Rob's Ego Trip!

As I did last year, I thought I'd continue my tradition of showing off some photos that recap our year.

January

PHPBNL 2011 happened in January. Also, my Mac OS X application, Daily Jotter was released onto the Mac App Store.

February

The first PHPucEU happened in Manchester which was great fun and, of course, the PHPUK conference in London. The biggest news for us though, was that we moved house in February!

March

I went to Canada for the rather excellent Confoo conference and watched a snowball fight!

April

A relaxed month after 3 months of conferences and a house move. There was a Royal wedding in the UK which resulted in a lot of merchandising!

May

May was the busiest month ever. Both sons have their birthdays in May and DPC in Amsterdam and php|tek in Chicago are back to back conferences! So many good photographs this month, but I have gone with this one of Jeremy Kendall as he took many excellent photographs at tek!

June

Our trip to the zoo this year was in June when we went to Twycross Zoo.

July

We went to the beach in July.

August

In August we went to the Fleet Air Arm Museum.

September

Jon achieved his Grade 1 classical guitar certification this month.



We also went to a friend's wedding.

October

October saw the very excellent PHPNW conference return for its forth year and I was very glad to be asked to do a ZF2 tutorial which seemed to go well.

November

November was the month that John Arnold held his creativityex project. I particularly liked my effort for negative space:

December

Last month of the year and as part of the Worcester Flickr group, I got to take a photograph in a studio!



All in all, a pretty good year. One interesting thing I did notice was that I have a lot more good photos sitting in Aperture than I published. I think this is because Aperture is so slow to use on my old Macbook Pro. I was better at publishing photos with Capture NX2 and I thought that was slow; Clearly it wasn't that bad!

Another year is over, so I get to show off some photos that recap the year!

January

We started the year with a visit to the zoo!



There was also snowy weather last January and on the last day of the month, we put our house on the market. We would be accepting an offer on it in late October.

February

In February, I took pictures of canal boats.

The PHPUK conference was also in February, where I presented a session about Windows Azure and PHP.

March

I took my best picture yet of Worcester cathedral.

April

April was all about my wife! She had her first tatoo done.



and spent some time in hospital having her appendix removed

May

The big event in May was php|tek. I struggled to find a single picture that captured the conference for me, but went for this one.

June

June saw another conference: DPC in Amsterdam.



This photo of Chris Shiflett was also popular:

July

Photographically, the main source of all my photos was my aunt and uncle's 40th wedding anniversary, of which I haven't published any of the photos :)

August

I took the kids to the Severn Valley Railway in August, but the main event was our friends' wedding!

September

September saw the inaugural PHPSW meeting in Bristol.



I also tried to take a photo of a glass of red wine with a white background. This proved to be much harder than I expected

October

The Severn Valley Railway's autumn gala was held in October



October also saw the fantastic PHPNW conference come back to Manchester.

November

I tried my hand at photographing fireworks

December

The snow really fell in December. So much so that we had to abandon a trip to London having travelled 13 miles in 6 hours.

Mitchel and Rachel married yesterday and we were invited! Jon and Ben were pageboys with Jon also acting as ring bearer and got to carry the rings in and give them to the best man. The kids looked so cute in their suits!



Rachel looked stunning in her dress. They both gave a speech at dinner; Rachel's was very emotional and I'm not sure that there was a dry eye in the house by the end of it. It was an excellent day and we wish Mitchell and Rachel the best in their new life together.

The new washing machine arrived today. It's an LG and very electronic. Every time you touch any knob or button, it beeps or plays a tune!

Our AEG washer-dryer died last night. Rather spectacularly it blew all the fuses whilst I was on a conference call to America...

Today we're buying a new LG. We went to the local retail parks to view washer-dryers at Currys, Comet and Apollo 2000, but they were so much more expensive than buying from dixons.co.uk. Hence, we came back home and bought over the Internet. I can see that over time, retail shops will become less and less relevant.

Whilst Jon was at a party today, I went down to the river and took these pictures of seagulls. I took around 70 photos in order to get these three!








I'm really pleased with all three.

I seem to have lost the habit of posting here for some reason. Probably because it doesn't feel that much actually changes.

Over the last month or so we've started decorating the lounge/dining area. I completed the dining area at the weekend, so we're onto the lounge over the next few weeks. I'm expecting this to take a while as we've got both boys' birthdays coming up over in early May with associated parties at the weekends. We also have a Christening coming up on Sunday which should be fun.

My laptop's motherboard died and it is in for repair. I'm currently using an old desktop with Windows Vista on it and fee like I'm in limbo as I have just a minimum of data on here. Using Windows again after using a Mac for a 18 months is proving hard too as I keep pressing the wrong keys!

Only 2 more days to go though!



(hopefully!)

Georgina celebrated her birthday today with tea in bed opening her presents with the kids. The kids were at home all day as the school was closed due to the snow. As a result they had a lazy day and then we went out for a meal this evening at the Beefeater as they are so good with the children there.

Happy Birthday, my love.

Seem to have had a run of unhappy clients where most of their problems haven't been our fault. Today's was though :(

Fortunately, Georgina has baked biscuits!

After a meh week, this weekend has been quite good. Yesterday was spent doing chores. For me, this meant that I've succeeded in chopping down the remaining bushes from the front garden. Just need to get the roots out now.

Today, we went over to Jacky's for lunch to celebrate Georgina's upcoming birthday. Jacky took us out to The Weston Cross where we had a very nice meal. One nice thing about this pub is that they do not skimp on the vegetables served with a Sunday lunch and it was all nicely cooked and not stodgy. In the afternoon, we had hedgehog birthday cake, which was excellent also!

The Almera has had a slow puncture for a little while now and today I organised getting down to Kwik-Fit and getting it sorted. The local Worcester Kwik-Fit is staffed by some nice people and is always very busy. As a result, it took over an hour before they were able to look at the car. Once they did, they repaired the tyre quickly and with a low charge. I was quite impressed as I was expecting to be told that I needed a new tyre.

As it's Saturday today, we did homework. For Ben, this turned out to be his activity bag which had a farm animals theme. He liked the matching pairs games and the fuzzy felt best. Jon also went to guitar lesson today and seems to be getting on okay, even though he found today's lesson quite hard.

We've got key fobs that open the car park gate now, but they don't work from inside the car! A fairly standard day at work, but I did get to go for a walk over towards the Symphony Hall where I took this photo:



There's something about photos with reflections in them that I really like.

Today, one of our clients went bust. They didn't owe us a lot of money, but it was still a bit of a downer first thing in the morning. As a result, I didn't work on a project specification for them and cleared a hundred or so emails from my inbox instead.

At lunch, I went to find a Post Office and found one in the Jewellery Quarter. Whilst there, I took a photo of this cafe:



Hard to know what to say really!

Every Monday I write a report about all the ongoing projects we have for one of our key clients. The main reason we do this is that they have a lot going on and usually, there's 40 to 60 items on the list. The best bit for me is that once per week, I can make sure that I'm on top of everything and that there's nothing that's stalled due to lack of action on our part.

As a result I get very little else done, so I took a still-life picture this evening: