DARTH

Upgrade to Wordpress 2.8 completed at the click of a button. I still haven’t really got round all the features of 2.7 as it took me so long to decide on a new host, but the upgrade from the dashboard is superb, no more faffing about downloading and tweaking the config file before uploading again, so shout if you notice anything.

Elsewhere at chez darth things have been busy. This years growing effort has been going great guns. We’ve had much better luck starting the tomatoes and tomatillos off much earlier, so much so they are probably a month and a half ahead of where they were at the same time last year. We’ve gone for a wider range of things this year still trying to see what works best. It seems whatever we put in the barrels does really well as the onions, leeks and carrots we have in them this year are all coming along nicely – well the leeks are finished really just picking them as we need them. I had started increasing the size of the plot but time got the better of me and short of taking the turf off an piling it up I haven’t got much further, so the plan is to get the larger growing area ready for next year and prepare an area for a greenhouse.

Time is proving to be short during the week as I’ve been back at the gym. I hadn’t been for about 2.5/3 years (since we’d been at the flat) but have been enjoying going again. I try and get three nights in a week, I know I should probably be doing more, but work is also really busy at the moment. As if that wasn’t enough it’s also been getting tough to try and fit everything in at weekends lately and the next few months don’t seem to have many free either. We’ve had a couple of barbecues, been into town for drinks and/or dinner with friends at various times over the past few weekends. This next weekend sees another dinner with friends, before we have the Scottish Traditional Beer Festival and a 50th birthday party to attend the following weekend. Then I think we actually may have a free weekend – although the car is coming up for a service and we may try and get it done then. We’ve also been trying to decide on the best weekend for this years pirate party and have a couple of dates in mind and will hopefully have that decided by the end of this week.

Looking forward to the AC/DC gig at the end of the month at Hampden. Graham and I will be heading through for that, Adele decided to pass. We’ve also got Cropredy coming up in August. I’ve been trying to get out with the sole of intention of taking photos and have been failing. I did get a few shots wandering round Edinburgh last month while the car was in for it’s MOT and at the recent Bathgate Highland games I just need to sort them out. Mind you I have been wanting to set up a photo blog with then intention of forcing me to get out more and take pictures, I hope to have that sorted before we are off on holiday in August but I am also trying to set up a more professional/work related blog where I can blether about technology and what I do on a day to day basis. Then again maybe I’m trying to do too much, ah well I like to challenge myself. Best get on.

Well it had to happen, it usually does when we are on holiday – one of us started to feel unwell, me as it happens this time. This also coincided with some particularly wet weather, which wasn’t good news as today was scheduled for visiting some of the fishing villages along the south coast. The forecast did at least indicate it would brighten up later on. After breakfast we headed off anyway hoping the forecast was indeed correct.

Continue reading Cornwall – Part 3

We’d decided to head further north up the coast for some walking and after breakfast we headed off towards Crackington Haven. The walk that we’d planned wasn’t as long as the previous day (slightly less than half the distance), but it was more up and down. It was a circular walk that started at the village car-park, took us through some woods and passed a couple of farms that are mentioned in the Doomsday book, before joining the coastal path to head back toward the village. There was some stunning shoreline to gawp at, along with some moorland ponies and some wild (well we presumed they were wild) goats. The walk itself was very quiet with us not encountering anyone (other than animals) until we were on the coastal path and getting quite close to the village. The weather had started dull and overcast, but soon brightened up again into a lovely morning. We didn’t mind the shortness of the walk as we had plans for the rest of the day.

Cornish coast near Crackington Haven

Continue reading Cornwall – Part 2

After the big trip last year to South East Asia, this year we’d decided to visit places in the UK that neither of us had been, but were keen to go to. One of those places was Cornwall. Yes we’d been to Bristol before, but the last time we were there the SS Great Britain was closed for refurbishment and we’d figured the drive all the way to deepest darkest Cornwall may be a bit knackering at the start of the break so we took advantage and had a one night stop over in Bristol.

Continue reading Bristol and Cornwall – Part 1

As you can see the site has a new look, not just a new theme but it is now sitting on a new host and has been upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. Let me know if anything seems weird in the comments for this entry. I’ll no doubt be tinkering with settings and options over the coming days and things may get a little strange. The images at the top of the blog came with the theme and I will update those in due course, although I will likely leave the raspberry one

Oh and the reason I didn’t do all this last week, was that we were on holiday. I’ll fill you in on the details of that later on.

As Mr Dylan once sang, the times are indeed a changing. Nothing major though just the site will be moving hosts very soon. I’ve cancelled the contract with my current hosts (Webfusion) and have organised the hosting with the new provider (CS New Media). One of the main reasons for moving hosts was to allow me to consolidate my Windows and Linux hosting into one. This meant I more than halved my current hosting costs. I had cancelled my Windows hosting with Webfusion when it was due for renewal earlier in the year, there wasn’t anything on there that couldn’t be off-line for a couple of months. I also wanted to upgrade the blogging software to the latest version and as the server I am on was lagging behind on PHP and MySQL versions I would have needed to have been moved by Webfusion to another server anyway. This would likley have resulted in a reduction of facilities while still paying the same price (reduced number of databases) as I was on an older hosting package, so I’d decided to just go the whole hog and move hosts. I’d resigned myself to once again ending up with two hosts until I spotted a number of recommendations on a forum for my new hosts.

This move will also see blog.thehairyhighlander.com disappear in it’s current form, in fact the blog subdomain will disappear completely (I may temporarily put a redirect in place though). I had great plans for it as my personal dumping ground I don’t think I have really got to grips with it, hence the lack of updates. Originally when I started this place I think I was being too strict as to the nature of the content and felt the need to write posts about the two three of us rather than just me. The other blog would then be my little playground where I could talk nonsense and keep my technical/development related posts. Of course this never really happened and I should have used the other blog purely for my development and technical musings. I am therefore going to be less strict in the content posted here and will be creating a purely technical blog so most of you will be able to avoid that. As well as that and as a way to force me to get out more with the camera I plan to create a photo blog. I’ve intended writing posts about the DSLR I bought more than a year ago now, but other things kept getting in the way. Admittedly I’ve got quite lot of photos already that haven’t got anywhere near this place or flickr so I do have some material to keep me going on that front for a while as well. More details will be forthcoming over the next few weeks. The move won’t be happening for another couple of weeks yet because of other commitments. I am aiming to do the switchover on the either the 31st March or 2nd April. I’ll stick a post up when I plan to make the switch though, so any comments posted between now and then are safe.

In other news Richard and Sarah (who we’d met on the trip to Laos and Cambodia) were over dinner on Friday night. Richard was up visiting Sarah and after we’d met them in town for lunch the previous Sunday we’d invited them out for dinner. Adele had a bash at making the leek and mushroom spring rolls we’d sampled in one of the restaurants in Cambodia and most delicious they were. She followed that with Massaman and Panang curries. We even made the sticky rice we’d been used to eating in Laos and that was an unbridled success. The evening was a well lubricated one (Richard and Sarah both sharing my fondness for a good ale). There was much Dark Island and Bath Ales consumed. A most enjoyable evening. Ended up being a late one as well.

Saturday saw a lazy morning and me forgo the footy (just as well we got beat 2-0) and head into town to catch the rugby with Richard, Sarah and Adele before we would be off to Le Sept for David’s birthday dinner. It was a good evening with great company topped off with a visit to the Halfway House before catching the last train home. It was nice to end up in there as we hadn’t been in a long, long time. Beer was good, although a bit of a struggle after much food earlier on – still it is just too hard to resist that chocolate terrine.

Our action packed weekend wasn’t finished yet. First thing Sunday was to wash the car before starting to get seeds started off for this years veggies. This years growing area will also be bigger. A couple of weeks ago I started to clear an additional area for growing, I’ll finish that off in a couple of weeks. I am letting the grass die just now, to be able to re-use more of the earth. This new area will likely mainly contain tatties with possibly one other crop down one side. It won’t be the early tatties though as we’ve been chitting them just now and have some patio planters for those. I may start the first of those later this week. I planted a range of things including courgette, onions, garlic, tomatoes, chillis, butternut squash and broad beans. The garlic that was planted in autumn is going great guns, unfortunately the onions and broad beans planted then seem to be taking a little longer so maybe the staggering of crops we had hoped for may not be as much as we thought. We’ve also picked up a couple of cold frames that can be moved around the garden (although they’ll start on the raised bed) to help speed some things along, in fact thinking about it I may stick one of them over some of the stuff that isn’t doing so well that was planted at the end of last year.