It’s okay, I’m back…

January 22nd, 2010 No Comments »

Yes, yes, I know, I haven’t posted anything since the end of last year, but that’s only because I couldn’t be bothered. I fancied a bit of a break, ok? Well I’m back now, so are you happy?

What’s been going on in my life then so far this year? I’m currently on day 14 of no chocolate. I decided to give it up for 2 weeks and I’ve been successful. If I make it through this evening then tomorrow morning my face will be very brown and sticky indeed. I’ve already decided I need to sample Cadbury’s mixture of mini easter eggs, a caramel bunny, a popping candy Terry’s Chocolate Orange, and Mars Celebrations ice creams. Not sure what I’ll eat on Sunday though.

Gadget-wise I’ve been pretty lean. I’ve finally given in to ‘The Wife’ and purchased SingStar, the karaoke game for the PlayStation complete with two microphones for competetive spouse fun. We used Nectar points to buy it though so I’m not sure if that counts as a purchased gadget. I had to buy a new car seat for Poppy as both her and Joseph were growing out of their current ones. Joey will take over the old Britax Evolva 1-2-3 and Poppy gets a brand new Britax Kid Fix Isofix seat which clips easily in to the back of the Scenic. Not very exciting but slightly gadgetty nevertheless.


My favourite purchase this year is the USB-MIDI adapter which arrived this morning letting me connect my keyboard (of the musical variety not typing) to my PC. In years gone by I’d have used a special MIDI-gameport cable to do this, but modern computers just don’t have 15-pin game connectors any more… even when you build the PC yourself it’s an optional extra to put one in and the USB cable is so much simpler. So far it seems to work well but I’ll review that once it’s been given a good hammering.

And finally in Joseph news, he had blood taken last week and sent off for genetic testing in the hope that we finally get a firm diagnosis. Well, that or we find out he is the next Wolverine.


My first PS3 PPV IPTV experience

December 15th, 2009 No Comments »

Need a translation?? It means that for the first time ever I paid to watch a movie on my PlayStation 3 streamed over the Internet. I mentioned a few weeks back that Sony had opened a movie rental service on their PlayStation store and at the weekend I finally got around to testing it. As it was daytime, and in an attempt to keep Poppy quiet for a few minutes, I opted to rent Disney-Pixar’s Cars in Standard Definition (no HD version available) – rental of this movie was only £2.49. The process was very easy, just select the movie, choose to rent or buy (£11.99 to buy???? too much money in my opinion) then click the download button. After a couple of minutes I got the option to ‘play while downloading’. I left it about 20 minutes to download 15% before I started to play it, just to make sure, but in all honesty I could have clicked play straight away with no issues. Download time on my 3Mbps broadband connection was estimated at 105 minutes, and the film itself was just short of 2 hours long. Poppy’s attention span lasted 45 minutes so it was all irrelevant anyway.

In other news with thanks to my dad for his assistance, I also managed to put the Christmas lights up outside the house which wasn’t as straight forward as I had first intended. Due to various cable slicing incidents this involved a fair amount of re-soldering wires.. but they are up at last. Last night we met Santa as well. He made his annual trip around the village in the back of a pick-up while being followed by every resident capable of walking, and some who weren’t in their electric mobility scooters. Afterwards there were mince pies, mulled wine, and a photo opportunity with Santa (pictures to follow at a later date…).

And in the final news of this blog post, I received the result from my latest Open University course (the hellish exam I took in October) and I passed with a better score than expected giving me (just) a pretty decent overall result for the course. Now… in theory, this means that I am eligible for graduation with a BSc Open degree, but I’m plowing on with one more year of courses (including the two that I’m taking at the moment which finish in a couple of weeks) to gain the final 60 points required to get a BSc (Hons) Open degree. Nearly there then, only almost 10 years after most of my peers!

Bowling Fun

November 28th, 2009 No Comments »

Poppy Bowling 1Poppy had her first 10-pin bowling experience today. We went to Cardiff Bay for couple of games, also going in to Cardiff city centre for a bit of German sausage and a quick look at the new shopping centre.

Poppy Bowling 2

Last night I also took part in the village Christmas Quiz roping in Pete from back in Brum and (drum-roll please for first colleague mention) Steve and Gabby from work to appear on our team “Three Geeks and a Lady”. Hmm, maybe we’ll do better in the summer quiz.

Poppy Witch

October 21st, 2009 3 Comments »

Poppy Witch

The village school held their annual Halloween Disco this evening and Poppy had a great time. She dressed in her specially purchased ‘Pretty Pink Witch’ costume we bought at the weekend and danced along to The Music Man, Superman, Fifi and the Flowertots, Lazytown and many more tunes hand picked by the ever enthusiastic (and slightly mental?) Mr Shepherd. The costume survived and will be used for trick or treating next week, weather dependent of course….

Slow News Week

September 15th, 2009 3 Comments »

There’s not been a great deal happening over the last week or so that I’ve felt compelled to write about…. so there’s been no blog update. We visited my parents at the weekend – Joseph’s first time in England (don’t worry, he’d had all his jabs). Then on Sunday Poppy helped me wash the car, mow the lawns, clean the barbecue and make a cheesecake (nothing fancy… from a packet!). Ooh and we nosed around the show home at the new development in the village. Makes for enthralling reading doesn’t it? It gets better.. we ordered a new tumble dryer because the drying part of our washer dryer is more like a washer-keep-soggier now. I played on Monkey Island for a bit.. and while writing this blog I am reinstalling Windows Home Server on the new 1TB drive I purchased (full review of Windows Home Server coming soon). We’re also moving from Tiscali to Talk-Talk for phone and broadband – they’re cheap and offer a 30 day get-out-of-contract deal if you don’t like them so if they’re pants I will hold them to that. Tomorrow is Poppy’s first ballet lesson so I’m looking forward to the report on how that went. Will she dance like a little dainty fairy or a hippopoppymus? I’m almost at the end of day 2 without any chocolate… how long can I last? We’ll see. I’ve been replacing it with a mixture of skittles, red bull and chewing gum. I think I need to cut out all three of those too in addition but that’ll have to wait.

And in sadder news.. it’s a fond fairwell to the greatest of all the TV Chefs, Keith Floyd – his food based entertainment shows shall remain unrivalled forever.

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