As I type this I am on my second mini bottle of French red wine cruising at 30000 ft on my way to London.
Although the time of posting will be based on when I land as UK airlines are not quite as advanced as our US counterparts with regard to in-flight Internet access.
Should I be worried about how much this enforced offline time effects me? I feel like a chain smoker who is deprived of that next cigarette.
What frustrates me just as much is that gadgets such as my iPad, MacBook and iPhone cannot be used (regardless of airplane mode) when the seatbelt sign is illuminated.
This is where I get very jealous of my fellow passengers enjoying their paperbacks from take off, while I have to wait (on this flght 35 minutes) before I can fire up my ebook.
Take-off and landing are one thing, but come on UK airlines my flight to London is only 1h40 minutes and I can only work/access my tech for less than 50% of that.
Even hospitals, including high dependency units (as I know from 1st hand experience) are more accommodating.
Sigh! At least the wine is ok (albeit French being AirFrance) and I’ve already finished my wee bit of Scottish tablet!
Better finish before that damned seatbelt light comes on 30 minutes before landing.
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July 19th, 2011 in
Family |
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We’ve not had many sunny days recently, but tonight was very nice…
Due to popular demand, Jeni has created a guide on how to organise a trip to Disneyland Paris without falling foul of the expensive gotcha’s.
We’ve been quite a few times now and learned the hard way – so please make the most of our experience and you could save a fortune!
Link above.
July 11th, 2011 in
Family | tags:
disney |
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Living and working in a city often means you forget to stop and take in the ‘tourist’ amenities on your doorstep. In this case it had been many years since we’d been inside Dundee’s McManus Galleries.
The McManus Galleries is one of Dundee’s most impressive buildings, built in a gothic revival style in the very centre of the town.
The building was shut to the public for 5 years while a multi-million pound redevelopment was undertaken, and it opened last year with a new cafe, creative learning suite etc.
Today we decided that it would be a lovely way to spend Sunday afternoon with Sofia and her Gran and Grandpa.
We had lunch in the cafe which was very pleasant, with a decent menu for a lunchtime snack and then set off around the various exhibits.
In one of the galleries Sofia was able to take part in some craft activities, relating to the current ‘Northern Soul’ exhibition and made a paper record.
This has required a fair amount of explaining in this digital age of mp3s and iPods – and made us feel quite old!
Well done Dundee, with this refurbishment, the new Camperdown Zoo, the new V&A and the longer term plan for the waterfront I expect we will get the title of European City of Culture again in the future.
Finally after a couple of months waiting, my wooden iPad2 cover arrived from Holland.
These handmade covers are €50, which when you add the postage is the same as the Apple ‘leather’ ones.
I chose Padauk as this is a wood I work with myself when woodturning, and I plan to make a couple of pens to accessorise my iPad.
The company who hand make this is Miniot and they have been making beautiful wooden iPhone cases for some years, but because of the switches etc. these are fairly pricey.
When they launched the iPad2 cover, they were so swamped by demand their servers crashed – I was lucky enough to get mine ordered in the first week or so and can honestly say it was worth the wait.
The hidden magnetic fasteners are great, and once you get used to the orientation simple to drop into place.
The rolling cover is fairly tight to start with, but I’m sure that will settle over time.
My only gripe is that I’ve not found a way to keep the cover in place when I am using theiPad in my hands – i.e. on the back, it sort of works but not snuggly.
Miniot also offer a free engraving service and I chose a small circular ambiagram of FALLONE which was nicely done.
The microfibre backing on the rear keeps the screen dust free.
Overall I fantastic cover which is nice to hold, beautifully crafted and a bit of a conversation starter!
Although she lived latterly with my parents, having been adopted by Paola before that; Pebbles was my first rescue cat who lived a long and quirky neurotic life and was full of character.
Today she reached the end of her nine lives, but her insistence on never venturing outdoors and her dislike of litter trays will remain in all our memories for a long time.
May 16th, 2011 in
Family | tags:
cats,
pebbles |
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So as is the nature of being 3 year’s old, each month involves making mummy and daddy watch a new Disney movie over and over and over again.
For the last couple of months Sofia’s favourite has been Tangled – the Disney retelling of the Rapunzel story.
Luckily for us, this is a great film with good music, amazing graphics and humour that survives being re-watching.
So when we were in Disneyland Paris a couple of months ago, Sofia got the obligatory plastic characters to add to her collection alongside Peter Pan.
Forward a month or so and as Spring sprung in the garden, it became obvious that one of the birch trees transplanted last year had died.
This coincided with a work colleague giving me all his oak offcuts from his new flooring, and then I had an idea.
Using said offcuts, some ash and lime wood I had lying around the workshop, and some spare slats from an Ikea wooden blind I decided to make a Rapunzel tower for Sofia’s toys in the garden.
The first stage was to grab a still image from the movie to get my design ideas, then from this I simplified it considerably (time is not something I have a lot of these days!).
I glued the Ash and lime together and turned this on the lathe to make the roof.
Then using the oak, I made the walls, floors and lower wall.
Sofia helped me with some of the more dangerous cutting and messy gluing!
This then left the detailing which I did using the Ikea blind – I’ve used this before, mostly as shims, and have no idea what wood this is – but it comes in handy.
Finally all that remained to do was stain the finished tower, cut down the tree and mount the whole thing.
As you can see, Sofia was delighted with the end result
Now off to the garden centre to choose a new tree!
Anyone who hails from Dundee will attest to despite having a population of 150,000 it is basically a big village. The number of degrees of separation between people is probably 1 or 2 on average which much be less than the average in other areas.
So it is common to find that when starting a new job, or meeting new colleagues or customers/suppliers from the area you probably know someone in common.
Despite being used to this, sometimes the coincidences catch you by surprise.
Yesterday was our wedding anniversary and Jeni bought me the Broons & Oor Wullie Summer Annual – (I think there might have been some DC Thomson staff discount involved!);
as I sat tonight reading it, I turned the page and there was an archive photo feature of summers at the beach in Scotland.
To my surprise the first photograph had my great grandfather, my great gran holding my mum – wrapped in a shawl.
As if this wasn’t enough, the other photograph from 10 years later has my mum walking across the beach right in the front of the photo.
My fascination for archive photographs continues and I hope that one day some company (perhaps even
brightsolid/DC Thomson) will create the google of all geo-tagged archive images – and now I’d like to include the feature of facial recognition!
One of the only programs in our Sky+ series record is The Gadget Show. It has always been a firm favourite in our hyperconnected house.
This year I decided to treat Jeni to a wee trip down to Birmingham for the live show and the biggest consumer electronics show in the UK.
Thanks to Paola for covering the babysitting logistics, we flew down directly from Dundee on Thursday evening and after a visit to The Bullring we headed out to the Balti Triangle and found an eatery where we had probably the best Indian meal we’ve ever had.
Friday morning we headed to the NEC and walked our feet off exploring all the technology.
Highlights ofthe show;
- Suzi Perry in her leather catsuit
- A chance to play a demo of Duke Nukem 3D (yes after 15 years of development!)
Things we bought…
and a set of Peppa Pig headphones for Sofia!
A fantastic consumer tech show – plenty to see and interact with, although hardcore techies won’t see much they haven’t heard about as all of the products are for sale and as such have been fairly well documented – however it is nice to get hands-on with some of larger tech like the electric bikes, 3D home cinemas/gaming rigs, Segways etc.
This year the main trend throughout was definitely 3D – with the Nintendo 3DS and 3D televisions.
I’m still not convinced regarding 3D TV – I can’t see me being inclined to wear a pair of 3D specs int he house to watch a movie – I would rather upgrade to a 47″ OLED screen which in my opinion is a much better experience than 3D and is absolutely the future for TV – the picture is in a different league altogether.
The most impressive consumer technology for me was the 3D printers – using CAD it is now possible to engineer plastic 3D models and prototypes using these bits of kits at laptop prices – very impressive.
The Gadget Show Live Super Theatre Event was fantastic, with Jason, Suzi and Ortis zipping down wires over the audience’s heads, dancing 8ft Titan robots, tanks, RoboJase, Avatar Suzi and loads of audience interaction.
I particularly like the voting system (even if I didn’t enjoy Pollyanna’s attempt at singing!) where they used an audience facing camera to count phone camera flashes – simple idea and it appeared to be very accurate.
A great day out – next year we’re planning to do it again but with a gang of mates.
Every time I am over in France I make a point of getting some of this drink.
Bizarrely, Schweppes don’t Market this in the UK.
It is what Lilt should be in my opinion – grapefruit, orange, lemon and mandarin.
There are some things I gladly leave behind when I leave France, like not being able to queue and people smoking everywhere – but this is one thing I miss back home.
I feel a campaign to Schweppes marketing coming on!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:Paris, France
March 24th, 2011 in
Family |
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