Tim Child

The weekend we got back from a visit to England primarily to see my parents as it was my Dads 60th Birthday – Happy Birthday! and we also managed to see some friends, and meet up to do a little business.

First stop was London. Its always interesting to go back to the place after having lived there for about 10 years. I forgot how busy SoHo gets during the day, but that was made up by other factors. London is overwhelming with choice, vibrancy and colorful people. One thing that was new to me was how much harder it is to get around with a pram than Stockholm. Here is Harriet at her first visit to an English Pub. She was asked to leave..

After a couple of days we moved on to Bath to visit my cousin and his family. Its always nice to visit Bath, a more relaxed venue than London. It was good to catch up, and we have a brief trip to the farmers market.

Then it was on to Exmouth via a scenic drive. My parents hired a very nice apartment on the sea front which was much appreciated and we could watch the usual English sea-side vacation weather in its full glory.

We took a drive to see some wildlife and black swans.

Visit to a Donkey Sanctuary

Went to the small fishing village of Beer (no we didn’t have a chance to have any):

And at the end a really good get together with a lot of the family for my Dads 60th.

Finally have done something about the sorry state of these pages.

I had a quick 3 hour sprint today to see how much I could do with the aim to improve this site in the following ways:

1. Improve readability
2. Get rid of all the unneccesary links and content
3. Generally update the look and colours
4. Remove that horrible header image that I had
5. Make the site more useful for viewers

3 hours isn’t a long time to do a complete redesign so I consider this the undesigned addition and its probably all the better for it.

I also took the opportunity to do the site in HTML 5. No canvas tags yet.

Next up I will be reintroducing things like search and archive links because it really does need them, but until then I feel happier about what I can see here.

After posting up the last entry about SSH I noticed that I had a problem with my Permalinks. Seems that there is some nasty little injection problem with WordPress that changes the Permalinks with the addition of.

I am following the suggestions here:

http://blog.4rev.net/2009-09/wordpress-hacked-eval-base64_decode-_serverhttp_referer/

And it seemed to work.

So I was thinking what have I/We bought in the last year that was new..

Well I think top of the list are:

• Pioneer plasma TV. We already had TVs but this looks and performs about as well as you can get right now.
• Harman Kardon 7.1 surround sound amp. We needed a solution for the bedroom and living room for surround sound so I upgraded to this and kept the old amp for the bedroom. It supports Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD MA and all the lesser formats.
• MacBook – Kristin needed a computer.
• Cables. New installations require many cables.

But come to think of it a lot of stuff we have bought secondhand such as tools, bikes and so forth.

As well as having a wonderful name, Julene has been making some pretty damn nice paper cut work such as these:

More at: http://madebyjulene.com/

As promised I have updated this site to the latest version of WordPress – 2.7

Its actually really impressive, and really shows why I updated to an off-the-shelf blogging tool instead of sticking with my own home grown set up several years ago.

I also cleared up many of the problems with images being aligned on the site, and finally have decent code previews thanks to the CodeColorer plugin by Dmytro.

There is probably some work to be done on making sure the feeds are 100% and then on to the design – the grid is totally messed up, but at least I feel confident in the software backing this up now.

It seems that my move of feeds from feedburner to the google feedburner service has messed up my RSS feeds quite a bit. Not sure what has happened or why the links on my site got messed up, but its probably something to do with the plugin that I had installed.

All in all it highlights the need for me to update this site from its current version of WordPress to the latest version.

I will be doing that shortly. Hopefully then the RSS feeds will resume properly.

From http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/001395.html

Well not really, but every year I do some maintenance to make sure whatever I am using is up to date and fresh and this includes installing the latest versions and services packs to everything including:

* VLC
* Microsoft Office 2008
* skype

skype 2.8 Beta is the one that I am looking forward to using, included in the new features is screen sharing – which apparently works across different operating systems, which should prove really handy for debugging and helping my parents with their PC from my Mac. Not sure about the new design of the chat window though, those icons don’t seem as smooth as their previous versions:

I have also cleaned out a lot of files, and Time Machine backups to make sure that I am only backing up the content that really matters to me. Deleting backups is as simple as going into time machine, going to the backup window that you wish to delete and from the gears menu choosing “Delete backup”.

I will deleting hidden backup files was as easy.

Now I am just waiting for my body to adjust to daylight again!

So its 2009, and it came around all too quickly. I can see from MarsEdit that the amount of posts that I have put on this blog is quite down from a couple of years ago, which is testament to how busy I have been.

For the Christmas period I tried to step away from my computer a bit and calm down, and the other period I was in Karlstad enjoying the festivities and doing a small amount of work and reading the great RESTful Web Services book.

But soon its back to work, and so back to computers, renovating the apartment (soon it will be done!) and back to everything else that makes up my day.

I have been thinking about what I New Years resolutions I should do and I have so far only come up with the following:

• Give up Snus
• Post more on this blog
• Create something of value
• Become more self sufficient
• Try not to kill every plant I ever get
• Increase my fitness

Of course, I could probably do all of these, but with such goals is it just setting myself up for failure, so what can I do towards them and why am I doing them (if you wonder why I am posting this then these posts often serve as a reminder to myself of what I should be concentrating on and as a diary for the future).

1. Why do I want to give up snus – its messing with my gums and together we spend 29000Kr a year on it. I think thats reason enough, rather than just doing it.

2. Post more on this blog – it serves me in many ways, and more often than not I post for myself to remind me of what I am doing rather than keeping a diary. Its not hard to do, I just have to remember to do it!

3. Create something of value – this could be the hardest if I wasn’t already started on this. I feel I really am doing so at work with the redesign that I am working on, and in my personal life I am probably adding value, but there is much more planned for this year.

4. Become more self sufficient – This is a very open goal that encompasses much, such as being more energy sufficient, growing my own herbs, not spending 500Kr every day in the supermarket on rubbish, cleaning green and many more improvements to my living style. I should make a list on this one!

5. Try not to kill every plant I get – Well I am quite bad at understanding the needs of a plant, and so I need to find out more about that. Perhaps it will even be enjoyable?

6. Get fitter. My fitness level is quite poor even though my body is perhaps in the best shape its been in for many years. I have a skiing trip planned this year and that is an excellent goal for getting fitter.

So thats it. 2009 a year of none resolute improvements.