Today consisted of the entire morning spent in bed watching Saturday Kitchen and Masterchef. How lazy are we? Still the main impetus for the Masterchef part was Terry Wogan's constant jibes about the superlatives used on the show.

He's right! After all it's only a cookery show and the way they talk up the food and the contestants is just crazy. Still it was nice to see the novice "natural genius" contestant get through.

What followed then was what seems to happen most weekends now. Sally and Phoebe do Girly things and Sam and I do manly things. Only Sally got the short straw this week of taking Phoebs to a birthday party for one of her friends in school. I wonder if/when I'll get the same exposure with Sam. Maybe I'll just feign ignorance/inexperience and get Sally involved. She does such a good job of it at the moment. Today being a perfect example, when Phoebe won the competition for best air guitar. Take a look at this video...



As for Sam and I, we cleaned the fish tank! Now, I'm not sure if it's not been cleaned since before Xmas (shock-horror-those poor-fish) but we got stuck in. Sleeves up, scours out and degunked the entire tank. Our 14 fish seem much happier now. How can I tell? well they're not trying to eat each other for starters.

Footnote: As I'm writing this , Heston Blumenthal is now talking about the perfect Chicken Tikka Massala. Methinks I've started watching too much "Cookery" TV.

Labels: cooking, fish, kids, Masterchef, party, Video, wii, wii-fit

I've remixed a series of short clips I took on Weds night. These were filmed after we realised that they'd rolled the TARDIS in as a flatpack kit. So what you'll see is effectively a HOWTO for building a TARDIS.

Pretty cool huh? I'll post this onto the Forums and see how far this video goes around the tubes.

Labels: ahremsee, Bute Town, DoctorWho, HOWTO, TARDIS, Video

Ahhh, a quiet night in tonight after the fun I've had in Cardiff for the past two nights.
Why? Watch this video..



Yes its more filming of the latest episode of Doctor Who. Only this time I've got not only the "bus" but David Tennant (DT) and Michelle Ryan (MR) with an over-enthusiatic Lee Evans too.

I posted this onto www.doctorwhoforum.com when I got home last night and when I got up this morning I found that the video had made its way onto a few of the "main" Doctor Who sites. Cool! I mean, this is seriously cool stuff. Not only is the video a long take of a prominent scene in the episode but y name is being plastered around the net and I'm the next best thing since sliced bread.



That other video was taken immediately before the better "first" one. Now I don't pretend to be a great movie/photo taker but the "angle" of the good one was a bit of fluke. Being on Level 7 of a Car Park that I hadn't actually parked my car in, I was able to leg it to the far end of the building and re -setup my pokey little video camera. It was really a case of being at the right place at the right time.

I also realised that night that it IS possible to take semi-decent night photos with a Casio EX-Z8. Using a £7 mini-tripod from Tescos i was able to wedge the camera into the barriers and hold the whole thing long enough to get a decent enough exposure. I think I'd better dowload the User Manual for my camera and see what all these extra functions actually mean.

Labels: ahremsee, DoctorWho, flickr, photobucket, twitter

Blimey, I woke today to find 309 unread items in my Google Reader. Everything from an instructable on how to make garden gates, to the latest gadget from the CES show in the states.

My reader does have a few ecclectic feeds I have to admit, including the instructables.com but I do feel I have to keep up my R&D persona with my subscriptions to the various tech blogs at gizmodo, engadget and the like. Now, even though I've returned to Interchange Group after a little sojourn into the travel industry at Comtec I haven't returned to my old R&D post. I do miss that on my business cards, having Research & Development on there did appeal to the nerd in me.

Still I can't complain about the varied work I'm in now, which makes keeping up with the tech feeds still quite useful. Every now and then I get a punt from the head of R&D asking if such-and-such is possible. Which brings me back round to the original topic.

The Bank of England has just cut interest rates to an all time low. Am I naive enough to believe that the tech companies think we're going to invest our new found surplus cash in their gadgets? The CES2009 show is selling the virtues of wrist watch phones and thinner than thin plasma TV's. Why?

Anyone with an ounce of sense will take the extra money they've got in their pockets and squirrel it away somewhere. Martin Lewis was just on the Jeremy Vine's Show on R2 extolling the virtues of 5% interest bank accounts. Excellent, I'll have two but the essence of what he's saying is right.

There's a little boy in me that is crying out for a 50 inch LCD screen (which is why i'm in the process of building a cheap projector but that's another story) but the grown-up that I am now is winning out. I guess I'm finally coming round to the responsibility of having two kids (yes me, two kids) and I don't feel so much like I'm pretending to be a parent anymore. Hence curtailing of frivolous expenditure and I feel quite righteous about it.

So put your money somewhere safe and make do for a while. Soon you'll find that the money you've put away will be working for you and that's the time to spend your earnings. Never spend against your capital and then suddenly one day you'll hit 65 and have enough money to have a great life.

All great on paper, but when you've got about a fiver to spare each month, retirement seems a long way off and just around the corner both at the same time.

Worryingly I seem to have slipped 4 days without adding anything to this blog. Where did it all go?

Day one - Saturday.
This was taken up by an expression of my creative and culinary skills. Though a word of warning to the masses, the magic golden coin maker is probably not something you want to buy for a 3 year old. Sam decided that Saturday would be the day we tried out this Xmas present he and his sister had been given. After 10 minutes of careful melting and 40 more minutes of setting, wrapping and pressing we finally had our first golden coin. Only to be greeted by the immortal words "Can I Eat it?" and in 20 seconds it was gone. Phoebe on the other hand had been given a martian alien maker kit for Xmas. Can't say we don't let our kids have diverse presents! We had assumed it was a sweetie maker though to my disgust I found that chomping on a recently formed alien, it coats your mouth with a tasteless layer of slowly setting rubber. Still at least I didn't let the kids find this out, we'd never have heard the last of it.

I did say my culinary skills were put to good use didn't I? Well Bernard Matthews did have a small part to pay. The dinosaurs, mash and spaghetti hoops did go down a treat. The plan was to progress to carbonara (from scratch) for tea.

Day Two - Sunday.
We spent the most of Saturday night disgusing working on the family tree and not vegging in front of the idiot box. After chatting with both sets of parents we suddenly realised just how appaulling infant mortality used to be. Everywhere in the family there seemed to be parents with tens of kids, most of whom died at a young age. Not sure how we slept on Saturday night but we did and woke up bright and bushy on Sunday with a eye on the park. I popped over to retrieve Sam's bike from my in-laws to be greeted by my father-in-law bouncing in shouting "Her name was Nellie!" at the top of his voice. The name of one of his aunts had eluded him the night before and it pains me to think he'd spent all that time on one name. This may take longer than we thought as Ty is still quite sharp compared to the rest of the tools in the box.

Still off to the park we went. Sam and Phoebe, Sally and I all bundled up enjoying the snow (yes it was slightly snowing but not so much as you'd really notice). Phoebs trundled off on her new Barbie scooter under strict instructions not to break out the lip gloss from her secret hidden draw. Sam on the other hand sat on his bike for about 6 feet and promptly said he'd had enough. We took turns in pushing the bike in the vane hope that he'd change his mind whilst running after his sister. He did keep the helmet on after all.

Yet more family tree nonsense ensued for the rest of the day, that is after I'd finally got all the ingredients for the carbonara I'd planned for the previous night. Sally said it was not my best, though since I've only made it twice before I'm not sure how to take that.

Day Three - Monday
Back to work again. Even though I'd been "in work" between Christmas and New Year, then in again on the Friday I did feel like I was returning after a long break. Strange that!

I finally got to discuss the merits of Matt Smith as the new lead in Doctor Who for 2010 with Jim at work. I think we settled on "best wait and see what he's like" as our considered opinion, rather than making our minds up off what we'd seen him in already. Though since we'd not seen him in anything comments about his hair and the shape of his head were all we could come up with. Men can be as bad as old women sometimes, perhaps worse.

Day Four - Today, Tuesday
And finally I can catch up and reflect on another day in the garage, sorry I mean office. I realised why yesterday felt like coming back to work after a long break. It was the realisation that the kids were back in school today and that I could come back into the house and make a cup of tea in piece and quiet. Though when I did come in after the kids came home from school, I was surprised to see Phoebe reading the paper and point out to Sally who had died. Not sure what worries me more; that she's 6 and reading the paper, or that the paper she's reading is the Daily Mail. I think we're going to invest in a subscription to "First News".

So now I'm back on the lappie and finishing off a bit of writing for work. Hate writing, which is one of the reason why I'm forcing myself to do this blog. I figure if I can get over this it'll help with other things. Yes Sally, I know there are spelling and grammar errors in here. I did fail English twice (if you count <C grade as a fail).

If I can't get that sorted I may have to call my own bluff and switch careers into something that doesn't involve writing. Carpentry might be good, Sally's dad seems to be able to knock up some nice pieces now he'd retired, so how hard can it be?

Sally and I have decided that its about time that we sat down with our remaining grandparents and write down on paper as much as we can. The best way to get the ball rolling on this is to start a family tree.

This suits me fine, as it helps to tick one of the boxes against my resolutions list and gets we away from the TV (I'm not that bad, honest!).

So as we found out when we sat down with a pad tonight either we're going to need a much bigger pad of paper or a different way of organising the family. Sally's focusing on her side of the family and I'll be doing mine, seems fair that but my lot leads to a very lob-sided tree. Dad is one of 5 kids but Mum is an only child. Only time will tell, and of course a quick trip round the net for some tree software.

So that's one off my list but the 2009 big list of things to do is scarily big. I'm at 20+ items so far and that's just things to do in the garden and office. I'll do a recount when I've gone through the house as well.

Then I just need the time and the money (ha) to do it all.


Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Well, it seems that the New Year went of with it's usual fizzle. Nothing much on the 500+ channels we get from Sky. Ended up watching a re-run of the best bits of Blackadder (again). Unfortunately we forgot that G.O.L.D (what a stupid name for a channel) isn't available on our second sky box. So when we sloped off to bed we had to make do with some other repeat on E4 (or was it More4, don't remember don't really care). I'm considering having multi-room put back onto our second box, because the "free" channels you do get aren't up to much. Oh and we missed the tick over into the New Year, though that might have had something to do with being up at 7am when Phoebe decided she was bored in her own bedroom. Being on call doesn't help matters either!

New Year's day had the same 7am start but with the twist of a starving 6 year old. I wonder if it's too early to play the starving African card with her yet? Spent most of the morning and afternoon in front of the TV again (this is not a good picture i'm painting is it?) as we'd had Sky Movies put back onto our contract for a while (4 months at half price is not too bad is suppose). Still can't get this kids to enjoy The Incredibles but since we've got cinemagic back I couldn't resist. I wonder if I can get the catatonic expression i have infront of the TV diagnosed as some sort of condition?

Now, the afternoon was spent at Sally's parents with a lovely dinner slotted in between moving from our TV to their HDTV (not jealous, just wanted to keep up with the bad picture I'm painting). Why is it that the little mermaid looks the same in SD as it does in HD? Surely this is a rip-off, or do I need new glasses again.

New Years Night, still nothing to watch on the idiot box so we spent most of last night watching Pirates of the Carribean before sloping off to bed again.

Not sure if you know this but Anytime TV can be copied onto your main Sky+ planner by hitting the record button. that way you get to keep any stuff that was squirted at you long after it expires on Anytime.

Have to say though that I'm still surprised that Sally watched the movie, what with her loathing of bumps and lumps and holes. Bill Nighy's barnacles used to freak her out so I guess she's mellowing in her old age.

Oh and my New Year's resolutions.

• Stop being so grumpy about everything
• Eat healthier food
• Exercise more
• Make better use of my evenings (hence the TV rant)

Back in work for a day now before the weekend kicks back in. I think I'll take some time today to work on my list of resolutions. Wish me luck!