Some quick links:
"Some home automation - http://www.jpdw.org/smarthome
Updates on our wonderful twin daughters - updates & pictures
Items about our garden, home & DIY
Welcome to jpdw.org...
Things move along
One thing that is certain about continuity (and normally proved right) : Things change and move on. They evolve. Continuity ceases or breaks eventually. Sometimes this brings change that is better, sometimes it's just different (=code for "maybe worse but we don't want to put it that way").
Travelling
- This will be the first time I've been on a plane for almost a year (a while back, 11 days was a long time)
- This will be the furthest I've been away since the girls were born in June 2008 (yes, further away than I was when they were born
- ... and the longest trip too (4 days / 5 nights)
iPad + Coffee = oops
Flock - Any good?
New raised planter
Two years ago we (with help of many friends) replaced the deck at the back of house. The old one was beginning to rot and even the patches of hardboard or ply over the more rotten bits were starting to break up. So over the weekend a new deck was built (see here http://www.jpdw.org/node/34). The design left a narrow unused strip down one side of the new deck.
I want a weekend
Such a long time since I posted *anything* on here. It's currently nearing the end of day 10 of last week. Okay, a bit of weekend working is sort-of expected occasionally and not a real problem, but 20 hours on Saturday & Sunday (forgetting a late night on Friday) is on the excessive side. Just to make it work, a lot of that time was spent sitting in a dusty-building-dust-ridden basement or the more comfortable (but still lacking daylight) corridor of the hotel above the basement.
Yet more smugmug amazingness
Every time I play with smugmug there is a new feature (or so it seems). I've just found the show off feature that adds a slideshow to any website .....
Updated photos
Since the girls were born in 2008, we've inevitably taken loads & loads more photos (it's true, newborns & small children are the most photographed things on Earth). All this photo-taking meant our hard disc I used for keeping them on got full, and for one reason & another upgrading it was going to be a bigger job than just buying a new one and plugging in. So it got put off.. and for about a year we were only downloading photos off the camera when it was full and putting them on one laptop or another.
Freeview just cost me £25 ....
Recently watching the BBC on Freeview I kept seeing "free Red for 6 Music". I pressed Red 'cos there was nothing else on and watched/listened to the La Roux / Heaven 17 session (http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/events/hub/artists/laroux-heaven17.shtml).
2010! First crop of the year!

Our first "crop" (if you can call it that) of Goji berries, picked on 7th January, so our first crop of the year !!!
Rolling back the stairgates
For about 5 months now we've had a stair gate across the living room doorway, to keep the girls from crawling out into the hall, stairs, kitchen etc,.
On the rare occasion they got out (when we'd left the gate open) they'd head straight for the untidy pile of shoes and start chewing on the laces. Or mess with any of the other junk accumulated in the hall.
Parcelforce Parcel Farce
It seems that Parceforce is also affected by the Royal Mail post worker strike. Probably not really suprising but what is annoying is that Parcelforce are specifically telling customers that they are not affected. To quote directly from Parcelforce's website:
"It's business as usual for all Parcelforce Worldwide services during the current Royal Mail industrial action, so
you can continue to despatch your parcels with confidence."
I'm not sure what you can have confidence in!
Domain / Domain name resources
Here's a few useful website for checking, ordering & tracking domain names.
This page is as much to help me remember the useful sites as well as a reference for anyone else looking in. No connection with any of these, no referrals on the click-throughs or any endorsements as to whether they'll be any good for you.
Demon's Internet Tools - http://www.demon.net/toolkit/internettools/
