
I'm halfway through the 2-week free trial and I have to say that I'm really impressed with Zoto Photo Sharing. It does just about everything that I want it to do, and a lot more besides. I've had accounts with Flickr, Zooomr, Photobox and some others, but they don't match Zoto when it comes to flexibility. Features that I'm particularly impressed with are:
  • Options for setting the order of pics (by date/time taken, date/time uploaded, title, an exif parameter etc.);
  • Options for setting the number and size of thumbnails for each album;
  • The facility to group pics into multiple albums, and to group albums into multiple sets;
  • Options for setting display colours and template colours (background, text, link, link hover, border etc.), these can be set independently for each album;
  • The bulk uploader;
  • The options for setting permissions;
  • Bulk editing for things like dates, tags, text, privacy, moving pics between albums etc.;
  • The overall ease of use.
 

  Bits that I don't like? Well, there's not much, really:
  • Page loads/refreshes seem a bit slow to me, but that may be due to the steam-powered processor that rattles about in my laptop pretending to crunch those 1s and 0s;
  • The user homepage is still a bit buggy, but it's just minor stuff, nothing to worry about.
But by far the best bit (IMO) is the Support. There's a Zoto forum, where there is a visible proactive approach to dealing with issues and bugs, where you can see that bug tickets have been raised, where you can see that the Zoto staff and community are willing to engage in a dialogue to get things sorted. So, to sum up, it's the best photo hosting/sharing package that I've used so far. So good that I've just paid a paltry $29.95 for a two-year subscription which doesn't kick in until the 2-week trial period has elapsed. Have a look and consider trying it out for a fortnight for free - what have you got to lose?
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