January: My Dad turned 60 and retired, great weekend in a National Trust property.

February: Ria and I had a few days in Krakow including Valentines Day at Auschwitz.

March: Had a weekend near Helensburgh at Strone Cottage – outdoor hot tubs are one of mankind’s great inventions.

April: Saw Honda’s Asymo, destroyed my website, went to a huge 50s themed charity party.

May: Spent a long weekend in Arran, travelling there on the train and then the ferry. Did some nice but very, very wet walking. First round of redundancies at work.

June: Lovely wedding, lots of warm evenings drinking outdoors, saw numerous films at the film festival. “Our” birthday picnic.

July: Went to Whitby and visited my parents at home including a day trip to York. Began the great flat hunt.

August: fringe, fringe, fringe and found a nice flat! 2nd round of redundanices at work.

September: Moved in with Ria, had a weekend in London, rounded off the festival, re-designed my website.

October: Had two weeks in New York, Boston, Chicago and New York again. Amazing trip – wanted to return immediately. Numerous halloween parties.

November: Finally had our flat warming party, my cousin in Kansas got engaged.

December: The Jackson & Phillips families went for a weekend in St Andrews together.

We’re on a paperless tarrif for our gas and electricity and so all correspondence arrives via email. All jolly good, less wasted paper etc. Except that their email subject lines are terrible:

It is time for your meter reading

What the heck? IT IS TIME – It’s like a summons to climb the sides of mount doom. Why so formal? Even just changing “it is” to “it’s” softens the tone.

Then I get a follow-up email, with the following:

You have not yet given us your meter reading

Not much better. Did I commit a crime? Not really a gentle reminder. Does anyone in marketing even read these before they are put into production?

My Virtual Machine got hosed. Excitingly I wasn’t doing any regular backups so I’ve had to revert to a backup I had from my last-but-one hosting account. Which seems to be from June last year :/ I’m devising some cunning way of pulling all my lost blog posts out of the Google Reader cache. Normal service will be resumed at some point soon.

There are so many gems:

• Timeline of inventions
• Featured desktop backgrounds

The blog posts have been getting pretty thin on the ground recently. I have been working a lot in my swanky new job: doing lots of MVC PHP but mixing it up with some C# which is a lot like Java.

I’ve been on to a stag weekend with karting, curry and drinking and the associated wedding. Both were enjoyable and very well organised.

A couple of months ago I got a super shiny 32″ Samsung HDTV from ebuyer. All was fine until last week when the image started ghosting and streaking horizontally across the screen. Not good. Now I’ve got to post the flipping thing back to ebuyer. Going to need a bigger box…

Update: So I’ve got a box, got it packaged up and arranged pickup from work. Just got to get the blasted thing to work in the morning.

I had two days off last week to attend my Grandad’s funeral in Calverley, near Leeds. When I say funeral you’d expect a very staid and teary affair. But it was nothing like that. He was in no way a religious man (rather like myself) and had stipulated that he didn’t want a religious service. So, it was just his two sons; Peter (my Dad) and Tim speaking about their Dad to friends and family. Everything was very cheerful, we entered to In the Mood by Glenn Miller and exited to the Skye Boat Song. My Grandad was very respectful of his Scottish roots and loved holidaying in Scotland and doing proper Scottish country dancing. I’d like to think this rubbed off on me adds to why I feel so welcome in Edinburgh and Scotland in general.

This is a photo of him in the RAF (back row, 2nd from the left):

Blimey I look like him.

Afterwards we went back to my Grandma’s for tea and scones (or scoones if you’re from Yorkshire) to reminisce about times past. On the way back up north to Billingham we stopped at Thirsk for awesome fish and chips and watched two daft ducks sit in the middle of a road.

My parents were visiting last weekend (and Monday) and we managed to cram in a lot of sights and eating out.

Saturday

Went out for a brilliant lunch at Centotre, a swish Italian place on George street. We had to wait a while for a table but it was certainly it. I had some gorgeous pasta with really spicy rustic sausage stirred into it. Then a super-chocolaty desert that was all very well presented. Highly recommended. Kerry had to work in the evening so my folks and I went to the Cameo to see Notes on a Scandal. Pretty much does what it says on the tin. Judy Dench is rather menacing when she gets to play a villain and Cate Blanchett is, as usual, gorgeously serene.

Sunday

Had breakfast out with Ian and Neil and then toured the many second hand bookshops in the South side. I picked up up a load of retro Bond paperbacks which I intend to do something clever with, and Felaheen by JCG.

Monday

Killed time in National Gallery on the Mound, playing with their very intuitive touch screen “library” computers. Caught the free galleries bus out to Stockbridge. Saw Off the Wall and Geometry in Art exhibitions at the Modern Art and Dean galleries respectively. Had lunch in the Modern Art cafe, good food and a good location. We took a very meandering route back into town by walking up the Water of Leith footpath through Dean Village and emerging at yet more second-hand bookshops where I got More Eric Meyer on CSS for 2 quid, bargain! In the evening we had Tapas out at Barioja and Kerry had her first drink (of alcohol) for three months!

The Brothers Turnbull have been having a bit of re-design. They now have a shiny new site for their Rotacoo company and Alex has as new site design complete with lavish over-use of moofx.

Very clever video with a good message: