With our preparations coming along smoothly at the moment it’s been nice to take a step back and imagine what it’s going to be like on the day. We are, luckily, not one of these couples that seem to have loads of stress in organising their wedding and it’s a very pleasant experience.

We’re off again soon to sort out the final bits of the official part of the wedding, documents etc and it’s all getting very close. I’m so excited!

So we’ve got a rough idea of what we want and we’ve just bittent he bullet and we’ve got an appointment with a travel agent to help sort out all the bits and peices inbetween getting there and back for us. We’ll see how that goes!

Xmas day at Dale and Debs place.

On the Satureday we took the train into London but got stuck at Southhall as there was a fatality in Ealing Broadway and they stopped all services running. So, we got out and walked into the centre of Sothhall and took a colourfull bus journey the remainder of the way into Ealing Broadway. From there we took the Central line into the heart of London, checked into out hotel and made our way out for an explore.

The evening saw us come back and enjoy a bottle of champagne along with a lovely chees board whilst we got ready for going out to dinner. A quick walk into Regents Street and up to the first floor of Veeraswamy. Reputably the UK Oldest Indian restaurant. It combines a fantastic decor and atmosphere, with excelent service and delicious food.  Although at first glance the menu seems to be uninspiring, this is mainly because it doesn’t really resemble your normal indian menu, with dishes such as Oyster Kebabs, is it any wonder that it throws you at first. However after a Cocktail and a glass of wine and jumped out on a limb with the mains dishes we were enjoying a great meal with a fantastic wine suggested by our waiter. All in all it went down well, albeit a bit more expensive that we were anticipating.

We got up not too early and not too late for breakfast before chcking out of the hotel at 1130 and walking back to London Paddington for an uneventful train joutrney back to Windsor.

The Sony PRS-300 Pocket Edition e-Reader is a marvelous bit of kit. I’ve been using mine now for a month, and it’s travelled from one side of the world to the other and back again with me. I’ve recently been in Australia for holidays visiting family and took this with me only 2 days after getting it as an X-Mas present. It handled well on the flight from Heathrow to Abu-Dhabi to Singapore to Brisbane and back again. I was able to use it in bright light (in Australia) with the attached reading light in low light conditions on the plane and just about everywhere in between.

I did find the software that came with it a bit lacking in functionality and so came across this bit of kit called calibre – E-book management. it’s much more thought out and comes with some handy tools such as converters and news “fetchers” that allow you to set news websites which it goes off and fetches and formats it for use on your ereader.

I currently have about 20 books on my device which I’m working my way through, I usually read 2 or 3 books in one go so having this is a real boon. Reading the news is good as well as I can set it to retrieve it before I leave in the morning and read it on the train, so it doesn’t take up time in the morning and on my lunch break when I would usually do those tasks.

The battery life is excelent on this. I’ve not run the battery down in all the time I’ve had it. I guess mainly due to the fact that I get the news every (other) day and the time it’s plugged into the USB port it actually charges whilst it’s there. Bonus!

One downer is that in the UK there are not as many places I can find to get the electronic content and the selections are still quite limited. Although a lot of newer titles are available for download, I’ve been using this to re-read some older series I read years ago, and coverage of these older titles seems to be a bit patchy.  In one case I’ve got 7 out of 8 titles (the one missing is right in the middle and is a pivitol point in the story line).

I’ve not had a chance to use the device yet for technical manuals and I’m not really sure I want to just yet, I am concerned about how ther device will automatically re-format the manual to fit on the smaller screen, I guess I could just load one of the many PDF’s of manuals I have onto it to find out, however at the moment I just can’t be bothered.

There is a lot of talk about why someone would want a decive to make phone calls, a device to take photos, a device to listen to music and now a device to read books on, why not do it all in one. Well let me explain why I’ll use separate devices for each of the tasks.

Phone calls : Use my phone, it makes calls, sends texts and I now get skype on it. I really don’t want it for anything else.

Photos :  My phone doesn’t take photos anywere near as good as my camera, I have one mini-slr for holidays and taking my “good” photos, and a normal digicam which I carry most days with me for “snapping”. I get brilliant battery life out of these devices and superior photo quality.

Music : I have an iPod Classic. I’ve had lots of MP3 players over the years and I finally forked out the money for an iPod and now I’d never go back.

All of the above if used on a phone (photos & music) run down  my phone battery, why would I want to do that?

and now for reading ebooks. Why would I want to do that on a small phone screen, a small ipod screen when I now have a device with a screen that is almost the size of a normal paperback and I don’t need to strain my eyes or run run down my other device’s battery.

In the old days I would have carried a book, instamatic camera, a cd player and my phone in my bag so why not cayy a didicam, ebook reader and phone along with my iPod. putting everything into one device to save space doesn’t really cut it.

And basically I just like having one device that does it’s job, that way the innovation and research and quality get targeted to a specific task and you get multiple devices at the top of their game not one device that is “Ok” across the board.

I realise that I’ve gone on for a bit now so I’ll call it a day and sign off.

Later!

A quick recap then, the tail end of last year saw quite a lot going on with both Jayne and I exhausted. I managed to get off home to Australia for a few weeks over xmas and new years and got back to life in England refreshed.

It’s that time of year now that I’m starting to think about what is going to be planted in the garden to help us in doing our bit by buying less and also to buy more locally. I think that I’ll be going for the usual staples of Garlic, Onions, Zucchini, Squash as well as tomatoes. I’m hoping that I’ll have both hens laying this year as I only had one of the last year. I may even see if I can manage to get an extra one in. One of the big problems I have is I would like quite a lot more space to do this and possibly get some other livestock but just do not have the space.

We are now at the end of January and our wedding is now only 7 months away. Invites are going out in a week or so I think and we should have everything in place before our trip out in April.

I’ll leave it there for now and post again in a few days.

600g Diced Goat
4 Small Onions (Quartered)
3 Cloves of Garlic (Bruised)
2 Glasses of Red Wine
3 Sprigs of Rosemary
Two chopped carrots
Bay Leaf
Water to cover
Tomato Paste

Put the Diced Goat, Red wine, the Onions and the Garlic (which you have halved and bruised) into a sealed container with the Rosemary and Tomato Paste in refridgerate for 24 Hours.

The next day…….

In a hot skillet seal the Goat and put into either an oven proof caserole dish or into a Crock-Pot. Add the wine from the marinade along with the onions and garlic into the pot, with the chopped carrots and add a bay leaf and cover with water, cook for 4-6 hours.

Thicken to suit with a little corn flour, I leave mine unthickened.

Serve with Bread Dumplings or Mash Potato

October is going to be a busy month. Not only are Jayne and I heading off to Hungary for a long weekend to sort out some wedding details, but we’re also going to try to get to the next Opportunities Australia EXPO in London. One of the big advantages that we both have is we are both Aussie citizens. I am because I was born there! Jayne is through decent. So immigration and VISA’s etc are no worries, it’s the jobs markets and housing and living we’re interested in. So Bring it on!

Ingredients

• 4 lbs. oxtail
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 5 cloves garlic, chopped.
• 1 carrot, thinly sliced
• 2 large tomatoes, chopped
• 2 green bell peppers, seeded and chopped.
• 1/2 tsp. dried thyme
• 1/2 tsp. dried oregano
• 1/2 tsp. dried rosemary leaves
• 1/2 tsp. paprika
• 8 peppercorns
• 2 bay leaves
• a few strands of saffron (optional)
• 2 cups amontillado sherry or dry white wine.
• 2 cups meat stock (about)
• olive oil for frying

Heat the olive oil in a large sauce pan. Lightly salt oxtails and brown on each side. Take oxtails off the oil and set aside.
Brown the onion and garlic in the remaining oil until golden. Return the oxtails to the pan. Add vegetables, herbs and spices and stir to combine. Add the sherry and only enough stock to cover the meat. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer covered for 3-5 hours, until the meat is done (it should be easily falling off the bones), and the sauce has reduced. If the sauce is still too liquid, uncover and boil rapidly for a few minutes.

Alas I was unable to find exactly what I was after, so after a bit of quick reading and looking at hpw existing simple plugins worked, I decided to write my own. Here is version 1.0.0. It currently allows you to add a Title, Author, Link and Image URL and when you add the code

<p>
    <?php whatimreading(); ?>
</p>

to one of your pages / includes in wordpress you will now have a nicely formatted little item showing what you are currently reading. More features that I mentioned above to come soon.

Here’s the current link

desc "Build scaffolds from existing db"
task :useExistingDB => :environment do
  connection = ActiveRecord::Base.connection
  connection.tables.each do |table|
    begin

      command = "# ruby script/generate"
      args = ["scaffold ","#{table} s"]
      columns = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.columns(table)
      columns.each do |col|
          args << "#{col.name}:#{col.type} "
     end
     puts "#{command} #{args.to_s}"
      system("#{command} #{args.to_s}")
    rescue
      puts "failed: #{$!}"
    end
  end
end

Don’t forget that this can be modified to create anything not just scaffold, use it to create all the necessary controllers/models etc.

• What am I reading
• Amazon Affiliate Programme
• Google XML sitemaps
• Contact Forms

to name just a few.

Well to get all the functionality in place ready to configure took about 30 mins, and Geeze I thought if I had been creating this website from scratch it’s take a lot longer than that.

Admittedly I haven’t yet activated these bits of functionality but they all look like they’ll work, without any hassle.

So now that I’ve got these installed more things will start to appear on the site very soon.