Recently in Real Life Category

As part of my effort in trying to improve my photography skills I have set up a PicADay set in Flickr. The most efficient way to view these photos is with an RSS reader but unfortunately Flickr doesn't easily provide the links for the RSS feed. However by installing the Flickr RSS greasemonkey script you get one click access. Alternatively you can create an RSS feed using the Yahoo Pipes interface and a nice web page builder kindly provided by alto maltés. The end result is my PicADay RSS feed. I have include these pics automatically on Absoblogginlutely! - IRL but for this I used the Flickr Widget (unfortunately the authors website is broken so there is no point in linking to it).

Happy New Year everyone - I hope you all had a good evening. This is a quick post to announce my new blog, Absoblogginlutely! - IRL (IRL stands for In Real Life) and this will continue my no techie posts. I have had several users say that my main blog is too technical but they would still like to keep up to date with the news so feel free to head on over. I have been working on some of the content and posts over the Christmas break, but you'd be surprised as there doesn't look like there is actually much there at the moment but the About Me page and the Contact Me page will make an appearance on this blog eventually.
There will be some cross posted content where appropriate, but this blog will focus on more of the Tech content and IRL will contain other things. This year I also intend to work on my photography skills and related content to that will be on IRL.

I woke up early this morning (3am!) and it was light outside - not sure if it was the brightness in the room or the cheese I had at the works Christmas do last night. It had snowed overnight (and still continues to snow). After about an hour lying in bed I got up and caught up on some blog reading and patched some customer servers and did some reboots. I then went into work early to beat the mad traffic rush - I'm glad I did as one guy took an hour to drive his normal 3 minute route to work!

This is now the fifth (I think) Thanksgiving celebrated in the States. It's a funny holiday as part of it is so traditional with the relatives around, Turkey dinner and the listing of things that we are thankful for (and the football game) .  Kristen's brothers and family are up for Thanksgiving which is cool, Brian's daughters have been keeping us amused with Kate's love of spaghetti and attempts at clicking her fingers and Mia's pride in the pink cake we had last night and it was cute when she couldn't wait to give me the pretzel they had brought from the mall (and waited patiently for her tip - a piece of Kristen's pretzel).  I'm really thankful for the 4 day break as I need some rest and a chance to recharge my batteries. No studying will be done this weekend.

Yesterday Kristen and I decided to go to the Ohio Music in Education Association Marching Band finals held at one of the local High Schools. We were there for a couple of hours and got to see several bands perform and march. As it was the State finals, the standard was really good. I had never been to one of these shows before but Kristen had participated in them so we both enjoyed the experience from different perspectives. At the awards presentation each of the drum majors would do a salute when their score was announced and I've included a quick video of one of them - it made me think of the characters in Camberwick Green

A couple of the bands had costumes, the last band we saw did a Pirates of the Caribbean theme and the flag bearers were dressed as pirates. Another theme was on insects with the band playing Incy Wincy Spider (among other tunes) - each of their tubas were decorated with a spider motif which was pretty cool. We had a great afternoon out, the weather was fantastic, really warm and lots of people were out wearing tshirts - in November!

We had a great time in Canada visiting Niagara Falls and Waterloo where our friends lived. Had a very relaxing week but a long drive home. When we got home, we opened the tons of mail that had arrived during the week - tonight I get to pick up my new ipod from Key Bank for opening a new account. We also got a letter from our insurance company, Hartford, that said they had mislaid 3 backup tapes and that Kristen's data was on the tape. They are providing the usual 1 year worth of credit monitoring for free (which nowadays seems like a cheap fallback option with no care being taken of the data) but the concerning thing is we were told a month after the tapes were lost and only her data is on the tapes. I'm not convinced this is accurate as surely my SSN is also on the data for the car insurance? We'll be calling today to get the credit monitoring service set up, setting up a credit freeze and seeing about getting my data included too.

Having a great time in Niagara Falls - whose tagline should be "Tackier than Blackpool*. The street that we walk down on the way to the falls is called Clifton Hill and is super super tacky. There are about 5 or 6 haunted house/horror house type attractions and we've counted at least 4 waxwork museums. Fortunately the Falls area is much nicer and there is some nice gardening going on to keep it looking good. Yesterday I went geocaching and walked about 6 or more miles - my feet now ache - and visited both the Canadian and the US side of the falls. Although I took my camera I forgot to bring my sd card reader with me so you will have to wait for a week until I can upload the photos. My first shot across the Horseshoe Falls should hopefully come out really well - as I took the picture a seagull flew straight into the frame - the thumbnail in the camera looks pretty good - hopefully the full size picture will be good too. Kristen and I also took some portrait pictures in the secret garden - again the thumbnails look good.....
Today we're leaving Niagara and are heading out to Waterloo...now where did I put the Abba collection?

* but our water is cleaner - probably.

This week has been pretty busy with several rather amusing happenings. Earlier this month was Kristen's birthday so we decided to get new licence plates. I got blogg3r (as blogger was unavailable) but I wasn't unable to remove the old plates from the car as the screws had rusted in tight. Whilst waiting for the new plates to arrive I was driving around with the temporary tag in the back window. I borrowed an extractor tool from one of the guys at work and tried to remove the plates from the car but no joy but by drilling the screw and some brute force I was able to get the old plates off. However, I had to get some proper fasteners to hold the new plates in. After one trip to the hardware store, the fasteners didn't fit and so I planned to get some new ones the following day but and as I was driving home from work a cop pulled up right behind me. There were two sets of lights that he followed extremely close, I could see him talking on the radio in my mirror and then eventually the lights started flashing. I pulled over and he gave me a warning for not having the temporary tags displayed properly as it was lying flat on the parcel shelf rather than sticking up for everyone to see. That night the duct tape came out and the following night I drove to the hardware store to get some more fasteners and I eventually managed to get the plates put up whilst in the car park. This was the first time EVER I had got pulled over by a policeman.
Friday night we helped load up a moving van for friends from church and then this morning I headed off to the Ohio Linuxfest. There was a long break over lunch until the next talk (and the previous Ubuntu one had been disappointing and irrelevant) so I decided to skip the final talk and go take some photos in downtown Columbus.
I wandered around the streets taking various photos that I've uploaded to Zooomr for my 20070929 set including the shot below.

I continued taking various photos of the Columbus skyline and buildings (the rest of the photos in the set) and spent quite a bit of time taking various photos of the green paint "accident" and then took this photo.

Just after I had finished taking the photo, a siren blipped right behind me and a cop in his car called me over - this was the second time in a week! Allegedly someone had called the cops as I was looking suspicious taking photos of the buildings. He asked if I had been near a particular building, but the name wasn't familiar to me and then said I had been taking pictures of a garage door (which I hadn't - the only thing I can think of is the hydrant shot). He also asked if I was a photography student - (does this mean anyone who claims to be a photography student could not be a terrorist??) I said that I wasn't but tried to explain Flickr to him. He then asked how long I had been in the country, where I lived, whether I had driven there and where I had parked my car - to that answer I waved vaguely in the general direction as I had no idea the name of the street I had parked on. He also asked for ID - it was a good job I had it on me!
I pushed him for more details on the alleged call but I got the "people are suspicious since 9/11" but I'm not convinced as when I asked where I should stay away from he said "I can't really say". I wouldn't be surprised if they saw me on CCTV and then came to see what I was up to.
The good news is that at no time did he say I should not take photos of any of the buildings so I was almost tempted to retrace my steps and take photos again - but I wasn't feeling *that* brave.
I continued to take some more photos which have been uploaded to Zooomr and then came home.
It really is a sad state of affairs when you can't take pictures of picturesque buildings in a city without being accused (indirectly) of being a terrorist.

8 years ago, in a town not very far from here, we got married. This picture was taken as we left for our honeymoon in Berlin, Ohio.

8 years has flown by very quickly - and so much has changed and happened since then but the one thing remains - I Love you Kristen!

I had a really good time yesterday at Grove City when Jonathan and I went to see Balloons Off Broadway. This is an annual event where hot air balloons are launched, tethered "rides" in a balloon are available, a band plays and then a night glow is performed. 

After a couple of quick geocaches, we settled in to watch the balloons being prepared. Eventually we decided to just start taking photos instead of just waiting from our spot so we had a good 30-40 minutes taking photos as the balloons were prepared and launched. After that we jumped in the car and caught up with the balloon chase vehicles and hoped to get some pictures of the balloons landing. Unfortunately we weren't able to get close enough but it was great fun joining in the convoy of people following the balloons and getting some photos on the way. Fortunately I had got my 2 way radio with me so we set it to scan and listened to the conversations between the balloonists and the trucks which was very funny. It was a bit disconcerting when one of them said the battery on his radio was about out and he would have to resort to hand signals - I would have been a bit concerned if I was a guest in the balloon and heard the operator say that!  There were also some pretty funny comments about the landing sites chosen and apparently someone's basement was really awesome.

We then headed back to the launch location for the glow - it wasn't as spectacular as I hoped but still fun to watch. I managed to get a couple of fairly decent photos - it was the first time I'd even done night shots like this so there was a lot of experimenting. In the meantime, the band The British Invasion were playing and they were pretty good. They play covers of various British bands such as the Beatles and play all over Ohio - well worth seeing them if they play near you.

Pictures of the event are at my Balloons Off Broadway gallery and a few highlights at my Flickr gallery. Finally a video of a balloon being inflated (along with the hissing of the air) and a backing track of "I get by with a little help from my friends" which I thought was quite appropriate uploaded to YouTube (below)

No need to buy me an iphone though :-)
For more details check out SysAdmins day

Happy 4th of July to all of the american's visiting this blog! Today is the third July 4th we've celebrated in the States. Last year Kristen was in Texas at a wedding and this year both her brothers, their wives and kids are in town so it is a packed house at the in-laws. Kristen drove to get her brother from Dayton airport this morning so I went to the parade to take some photo's. This is the second July 4th I've been to and the second parade this year (the first being the St Patricks Day parade. I was a bit disappointed with the parade as so many of the entrants were exactly the same as the St Patricks Day and it still makes me wonder why some of the groups are allowed in the parade - surely an empty old people's home bus should not really be an entrant?
I took several photo's but haven't worked out where to put them yet - Zooomr smartset functionality is still down and I'm limited with the number and size of images at Flickr but I will get around to uploading some of them later.
It was nice and sunny this morning but now it is riaing and thundering - hopefully the weather improves as the Village People and KC and the sunshine band are scheduled to play at the concert tonight before the Dublin fireworks.

I started my Square Foot Garden blog this weekend - there are some photos at flickr to go with the project too. So far I've just got the soil down - seeds to go in later today

Today is May 25th and therefore Towel Day as a tribute to the late Douglas Adams. Unfortunately I don't have a don't panic towel and I can't find my Steelers terrible towel so I'll have to make do with carrying a plain towel around instead.

The family waiting room at Riverside hospital has a neat web based (I assume) application that shows you the list of patients in the hospital and their progress. When you checkin at the hospital, the accompanying person is given a piece of paper with a number on that relates to that person. They can then look up the patients status on the various monitors around the waiting room to see if they have checked in, awaiting surgery, in surgery, recovery or what room they are in. This makes it easier to keep up to date on someone's status. They also tannoy announcements whenever a doctor has new news for the family. It's a cool system but would be really good if this was available outside the hospital on a website so that a patient could let people know their number (and I guess they'd also need a passcode to prevent unauthorised disclosure) so people would know how soon to leave their home to come visit and what room they would be in.
They also have free wireless for internet access and a couple of phone jacks for the poor souls who have to use dialup to access the internet. Each room also has incoming telephone access (in comparison to the hospital in the UK which had premium rate dialin access for each bed which is a despicable practise and I think there is actually talk of dropping this charge) and you can even Send an electronic greeting card to patients.

For those of you who don't know, Kristen is undergoing surgery at the moment for the removal of her thyroid. Before she went down for surgery she seemed pretty relaxed and was joking around like crazy - I'm not sure if they put something in her drip or whether it was the fact that she'd only had 3 hours sleep in the past 49.5 hours. For more updates, keep an eye on Kristen's blog where I'll post updates.

I really should have taken today off and gone geocaching as the weather is absolutely wonderful today.instead I have 4 client sites to go to. I did manage to schedule a lunch break though and as it was so nice I had pizza in the park in downtown Columbus. Although it wasn't very quiet it was relaxing. - thought I'd try a bit of blogging but I can't remember which symbol is above which character on the keyboard so I can't log in to my MovableType installation as my password contains the shift 5 character but the blackberry already has 5 as an alt key so there is no shift 5. I also have a similar problem when I hit a voicemail tree that asks me to spell the users name. As the bb doesn't have the phone letter combination like a normal phone does, it is hard to spell a surname correctly when you are guessing which numbers to press.

On a unrelated note how many people does it take to paint a green line down the middle of the street in Columbus for Saturday? The answer is an incredibly tax wasting 9 (or 10) -

• 3 police bike escorts (2 at the front and one at the back),


• 1 poor painter bloke who has to walk miles on the hottest day of the year pushing a smelly green paint machine,


• 1 bus driver (who knows what he was there for),


• 1 paint truck in case he runs out of paint,


• 1 truck to carry traffic cones


• 1 person putting the cones in the middle of the road so people don't drive on the green paint


• 1 truck with flashing lights to warn people that they may shortly run over orange cones and get green paint on their tires


• And I think there was another person running around to make sure the other 9 were still ok.

Aaaah the things you see during the lunch break (and the things you blog about!)

Not only has work been incredibly busy recently, but tomorrow night we are hosting a games night at our house to play various board games - apples to apples and cranium are typical favourites.
I've also got a nice reason to get a nice shiny hard disk to put in one of the machines at home - partly because I want to play around with features in Microsoft Office 2007 such as Groove but also to do some more work with System Center Essentials and other beta products ;-)

This little beast has been busy in the tree for the past couple of days - he can get really loud sometimes. Unfortunately he's quite a way up, well camouflaged, its freezing cold yet bright outside and I'm at the extreme end of the zoom on the camera so the picture isn't brilliant.

Sorry this is late but I hope everyone had a great Christmas and have a wonderful new year....
I came down with a cold on the Wednesday before Christmas after working 12 hours in a cold airconditioned room and catching it from Kristen on the Monday previous. The annoying thing was that my throat was sore for 2 days and I knew the cold was on it's way but it took ages before it started to hit in earnest. I was off sick on Thursday and Friday (but still got calls from work) and Saturday and Sunday I was still coughing and sneezing a little (and still got calls from work). Sunday I felt much better and we had 2 christmas services which were nice although the evening service was not very well attended - I think most people had either settled in for the evening or had gone to visit family and friends. (We had to drive back from some friends after spending a wonderful afternoon laughing at "my little ghetto pony" - a pony made from a plastic toy box upended with a pompom tail, cucumber neck and a lambs head - a very funny frankenstein contraption but the child loved it).
Monday was Christmas day, of course, and we opened presents at our house (well some of them- the order I placed with Shutterfly for Kristen's present didn't turn up until Boxing Day despite ordering it before the cutoff and paying for priority handling) and then headed over to her parents for Lunch - fondue and tea - Egg Rolls and English Apple Pie - hardly the traditional Christmas Meal. I enjoyed the meal but it did feel weird not having Roast Turkey and all the trimmings, Christmas Cake and Baked Alaska (the latter we had for Thanksgiving instead). Thankfully there were no calls from work.
Tuesday (yesterday) was meant to be a day off from work as the office was closed but started with pages from work as the monitoring system detected a customers box down - turns out that isp hosting their dns had both dns servers unavailable and there was no 24 hour support or phone number easily visible on the website and there was still an hour to go for the company to start work. Eventually one of the dns servers came back online so they were ok (although the customer was actually ok as their outgoing access was fine - just incoming mail and web hosting was unreachable by name). At the same time I had calls about the phone system from another company (this phone system has been in for 13 months and I am still debugging, supporting and fixing it on a daily basis) and several helpdesk tickets that needed answering to as they weren't taken care of whilst I was off sick.
Eventually I was able to unplug the laptop and go out to Microcenter to get a new computer, monitor and peripherals for us - more on that later.......
So today is Wednesday, I woke up early and I have no idea what is in store for me at the office today - should be interesting.....
Friday we are off to a wedding so a very short work week! (Thats the good great news)

Kristen's dad retires today and the mayor has proclaimed that today shall be known as Frank Ciarochi Day in Dublin - Congratulations Frank and enjoy your retirement!

My parents are flying over to the US right now to spend time in America for Thanksgiving. Kristen and I have been pretty busy working on the house to clean and tidy it up. We're looking forward to them arriving and doing stuff with them - have a safe trip Mum and Dad!

This is not me, never has been and never will be - phew!

I've been trying to use Microsoft's WWMX application to geotag some of the photos that we took on holiday ready to upload to zooomr, but the level of mapping detail for Jamaica and Grand Cayman Islands was pretty awful However I have found that by using Garmin's mapsource to load the track data from the gps and then saving the tracks to a gpx I can then use wwmx to automatically tag the photos if I had the gps on at the time the photos were taken.

However, for the rest of the photos that were taken without the gps I needed a better way of marking where they are taken. A combination of picassa and google earth makes the job very easy. First the photo's need to be loaded into Picassa - this will probably be done automatically (although for some reason Picassa doesn't like to find my cruise photos and they disappear from the folder view even though I can see them being scanned). Anyway, once the photos have been loaded, select the photos that need to be geotagged and then go to the tools menu, geotag, geotag with google earth. Then use Google Earth to navigate to the spot that the photos were taken -the satellite view does an outstanding job for this. Then just hit geotag, select the next picture and repeat (or do geotag all if they are all in the same place. At this point, the locations are written to the picture (exif data I presume) and can then be uploaded to flickr or zooomr already geotagged for you.

As it will take some time to load the cruise photo's, I took some pictures of the Pumpkin Festival at Oakland Nursery including the Worlds Fastest Pumpkin Carver and entries for the Worlds biggest pumpkin.

7 years ago today (if you count aphian years where 1 aphian year= 1year and 5/7ths of a day) Kristen and I got married. Loads of things have happened since then and I'm looking forward to many more years in the future. (I got in trouble for not blogging about our anniversary but I thought that if I blogged on the anniversary I'd get moaned at ;-)

Kristen and I were having tea at the Old Bag of Nails pub in Upper Arlington (the fish was obviously cooked by someone who had never had real english fish and chips - you are not supposed to be able to pick the whole fish up between two fingers and it stay in one piece) and I was telling Kristen about the Trigger Happy TV that I had been watching on You Tube this morning. There were two skits in particular - one was about a man walking up a street and the other was about a man playing squash whilst on the phone (fast forward to 1:53) and as I was talking about it - someone's phone rang in the pub - playing the very same ringtone -which is infamous if you've ever lived in the UK. I was so tempted to shout "HELLO? YEAH - I'M IN THE PUB - EATING FISH AND CHIPS"
The other trigger happy clip I liked was the Stop and Stop board - the funniest thing is how the car moves forward twice!

Kristen had the day off so I took the day off and we went to Cincinnati. We went to Newport Aquarium in the morning and I tried to do some geocaching.
We also saw Over the Hedge. I was not sure that I wanted to see it as the commercials looked too cheesy and I enjoy the comic online so didn't want to get disappointed by watching the film. The film was very funny but the ironic thing is that the film has been plugged by Walmart and Kroger a lot - yet the film is about the excess purchasing and food eating habits of humans. My favourite character was Hammy - the squirrel (thats squ-ir-rel).
I've loaded some of the pictures we took up to flickr - there are more photo's but these ones will do to start with.

Realised after the computer had a hectic few moments tonight when the power surged that the pc was plugged into the surge protection port of the UPS and not the battery backup - oops!

Two weeks ago I got the honour of being the employee of the quarter from work which I am pretty chuffed about ;-) Thankfully I didn't have to give an acceptance speech as there would have been too many people to thank. As a prize I was firstly awarded a Batbelt - complete with (nonworking GPS). This was because of the gps but mainly because of the fact that I always have a software tool to solve a computer problem and it's become the joke to ask if I have a tool on my batbelt for a particular problem. Needless to say, everyone thought it was funny so I proudly hooked it up to the top of my cubicle to be on display - this also means the little dart gun is close at hand in case I need to ward off a particular nasty case of job sloping.

I also received an avaya t-shirt - again a gag gift - as I have done so much work on the avaya phone system that support should really be doing, that everyone thinks I am an avaya employee now! (incidentally I got a compliment from the tech I was working with last night (on our third firmware upgrade to solve persistent phone problems) when he said it was nice to work with a customer who actually knew their way around a computer and could help in the diagnostic problems)

The third gift was two tickets for the North Market 10th annual Apron Gala which we went to on Saturday night. The event was really good fun with loads of posh food to try out. We didn't stay right to the end but did enjoy being there at the beginning when there wasn't too many people around. One of the most popular stalls was Bob the fish guy who had two huge containers of shrimp which were really nice - lots of people made several trips to that stall! The picture framing stall had a caricaturist doing pictures so Kristen and I got ours done as you can see on the left - click for a bigger picture. We also purchased two aprons as our donation towards the event - the pockets in the apron were great for keeping napkings, forks and a cup handy whilst walking around.

Kristen also got me a congratulations cookie biscuit (thanks Rob!) which we are now half way through - thanks luv!

Tonight is the Superbowl and I'm really looking forward to it. It's the first time that I've been able to see it live (as it's normally on about 11pm or later in the UK) AND the Steelers are in the finals (and going to win of course). Seeing as though I'm an adopted Steelers fan by marriage that makes it more fun. Kristen's Dad is at the game so if you see a bloke with a 'tache (ok, admittedly that is about half the crowd) and a flashing hat, that might be him - we're going to keep a close eye on the crowd. Friday night Kristen and I put together one of my Christmas presents - a Steelers blanket throw so we can snuggle up and keep warm.

Just to let you know that Kristen and I are unlikely to be blogging much until next Tuesday as that is when we finally get internet access back at the house. I signed up for Roadrunner last Wednesday and was told they would contact me in 7-10 days (when I assumed they'd arrange an installation in the next day or so). I rang them yesterday to chase and got told that the next available installation was in a weeks time. If I'd have known that I'd have rung them straight away.
There is no decent wifi signal in the house either which is good news in some respects as it means there is nothing to interfere with our signal when we install it.

Rob's posted some cold photos and mentioned that he didn't have his thermals when he went out for a walk. On Thursday night we had a similar experience when we went to the Columbus Zoo lights opening night. I didn't have any thermals but I did have three pairs of pants on (thats trousers to the brits) a shirt, two sweatshirts and a coat so I was nice and warm under all the layers but it was freezing cold - too cold to take photos with the camera. We had a good time although it was extremely crowded - loads of people were there. Didn't see (m)any animals but we had a great time and went back to Donatos pizza afterwards - delicious!

...when you see a shop entitled MothersWorld with an advert for school stuff on the top of their store sign and think that it sounds like a promotion for gymslip mums!
(I don't think this sounds as funny as it was last night)

the geeky way to propose is to get Ask Jeeves to collaborate with you so that when your girlfriend types her name into the search engine, your proposal comes up. I wonder if this will be googles next beta product - propose.google.com or willyoumarryme.google.com

We're having a nice time in Georgia - the weather is nice and warm hot and the hotel, the Amerisuite in Alpharetta is great. The room is stonkingly huge with a kitchenette, lounge with sofa and single chair, the tv has a vcr and games in, there is a safe in the room (not that we need it), nice air conditioning and free breakfast and newspaper. They also have pretty fast wifi internet access although our laptop is soooo slow it wouldn't matter if it was a dialup account, the bottleneck would still be the pc.
I've only managed to find 1 cache in Alpharetta after hunting for 6 others this morning, but there are about 5 just down the street from the hotel so I hope to get out sometime and do some more. With the cache density in this area, I should be able to get to 400 caches found but time and the heat (and the family) is not going to let that happen. We had a nice time with the bride and groom to be (Kristen's brother and fiance) last night, with brats and yachtsman's salad - mmmmmmmmm. Katie made a birthday cake for Dave so we sang happy birthday and I've got some goofy pictures I might upload later. We then finished the evening by playing 90's trivial pursuit but I was at a real advantage as ALL the questions were american so I had no chance. I did manage to get the first cheese though and it went rather nicely in my pda game piece.

When there is an emergency in cities like New Orleans where they are trying to get everyone to leave, why do the authorities not open the other side of the freeway to allow more traffic to get out of the vicinity quicker? The picture on the left shows 3 lines of a freeway in use and very few vehicles going the other way.

Apparently I've been to 19 states (37%) in the US from the map below


but a paltry 5 7 countries (2%)

create your own visited countries map | create your own visited countries map

Andy's Winston and Kristen's Teapot were ready this afternoon so we went to pick them up. We're both pleased with how they came out.

Angela had secretly organised a pottery painting event at Clay Cafe Columbus for Mike's birthday last night. Kristen and I went over as the cover for persuading Mike to go and when we got there, some more friends were waiting. We had a really good time and this is the group photo after we had finished. For more photo's go to http://absoblogginlutely.net/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=51 or Angela's photos.

on msnbc or just grow a beard as its easier :-)

maybe this is why I wake up so early in the mornings

We went around a friends house last night as the first of our leaving do's and after some delicious pizza (but no hanky panky this time) we played a game of rapidough where you have to mould things out of dough to get the other team members to guess the word on the card. Thankfully you are able to use the clay with actions, so a plane may be modelled and then waved around the room in a flying motion. Anyway, about half way into the game, I had the word salt. Thinking quickly I started to pinch small bits of plasticine off the lump and throw them over my shoulder. Kristen was horrified as the aim of the game is to keep as much plasticine as possible (and remove it from the opponents team) and here I was, throwing the remains of an ever decreasing lump of plasticine down the back of the settee! Thankfully it didn't stun her too much and she managed to guess correctly with her first word after three throws. Much hilarity ensued as she complained about me reducing the dough - my protestations of "it was an attempt to ensure you guessed correctly quickly" were ignored and I was banished to find the pieces of plasticine (which I did much to the hosts relief).............I think I got away with the fact that I was throwing the salt over my right shoulder when you are meant to throw it over your left :-)

I get the best ever April Fool's joke today as it is my last *ever* day of work in the UK *does a happy little jig*

If you job was a paint inspector how bored would you be or what would you do when you got bored?

Kristen has just done her taxes for last year in about 15 minutes. That is pretty good going by any standards.

Friday was unseasonally hot with temperatures apparently reaching 18degrees which is pretty good for the uk. I think it was spring trying to show us that it was ready for today (first day of spring). However the effort was clearly too much as Saturday and Sunday have been dreary and overcast - but at least it is not raining.

Just heard on the news that in this budget fuel will not go up until september, stamp duty is now £120,000 - so no stamp duty if you buy my house in congleton, company car tax is static and you can bring back up to a more realistic £1000 from abroad as opposed to the miserly £145. I'm still emigrating though :-)

Friday I took the day off for my birthday and we met up with Tash & Dave (non-bloggers) to go to Birmingham's BullRing shopping centre and then to Outback for tea. The bullring was an interesting shopping centre - not the usual meadowhell/trafford centre type layout of shops and the outer design is definately funky in the extreme. I was not impressed at the parking fee's though - it is VERY expensive to park in the middle of birmingham - we paid over £5 for 3 hours parking. I managed to get one geocache done, A bit of ..... which is a bit of a cheat really as it was a virtual and needed a photo taken of a bull statue. After lunch we went to see Hitch which was very good and funny (although the funniest bits were shown in the trailers for the film. We went to an AMC cinema and that was suprisingly cheap, £3 for the matinee performance and £5 for shows after 6pm. The local Vue cinema near us charges £6 and you have to pay about £3 for parking so a night out at the cinema works out pretty expensive (which is why we go on Orange Wednesday's instead). Photo's uploaded to my flickr page.

Can you imagine how much deicer you would need if you lived at the place these Ice Storm pictures were taken at?

It is a bit scary how many foods are getting added to the list of Food Standards Agency - Sudan I product lists 21 and 22 February 2005.
A quick look through the list shows how important it is to provide home cooked food as opposed to ready meals! (just go easy on the worcester sauce)

Kristen brought me Froderick the Gnomad for valentines day - similar to a travelbug used in geocaching, this is a cute gnome that is trackable and has an online photo album. When I saw Mike's gnomad I wanted one too but at the time we only had 1 day left in the states and I wasn't going to be able to get one.
Kristen remembered and got me one - thanks luv!

I got home from work last night and volunteered to help paint our kitchen ready for part of it to be tiled this morning. It now looks really good but does need at least one more coat of paint. My arm and fingers ache from pushing on the roller though. Hopefully all the paint and tiling and tidying up will be done before a viewer comes round on Saturday.

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*(well Kristen and Andy do) **This post to be sung to the tune of We all live in a yellow submarine with apologies to the beatles.

If you thought antidisestablishmentariansim was a long word, then check out the 310 letter word a 9 year old learnt from memory (would be interesting to see if he remembers it a week or a year from now though)

Being sick must do something to your brain as this afternoon we were discussing whether you could strangle a fly or not. (There is actually a sane reason why we were saying this but that spoils the story). Apparently it turns out that you can't strangle a fly. But fear not, you can drown them instead - its funny how the last line of the page ends with this reassuring fact.

It's not a good idea to start dolng some diy where the power needs to be cut off at about 3pm. By the time l had gone to focus to get some more stuff, it was getting dark. However, we now have lights in both the upstairs and the downstairs of the hallway.

Bored drivers with cellphones. I can't believe how many drivers I see in the uk talking on their handheld mobiles after its illegal. Disqualify them from driving I say!

....Kristen was born - Happy Birthday Kristen! Have a great day and see you on Wednesday! Click on more for more.

Finally got to complete Ratchet & Clank 2. It's more fun the second go round when all the bolts get multiplied :-)

....and then there ARE things worth blogging about - Kristen and I celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary yesterday. We went to a nearby pub that we'd never been to, despite living about .5 miles away from it for 10 years (in my case). Had some really nice food that filled us up so much we couldn't even eat pudding. The five years have flown by and we're both looking forward to many more. I Love you Kristen!

Nice to see that the adverts for McDonalds Healthy eating meals have finally changed. The recent adverts have often made me wonder *why* someone would buy a meal when McDonalds portray their customers as gossips, dotty,and/or crazy people. Now they are giving away a free stepometer which I think is a good sign - apparently people who start wearing one tend to keep wearing it. The weird thing is that this happens less than a month when they were giving away a free bigmac with every bigmac meal purchased (and are still doing that via a coupon for my local shop)
I wonder what would happen if they gave away a stepometer with every bigmac meal purchased?

The Beeb have a report on 'Most' UK staff work extra hours. Makes interesting reading - just how many of the stats apply to you?

Yesterday was a fairly busy day - in the morning I went to do Moors the Merrier geocache on the way to Stoke where I was going to do a trailer check for King Arthur. This involves being paid to go to the cinema and record what adverts and trailers show before a particular film starts. If the film is showing on more than one screen then you have to do it for each screen at the cinema. You are then normally allowed to watch the film (for free) and then you have to go home and log the findings on line - not bad eh? King Arthur wasn't too bad - pretty violent in parts although not gory. It did seem to go on a bit and at times you almost caught yourself thinking you were watching gladiator. There were a lot of romans in the film and I strongly suspect the music was by the same person.
After logging the results, a couple of friends came round and we blitzed the garden. A grand total of 13 dustbin bags full of grass,ragweed,and brambles are now waiting to be taken to the tip. I had taken two Benadryl tablets for hayfever during the day and was not really affected by the hayfever. These tablets work great but I've noticed that they tend to make me very congested the following day (but they haven't this time round.)
Sausages in a bun for tea and then I collapsed into bed at 9pm for a great nights sleep (for once)

Spent the morning at the Roaches in Staffordshire as I attended the Don't Look Down cache with loads of others. Had a great time but it threw it down with rain right at the end. It was still raining this afternoon so I didn't feel like going out again and taking photo's in the rain. In the meantime, this post is written with the version 4 beta of <w.bloggar

Sorry the sites not been updated for about a week - last weekend we were at my cousin Neil's wedding. Then Monday-Wednesday I was involved in doing some disaster recovery for a client, Thursday was a night in together relaxing and today's Friday!

..is a chef trying to get out. Actually I noticed a leaflet on the noticeboard at work from another company in the same building that our office was in. They were seeking volunteers to follow some recipes for a book they were doing and would pay expenses and also a small amount per recipe that was cooked. I thought it sounded like a good idea, Kristen agreed and so I contacted them. A week or so ago I got the recipe's. Some looked pretty strange and disgusting, others looked really nice and some just looked interesting. So Thursday night after getting home from work I made Lemon Tuna on lettuce leaf bed and White Chocolate Fondue - guess which one was our favourite ;-)
The fondue just screamed out for some artistic work so here are two pictures of the dips. Overhead, Side on

Kristen goes into the hospital tomorrow for surgery on her deviated septum. Hopefully they'll only keep her in overnight and she makes a speedy recovery. Its been really bothering her sinus's and sleeping and general health so it will be good to get this sorted. Get well soon love!

Kristen's sister-in-law gave birth to a healthy 5lb and 14oz baby girl at 1am this morning, red curly hair and blue eyes. So we are now an Aunt and Uncle!

Well I feel like a fully fledged plumber tonight. Wednesday night I brought home the dishwasher from work as we had no room to put it in the new offices. We gave it a good clean outside (after the clean it got in the office too!) and I wisely decided not to tell Kristen that there was a dead mouse under it when we moved it from under the sink - that brought the grand total to 3. Anyway, I stopped off at Wickes on the way home and for under £9 I got a splitter for the cold water outlet and a self cutting waste outlet clamp. Both are now firmly in place with no leaks....yet. I did manage to get wet putting the splitter on the cold water pipe as I foolishly decided to let the stopcock on the join stop the water - it didn't. As I called Kristen to give me some help she went into the loo - I thought she was going to turn the main stopcock off, but no - she just needed the loo! Afterwards she turned the water off and I was able to adjust the nonworking stop cock into more of an off position. Then it was a quick attachment of the washing machine and dishwasher, turn on the main stopcock and then struggle to turn the little splitter stopcock back to the on position. Then it was loading the dishwasher - which started the arguments off already - and we're now sitting up waiting for it to finish, neither of knowing how long it will take - to ensure that the waste outlet doesn't leak. Oh and Kristen says that I am a fully fledged plumber ;-)

What can I say?. ;-) (that'll attract some google searches!) Turns out that she was over enthusiastic yesterday and managed to not only destroy the equipment but trip the electrics for the entire house. I didn't notice as by that time I was asleep as I had been awake really early in the day to drive to Birmingham to visit a customer. Unfortunately the equipment was not ours and was borrowed and they didn't have a receipt for it. I was not looking forward to the visit to the shop to see if we could get a replacement under the year guarantee and thankfully they did. Thanks Wickes! Now as long as it lasts for an hour tonight we'll be happy and the bedroom will soon be back to normal ;-)

Things have been really hectic and busy round here the past couple of days so I've not really had a chance to blog much. As I mentioned earlier, our section of the company was sold off over the weekend, so Thursday and Friday last week was very stressful as I was trying to juggle responsibilities of the old job with planning the merger of the two companies and their networks, in particular trying to plan for an email migration with the minimum downtime and user hassle. Tomorrow the big switch over will take place and we will be cut off from our old company network and we'll be joined to the new one....so yet more stress :-)
Saturday evening we went out with some friends of ours to Old Orleans which neither of us had been to before. The evening was different as we were greeted by an extremely hairy chested, back and legged wait(e)r(ess) wearing a dress as it was their 20th birthday and so all the staff were in fancy dress. It really was a mistake in allowing a hairy guy to wear a dress and seat people at their tables and bring the food over - it really was a sickening experience. If we hadn't have booked a table or been on our own I think I'd have left the restaurant. We had a magician come over to the table and do some card tricks,smutty innuendo's and balloon puppetry. Kristen kept trying to be clever in the cards, as they were all different shapes and sizes and didn't do too badly although she pulled the king of hearts out when it should have been the queen of hearts. Credit to the clown though, he carried on without pausing in his patter and took her heckling in his stride. The funniest thing is that he was incredibly hard to understand and our friend had a really hard time. Whenever she was asked a question there was a pause, followed by a "errrmm" and then the answer. It really looked like she was trying to think up a fake answer to her name or where she had come from. The rest of the time we were served by a playboy bunny (with matching outfit) who did a good job of apologising for the delay in the food as apparently "everyone had ordered the main courses at once". When the food came it wasn't very good and there was quite a lot of food left on the plates. I did manage to eat all my alligator though (tastes like chicken with the consistency of tuna steak) so thats another exotic meat I've tried. Note this was NOT eaten at Jamie Oliver's Dad's pub, I do not know Jamie Oliver and can't come to your school for cookery demonstrations or get you a tv break.
Monday I went to see the Doctor about my knees as they've been really hurting since we did a 6 geocache hike and he told me that it was just the knees not being used to the amount of exercise and I've got to take Ibuprofen for a week.
Today I had my cancer checkup and was given the all clear, which as usual is good news.
Also managed to clear out the broken glass in the barbeque outside so we had steaks on the grill tonight and they were delicious. Thanks luv!

There was/is a major fire in tunnels underneath Manchester yesterday which seemed to only affect BT phone lines. BT said it would affect a wider network and yesterday we were unable to receive calls at home although we were able to make them. Same thing at the doctors. Apparently the pharmacy opposite the doctors and the job centre had no phones or data lines either. Fortunately our broadband access was not affected :-)

I've just been looking at the Yahoo news about the Columbus shooter capture including the slideshow of photos. What is a bit disturbing is that after 4 pictures there is an advert for a 007 James Bond game on the Yahoo games domain in which a car comes into view on the screen and a sniper scope focus's in on it. This seems to me to be entirely inappropriate considering this is what the guy was doing and he managed to kill someone.
You can complain about this by going to Yahoo advert feedback and clicking on the ad feedback link.

Well for once it was worth going to work today. We had a meeting with some customers and partners. Naturally the partners brought freebies for the customers. Thankfully the partners couldn't count so there were plenty of freebies left over. The first was a stuffed tiger, the second a magnetic puzzle, where you have to put the slices of a square back together again and the third was a mousemat. I decided to "upgrade" my 2002 mousemat (with our company logo and 2002 calendar on) and was pleasantly suprised to feel the mouse being so much more responsive. Hooray for Fridays (well this one anyway)

Kristen suggested that we went to ReaseHeath college for their lambing open day. A quick search on google shows a blog entry for last years lambing which explains how all the lambs are born at the same time of the year. We were very fortunate to see and hold lots of lambs - most of which had been born early this week and we were even more fortunate to watch a 2 year old ewe give birth to the first of twins - that was a really neat sight and something that neither Kristen or myself had seen before. I took some pictures but not sure how they'll come out as the flash is pretty useless.

Yesterday was my birthday so I took a much deserved day off work. The only problem is that today feels like Monday again :-(
In the morning we went and did a nice cache in the Delamere forest which was a very busy walk meeting loads of dog walkers. We found the cache fairly quickly, despite walking in the wrong direction a few times. Whilst we were signing the logs a dog came up to us to give a sniff to see if we had any food for it. The owner apologised and explained that is what the dog was doing, thinking that the cache