Not much to say for a few days

Been watching quite a lot of Due South (we forgot to update our Amazon list) and doing some work on my Folkestone maps when I've had a few minutes. Now weather.

I've sort of been enjoying the weather. Monday daytime I thought was fabulous, around lunchtime I went out and it was pleasant with a very slight breeze that was cool to the skin. Perfect festival weather I thought, so it was probably that it was the weather I remember from a festival I enjoyed in the past. Not hot enough to get sunburned, warm enough to not have to wear a jacket, but not so hot as to be uncomfortable if you had to put one on to save carrying it... Yesterday was an odd one, it showed up the mighty distance we travel to work each day. In the morning it was spectacularly foggy at home, though clear by the time we got to work and then really too hot in the afternoon here in London. We both do a bit of a speedy walk from the station to our offices, so when it's "nice" and hot, it's really too hot for that sort of activity.

Today, who knows, it's started out a bit warm, if it really does get hotter then things might just start bursting into flames here at work. There's been some kind of air-con problem, and we might have to turn the power off to stop all the computers going bang. I'll keep you informed by the medium of smoke signals.

Outlook for the rest of the week: I can see me having two lunches tomorrow, I have a couple of ready meals at home that were supposed to do for lunch this week and I keep forgetting to bring them in. We're looking for more of the perfect festival weather for the rest of the week and the weekend, as we're off to The Kent Show. We know how to live these days.

Now I remember, I had some content from elswhere I was planning to recycle here. I put out a shout out to some of my homelies looking for answers regarding home cabling, and everyone's on holiday so no-one's answering.

Who can help me with some video skills? I want to digitise a video, but my TV card isn't picking up the signal from my video, that I'm sending down an aerial lead, any ideas? I've retuned the TV card every which way but all I'm getting are ropey TV signals where that it's picking up using the video (that's not plugged into a real aerial) as an aerial. The other input options I have are s-video and composite, but the only other outputs I have on the video are scart The TV card is this, someone gave it to me at work.

I've got a little scart -> component converter that we used with the PS2, it looks like if that worked at all it would only send the video signal and no sound. I've not tried it yet because we only used it for converting the component signal from the PS2 into the TV SCART, and not the other way round, is there a chance of it going bang?

Should I get a SCART -> s-video cable instead? They look cheap, will that work?

2006 :: Comment / reply

Text alerts success

You're now set up to receive Text alerts and you'll receive your first message in 7 working days time. ROCK! It's free and it's going to text me a mini statement once a week, that's cool... Tried to change my address online for proper postal statements, but I have to fill out a form on screen, print it out and then post it, DUH! Now if only I can remember who my mortgage was with, maybe I can sort out some overpayement and then my banking responsibility for the month is SORTED! I want to quickly stash some money away as we're going wedding ring shopping this week and if I just don't have the money available, then I can't eb spending it all on jewelery.

VERY NICE weekend, thanks for asking, sorry to lead with something so dull, it's just that I'm interested in the technology... had seen these Lloyds TSB ads on TV and assumed there would be some charging, but apparently not. AND they're going to give 30 days notice if they do start charging. Anyway, weekend, GREAT! Last minute decision not to go to Folkestone and decorate on my own (sorry the Folkestone massive, for not tipping you off I wouldn't be there). Decided to go to Fareham instead, see the family and meet up with friends in the pub to watch the football. GOOD game, and would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for that pesky kid Rooney scoring a goal at both ends of the match. Watched in the Brass Monkey, and then for some reason headed to Chicago Rock Cafe at something like closing time. Turns out it's not a real cafe at all, it's some sort of music dance club bar! I could really have done with a cup of tea and a sandwich by this point, but had more beer instead. Had to move from the IPA of the Brass Monkey to blee John Smiths smooth or something equally foul, and then on to cider when that ran out. And no dinner! Good job I had two lunches. Good work to the chums seeing me home in one piece in a taxi.

Hanging out with the family is a bit calmer, even the nephews weren't too hectic this weekend, maybe they sensed my hangover and sympathised. Excellent huge dinner, and no probs coming back to London despite there being a replacement bus service on the main Portsmouth to London line, changing at Eastleigh beat all that.

Was hoping to see our coffee table, that w ordered last year, and it's still not in... now I know the name of the range I can search online though and can show you what it looks like, and the matching bookcase we might go for.


Antibes light oak furniture apothecary chest coffee table Antibes solid light oak bookshelf

Took some snaps at the weekend, and had an idea for how to show them on the site without needing to do a bundle of resizing and putting pages together by hand, so I will work on that later...

2005 :: Comment / reply

What I done on my holidays

Well, that was the holiday then. A fantastic 168 hour long boozy lunch, we didn't do much more than get up for a big breakfast, sit snacking and drinking by the pool while waiting for our big boozy lunch, then eat and drink until it was time for a big dinner, then retire to the bar. Was great to have so many family members there, there were eighteen of us in all. It was very sad to leave them there for the second week, while we came home.

The resort was ace, very impressed with how lush and in bloom it all was, they have made a real effort with populating the place with flowers and that. We have learned a new name for a lovely thing, it's Bougainvillia, and if it's not too uncool to have a favourite flower, then that's it, the colours are ace and I hope that it features in some of our photos, and that we can grow some somewhere, somehow over here. And anyway, it's more a big creeping manly vine. Must have taken a lot of water to keep everything so nice and green, but then they save a bit by filling up the pools with what must havebeen sea water. Once you got outside the resort there was the dry dustiness I expected, but Hersonnisos itself was cool. It was early in their season, they were just getting ready for a huge influx, and a lot of it was fairly eighteen-thirty, but we found some nice places.

Lunches were all in, buffet style, a mix of healthy and less so... this is the first year that this resort had been marketed to the UK, so it was mostly made up of French and German guests, so when there was a canteen or two of something nice and simple and vegan like broccoli or beans, it was often sprinkled with chopped sausage, bacon, ham, or cheese. So most days I had chips, in a roll, with some nice salad things. Got a bit more of an overhanging belly now, that I must work on. Used some exercise kit while away that has inspired us to do more too.

Our one trip out was to the capital Heraklion, which has lots of cool shops and bars and things. Apparently it's expensive as Greece goes, but we didn't really notice this. Favourite place we went to was the very cool Living Room, but there were the typical tacky joints too.

We went to Knossos too, there are remains of a palace there from between four and six thousand years ago, and they claim it had working sanitation and the like - so with all that experience, why can you still not put paper down the toilets now? It is likely to be that if it wasn't for "improvements" and renovations by the Victorians all would be cool for flushing as much folding as you like. The renovations done at Knossos were most confusing, when you first have a glance across the site, you see a few columns and standing walls with murals still in place, though it turns out these are concrete reproductions put in place by a chap called Sir Arthur Evans, to give an impression what the place would have looked like. It turns out these reproductions are starting to crumble now, and the archaelogists working there now are having to put serious effort into preserving / restoring them. Also some of the restoration was quite inaccurate, there's a bit of mural called "Prince of the lilies", looks like a man dancing through some flowers, but it turns out now that it's very likely to have originally been three different figures (one female, two male) that were forced together jigsaw style by the Victorians. Seeing things like this has given me the impression that the only things we know about ancient history are what the generations who came between then and now have left for us to know. What will later generations think of us, when all our DVDs and hard drives have degraded away, and there's not a surviving accurate record of we live? It could be that's all that survives from our generation are frivolous things like marble statues of Michael Jackson and the like.

Anyway, REALLY got into the archery, it was easier than I thought to get started, though I have a blister from using a bow that didn't quite fit my hand. Not sure if you're allowed to just buy this kit and use it in your garden, maybe we will see about joining a club.

This weekend, got to get a van and move some bits round from Clare's parents to the flat, hopefully this will go smoothly. Looking forward to moving a bagfull of symbolic househould items from Stokey to the Folkestone flat... not decided what yet, but it will be a few choice items that deserve the nice new surroundings, a lamp, some books. Apart from something obvious but too big to carry down from London (like my spare fridge), any suggestions?

2004 :: Comment / reply