The Trials of Trustees

It appears that this October I shall be required to attend a couple of meetings here at Sabah in Malaysia. I’ve yet to find out of we’ll be insisting on business class travel or choosing to travel economy for the benefit of the members…

Now to me, that looks like a little bit of paradise, but I will be mainly sitting in some conference room or attending some semi-formal dinners whilst I’m there. It might be nice to share the trip with my partner, but it may well be a tad expensive for a short break… Still, at least they’d be able to relax in luxury, so we’ll see.

Best. Book. Ever.

Simply the best book I’ve read in ages: lots of useful and irrelevant but interesting facts and ideas for Dads.

It also makes ideal toilet reading…

Google Calendar Sync

Woohoo! Back in July, I posted about keeping my calendars synchronised. And guess what? We’re nearly there!

All is explained in the Official Google Blog:

“…This was my life for a whole year before we started working on Google Calendar Sync, a 2-way synching application between Google Calendar and the calendar in Microsoft Outlook. I was probably the most excited person on the team when we started developing it, because now I can access my calendar at home or on my laptop, on Google Calendar or in Outlook. When I add an event to the Outlook calendar on my laptop, Google Calendar Sync syncs it to my Google Calendar — and since I also have Google Calendar Sync running on my desktop, the event then syncs from Google Calendar to Outlook calendar on my desktop. All of my calendar views are always up to date, and I can choose whichever one I want to use.”

Most excellent! Downloaded and installed. And I can access Google Calendar from my mobile and add appointments from there too.

SatNavs Compared

I had a journey to go on today: Google Maps reckon the outward leg should have taken 3 hours. The Garmin i3 (aka Psycho SatNav Bitch as ‘she’ tends to taunt me with unrealistic targets, even the way I drive) reckoned around 2¼ hours. My Nokia N95-8GB with Nokia Maps, on the other hand, reckoned 4 hours. Something of a disagreement.

In the end, the combination of the time of day, the occasional spray and muck left over from gritting (even though it hadn’t been icy) and the way I drive meant it took 2½ hours.

The routes themselves were almost identical, the only difference being the route in or around Grantham.

And the other differences were:

  1. the Garmin had the speed camera database to warn me of “accident blackspots”;
  2. as the Nokia was on the cradle and connected to the car kit, every spoken direction muted the radio which is a tad annoying when the voice prompts get a little frantic; and
  3. the Nokia’s display also shows the current speed (good) and the time left rather than the ETA (bad).

Looks like there’s still no ideal solution for me, but the Saga-driver Nokia is closest as it’s so nicely contained within the phone.

Armstrong & Miller

One of the funniest shows on television at the moment is the Armstrong & Miller show on BBC1, showing again after a break of six or seven years and having moved from Channel 4.

The plain-speaking divorced Dad makes me laugh, but the highlight of the show has to be the two chav World War II pilots who are somewhat “shtreet” in the language they use:
Armstrong & Miller's Chav Pilots

Standard, isn’t it?

NEC Bike Show 2007

An earlier start than usual as I was heading off to the NEC at Birmingham for the bike show on Trade Day.

I picked up a friend just after 8.15am and was at the NEC at around 10.30am. Wandered around the other halls until 12.00pm when Hall 1 opened. This was where the big manufacturers were exhibiting as well as where TWO Magazine had their corner plot. TWO bought visordown.com earlier this year and they were running a competition involving their “Wonderwall”: a collage of photos of VD members as submitted by us. If you spotted your photo on the Wonderwall, you would be entered into a draw to win something, in this case a Shark Helmet.

As Hall 1 only opened at 12.00pm and the competition draw took place at 2.00pm (geddit?), there weren’t many entries today … two, as it turned out. And I won! Now all I need to do is ring Nevis Marketing and claim my prize.

Anyway, I took some photos:

New, Smaller Photos Section

There’s a nifty plug-in to bring a nice touch to a small photo-album page: the Slimbox WordPress plug-in.

To operate it, just use this format:

Single example:
<a href=”img1.jpg” rel=”lightbox” title=”my caption”>thumbnail1</a>
Image set example:
<a href=”img1.jpg” rel=”lightbox[roadtrip]”>thumbnail1</a>
<a href=”img2.jpg” rel=”lightbox[roadtrip]”>thumbnail2</a>
<a href=”img3.jpg” rel=”lightbox[roadtrip]”>thumbnail3</a>

I’m now using it to display sub-sets of my photos on Flickr on this site (in addition to the six latest photos over there in the sidebar).