First blog post in six years, that must be a new record right?

Putting aside the current global pandemic a lot has happened to me personally in the last six years:

• Sold our flat and bought a sensible house, with a garden and everything
• Had not one, but two children – both boys, now 4½ and 1
• Became a bona-fide Director at Whitespace
• Sold the company to Dentsu Aegis Network – fulfilling my cyberpunk dreams of working for a mysterious Japanese multi-national corporation
• Un-became a Director at Whitespace (but I’m still on the board)

Moving back to the present – everyone at Whitespace has been working at home now for six weeks. UK-wide, we’re on “lockdown” with schools, nurseries, libraries, cafe, bars all closed. Exercise limited to once a day, and the government advice to just generally stay at home. It’s a strange and bizarre time.

Does this thing still work? Guess I fell out of love a bit with blogging. I’ve done quite a bit of tweeting, a lot of DIY at home, bought a car, and did a lot of work at, er, work.

In other news, we got two lovely cats.

Lovely wedding in Englandshire for friends Ruth & Craig.

Grant’s stag weekend – I’ve never seen a man smash so many eggs on his head.

Cracking weekend in Alnwick – castle, archery, treehouse for dinner. Lost our DSLR camera on the way back.

Had an extremely muddy time at T In the Park.

An epic amount of planning and organising all built up to Our wedding!

Then off on our honeymoon! Berlin-Prague-Vienna-Salzburg-Munich. Photos to come later.

February

Visited Marrakech and proposed to my darling Ria. Thankfully, she said yes!

Looked at a lot of flats in an attempt to finally get on the property ladder.

May

Had a wee break on the West coast around Troon. Good ice cream.

Went on a mountain biking related stag, somehow survived despite my lack of fitness.

June

Found a beautiful flat and jumped through the many mortgage and solicitor hoops. RBS now own our soul.

Got hospitality tickets to T in the Park though work. Had an ace time with the boys. Shame we went on the Sunday, Monday was pretty painful.

Moved out of Gilmore Place and into our new place. Didn’t want to lose our deposit so we did an epic amount of cleaning.

August

Summer emerged in Scotland. My parents, sister and brother in-law all stayed at our new place. We took them out on the town during the festival. Great times.

September

Mike’s stag do. Fired shotguns (badly) and jumped off cliffs into a very cold river – surprisingly good fun!

October

Our holiday for the year: Venice, Florence, Sienna and Rome. That warrants a post of it’s own…

November

Grew a ‘tache for Movember. Lots of people laughed at my face.

My little sister got married!

December

Christmas in Bathgate, post-xmas in Billingham. New Year in Bathgate.

Roll on 2012…

My parents were visiting for the weekend to get a taste of the Festival experience.

Friday evening we had a very nice meal at L’Escargot Blanc, but chickened out of the £20 “surprise” menu. It really was a surprise, only the chef knew what we would get, the waitress wouldn’t give us any hints, and the whole table had to opt for it. Given the name of the establishment, there was a good chance it might be snails.

Saturday we wandered around Bristo square before picking a random matinee show to go and see – Kate Fox News. Mostly an auto-biographical show based around the major news events in her life, her slightly bizzare up-bringing and, sprinkled with some poetry. Browns on George Street for lunch, very busy, great burger! Then off to the Book Festival to browse the books and people watch the odd mix of grizzled book fanatics, families eating ice creams, gin soaked publishers and people hoarding spare chairs on the lawn. We had tickets to see Rhapsodies in Red, White and Blue at 7pm so we went home to smarten up before heading to the newly refurbished (in a frantic hurry just before the festival) Usher Hall. Great performance, I don’t think I’ve ever since something with a a full orchestra and choir before. I loved the Copland and Gershwin, but some of the Ives was quite challenging. Back home for an excellent (and promptly delivered) takeaway from Zen Kitchen.

Sunday we had a bit of a lie-in and then got a bus over the Foodies Festival in Holyrood Park. I wasn’t quite sure what the expect, they had seemingly been giving free tickets out left right and centre. I was pleasantly surprised though! It was a good size, lots of different exhibitors and we signed up for a free rum tasting class – which amazingly wasn’t a complete sales pitch. Scorching weather by this point which just brought even more people out to the festival! My only nitpick was that they needed more seats, people were sunning and drinking all over the place. We saw my parents off on their train back south and then I joined Ria and friends at Reel to Real. Which was pretty schmaltzy, camp musical goodness with some clever interactions between screen and stage.

Great weekend.

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:

Sex offenders could be forced to register their e-mail addresses and chatroom names, the government says.

This has got to be the stupidest idea I’ve heard for a while and a prime example of the illusion of security as often explained by Bruce Schneier. In real life it is tricky but not impossible to fake an identity. But online a new “identity” (email address or chat nickname) can be created in seconds. Plus, what is this supposed system that would be screen all of these people? How soon would that system’s powers be abused for “law enforcement” purposes or the database get leaked/stolen? There are some real technological geniuses manning the pumps somewhere in our government…

Christmas at my parents with Kerry was great fun. We managed to get down there without any transport troubles. My Granny was also there, so that made it a ‘proper’ family event. I got some very nice pressies: chocolate, whisky, books, DVDs. Thank you to everyone for all of them. Christmas dinner was both beef and turkey with all the usual veg and stuff. My sister and her boyfriend had made starters and put on a great finger buffet style spread of Italian meats and mozzarella, Indian bites with cucumber dip and melon balls and prawn cocktail. Kerry and I had agreed to make trifle for desert. We’d got all the sponge, fruit and jelly done (and set) the night before but when we came to add the custard it wouldn’t set, even after about six hours in the fridge! We just served it in the kitchen and said it was quite as firm as we’d liked… I think we got away with it as everyone seemed to enjoy it. When we’d finished dinner, we all looked at the clock and noticed that dinner had taken six hours! Now that’s what I call a meal.

Disaster struck on the way back into Edinburgh. We had loads of bags to carry and I managed to leave one of them in the taxi we got back to the flat. It had my digital camera, ipod, scarf, latest copy of Edge and some of my Mum’s christmas cake in it! Doh! I immediately noticed but the taxi had already disappeared around the corner. Raced up to the flat and called around all of the black cab companies but heard nothing back. I reported it lost the next day but still haven’t heard anything 🙁 Looks like I’ll need to claim on our household insurance.

Kerry and I are off to my parents today for three days of festive cheer and present giving and receiving. Hopefully the fog/leaf/flood bound UK transport system can get us there in one piece, with more luck than Nick & Steinunn.

Shawn Brown is a Cartographer. He draws maps, awesome maps. If I could have a vast, dramatic change in career I’d be a cartographer (or maybe a steam train driver). I’ve always been fascinated by maps, their construction and just sitting pouring over one. My Dad made sure I could map read and navigate from an early age and has a rather large collection of Ordnance Survey maps as well as an interest in surveying and drawing plans of abandoned underground workings. OS maps are very, very nice but it is a shame the licensing issues are such a mess in the UK. If map data was licensed like the USA then I’m sure we wouldn’t have the quality of maps that we do, but would the openness overcome that?

Pirate Hip Hop with a stop-motion animated video. Need I say more?

Kerry and I are off on a wee break to sunny Whitby tomorrow for a couple of days. Expect a slew of piratey/sea-side photos when we get back 🙂

Update: Here are the photos

Yesterday was the wedding of our friends Ian & Jenn. It was an excellent day, superbly well organised and we can’t thank them enough for inviting Kerry and I. I took lots of pictures and a few are up on Flickr.

An advert tartgeted at gamers?

My parents were in Alnwick for the weekend seeing Jools Holland at Alnwick Castle. I got the train down to see them yesterday, Alnmouth station is only an hour on the train from Edinburgh. You can’t go to Alnwick without going to the awesome Barter Books, one of the largest second hand bookshops in Britain. The place is huge! It’s based in Alnwick’s very grand Victorian railway station and has gazillions of second hand books on a myriad of subjects. All pretty reasonably priced, unlike some places in Edinburgh where you can often get the same book new on amazon for a quid more. They’ve also got cases of old first editions and antique stuff, all very nicely presented. Plus a large reading room with newspapers, seats everywhere and very cheap coffee and cakes that you pay for on an honesty basis. It’s a book geeks dream. We could easily have spent the whole day there but we managed to drag ourselves away after an hour and a bit. We had lunch in the courtyard at The Art House which did nice food but the service was a little slow. After lunch we wandered into the town square where the Alnwick International Music Festival was happening and wandered among the trinket stalls listening to Mexican dancing and Lithuanian harp playing. A good day out with some cracking weather.

The book haul:

• The Bourne Identity
• Cross of Iron
• Straw Men
• Idlewild
• The Godfather

Saturday was Kerry’s birthday and after the initial present opening and such I was dispatched for cake. Now, this couldn’t just be any cake, it had to be cake worthy of Kerry’s birthday. Coming home from work I kept noticing this strange (but kinda cool) German bakery that had opened on Leven Street. Honestly, you can’t miss it, they hang giant pretzels from their canopy.

So I ninja-ed over there and managed to get some slices of delicious cakey goodness. One black forest gateaux and one strawberry tart, yum yum. Just as I was paying they brought out some fresh Brioche, still warm from the oven, which just looked to good to pass up. With this haul of goodies I set off (carefully) home but not before I popped into the Chinese bakery next to the Cameo, as recommended by George. I got a Beef Curry bun which was a strange combination of sweet steamed bun and quite hot curry inside. Not so sure about that combination but they have plenty of others to try. Needless to say, the German cakey goodness went down well when I got home. An interesting day for food…

So I’m doing one of those ‘update’ posts which is never a good thing. I should be maintaining the flow of awesome olly information, not just forgetting to blog and doing it all at once…

I played and finished Half-Life 2: Episode 1, which was just more of the same goodness really. As it was a smaller package I felt a lot more involved in the plot and the gameplay just seemed a bit tighter than Half-Life 2. The addition of the ‘commentary’ points (just like a DVD) was a neat touch for game geeks and adds some extra replay value. Still playing lots of Battlefield 2 which is just awesome fun, and the RPG style ‘levelling up’ makes you not want to stop. I also picked up a copy of Splinter Cell 3 which is very slick so far, plot is a little contrived, but good sneaky fun.

Went down to Kerry’s parents in Selkirk for the common riding a couple of weeks ago and that was a good laugh. There are some photos in my super-hip flickr stream. Just got back from my sister’s graduation ceremony in Durham but that’s another story (as the Rev W Awdry would say).

On the work front we’re having fun attempting to roll out VOIP in the office. Totally not helped by the face that there are no good SIP soft-phones for OS X. We’ve had to use SJPhone which is free and has all the features but looks like a 1st year CS student’s test Java swing app. Not the best thing to put in front of the boss and say “teh futar is here!”.

I’m still punishing myself by coming home and doing even more web dev outside of work. Work on the re-design of this site is progressing, honestly. I might even have it done some time next week. I’m jumping on the Microformat band wagon and integrating hReview into my ‘review’ blog posts plus lots of other goodies. A while ago I took the plunge and modernised my last design of npht.com (the older style is visible on the education site) which had always been a stop-gap measure. I’m much happier with this version, it is much more flexible, I’ve integrated wordpress better and it leaves lots of room for expansion.

Oh yeah, I’m now 25. The big quarter century. Thanks to everyone who congratulated me and sent cards etc. I got some nice goodies and a pile of DVDs in the HMV sale.

Some other events:

• Google Sightseeing has been accepted into the 9rules network
• I got new Etnies from schuh on ebay
• I’m addicited to Fenchurch t-shirts
• I placed a test order with super cheap Hong Kong spectacle makers Optical4Less
• I discovered Facebook
• I’ve started using Google Calendar
• I bought my first mp3 from the iTunes store: Beastie Boys – Three MC’s And One DJ (Live Video Version)
• Kerry and I bought a ‘Jack Lalanne Power Juicer Express’ off ebay and Kerry is now juicing everything in sight

I promise, this will be the last of the ‘update’ posts…

I don’t blame them, and it’s pretty funny. Mainly becuase it will rile microsoft so much 🙂

We got a super early copy of the new summer Howies catalogue through the door last week and I see that they’ve now re-designed their website.

The website is a nice subtle improvement on the old, mainly just navigation tweaks and even more fantastic photos from what I can remember. They’ve got some very nice looking t-shirts and tops but I should really resist spending more money this month :).

Ahhh, the trivia you find whilst trawling the depths of wikipedia:

The Globe Theatre in London has a “Supporting Wall” which bears the names of individual donors to the Shakespeare’s Globe Trust. John Cleese bought two “signatures” on the wall, one for himself and one for Palin, whose name he intentionally mis-spelled as “Michael Pallin”.

BBC Programme Catalogue

Wow! That is a lot of data and it’s presented reasonably nicely for a prototype. Although, does every web app have to looks like a Ruby on Rails test installation?

I should have mentioned this earlier but James and Alex have been showing off their mad skills with a new design over at Google Sightseeing. I love the retro travel brochure feel and the dynamically generated customs stamp images, nice one guys.

Uh-oh, it’s ten dollar sale at threadless time. I’ve managed to restrain myself to three new shirts this time. But I did have a whole fifteen bucks worth of street points to use. Awesome.

We’re having some serious issues with our web hosting over on Google Sightseeing (probably not working). Please bear with us while we work it out.

I was reading defense tech the other day and noticed this in an article:

…of the 12,500 targets in the SIOP at that time, one of them was slated to be hit by 69 consecutive nuclear weapons.

69!? for one target! How on earth did they work that out?

…the highest kill probability for the United States’ best weapon against deeply buried, sprawling, hardened command posts was less than 5%. Blair got out a calculator, assumed a kill probability of 4% for one weapon, and started multiplying. To attain a 50% confidence in destroying the target required 17 weapons. When Blair got up to 69 weapons, the “kill probability” had reached 94%.

wow, that’s some real smart thinking!

Read the whole article.

Last Sunday we had a “tourist day” with my parents, away from the shops. We went along to the Bo’ness & Kinneil Railway, unsurprisingly, in Bo’ness. My Dad is a bit of a train fan and I think I’ve still got some of it in my blood :). Of course, I wanted to a be a train driver when I was small. Not sure when that phase ended…

Anyway, we rode the train along the line to to Birkhill where the clay mine is. The mine was as good, possibly better than the train journey. There are miles of big tunnels to explore and we were given a tour around just a small section. Our family and especially my Dad as a Director of the NPHT have become quite the mine-tour connoisseurs and we all thought this one was a beauty. The guy who led us around knew his stuff and it was well laid-out and timed well. Just long enough to feel like you’re not getting ripped-off and not too long so you get bored. There’s a gallery up in the pictures section of the days sights. Taking photos underground is always tricky but I tried with a couple.

On Friday night Kerry and I met my parents, who were up for the weekend, at Fishers down on The Shore at Leith. Now, I’m not normally a sea food fan but hey, you gotta try something different now and again. I had a wee haggis thing to start and then spicy grilled monkfish with pitta bread salad. The starter was tasty but very small, the monkfish was gorgeous. I’ve never had it before but I’d certainly have it again. To finish off I had a lemon and ricotta cheesecake which was obviously home made and great after the spicy monkfish.

Saturday was shopping day and we hit the sales early. I got a couple of shirts in Next, some jeans in H&M and Kerry bought me a denim jacket in Gap. We were pretty knackered by lunch time so we went for lunch in No 28 Charlotte Square, a National Trust property that has a bistro and restaurant. Out the back, in between Charlotte Square and Princes Street it also has a secluded courtyard with tables. This was great to get a break from the hustle and bustle of the sales. It wasn’t bad value either. You could get soup and a sandwich or panini for about £6. We did a bit of non-clothes shopping in the afternoon and lurked around in waterstones before getting a taxi over to the south side and sitting around in Assembly for a bit. We then went to Khushi’s for Dinner which was aces and certainly an experience. The atmosphere is very friendly, the food is great, service was quick and it’s great value. Definitely recommended.

Great articles on the New York Times about Japanese convenience stores:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03EAT.html

Reminds of the ‘Lucky Dragon’ chain in William Gibson’s books.

Amazing story from Moscow News:

Stanislav Petrov was a Soviet army officer monitoring the satellite system for signs of a U.S. attack, the year was 1983, and his instructions, if he detected missiles targeting the Soviet Union, were to push the button and launch a counter-offensive.

He didn’t. Minutes later, no missiles came; months later, the frightening data across his monitor was determined to have been a system glitch. Today, the Association of World Citizens is calling him “the forgotten hero of our time,” a title befitting the man whose responsibility had been to start World War III.

http://www.mosnews.com/feature/2004/05/21/petrov.shtml

Some really creepy urban exploration pics of the abandoned Russian embassy in Bangkok.

“Principal Associate Director for Nuclear Weapons Programs”: washingtonpost.com: Jobs

Update: Looks like the ad was pulled. Click below for the text.

read on…

Had some strange spam this morning that managed to slip past spam assassin. It’s sole content was:

and the title was “Cyb Billingham”. Two words that have obviously been scraped off my site (I’m from Billingham). So, they went to all this trouble of scraping my domain before sending the spam and then include nothing useful in the content. Weird…

Another brilliant t-shirt idea from skinnycorp (the people being threadless). Anyone can submit ‘slogans’ which they think would look good on a t-shirt. Then, other users can say whether they would wear them or not. The best ones will then get printed up and the user who submitted the slogan gets $100 and $100 to spend in their store.

Check it out: www.omgclothing.com

Threadless, amazing t-shirt suppliers and one of my many money-spending weaknesses have had a re-design. Must resist…

So, someone has stolen another of my ideas that I hadn’t implemented yet (well, only in my head). Preshrunk is a blog purely about cool t-shirts to buy off the web. Nice design too 🙂

Merry Christmas everyone! I got back into Edinburgh tonight after a very nice time at home with my parents and sister. It mainly involved eating lots of very nice food and drinking lots of very nice champagne/wine/beer. Got a good haul of presents and seemed to come back with more stuff than I went with! We also managed to fit in some super-early sales shopping in Middlebrough. I got a really nice winter coat half price in Burtons and some new dressy shoes that I’ve been needing for a while in M&S.

I’ve got three days at work now as part of the “skeleton crew” just incase anything really hits the fan. Then its new year!

I still have a heap of gmail invites and three brand new o2 sim cards. If anyone want anything, just leave me a comment. Merry Xmas!

Anyone looking for a cheap old skool car in amazingly pristine condition? My flatmate Ben is selling his Vauxhall Chevette.

It was the the Playstations 10th birthday yesterday. 10 years, wow. I can still remember the first time I saw one in use, it was pretty damn impressive for the time. It had loads of fast moving 3d stuff, amazing cd sound and the actual console looked good. Speaking of which, I like the new Playstation3 logo a lot:

Sony’s graphic design is always very nice.