No I've not been out on the larry-large every day over christmas, been a bit under the weather actually, though that's not what's kept me off the computer. When I'm not at work and Clare's home too I never get to sit in front of the computer, she's playing Spider Solitaire all day, and that's the truth...
Had a fairly active weekend, I was working the last two days of last week (when did I last write anything?) and went straight to Hythe after work on Friday. Met the wife, Jenny, and Emma in The Butt Of Sherry for one, then off to meet others in Everest for a splendid early curry. This was Kevin and Guiselle's last night before heading back to the USA so we were replete with friends and family. The food is pretty good there, it's probably my favourite of the local sit-in curry houses. After, on to Earl Brownes. Not sure what it is but I can hardly be bothered with that place. Maybe it was just me, but they didn't even seem that keen to serve us.
Sort of a normal weekend for me, working the Friday and the Monday, and not just running it into one huge festive holiday like everyone else, but not quite normal - no trip to Wagamama. We saw Kev and Guiselle off about lunchtime, then took our festive recycling to the tip, plus some other bits that have been cluttering the house up for ages. I had a broken flat screen monitor that I wondered about getting fixed, and a spare kitchen cabinet that have been sat in our hallway for a year or more. I did intend to freecycle them, but never quite got round to it. Now, they are gone! We have some spare space for a wine rack or something - the hallway would be just about the right temperature, but I can't be sure who'll be coming and going past our front door, especially while the flat upstairs is about to be re-let... Can't find it online, but it's reassuring to see our street is at the top end of rental values1 (Hope that link to rightmove works out OK for you, search for two bed flats in CT20 otherwise...), good to know for when we want to rent out, but also not so good to see there's quite a lot of competition out there... maybe renting the flat out with the pool table in-situ will give us that edge?
Enough of the future plans, back to the weekend. Almost walked to Dover yesterday. I got a GPS thing2 for my camera for christmas, so our entire walk is logged and plotted, and I took some photos along the route, and they look good on my desktop software, I'll figure out a way to plot the route and the pictures easily here on the blog, without having to use everytrail.com3 or anything else like that. I say "nearly walked" because we didn't set out until after lunch, and it was starting to get dark by the time we'd got to Capel, so we went for a cheeky half in The Lighthouse and headed back. You'll be able to see all this when I plot the map later. As soon as I've uploaded my pictures you'll be able to get a nice map view of them, because the coordinates of where each picture was taken are now stored in the meta data of the image file itself, but to combine this with the route of our walk etc I need to convert a data file like this:
@Sonygps/ver1.0/wgs-84
$[GPGGA](/wiki/#gps),124840,5104.7582,N,00110.0559,E,1,03,06.8,00037.1,M,047.0,M,,*43
$[GPGSA](/wiki/#gps),A,2,03,18,19,,,,,,,,,,06.8,06.8,00.9*08
$[GPGSV](/wiki/#gps),3,1,12,03,82,280,42,08,12,330,29,15,08,033,29,16,39,178,35*7F
$[GPGSV](/wiki/#gps),3,2,12,18,42,073,44,19,49,288,49,21,22,061,32,22,45,131,35*7B
$[GPGSV](/wiki/#gps),3,3,12,25,15,285,33,26,07,023,00,27,16,304,29,32,30,158,00*74
$[GPRMC](/wiki/#gps),124840,A,5104.7582,N,00110.0559,E,003.3,059.7,301207,,,A*76
$[GPVTG](/wiki/#gps),059.7,T,,M,003.3,N,006.2,K,A*02
$[GPGGA](/wiki/#gps),124900,5104.7572,N,00110.0835,E,1,03,06.7,00037.1,M,047.0,M,,*41
$[GPGSA](/wiki/#gps),A,2,03,18,19,,,,,,,,,,06.8,06.7,00.9*07
$[GPGSV](/wiki/#gps),3,1,12,03,82,279,48,08,12,330,29,15,08,033,33,16,39,178,42*78
$[GPGSV](/wiki/#gps),3,2,12,18,42,073,51,19,49,288,46,21,22,061,50,22,45,131,41*77
$[GPGSV](/wiki/#gps),3,3,12,25,15,285,29,26,07,023,00,27,16,304,30,32,30,158,00*77
$[GPRMC](/wiki/#gps),124900,A,5104.7572,N,00110.0835,E,003.5,081.1,301207,,,A*7E
$[GPVTG](/wiki/#gps),081.1,T,,M,003.5,N,006.6,K,A*03
into just the latitude and longitudes, and then javascript them up to put them on to a map like this.
Looks like it will be quite easy, strangely there's no date info in there that I can see, maybe it's in the file name, but if I just use the lines beginning $GPGGA like so:
$[GPGGA](/wiki/#gps),124840,5104.7582,N,00110.0559,E,1,03,06.8,00037.1,M,047.0
124840 is the time (12:48:40), and the location looks like roughly 51 degrees 4 minutes North and 11 minutes East and I can ignore the rest. Except, there's a spare zero in there, I need to investigate this NMEA format further... I need to revisit my maps generally, I've changed the way I store a lot of things, I bet they're broke.
New year plans? I'm in work today, and we're staying in tonight, quietest new year EVER! A big chilli pie feast for tea, fingers crossed something good is on TV, then a quiet day tomorrow too I hope.
javascript: Programming language of the internets, mostly how I earn a wage.
⬅️ Whole lot of interesting detail there, though you do sound a bit bitter :: also "literally dozens turned up on the opening night [to find the place full]" ➡️
Paul Clarkeʼs weblog - I live in A small town. Wed and dad to two, I am a full stack web developr, + I do js / nodejs, some ruby, other languages ect ect. I like pubs, parkrun, restaurants, home-automation and other diy jiggery-pokery, history, genealogy, TV, squirrels, pirates, lego, and time travel.