Rob's Ego Trip!

It snowed!



Jon and Ben have played out in it with their friends from the houses around us. Ben's hands got too cold though, so he came in after half an hour. Jon stayed out for a fair old while though and really enjoyed playing.

This is the last day of the Easter holidays too as school and nursery start again tomorrow. This holiday, the main achievement has been the decoration of the downstairs cloakroom. Georgina did most of the work - all I did was rubbing down at the start and then painting the woodwork at the end. We've got a new blind for it and as this one rolls all the way up, the room is so much lighter! The new flooring is being laid tomorrow so that will be another room ticked off.

Georgina bought a bike yesterday, so we'll be able to go riding as a family when we go camping. As a result, I dusted off my bike and repaired flat tyres, so we are all ready to go :) I'm going to have to work out how we are going to transport the bikes. Current plan is for roof bars and 4 bike attachments, but that seems quite expensive. We may go for a high level rack on the back of the car for 3 bikes and then store Ben's in the trailer or boot.

My beautiful, wonderful wife is celebrating her birthday today!

Happy Birthday, my love.

Although I titled my last post "last day of stress", in reality, the website that was the cause of it all actually went live last Thursday!

So... I'm back on the book and making good progress again and I have managed to put up some photos from Christmas day into the Photo Album.

Due to a deadline that's much too close, this last week or so has been really stressful at work. We close for the break tomorrow lunchtime, so I'll start looking forward to Christmas then!

We're having Christmas at our house this year with G's family, so are seeing my family this weekend and also intend to catch up with some friends which should be fun.

We put the Christmas decorations up today. The kids seemed to really enjoy it - especially putting the baubles onto the tree. We also have some Christmas soft toys which they love.

With only a week left, I'm beginning to think about Christmas now. Tomorrow we put the tree up and then there's only 4 working days left! (We are having our work Christmas lunch next Friday).

The only fly in the ointment is that we have a deadline on a project that is 2nd January, and so we are working really hard in the office to get it done. No doubt, I'll be putting in lots of extra hours to make sure we deploy something we can be proud of, but that's the way it goes in a small company :)

I'm really enjoying photography at the moment. Generally, I only put up family pictures here on the-allens.net and use other services for my other images.

Most of the pictures that I upload go onto Flickr. It's an eclectic collection as I take photos of whatever takes my fancy at the time.

For instance:


One thing I'm struggling with at the moment is coming up with an efficient work flow to actually get my images processed and uploaded. I find it quite time consuming at the moment and so don't process that many photos. Last weekend we went to Clearwell Caves and saw Father Christmas. I took 32 pictures and haven't yet processed any of them and there's at least 5 that are worth doing.

Of course, by the time you read this, I've probably uploaded one or two from that trip...

I've updated the photo album on this site so that you can now view all photos in date order.

Go me!

Everyone should read Mark Pilgrims thoughts on E-books as it explains why DRM just doesn't work.

With books especially, the ability to share is precious.


John Gruber also points out the problem of longevity:

Barring physical catastrophe, I expect that the real books I own — the ones printed on paper — will remain in good condition long after I am dead.1 With digital Kindle books, I’m not even sure they’ll be available 10 years from now. They’re only useful so long as you own Kindle-compatible hardware. What happens to these e-books if Amazon, having lost money on the endeavor, stops producing Kindle readers a few years from now? What are the odds that these files will be readable 50 years from now?

DRM protected e-books? No thanks.

http://simpsonizeme.com/

Jelly Battle

Today was the last day of Jon's football for this term and so it was Trophy Day. Essentially everyone gets one trophy and then a series of additional trophies are given out for various categories. This term, Jon won the "skill points" trophy which means that he put in the most effort and improved his game over the term.

I'm dead chuffed.

Obviously as the weather's lousy at the moment, the obligatory picture is grey with raincoats!

Jon with his two trophies:

It was a bit wet yesterday and it took me 4 hours to do my usual 30 min commute from work back to home!

A couple of pictures show it better:

Just after I'd left work:



Joining the M50:


I got home easily enough - mainly it was a case of taking it easy which wasn't difficult as the traffic was very slow!

Today we stayed in...

We've just had quite a good weekend all in all. Jon did very well at football and managed to get some good defensive tackles in. At this age, it's very much a "clump" of kids chasing the ball! For the rest of the day, I painted the woodwork in the hall. This is a big job as there are so many doors and I'll be doing it next week too! Good progress was done though and all the skirting and door frames are done which is nice.

On Sunday, Jacky came over, so we took the kids to the Severn Valley Railway for lunch and a train ride. It was a hot and so we should have done a journey over half the line rather than the full trip. Next time :)

Not a good day at work today. A project that I'm managing is running late and I received an email from the client today letting me know exactly what they thought of my project management skills. It's not all my fault though that doesn't make me any happier.

This blog doesn't have a "mood" setting, but if it did, my mood would be miserable.