Disneyland: still the best

31 Aug 2006: So we came into a bit of money earlier in the year, and decided we’d each have a treat. Mrs R got her new kitchen (report follows), I got my big telly (report follows), and Alex got his return trip to Disneyland Paris. Here’s the trip report! I actually like Disneyland, and I like myself for liking it. Dismissing it as some sort of chav nightmare is the easy middle-class thing to do. Coming out of the closet and saying it’s actually great fun is far cooler, IMHO. Firstly, plaudits to Short Breaks for seamless organisation of the trip; I picked them off the web because I liked their web site and because it had some credible testimonials, and the [...]

JCB Dieselmax: a landmark for new media

25 Aug 2006: Firstly, the breaking of the diesel-powered land speed record this week by the JCB team: brilliant. But something interesting occurred to me yesterday, whilst I listened to a caller on Five Live berating the BBC and other mass media for neglecting what for many people has been the only noteworthy thing in a quiet news week. Whilst an avid web surfer, I’m usually someone who doesn’t consider something to be a genuine event unless it’s been on the BBC Six O’Clock News, front page of the dailies, etc. So I was surprised to hear from the caller that the coverage of the JCB Dieselmax had been so low-key. Hang on a minute: I hadn’t even realised that the coverage had [...]

Andy Green: Sports Personality of the Year!

25 Aug 2006: Which one of these looks more like the Sports Personality of the Year to you? OK, probably neither. In a conventional, sane world, Nicole Cooke or Monty Panesar would be shoo-ins for their achievements and entertainment. Proper sports, proper accomplishments on and off the field or track. But in this celebrity-obsessed world, it’s being suggested that comedian David Walliams should get’s this year’s BBC-organised gong, for his – admittedly impressive – feat of swimming the Channel for charity. That’s not a sport. It’s an achievement …but it’s not a sport. If we’re going to open it up to achievements which are vaguely related to real sports, then forget David Walliams; it’s the RAF’s Andy Green for me. The driver of [...]

HD = Highly Desirable

22 Aug 2006: Lots of things to catch up on from the several weeks when I wasn’t posting in May, June and July. One of the things I would have blogged about on a daily basis would have been assembling a new AV system for the living room. So much research to do! So much shopping! So much fun! I’ll do a short review of most of the components I ended up with in separate entries here, but the inspiration for the whole change was the launch of HD TV here in the UK, which the geek in me couldn’t resist, naturally. That meant a new screen, and repositioning everything in the room meant the old sound system wouldn’t fit, and… you get [...]

My new favourite online game ever

18 Aug 2006: Thanks to Gibbo for alerting me to something really special. Geosense says it’s been around since 2003 so I’m gutted that I’d never seen it before. It’s a “point to where the place is” quiz with a world map, and to add interest, you can play against other people online. How cool is that? Very.

Put yourself on a plinth yeah?

14 Aug 2006: Unquestionably the thing on TV at the moment which makes me laugh the most is Modern Toss. Indeed it’s the only TV for a long time which has made me giggle out loud, so much so that Mrs R came down to find out what it was all about. And it just got better, because she denounced it as “simply not that funny” and “just a load of swearing. That’s all. Just a load of swearing”. Which just made it funnier. “It’s the stink of excellence in a world gone tits up”, as Doon Mackichan (for it is she) says every programme. Help Desk and Drive-By Abuser are the highlights. No question. It’s on for about one more week on [...]

A New Web Site Host

11 Aug 2006: Next job was to choose someone new to host my web site. As previously noted, I’d kindly been allowed some spare space on the server of some business associates for many years, but I couldn’t bank on their hospitality forever, and they weren’t able to host WordPress. So it was time to move on, with grateful thanks. Having chosen WordPress, and not having any unusual requirements, the choice of host was fairly open. US-based ones seemed cheaper, but somehow I feel more comfortable knowing my web site is spinning around in a UK-based server. Also, I have a page about UK-based services which ranks really well on Google, and people would argue that having this on a UK-based server helps [...]

Why WordPress?

11 Aug 2006: So, why did I go for WordPress as my blogging software? Remember: application first, platform second. Zeldman.com puts it well: easy writing facilities, easy design facilities, standards compliant, and as the leading open-source application, you know that there’s plenty more development left in the tank. I’m not fussed that it’s free, although that’s a nice extra. And once I’d had a look, and realised WordPress did everything I needed well, I could see that there was a lot, lot more for me to play with in the future. The clincher was that I quickly discovered that WordPress comes with built-in facilities for importing an existing Blogger blog (amongst others). This turned out to be so smooth I wondered if it [...]

The Blog is Back!

11 Aug 2006: You’ll notice there’s a 10-week gap between this entry and the previous one. You may think the reason is probably because I couldn’t be a**ed to write anything while the sun was out. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I haven’t been able to publish anything, because as with a lot of other users, Blogger has been having problems publishing to my non-Blogspot site. I realised some weeks back that the way ahead would be to move to a better blogging platform, so I firstly had to research which one (WordPress didn’t take long to push itself to the fore) and then I had to move the whole web site away from the server of some business [...]