Holiday to the Lake District – Day Four

Posted on Monday 5 July 2010 by Mark
Windermere at the widest point

Windermere at the widest point

Day Four of the holiday and the inevitable happened at last. It was always going to, despite warnings from those who know the area better than us, and who cautioned us against it. That’s right; today, we took a boat ride on Lake Windermere.

Yes, yes, I know, I know! The other lakes are better, cheaper, less touristy etc, etc. I know that! And, in time, I hope to spend a great deal of time exploring the less well known parts of the Lake District, and getting to know the real place. But I still had to do Windermere, just once.

The problem with it as a lake, being long and thin (a ribbon lake, I think they call it) is that there is no one place you can stand to get a good idea of the size of the thing, it is just too long. The only way to experience it properly is by boat. So that is what we did.

In order to combine things and save some cash, we decided to go with a combined steam train and boat ride ticket, allowing us to tick two things off our list of planned activities for the week, and so free up yet more time for stuff that is perhaps a little more worthy.

They don't make them like this anymore - Steam Train "Repulse"

They don't make them like this anymore - Steam Train "Repulse"

We settled on the Lakeside & Haverthwaite railway to take us as far as the boat; a pleasant enough ride on an attractive little steam train (with an unattractive name: Repulse) at speeds so slow you would half expect to be overtaken by continental drift. The boat we boarded was the MV Swan, the youngest of the three boats on the route at only 72 years of age. We elected to sit outside at the front, as it would afford us the best view of the lake, a smart decision whilst in port, but one that we would soon come to regret, once we felt the full force and chill of the wind upon the open lake.

Indeed, it was only bloody minded stubbornness on both our parts that had us sit there, frozen and huddling each other for warmth, all the way to Ambleside, where we disembarked.

MV Swan, entering Lakeside Dock

MV Swan, entering Lakeside Dock

We had around an hour before the return boat, and so elected to look around Amberside itself, a pretty town with a frankly astounding number of outdoor clothing shops. Amongst these was the first ever actual branch of Cotton Traders that I’ve ever seen, and, much to my delight, they had a 50% off sale, just as I was finding my existing pair of black Cotton Traders shoes in need of replacement. Perfect timing.

Upon our return to the water, we discovered that we’d be travelling on the MV Tern, a Victorian steam ship built in 1891 that had since been converted to diesel (sadly), but was nonetheless comfortable and roomy inside and a massive improvement on the previous boat.

Whilst on board I sampled the hot chocolate (not bad) and bought a postcard for my mum!

This evening we made an effort to eat as early as possible once we arrived home. The reason for this is that the sun was shining, and we just couldn’t resist an opportunity to go for a walk round the village of Morland once again. As we walked we amused ourselves by making bets about the number of cars we’d see on our walk (6 out, 6 back) and chatted about how pleasant the countryside is during the summer. We were passed repeatedly by a tractor that was conveying covered hay bales from a field to a barn a little way down the road.

Yachts at Ambleside

Yachts at Ambleside

The short walk we had planned ended up being somewhat longer, since once we got going we just didn’t want to stop! In the end we were forced to turn back by concerns that it might be dark soon, and neither of us were carrying torches with us.

Tomorrow we are thinking of walking a little in Coniston and seeing the sculpture walk at Grizedale. The weather looks like it may not make up its  mind, so we are thinking sunny thoughts.

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Holiday to the Lake District – Day Three

Posted on Sunday 4 July 2010 by Mark
Tarn Hows

Tarn Hows

So, Day Three of our adventure is drawing to a close, and I am buzzing with the beauty of the place. This was our first day of visiting the Lake District National Park itself, and boy, is it beautiful!

I’ve seen my fair share of fabulous landscapes before. I live almost in sight of Dartmoor, and I have travelled across Kenya in a jeep, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this place. Whoever put in the hills didn’t seem to realise that hills are meant to sit side by side, not one on top of another, so the result is that each general rise has odd smaller hills all over it, making it impossible to get any real idea of where the hill begins and ends.

I could explain this much better with photos, but the effect is really most obvious as you drive along the roads, and as the sole driver, I can’t take photos at that time.

It was raining when we set out, raining hard. Cumbria is a beautiful, wild county, and no more so than when wind and rain are pounding on your windscreen and the marvellous hilly scenery is virtually obscured by the spray on the fast, windy road along which you travel.

We decided, since it was too wet for a long walk whilst L’s cold was in full flow, to visit Hill Top, the famous home of children’s author Beatrix Potter. Getting there required a long drive along small, winding roads, and then a trip on the car ferry. Through the water that poured onto the windscreen, and the glare of headlights, we could just make out the choppy water in front of us, our first look at Windermere, the largest lake in England!

Shortly afterwards we arrived at Hill Top. It was still pouring down with rain, and I congratulated myself on wearing light weight, quick drying linen trousers rather than jeans, which would have been wet for a month after just two minutes outside.

Fortunately we were amongst a fairly small number of people who weren’t put off by the weather, and so our wait outside the house was just a couple of minutes. Some would suggest that the house is prettier in sunshine, and maybe it is, but I wouldn’t have swapped the weather for anything.

Gushing Drain Pipe at Hill Top

Gushing Drain Pipe at Hill Top

Like most people growing up in the 90s, my first experiences of Beatrix Potter’s work were through the excellent BBC animated series. The start of each episode showed Potter returning to her home through a heavy rain storm before beginning her latest story. And it was just like that, down to the water gushing down the drain pipe.

Despite being a good 300 years old, the house was sturdy, warm and comfortable throughout. I especially liked the roaring coal fire in the front room; far hotter, brighter and more inviting than any wood one I’ve ever seen.

The rain was easing off by the time we returned to the car for our lunch, and as we entered the ticket office of the Beatrix Potter gallery to declare our intention to join the National Trust, the rain was all but gone. Seeing the original paintings that adorned the Peter Rabbit books was a magical experience, even for someone, such as myself, who rarely appreciates art of any kind. The brush work, the colour and the detail is quite mind boggling. How did she do it? I will never know how anyone can possess such a level of skill and patience for what was, after all, a hobby originally.

Our morning soaking had convinced L and I that the one thing we needed most in life was a pair of waterproof over-trousers. Fortunately these, and virtually any other items of outdoor clothing you can imagine, can be bought at any of at least 100 shops in the Lake District, desperate to tempt in budding walkers with heavy discounting and large ranges. We each found an excellent pair that can be stored in a small bag when not in use; perfect for carrying around with us wherever we go.

At this point we had run out of planned activities for the day, and started flicking through leaflets for some ideas of what to do, as it was still a little early for our return home. We eventually settled on Tarn Hows, a lake so small and insignificant it hardly appears on most maps. Nonetheless it is extremely picturesque and an ideal size for a short walk, being around a mile and a half in circumference.

One curiosity that we could not explain: As we walked around the lake we happened across a fallen tree. Around part of the the trunk, the bark had been removed, and into its place someone

Coins in Tree

Coins in Tree

had inserted dozens of copper coins. The tree was still hard, and they could not have been buried as they were without the use of some considerable force. Yet there was no indication of how or why this had happened, nor who was responsible.

Back home, we discovered that our landlords, who live in the main property to which our cottage is attached, have returned home and that the sound proofing between our properties is minimal. Not a problem, unless you are watching the rather noisy sex scenes in Four Weddings and a Funeral (we were watching the rest of the film as well, I hasten to add) and suddenly realise you have the volume up quite high. Did they hear us? I don’t know, but they’ve not yet dropped in to say hello, so either they are busy, or they think we are.

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Holiday to the Lake District – Day Two

Posted on Saturday 3 July 2010 by Mark

Well here we are at the end of Day Two of our adventure to the Lake District. I don’t know why I’m calling it “”Day Two”. It doesn’t feel like day two. In truth it doesn’t really feel like day one, since we only arrived here late this afternoon, and most of the time since then has been taken up with shopping, unpacking and settling in. In practical terms, tomorrow is day one of the actual holiday, but for ease of sense making as far as this blog is concerned, I’ve named this second installment as day two, and that is how it shall stay.

Anyway, we are now in the Lake District, or rather, just outside it, in our small cottage, The Bower House, on the edge of the quaint Cumbria village of Morland. It is a beautiful spot, in an area known, I believe, as the Eden Valley. Our humble abode is a tiny, but well fitted out little cottage that started life as a barn of some description, but is now so luxuriously furnished that I have to confess it puts our flat in Plymouth to some shame.

Amongst other features, we find ourselves, most welcomely, in the company of a Grandfather Clock, which, though silent when we first arrived, is now ticking merrily away to itself, albeit with a slowness of pace that could only seem fitting in the middle of the countryside.

We awoke this morning in Bristol and, having decided not to rush on account of the expected journey time being less than originally anticipated, we found that it was nearly lunch time when we finally dragged the suitcases to the car. Our journey was fast and problem free, and within a couple of hours we were sitting on the bonnet of the car at a nameless service station just north of Birmingham, eating our lunch and chatting about cars, a subject that L has taken an increased interest in, now that she is planning to learn to drive later in the summer.

We were both mildly appalled by a 4×4 driver who, having driven his over sized Planet Killing car into the bay next to ours, got out and wandered off without bothering to switch off the engine! We can only assume that the passenger who remained in the car was dependent on the air con for basic survival, but when we left, a quarter of an hour later, the driver had not returned and that blasted engine was still ticking over.

We were well past Manchester and St Helens (the birth and final resting place of my late grand parents) when I happened to glance down at the fuel gauge and discovered that we were virtually out of petrol. A moment later, a sign confirmed that the next service station was 18 miles on, a little too far to want to take any changes. I had the Sat-Nav (a TomTom One, not my nickname for L) look up the nearest petrol station, and it took us straight off the M6 and along a winding road into a nearby town. Sadly, the stupid thing was not set to impress today, and far from taking us to the promised service station, it dumped us halfway along a quiet residential street with those words I so dread it saying on occasions like this:

You have reached your destination!

Swearing and muttering under my breath, I then told the bloody contraption to take me to the next nearest one, which was an Asda, thinking it should be pretty easy to find. Half way there, the Sat Nav runs out of battery as we are going round a bend, and L has to find the lead, plug it in and switch it on before we reach the next junction, so we can find out where we are going.

By this point I am more or less expecting the engine to stall at any minute, so you can imagine my annoyance when once again it smugly informs us that our destination is on the left, whilst we travel along a road with no left turns and no Asda.

Having eventually found a Shell garage in the town, we returned to the motorway and on with our journey, which took us through some of the most beautiful landscapes I have ever seen. I would have taken a picture, but I was driving so couldn’t.

We arrived at the cottage, unloaded the car and headed straight out to the supermarket, which we assumed would be in a building in a town. It wasn’t. Ok, yes technically it was in a town, Penrith in fact, but it wasn’t in a building. Instead, erected in front of the still being built supermarket was a giant gazebo, the local branch of Morrisons. Very surreal, I can tell you.

We ate on the terrace later, and with the exception of some rather pesky flies, everything was perfect. I’d cooked quiche and chips, and in doing so had happily discovered of an extremely impressive set of kitchen knives.

Afterwards we went out for a walk around the village, as the daylight faded away. It seems like a pleasant little place, with a cheerful looking pub, a few converted barns that are now holiday cottages, and a 1950s style garage.

Tomorrow we hope to do some site seeing, as we are still a little worn out from our journey, and the cold which has emerged from L’s sore throat of yesterday and which I am fast on the way to beginning , if my nose is anything to go by. It all hangs on the weather at the moment though, and the forecast is for heavy rain. We shall just have to wait and see what comes our way.

The Living Room

The Living Room - I write this whilst sat on the right hand sofa

View from Our Window

View from Our Window

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Holiday to the Lake District – Day One

Posted on Friday 2 July 2010 by Mark

So we are going on holiday to the Lake District and I am blogging about it.

The original plan, back in April or May had been to go to Paris for the weekend to celebrate our 2 year anniversary, which is coming up soon, but that wasn’t to be. A mixture of ash clouds, lack of availability and a general desire by the Great British Public to head south and escape the cold weather had pushed prices on Eurostar and ferries alike to well above affordable prices.

“Crikey, we could almost holiday for a week in the UK for what a weekend abroad would cost us” I remarked. So we started looking at that.

L and I had talked about going to the Lake District for a week almost as soon as we got together, so it didn’t take us long to settle on it as our chosen destination and find a cottage to rent. So, that is where we are going and what we are doing, and the next few blog posts will be chronicling our adventures on what is to be our first couple holiday for a whole week.

Our story begins earlier this afternoon, or yesterday, as it more or less now is and certainly will be by the time anyone sits down to read it. How about we call it even and say Friday, just to clarify things. The plan, earlier in the week had been to pack everything on Thursday and leave as soon as I got home from work at 6pm on Friday.

In the event, things took a slightly more leisurely start than that. I arrived home at 7, having felt morally obliged to actually finish the work I said I’d finish, even if it meant staying back an extra hour, and found that L had just about started packing. To be fair to her, she had got a lot of things into piles, but since I had neglected to get the suitcases down from the top of the wardrobes, that was as far as things had got.

L has, rather unfortunately, been struck down with a sore throat today, and is therefore unable to shout at me for being slow. I put this down (along with our good holiday moods) as the probable cause of us getting things done rather well, without the usual snapping, sarcastic comments and general abuse that so often pass between us on occasions when we are either running late, have a lot to do, or are hungry. Or both. Or all three in fact.

Instead we were able to dodge round the ridiculous number of items that are still waiting to find a home after the move, computer problems, each other and a phone call from my mother wishing us a happy holiday, to finally be packed and ready by about 8:30pm.

The Plan, as we shall continue to call it, had been to set off immediately and drive as far as Exeter before stopping at Harvester for dinner, a strategy we have used before when driving to Bristol on a Friday night. It was getting rather late for that by this point however, so we elected to try our luck (in a not gambling with money sense) with one of the many Fish and Chip shops dotted around the Barbican and only a few minutes walk from the flat.

The shop was open, much to our delight, and the service friendly in the extreme. We sat on a bench beside Sutton Harbour and ate very well indeed, before returning to the flat to finish packing. It was a little after 10pm by the time we finally hit the road, but late evenings in summer are a pleasant time for a drive, and with the audiobook version of Time Traveller’s Wife to keep me company as L slept, I found the journey passed speedily and without incident.

We are kindly being put up by L’s mum tonight, in the house in Bristol where L grew up and, until recently, called home, and that is where I am writing to you from now, in a completely dark room, save from the light of my laptop screen.

About this time in a normal one of these holiday blog posts, I plan to offer you a photo taken during the day of our adventures. But, it being the first night, and with the camera buried at the bottom of a suitcase somewhere, I hope you’ll accept this stock image of the M5 that I stole borrowed from Wikipedia:

Stock image of the M5 that I stole borrowed from Wikipedia

Stock image of the M5 that I stole/borrowed from Wikipedia

Pretty isn’t it?

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On the Move Again

Posted on Wednesday 19 May 2010 by Mark

It started with a phone call.

Me: Hello?

Woman#1: Hello I’m Random-Babbling-Blonde-With-A-Forgettable-Name from Current-Letting-Agency.

Me: Hi there.

Woman#1: The landlord has asked to have a look round the property on Saturday morning, is that convenient?

Me: I guess we could be in, why does he wish to see it?

Woman#1: …..he…just…hasn’t seen it in a while…

Me: …right…

So Saturday morning arrived and no one showed up. I eventually received a phone call at around 1pm.

Me: Hello?

Woman#2: Hello I’m another Random-Babbling-Blonde-With-A-Forgettable-Name from Current-Letting-Agency.

Me: Hi there.

Woman#2: We’ve arranged for you to have a visit of your property today, is that still convenient?

Me: It was, this morning, when no one turned up.

Woman#2: Yes, he’s been held up viewing another property but should be with you at 2pm. His name is Forgettable-Name-That-Isn’t-My-Landlord’s

Me: Umm….

At 2pm we get a knock on the door and outside are a man, a woman and a youth.

Me: Hi, come in.

Man: Hi, sorry we are late, were you expecting us?

Me: We were expecting…someone.

Man: Thank you for agreeing to let us look round.

Me: Umm…no problem.

Woman: So when are you planning to move out?

Me: Pardon?

Man: When are you leaving? Has the landlord said when he is selling yet?

Me: Umm…we aren’t planning to move out at all. Are you looking to buy this place?

Man: Yes. You didn’t know your landlord is selling?

L: No?!

Man: Oh.

*embarrassed pause*

Woman: So, what is your landlord like?

Me: We’ve never met him.

Woman: Oh.

Me: So, shall we give you the tour?

Youth: Ok.

The tour continued and they left, clearly feeling embarrassed. And that was how we found out that the flat we’d planned to rent for 2 years, and which was a fantastic find, was now going to be snatched from us after just 9 months, thanks to the greed/financial problems/greed of our landlord.

It wasn’t until several weeks later that we actually got a call from the Current-Letting-Agent to inform us that we were being given notice that notice would be given. In other words, the landlord had informed them that they were planning to serve notice, which they felt we should be notified about. Only because they needed to give access to the estate agents of course. Not because they felt that being thrown out of your home is something that most tenants would want to know about in advance or anything.

L and I decided that it was a good thing, as we’d have two months to find somewhere new before the notice expired. We could really take our time to look around and find somewhere new.

All this talk of finding a new home got me in the mood for property searching, and so I began trawling through Right Move. Just out of curiosity you understand. 10 minutes later I found out that the flat immediately above ours – identical, save for a much bigger balcony – was available to rent for exactly the same rate that we were already paying. 10 minutes after that, I’d emailed the New-Letting-Agent to express our interest in seeing the property, and by 9 the next morning I’d arranged a viewing for the following day.

And so we are to move. Not today, but at the beginning of June, all being well. We shall move ourselves, our possessions and our furniture, out of the flat, up a flight of stairs and into the new flat, to be put in exactly the same place as they are in now.

It doesn’t feel like moving home. Not really. It feels like….a balcony upgrade.

That is all.

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Thoughts On A New Government

Posted on Wednesday 12 May 2010 by Mark

Well, the effects of the election have sent shock waves across the country and kept the various news services busy for days, but at last it looks like things are coming to an end.

Today is the first full day of the Conservative/ Lib-Dem coalition government, and it seems to me like a good day to express my thoughts on what has happened and what may happen now.

…in 15 minutes, as that is all I have left of my lunch break. *ahem*

In the past I’ve always voted Tory (yes I’m posh and snobby, get over it), but this time round I found myself curiously torn between Tory and Lib-Dem policies. Each side seemed to present ideas that excited me, and others that seemed like terrifying suggestions.

A few weeks ago I was chatting to a colleague and felt obliged to point out that the ideal government for me would be one that I could customise by stealing bits from the existing ones, but not having to fully subscribe to any of them.

When the result came in, I didn’t really know what to make of it. A weak and ineffectual Tory government? The threat of a lib/lab pact and the looming specter of Brown remaining in power? Political and economic chaos for months or years to come? The only thing I was certain about is that we’d be seeing another election before long.

Now though, I don’t think we will be. Far from attempting a lukewarm, vague agreement to sometimes not stab each other in the backs, the Tories and Lib-Dems have gone the whole hog and entered a genuine coalition and majority government. In a few days they managed to thrash out all the differences in policy and who said what to who, and managed to agree to stick with each other on everything for the next 5 years.

If they can do that in a week, what can they do together in a month? Or a year? Or 5?

The way the policies have worked out has also been very favorable. The influences of each party on the other has caused both to drop their scarier ideas and stick with the ones that make sense.

This might be a big flop, like every hung parliament has been before. Or it might not be. This could be the first day of a whole new chapter in British Democratic History, where coalitions are the norm, the standard. The trusted option.

I can’t claim to know how things will pan out, no one can these days, but if ever a government was formed to suit me and what I want to see happening over the course of the next parliament, this could well be it.

The next few years will be very interesting indeed!

…and that is my 15 minutes! Go back to your lives people :-)

Posted in Social Commentary, The Future | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I’ve [Not] Got The Power

Posted on Tuesday 4 May 2010 by Mark

When I started blogging, back in 2004, I tended to spend my free time pretty much glued to my home desktop, and so, naturally enough, that is where I used to write my blogs.

Occasionally I used to venture out to Starbucks in Bristol and tap away on my big clunky Dell Inspiron, as the change of scenery seemed to be good for my blogging. On occasion I’d try my hand at typing out a whole post on my HTC Vox, the first Smartphone I had that came with Wi-Fi, but it was slow going.

These days I find my Asus EEE PC is my prefered blogging tool, even when I’m at home and have access to the desktop (still struggling on, all these years later), but not today. You see, I’ve forgotten to charge the laptop.

Times gone by I’d never have dreamed of leaving the house without the power cable for the laptop, because with a battery life of less than an hour, it wasn’t worth ever using it without the mains. But with the Asus, the battery life is 9.5 hours, which in lunch break terms equates to several days worth of use. And when a battery lasts that long, not only do I not take the cable with me, I rarely even know where it is, so long is the gap between charges.

So, on Friday I may have noticed that my battery was low, but a bank holiday weekend of barbecues, jazz and fish have completely wiped my memory of this, leaving me with a flat battery.

And so I’m typing this on my iPod. And that’s all I wanted to say really.

Goodbye.

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And Here I am – Again

Posted on Friday 30 April 2010 by Mark

My, my, yes, it is me, back after months of neglecting the blog again, blah, blah, blah, etc, etc, etc.

Actually it is so long since I was last here that it took three attempts to remember what my blog password was, which is somewhat shameful.

That’s not to say I haven’t been on the internet, or even bl0gging, in the last few months. In fact, in my current job I spend my entire day on the internet and quite a lot of it blogging, just not here.

Actually, it has been frustrating me for some time how rarely I make it here, and I’ve been looking at my day to day routine to see when I have then most free time available for writing stuff. And it’s now. That’s to say, on my lunch break at work.

For the first time in my life, I’ve found my way into a role where I get to take an hour for lunch, rather than the usual 30 minutes. Granted, I go home half an hour later in the evening, but I quite like the arrangement, especially if it allows me to spend a few minutes here from time to time.

So, what news then?

Well, as I’ve been hinting, ok stating, I have a new job. When we were last together back in…January, I was working as a temp at Plymouth City Council. Well, as the month rolled into the next, the warning sounds about public sector jobs began to grow louder and louder, and it wasn’t long before I felt the need to escape to the relative safety of the private sector, where I now am.

Lucky I did when I did actually, as I found out the day after giving my notice that the council were looking to get rid of their temps. Whether they actually did or not, I have no idea, but it was a relief to get out of there on my own terms.

Not that I have complete security here. I’m officially an intern on what I think must be the last day of my internship. Although I’m being kept for the time being, it’ll be on a month by month rolling contract, at least until they can decide whether my role within the company has a long term future.

Can’t complain though, as I’m employed and get to spend my time doing something that is at least reasonably close to what I wish to be doing.

Outside of work things are also a little tenuous (the owner of our flat is considering whether to sell the property – a full year before we were planning on moving on) but mostly happy and enjoyable, and L and I are both looking forward to a great summer in Plymouth and Devon more widely.

I might just fulfill my long standing promise of blogging more regularly, if things remain the way they are. Lunch breaks have the advantage over most times of the day of being fairly consistent and also, at the moment at least, relatively free of other things I should be doing.

There are lots of great things I could be blogging about at the moment, especially with all the exciting things that are happening in Plymouth at the moment. Tomorrow, for example, is the first day of the Barbican International Jazz Festival, a great big event on our very door steps.

Stay tuned for more, dear reader…

Posted in My Life, Plymouth | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Too Late for New Year?

Posted on Sunday 10 January 2010 by Mark
calendar

Calander

Like most bloggers, I like to finish off my year with a summing up of the 12 months gone/this is what I’ve got coming up in the year ahead post, but for various reasons I’ve not had time so far this January. The principle being that blogging, for me at least, is an incredibly antisocial activity. I like to have as few distractions as possible when I’m writing, as other things going on tend to break my concentration, and for this reason I can’t blog in front of the TV or whilst L requires my attention, undivided or otherwise.

So, here we are, January the 10th and no updates so far this year, (Remember the days when I wrote daily?) and I find myself enjoying a Sunday afternoon with not too much on. The roast chicken is cooking and in a minute I’ll be off to eat it, L is sorting out her university paper work and BBC Radio Devon is playing quietly in the background…

…Ok so that is lunch out of the way. The slippers are on and I’m back to relaxing on the sofa with my laptop and a rather full tummy! Time to get this post under way I think. Among my friends, the most popular way to round up the year past seems to be to list the highlights from each month, so that is what I shall now do.

2009, the Summary

January

  • I ring in the New Year with L and her group of school friends, known to all as the Tramps. It is the first of their social occasions that I have attended, but it certainly isn’t to be the last.
  • 7 days into the new year I take my first sick day in nearly 11 years in order to have my right toenail surgically removed. It has been ingrowing for over 6 months by this point and my initial relief at having it removed (and a good deal of local anaesthetic) results in my walking out of the building without the need of any help from L, who proceeds to nurse me back to health over the following days and weeks.

February

  • Still limping around from the foot, I find myself snowed under, both literally – 2 snows days as the whole South West (except Plymouth) become buried in the white stuff – and metaphorically, as coursework deadline after coursework deadline come upon me. Amazingly, I get everything in on time.
  • One of the Tramps asks me to appear in a music video he is shooting, the result of which is several days spent filming around Bristol.

March

  • The coursework finally comes to an end for the last time in my degree, and L and I celebrate with a weekend city break to Brussels. We take the Eurostar and have a fantastic (and surprisingly sunny) two days looking around the heart of Europe. The only dampener is a stomach bug that kicks in just hours after I return, leaving me in bed for the next 24 hours.
  • A job offer from Data2Impact Ltd sees me leaving my job in the bar after two and a half years of punishing service. The new job – as an office assistant – is in Andover, a commute of 180 miles a day, five days a week.

April

  • L turns 20 and we celebrate with a trip to Bristol Zoo with the Tramps during the Easter Holidays. She remains in Bristol for the rest of Easter before returning to Plymouth in order to begin her teaching placement  in Torquay
  • I attend the funeral of my late Uncle, Robert Austin in Kent. Having travelled all the way from Yateley to Kent and back, I then set off immediately to Bristol to meet L from a day trip to London.

May

  • L finishes her teaching practice and likewise her second year on university and returns to Bristol for the summer. Before she goes we spend a windy bank holiday Monday attempting to have a Barbecue on the beach in Exmouth. I burn my fingers badly on hot sand and everything we eat has a suspiciously crunchy texture, but otherwise we judge the day to be a complete success.
  • I take my final exams, thus concluding the degree I started in September 2004.

June

  • We hold a far more successful barbecue for the Tramps in L’s Mum’s back garden. The turn out is fantastic and I can hardly keep up with the demand for delicious food.
  • I turn 23 and celebrate with my parents as L is away in Prague. She and I go out for a very nice meal in Kingswood upon her return.

July

  • My working life takes me to Guildford for a couple of weeks where I find myself helping to set up and run Lean courses for some clients in the town. About this time I receive word that I’ve passed my degree and achieved Third Class Honours.
  • L and I celebrate our first anniversary with a trip to Edinburgh for the weekend. The rain isn’t nearly as severe as we had feared and we both fall in love with the city and everything it has to offer. The highlight for me is a visit to Royal Yacht Britannia.

August

  • I’m offered a one year extension on my contract but am forced to decline having taken the decision to move to Plymouth and live with L. We spend a day in the city house hunting, and after some ups and downs we find a wonderful flat that meets every single one of our requirements.
  • We holiday in a Devon cottage for a week with the Tramps. The weather is typically August, but we have a wonderful time seeing the sights and spending time together. I spot TV’s James May at Barnstaple Railway Station and we visit the Big Sheep in Bideford.

September

  • I leave Data2Impact. We part on good terms but I am disappointed that they were unable to offer me remote working opportunities – an unusual problem in an IT company.
  • L and I hire a van and gradually move all our stuff 128 miles down the road to Plymouth. It takes over a week to get everything down, and by the end of it we still have a car load of odds and ends being stored in L’s Mum’s house.

October

  • I begin searching in vein for a job. As the weeks roll by my expectations begin to slip from “a job in IT” to “anything I can get paid for, no matter what the salary”.
  • L starts back at university, and life begins to fall into the normal patterns of living together. Finances are tight and life is like the final round of Monopoly, when every roll of the dice becomes an exercise in survival.

November

  • L begins her third year teaching placement and is fortunate enough to end up at a school in Plymouth. I find myself filling my days with job hunting and my evenings helping L prepare for her lessons.
  • I am finally offered a temping position at Plymouth City Council, courtesy of Pertemps. The salary is the lowest I’ve been on for many years and the work is far less involved than in my previous job, but after 2 months of unemployment it is heaven. I take an afternoon off to attend my graduation ceremony at Bristol Cathedral.

December

  • L and I turn our little flat Christmasy. Everything is on a tight budget, but that doesn’t sop us enjoying ourselves. We spend the day itself with our individual families and then enjoy the rest of the break in Yateley and Bristol respectively.
  • New Year’s Eve finds us once again at a Trampy party. We toast to a good 2009 over and done.

And now it is 2010…

… and we are back in Plymouth and back to the routine. L starts her Spring term on Monday and I am a week into work again. It is hard to know what the next 12 months will hold, especially given the number of unexpected occurrences in 2009. I hope to find a better job and a much better salary, now that the recession is ending. What else will happen is pretty much dependant on that, as all my plans involve money. I’m hoping we’ll be able to go away somewhere during the summer and spend our weekends exploring the city and county that we now call home.

I want to find more time to be involved with this blog and the other online aspects of my life, and maybe for the first time in years this will be possible at last.

Whatever happens, I’m looking forward to a great year ahead.

Happy 2010 Everyone!

Posted in Christmas, My Life, Plymouth, The Past | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off

Why I’m Not Joining the Photo Blog Revolution

Posted on Wednesday 4 November 2009 by Mark

Anyone who spends a little of their precious time each day reading Twitter or navigating their way through the blogosphere will be well aware by now of the trend towards user uploaded photos on the internet. It’s been a feature of blogging ever since the invention of broadband, but it’s perhaps more recently, with the arrival of Facebook, Flickr, Twitter etc, that the trend has become more mainstream. After all, these sites exist purely on user generated content, and each one treats photo sharing as a core part of its operation.

As someone who has owned a digital camera since before any one of these sites had even been dreamt up, I’m very much in favour of the practice. Yet, if you look at any of my web content you’ll be pretty quick to notice how rarely I contribute any photos myself. Try as I might to be an active photographer, every time I come to share my photos with the internet, I find there are simply too many barriers in the way. The main one, quite simply, is the amount of effort I have to go through to actually complete the process.

Twitter users among you will, no doubt, be familiar with services like Twitpic, which make it easy for users to upload their photos and include them in their tweets. I don’t know what percentage of Tweets include links to photos, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was something like 25%, thanks largely to the popularity of the iPhone, and other high end smart phones as the Twitter platforms of choice. It’s a very easy thing to do. I know this because I have used Twitterrific to upload a photo stored on my iPod Touch, and it only took a few seconds. Unfortunately my iPod doesn’t have a camera, and the only photos I can share using it are those that have already been copied across from my computer.

This means that if I want to share a photo of something I can see using Twitterrific, I must take the photo with my mobile or digital camera, copy it onto the computer, sync the iPod with the computer and then post the photo as a Tweet. A quick, hassle free process that I can do anywhere in the world (as long as “anywhere” is my home office) in perhaps just 15 or 20 minutes. By comparison, if I had an iPhone I could take the picture on that and upload it then and there, from anywhere with a phone signal in as little as 15 or 20 seconds. I’m not actually sure it would be possible to upload a photo using my Nokia 2630, and if it were the data rate would probably take several quid out of my credit every time I tried it.

The same situation occurs for Facebook and Flickr, both of which allow iPhone users to instantly upload a picture they’ve just taken, but which have no such facility for the camera-less iPod, and this is why I’ve yet to engage in the real-time photo posting culture that has sprung up in recent years.

Ah but! I hear you cry, Why don’t you upload photos on the computer, like the rest of us non-iPhone-owning types? Well, here, Ladies and Gentlemen, I must confess an element of laziness. No, no, not so much laziness, as lack of time. You see, proper uploading and archiving of photos is such a demanding business these days. Once upon a time you just stuck them on the internet with names like pc98382901.jpg or pic0047.gif, but not anymore. You have to name them, you have to provide descriptions, you have to tag them, tag people, decide on the order of photos in the album. And if you are anything like me and take a dozen photos where one would do simply to make sure that you get the best possible angle and lighting and facial expressions, you have to spend half your life deciding which of 37 almost identical photos is the absolute best one to be shown to friends and family alike.

It has got so bad these days, with so many sites expecting so much of you that I’m simply unable to upload photos at a rate of more than 20 an hour. Which when you’ve taken 200 photos at a party, of which 80 are worth keeping, is a serious time commitment. It used to be a commitment that I was willing to make, but recently I find myself slipping terribly. If Flickr is to be believed then I’ve not taken any photos since the snow in February, and according to Facebook, L and I don’t take a camera out with us anymore, which is very much not the case.

If you are wondering what has brought on this rant – as it seems to have become – I’ve just plugged my camera into the computer to copy the photos on it (I don’t have a card reader for my computer, which just adds to the level of hassle involved in the whole blasted business) thinking that I would find 5 or 10 photos from the last few days. Instead I find there is over 150 shots awaiting me. Photos that are months old. Photos I’ve never ever looked at. Photos I hardly remember taking. Time and time again I’ve taken my camera with me on trips out at weekends and in the evenings and every single time I’ve returned home and not even thought to look through them and see if they are any good.

I am incapable of deleting photos at all. Duplicates, blurs, hideous mistakes, they all stay. I think it’s because I’m anal. I don’t like to delete them on the camera, even though the delete button is nice and big and convenient, because you can’t really be sure on that little screen whether a photo is good or bad, and I won’t delete them on the computer, because when they are imported they get numbered, and I can’t stand the idea of there being gaps in the number sequence, even if I’ll probably never notice it again. It’s really stupid, I know it is, but I just can’t do it. So what if I no longer have 3 photos of me looking naff in Edinburgh? It shouldn’t matter at all, and yet somehow I can’t stand the idea that I’m deleting a part of my memory, no matter how trivial.

The result of this particular element of insanity is that I currently have 12,893 photos on my computer.

Perhaps progress is about making small steps rather than big ones. After all, I managed to semi-sort my Documents folder the other day and that hasn’t been cleared out for years. I think my first aim should be to delete duplicate photos, even if I leave all the others. That way I’m not actually losing anything. And maybe, just maybe, if I can start to get on top of the photos on my computer, I can start sharing a few on here, at long last.

Bodmin Moor 17th October 2009

Bodmin Moor 17th October 2009

As if to illustrate my point, it has taken me half an hour of messing about to insert this picture for you.

Posted in My Life, Rant, Technology | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

I balls-ed up!

Posted on Monday 26 October 2009 by Mark

Ok, I just glanced back at the post I wrote the other day with the details of my change of feed URL. Unfortunately I wrote it down wrong, because I’m a bit thick.

It should have been: http://markglover.co.uk/blog/feed/

Sorry about that!

Posted in Important Information, Technical Note | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off

Unemployed

Posted on Sunday 25 October 2009 by Mark
Job Centre Sign

Job Centre Sign

This blog has always been a mixture of diary and wider commentary, and such is the case with this post.

I moved to Plymouth a little over a month ago without any job to come to. I actually left a job in order to come here – one that I’d found without any effort at all on my part – and I rather assumed that despite the recession I’d have a pretty easy time of finding work. After all, why shouldn’t I be able to just walk into a job? I have a degree in a part of the country where many people don’t; I have work experience in several different industries and am above average when it comes to working a computer. I sat myself down in the sunshine outside Starbucks, logged onto the internet and started applying for any job that took my fancy.

A little over a month later, I am still unemployed, and have learnt a few things about job hunting and what the job market is like during a recession, when you’re a very long way from London.

The first thing I’ve learnt is that there is no big business down here. None. Although Plymouth is the 15th biggest city in the country by population, it has achieved this feat in spite of the job market, not because of it. People do not come to Plymouth to work. They come here to retire, or to do a bit of shopping in they live somewhere more rural, but not to work, and definitely not to relocate their business. There are two reasons for this; two factors that shape the size, affluence, diversity and scope of the city. The first is the time it takes to get here from London, which on the train is usually around four hours. The second is the lack of other business centres in the area. Why are these factors important? I’ll tell you.

The majority of cities in this country – indeed, the majority of regions – thrive because they are easily accessible from the capital. If you locate your business in Reading, Bristol, Cardiff or Birmingham you will often find that your customers are not living in your neighbourhood, and are most likely to be living in London. Not a problem, you say, I shall come to London to see you. So you hop in the car or onto the train and 2 hours later you are in the big city. Fine, no problem there. Your business can go on not being based in London and your customers may not even realise.

But supposing your city of choice isn’t within two hours of London? Well, why not form your own micro economy? The likes of Manchester and Liverpool, which are a long way from London – or indeed Edinburgh, which is even further – get around this unfortunate handicap by turning themselves into business centres. They get together and help each other to become so big that if you set up your business there, you will be constantly surrounded by customers, and will never need to look – or travel – to the capital for your company to survive.

And that, my friends, is why Plymouth is an awful place to find work. Not only is it so far from London that even the specially timetabled “fast” trains to the city take a whopping three hours to get there, but there aren’t even any other cities near by with which Plymouth can form a micro economy and attract business that way. After all, the nearest – dare one say, only – settlement of any notable size in the whole South West with which Plymouth could do business is Exeter, a full hour’s travel away. And no, before you ask, I don’t mean an hour in the Bristol to Bath on the bus 12 miles in rush hour sense, I mean the hour of driving along a dual carriageway at 70 sense. And because Devon has the hilly landscape that it has, even the high speed trains spend most of the time stuck at 60 or less, as they wind, snake like, round every peak and valley in the county. After Exeter, which itself isn’t known for its massive, beating business heart, the next nearest city is, sadly, Bristol, and as mentioned above, that is too close to London for it to ever worry about doing trade with anyone else.

I think the lesson about the business situation really hit home for me when I got an email from my dad listing some PC repair companies to try talking to. When I phoned them up, each and every one told me that their only concern at the moment is staying afloat, never mind being so swamped with work that they must expand their workforce to cope. I mean, what sort of a city has so little business that even a computer repair man can’t find work?!

The next lesson I learnt is that people don’t give a toss about CVs. I started, as most would, by applying for jobs over the internet, using many of the countless job sites that have sprung up in recent years. The idea behind them is that you see a job being advertised and you apply for it, which sends your CV and cover letter straight to the employer and they get back to you to tell you if you have been selected for interview or not. Let me tell you this right now, so you can be in no doubt whatsoever:

It is BOLLOCKS

First of all, no one who is actually in a position to decide to employ anyone has ever looked at these sites, or would ever consider using their services. Not one. The hundreds of thousands of job adverts posted on these sites have never ever been put their by the employers themselves. What happens is this:

  1. The company in question decides to employ a recruitment agency to short list some candidates.
  2. The recruitment agency, being keen to get their name out, post details of the job on hundreds of different job websites with a link for CVs to be emailed to them. Each advert shows the name of the recruitment agency, not the employer.
  3. They then ignore the hundreds or thousands of CVs sent to them, whilst drawing up a list of candidates from the pool of workers they’ve interviewed face to face and know more about that a CV could ever say.
  4. They give the list to the company who is hiring, never mentioning to anyone the thousands of CVs that weren’t even checked.

And that is it. I don’t even want to think about how many times I applied for dream jobs that would sort out all my problems only to never hear back from any of them.

The fact is there is only one way to get a job, even on a low salary, and that is to go and see people face to face. As crap as that is, and God knows I’d be the first to advocate getting a job without ever leaving the comfort of your computer chair if it worked, employers will never even look at your CV unless they already know who you are. And I have that on pretty good authority. After all, both my parents hire and fire. They both have the power to pull someone out of the dustbin of unemployment, shake the dust off them and give them a job. And both of them automatically delete any emails they receive containing a CV unless they have already met, or at least spoken to, the person sending it.

Gloomy as all this may sound, my hopes of finding a job – and so being spared from the awful clutches of bankruptcy - are higher now than at any point during this thoroughly depressing and stressful month. This week I went in person to two separate agencies, one temping, the other recruitment, and at both I was able to speak to someone about what I’m looking to do and they told me it is doable. I had been resigning myself to applying for part time work in Primark out of shear desperation, but they said I don’t have to. There is real work out there, and they will help me find it.

At the same time, I’ve spoken to two separate people about gaining professional IT qualifications. I’ll have to teach myself the knowledge and pay to become certified, but when I’m done, I shall have a fighting chance of getting through to those employers for whom a degree isn’t enough.

The recession has been long and hard, and looks set to stay that way for many months and years to come, but if I keep making the effort and keep jumping through those hoops, than perhaps I won’t have to keep being unemployed.

Posted in My Life, Plymouth, Social Commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Change of Address

Posted on Monday 12 October 2009 by Mark

If you are reading this (and I hope you are) you may have noticed that I’ve changed the URL of the blog. Previously it was a standalone site hosted at http://ignorminious.co.uk, where it has been residing for over three years, but in an effort to bring it in-line with my main website, http://markglover.co.uk you can now find it at http://markglover.co.uk/blog.

If you receive the blog via RSS, you will hopefully continue to receive updates as normal, but to be on the safe side, please update your feed link to http://markglover.co.uk/feed/

Thanks

Posted in Important Information, Technical Note | Tagged | Comments Off

Grass is Always Greener?

Posted on Tuesday 6 October 2009 by Mark
Grass is Always Greener

Grass is Always Greener

When I first moved to Bristol, back in September 2004, I chose my accommodation very carefully from the wide range of buildings and locations offered by the university. I had it in my head at the time that I wanted to be at the centre of all the action and university life, so I deliberately chose a flat in the block with the highest student population in the city centre. I had it all planned out: parties, cinema, shopping, sight seeing, theatre – the works.

When I got to Bristol however, I encountered something of a culture shock, coming as I was, from a small, sleepy commuter town in Hampshire. I was emotionally intelligent enough at the time to foresee that I’d have to adjust to my new surroundings, but the sheer scale of the change drove me half way to insanity before the year was out and I could move to the suburbs.

The first thing that struck me was the noise. I’d been a regular visitor to London and many big towns and cities before moving to uni, so I was well versed in the sort of noises that cities make, but it didn’t take me long to realise the real challenge. You see, it isn’t the volume that is the problem, it’s the longevity of it. All day and all night the traffic purred away to itself and the sirens bleared. Every single day and night, with not so much as an hour’s peace to give my poor ears time to recover from the daily assult. The windows were single glazed, which I think probably exhasibated the problem still further, and it wasn’t that unusual for a particularly warm night to force me to leave the window open.

The second problem was the smell. From the moment I stepped through my front door each moring until the bus dropped me off at the out of town campus where all my classes took place, I was choked by a toxic cocktail of diesel fumes, fast food outlets, dodgy sewers and half a million other people making their way about the city. I’d never previously thought much about the value of fresh air, but once it was taken away from me, I would have given the world for it. This became especially apparent as the autumn wore on and I began to fully appreciate the ability of the pollution in the city centre to drive away those crisp cold mornings that had always told me that winter was coming. Even the frost and the snow was unable to penetrate the mild stew of exhaust gases.

The third problem was the view. I lived, as I have mentioned, in a small commuter town, prior to moving to Bristol, and although I wouldn’t dream of calling it the countryside, I was used to spending my days walking under trees, kicking the leaves, or admiring the dew on the grass early in the morning. In the centre of Bristol there was no grass and the only trees I could see from my building were struggling to break through the concrete and tarmac laid right up to their trunks.

Between these three major environmental differences and the social changes of arriving in a city where I knew no one and was unable to connect with the students I met due to my lack of interest in being continually drunk or stoned, I found myself alone and depressed most of the time, and stayed in my room, hardly ever partaking in any of the fun I’d planned for myself before arriving.

As the years went on things slowly improved. I moved out of the city centre, made a few friends and eventually got myself a girlfriend. The thing is, as my life in the suburbs gradually settled into some sort of routine, I found myself craving a life in the city centre again.

It’s not that I suddenly missed the fumes and the concrete, far from it, but I found it annoying that in order to take advantage of any of those things I was looking forward to about living in Bristol, I had to travel. Even something as simple as popping into a coffee shop for an hour meant half an hour on the bus or in the car each way, and excessive charges to match. Similarly the cinema was a long way away, and even the beloved countryside, which I was much closer to, wasn’t actually in walking distance at all.

At the time I was working in a bar at UWE, which is north of the city centre, and I was living in Kingswood, which is east, so my daily commute was a drive between the two, completely avoiding the centre, the restaurants, coffee shops and cinemas. Whilst this saved me a whole lot of traffic jams, I found that actually visiting the centre of the city I called home became something of a rarity, and I felt disconnected from whatever it was that gave the city its soul.

That said, during the course of the summer, L and I made the effort to go into town very regularly. We attended all the festivals we could, and ate in most of the restaurants. I even discovered a few new parks that I’d previously been unaware of.

For L, this summer was a chance to have one last look round the city she had grown up in, as well as showing me all the parts of it that were dear to her. For me, it was a chance to make up for my complete failure to find anything good about the place during my first few years there. Ironically, had I finished my degree on time and not stayed their an extra two years, I’d never have discovered the hidden gems that make Bristol such a wonderful city. Indeed, it was only after I’d moved out of the centre and was shortly due to leave the city that I finally realised what a wonderful place it was to live.

I think it is for this reason that L and I have made up our minds not to repeat the mistake. We have just completed our move to Plymouth, where we shall be for the next two years. I am currently unemployed and frantically looking for work, but that hasn’t stopped us settling down in our city centre apartment and engaging in absolutely everything we can find (and afford) to do here.

In the two weeks since we’ve arrived we’ve gone on a group walk on Mount Edgecumbe, visited the city museum and art gallery, swam at the Pavilions pool, attended a free comedy evening, walked along as much of the coast as our feet will manage, dined with friends and still managed to spend every sunny breakfast and lunch time in late September on our little balcony, looking out over Sutton Harbour. We’re even due to visit the theatre on Thursday!

For the five years I lived in Bristol, the grass was always greener on the other side, but now for the first time, I can honestly say the greenest grass is that which grows under my feet.

Posted in My Life, Plymouth, The Future, The Past | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

New Kit

Posted on Thursday 2 July 2009 by Mark
Asus Eee PC 1000 HE

Asus Eee PC 1000 HE

It’s become something of a time honoured tradition on this blog that when I get a new piece of computer hardware, whether it be an iPod, a laptop or a mobile ph0ne, one of the first things I do with it is write a blog post using it. I have to say, of all the times I’ve done this, today is definitely the easiest, on account of the magnificent hardware I’m using.

As many of you will know, I love my iPod, and I’m sufficiently fast at typing on it to make blogging a reasonable possibility, even if it couldn’t be described as “ideal”. The device I’m typing on at the moment, however, is in a completely different league.

That’s right, it’s a netbook.

But not just any netbook. You see, I did my research this time and actually read some reviews, beforedeciding on the model I wanted to buy. Thanks to the recession killing off expensive price tags on consumer electronics, it’s actually the highest rated netbook I’ve been able to find; the Asus EeePC 1000HE.

Those of you who are tech savvy will know that the first ever netbook to appear - the catalyst that sparked off mini-laptop mania – was the original Asus Eee PC. It was so good that it convinced manufacturers and consumers alike that there was a future in ultra-portable computers. Since then, Asus have been back to the drawing board several times, eventually coming up with the gorgeous bit of kit on which I now type to you dear reader.

They really have pulled out all the stops on this model, with a faster processor than before, an easy to use keyboard and (best of all) a 9.5 hour battery life. No, I’m not even joking. Nine and a half hours on one battery.

I won’t bother you with the technical spec, as I know many of you tend to tune out when that happens. Instead I’ll be restrained and just tell you what an amazing machine it is.

It’s a really amazing machine.

There you go. What, you want to know more? Ok, fair enough. The machine runs Windows XP, which, despite its age, remains the best operating system currently on the market. It’s also the only one that will run on this machine, since Vista is so hardware greedy that I’d have to pay an awful lot of money for a machine that’d run that mess of code smoothly. The hard drive is 160Gb, which is the same as the Windows drive on my desktop computer, and plenty adequate enough for what I need, and the…oh sod it!

Look, if you want the technical spec then you can find it here: http://eeepc.asus.com/global/product1000he-spec.html

If, on the other hand, you are asking what everyone I’ve shown it to has asked, ie “Apart from being small, what is it about this laptop that makes it half the price of a standard laptop?” then I shall tell you: it doesn’t have an optical disc drive.

That’s it.

No, seriously, that’s the only thing it’s lacking. Ok, ok, the hardware is slightly slower than you’d expect to find in a normal laptop, but so what? If it was using Vista it’d be a problem, but on XP it flies!

I think the thing that will make or break this machine for most people is whether it meets their needs or not. So, is this machine right for you? Well, if you are looking for a fully functional main computer that you can keep all your files on, watch DVDs, play the latest games and sync your iPod with then no. Granted, it’ll do all of those things apart from the DVD playing, but there are much better machines on the market you can use.

If, on the other hand, you already have a workhorse machine to do all of those things but are looking for a portable computer that isn’t going to run out of battery, break your back or disappoint you with a lack of ports, then absolutely this is the best machine you can get, and, at around £300 from Amazon, you’d be silly not to!

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

The Real Me?

Posted on Tuesday 9 June 2009 by Mark
A Lazy Cat - Just Like Me

A Lazy Cat - Just Like Me

I am two people, not one.

I guess we all are, really. Not in a split personality way, although some people are. Just in a variable mood sort of way. I doubt I’m really that different from most people, and I don’t pretend to be so, so please don’t think otherwise of me. I know we all have different moods at different moments, but some people seem to do a better job of controlling their moods than others, and I’m not really sure how it is they do it.

The two people within me are quite distinct. They have different views and opinions, different hopes, ideas and plans. They are interested in different things, do different things, behave differently and, ultimately have different futures. The trouble is, I don’t really know which one is the Real me.

Person A is the Mark I’d like to be. He is motivated and enthusiastic. He loves life and loves learning. He has a powerful imagination and constantly dreams of the life he can achieve if he puts the effort in. He wants to succeed; wants to do whatever it takes to be the best. To make it to the top.

He’s the Mark who once wanted to be a lawyer. Now he can’t decide between becoming an IT professional and trying to be the best in the industry, going into management and working his arse off to become a chief exec in some large, global company or starting up his own business, where he’s already the boss, and if he works hard he can make a success of it.

Mark A respects himself and is respected by others. He wants to save up for a yacht and learn to sail. He wants to work out in the gym until he’s fit enough to enjoy exercising. He wants a big house, plenty of surplus income and lots of foreign holidays. He’s a success story; a product of all the best things that life in Britain has to offer. He’s a winner.

Person B is not the Mark I want to be, not by a long shot. The first thing to know about Mark B is that he’s lazy. I don’t just mean a little lazy, he’s digustingly so. He combines a particular mixture of laziness and procrastination that allows him to pass hour after hour whilst doing very little and wastes all the time he could be enjoying himself.

Mark B suffers from a deep set dislike of putting an effort into tasks. He shrinks away from companies whose job adverts say they are seeking “highly motivated types”. Mark B isn’t highly motivated at all. He has no motivation to do anything. His main focus is on achieving instant gratification and he’ll always seek out short term pleasure at the expense of long term gain.

This Mark has very little ambition in life. It’s not that he doesn’t wish to be rich or have everything he desires – far from it. It’s simply that he doesn’t want to have to do anything to get it, and as such he has no life ambition. Given the choice, he’d choose a deadend job with no responsibility, no matter how dull it is and how long it goes on for. Learning is not something Mark B takes much interest in. He is quite happy to have knowledge in his head, so long as he doesn’t have to put it there himself.

If this sounds dull and teenage-angsty then I apologise. I’m not a teenager and I’m not trying to whine, I merely wish to explore an issue that is bugging me, in the hope of embarking on a little self discovery in these words.

The problem is that I really, honestly do not know which Mark is the real one. Yea, I’d like it to be Mark A – who wouldn’t? I’d love to be a winner, I genuinely would. Or, at least I think I would. Surely if I do as much as I say I’d just do it, right?  But Mark B is here too, stealing my energy and drive. When he comes along (which he does at some point almost every day), it’s like I’m a car, speeding along, and then someone puts the brakes on. Try as I might I’m suddenly having the momentum forced out of me and I can’t fight against it.

I think in many ways it comes down to energy. Whilst I have plenty of mental and physical energy, things are good. On Saturday afternoon I was Mark A, and I sat in Starbucks, drinking coffee, blogging away and loving every minute of it. On Sunday though I woke up with Mark B, and although I tried to fight on and get stuff done, I eventually went to bed with a mess of a flat, a pile of washing up and not a single shirt ironed. In fact, the only task I completed the whole day was to wash my car, which took barely 10 minutes. What a waste of time!

I know everyone has their off days. I’m not claiming to be anything special in that regard. I know everyone needs their chill out time, so that they can relax and recover, but that’s not what I’m talking about. At the moment I’m having so many off days, it’s stopping me progressing in life. People say to me “Mark, you’re an intelligent guy, but you’re so lazy. Think what you could be achieving if you just worked hard!” and they are completely right of course.

I’m writing about this here because I’m curious to know if anyone else suffers or has suffered from the same problem, and how they’ve solved it. I can’t believe that it simply isn’t possible for people like me to consistently find the drive to succeed.

I’m  just not ready to be Mark B.

Posted in My Life, Rant | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Revenge of the Glasses

Posted on Saturday 6 June 2009 by Mark
BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson

BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson

Back in March I casually mentioned that, because of the economic crisis, Nick Robinson had been replaced by Robert Peston as the BBC blogger of choice on the BBC News Front Page. Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m sure none of you can have failed to notice that Nick is back with a vengeance!

You see, he clearly reads my blog, and as soon as he read my observation, he set out on his daring plan to ensure that the Beeb would put him back where he belongs. Now, obviously it would be reckless of me to suggest that it was Nick Robinson who leaked the MPs’ expenses to the Daily Telegraph, and indeed it would raise the question of why he didn’t break the news himself (not to mention the fact that he’d probably threaten legal action unless I revoked the claim), but if anyone has done well out if this crisis it is he.

Actually, with the exception of Labour itself, it’s hard to find anyone who’s done badly out of the ongoing meltdown in the Cabinet. Thanks to my new job, I now have the option of not only checking the news headlines on my lunch break, but also of listening to the radio in the car and in the office if no one else is around, and the last few weeks have been somewhere between comedy and fantasy every time the news reader starts to speak. You might call me sadistic, but I’m enjoying watching the Government tearing itself apart more than I’ve enjoyed anything in the public domain for a long time.

Those normally prim and proper figures of state, who like to bore us at every opportunity with dull arguments  about dry policy have descended into what can only be described as the thinking man’s Big Brother. Indeed, with the 24 hour rolling news footage, the interviews, the name calling and the unnecessary racism (thank you BNP), the only obvious difference between the current political state and that dreadful show (which I’m reliably informed has just entered it’s 10th season – can it really have been a decade?!) is the channel it’s on, and the fact that Davina McCall has been replaced by a quietly amused balding man in distinctive thick rimmed glasses, barely able to conceal the heavily loaded irony from his voice as he attempts to report on the mess in Westminster with as little bias as is possible in such situations.

Blimey, that was a long sentence. I really must remember to pause for breath. Sorry about that.

It’s hard to know just how things will pan out in the next weeks. I’m too young to really remember the collapse of the Conservative government in 1997, nevermind the hounding from office of Margaret Thatcher earlier that same decade, but I suspect that even if I did, I still wouldn’t be able to give a clear prediction on how long Brown will last. What I can say with certainty though is that, when he finally goes, Nick Robinson will be there to report it, wearing a slow smile that says:

“Blog this Peston!”

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This is an Update

Posted on Saturday 6 June 2009 by Mark
Laptop in StarBucks - Not Mine

Laptop in Starbucks - Not Mine

Wow, over three months since my last post here! Hasn’t time flown by?!

Well, probably not if you’ve actually been waiting for me to update, but in this age of RSS feeds and automation, who actually does that?

I come to you today from a corner of the (relatively) new Starbucks in Cabot Circus. Those of you who’ve been here for too long will probably remember that at one point I wrote quite a few posts whilst sat in one of the branches of Starbucks in Broadmead, either on my heavy old laptop, or else painstakingly tapped out on my old HTC Vox. Well, both the laptop and the Vox have died and been buried (read binned in the case of the laptop, recycled for the phone) and I’m now sat here using L’s laptop, which she has kindly lent me whilst she’s away in the Czech Republic. It’s the mark of a good girlfriend that she knows that the best way to help me deal with the inevitable loneliness of being without her for a week is to lend me a cool bit of computer to play with for the duration.

As I hinted at the start of this post, it has been an unforgivably long time since I last posted. Fortunately, it’s so common for me not to post for an extended period of time that if you are still reading this then you will probably forgive me any period of quietness. It does say something though when L, who has been pretty internet deprived for one reason or another recently is telling me I need to update more often.

On the plus side, my absence has given me far more to talk about than I’d have had if I’d blogged all the way through March, April and May. The main news, if anything that happens in my life can be said to be newsworthy, is that I’m no longer a bar tender in the staff bar of my university. In fact, in every way that really matters I’m no longer at university.

Back at the end of March, I received a phone call from my mum, who’d just been talking to someone who thought I might be a good employee and was I interested in a job? To cut a long story short, I’m now almost half way through a 5 month internship with a company called Data2Impact, who help large corporate and public sector clients to better manage the large quantities of data they are pushing through programs like Excel and Access. It probably doesn’t sound terribly interesting to a layman, but if you are interested in problem solving and programming macros, it’s a really cool place to work.

As an intern I’m gaining a huge amount of experience doing different sorts of work all over the company and loving every day of it. So far, I’ve only come across two draw backs of the placement, and I think I can live with both. The first is that the office I’m based in is in Andover, a full 90 miles from my flat in Bristol, so I spend a lot of time on the road and clock up pretty hefty fuel bills. The second is that I’m getting to do so many different cool things, I’ve no idea how I’m going to fit it all on my CV!

Job Crisis. What Job Crisis?

Sorry, shouldn’t gloat, I know it’s tough out there, and I’m not likely to be spared the difficulties for long, because of the other major development in my life at the moment. Given that everyone who’s anyone knows already, and we aren’t keeping it secret, I’m hoping L won’t mind me announcing here that she and I have decided to live together in September. We actually decided back in January, but as I’ve already said, I’m not very good at keeping this blog up to date.

As I may or may not have mentioned before, L is at university down in Plymouth, and after a year of driving down to see her every weekend, the thought of having to keep up this lifestyle for another two years isn’t exactly appealing. My degree, which has kept me routed in Bristol for 5 years is now all but over (just waiting for the results of my finals – fingers crossed) so, with no reason for me to remain here, I’ve decided to move down to Plymouth, and L and I are going to get an apartment together. The major upside of this is that we’ll be able to enjoy being together and seeing each other every day, without the long hours on the road and the massive fuel bill. On the downside, it means leaving Bristol (which I’ve come to love) and having to look for a new job, as there’s no way I can cope with the 6 hours a day I’d need to spend in the car if I were to commute between my office and my new home.

L has returned to Bristol for the summer now, having finished her year at uni, and it’s been great having her around the last few days. It’s entirely possible that since I don’t have to travel quite as much, I may start updating more regularly. I can’t make any promises, but I do hope to keep you up to date with the massive changes in my life, as well as all the fun that I’m expecting summer 09 to bring.

Thanks, as always, go to all of you for bothering to read me. Perhaps now you could go one step further and be bothered to comment with an answer to the following question: Would you be able to cope with me changing the URL for my RSS feed once again? I’m painfully aware that I’ve changed it several times already during the life of this blog, but I’m thinking of moving the blog over to my main website, http://markglover.co.uk so as to keep everything under one roof, as it were. Your thoughts please…

Posted in My Life | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Backward Banks

Posted on Tuesday 3 March 2009 by Mark
Hiding Banker

Hiding Banker

For me, a poor, penniless student with no property, no morgage, no deposit for a morgage, no shares and no capital, the recession has, so far, had very little impact on my life. Perhpas this will change in a few months when I try to get myself the well paid, exciting graduate job that the government promised me I’d get, if only I’d go to university first, but for now I find myself disconnected from the issue that has made headlines virtually everyday for the last 18 months.

In fact, the most obvious sign that there is a recession, so far as I can tell, besides the fact that I now own the bank withwhom I hold such a large overdraft, is the change of blogging hierarchy on the BBC News Front Page. Back in the Good Old Days there was a permanent spot reserved for the blog of the Beeb’s Political Editor Nick Robinson, who’s regular takes on the latest political stories provided us with welcome relief when the news was going a little bit slowly. Now though we are enduring the dark days, and poor Nick has been replaced by the man blamed for the run on Northern Rock. A man who, in all probability, might actually be Satan himself: the BBC’s Business Editor Robert Peston.

Ok, he probably isn’t Satan – if he was he’d be working for ITV – but it’d be hard to deny that he’s loving the current economic turmoil and the massive shove into the limelight it’s given him. I remember glancing at the headlines on the BBC website the other day and spotting the following, amusing little arrangement. The leading article was reporting another major problem with the economy. I think it was a report on another bank admitting massive losses or something, and under it was a list of related stories, as you usually get. It looked something like this:

Bank of Monkeys Reports £4bn Losses

Housing Market Falls Further

Bananas R Us Goes Into Administration

4,500 Jobs Lost At Chocolate Teapots Ltd

And then, at the bottom of the list, was this cheerful entry:

Peston: Good News At Last

That man has serious issues…

Anyway, so we are in a recession, and if Satan Peston is to be believed, it is all the fault of poor banking practices, which I have to say, I’m perfectly willing to go along with. Recently, I’ve had far more to do with my bank than I’m used to; partly because I’m earning less than I used to be, and so am having to juggle my finances a bit to keep in the black, and partly because the Fabulous L and I are spending this coming weekend in Brussels, enjoying our first ever romantic weekend away, and so there’s been a lot of buying of Eurostar tickets and booking hotels and buying Euros and what not to be done, all of which involves banks.

So, what I want to know is this: Why does it take 4 whole days for L to transfer some money from her account to mine via the electronic wonderfulness of the internet, using services provided by banks, who are, after all, specialists at moving money, when it takes less than a minute for a girl in M&S to take a wad of notes from me, count them, tell me what I’ll get in Euros if I go either under or over, count out the Euros and hand them to me in and nice little envelope? *Pants*

It’s absurd! How can banks justify these waiting times, which haven’t changed since coins were first invented, in the 21st Century. It takes less than a second to send enough information down a phoneline to securely authorise a transaction. Less than a second. It is a tiny, tiny amount of data, even taking encryption into account. There is more data in this paragraph than is needed to move money from one account to another, and yet our banks tell us it takes 4 working days. Working days? What are those? I use my money 7 days a week and I expect it to work 7 days a week. I don’t expect it to take weekends off and finish early on a Friday; especially not when I’m having to work evenings and sometimes weekends to earn it!

I tried to visit my bank at 9 o clock one Wednesday morning before Christmas, and found it to be closed. Why? Because they were having a staff meeting, and they were too sodding lazy to come in an hour early to do so, meaning that the bank couldn’t open until 10. 10 in the morning! I know bars that open earlier than that!

*Deep Breath*

I’m sorry, dear reader, that this is fast turning into an insane rant, of the sort you probably don’t want to listen to, but am I the only one who sees the sheer insanity of the situation? The government is worrying itself over bad banking practices suck as risk management, which may be all very well, but how are they able to deal with something like that in banks when the sector as a whole hasn’t even mastered basic customer service skills? How can anyone hope to reform practices that are so complicated even the bankers don’t really understand them, when they can’t even master the art of being open on time?

Why is it that we live in a world where I can spend my money in Tesco at 3 in the morning, but I can’t deposit a cheque at 6 in the evening? Or at the weekends? Or bank holidays?

It seems to me that if the government wish to make good on their promise to overhaul the banking system, perhaps they’d be better off starting at the bottom again and working their way up. At least then they wouldn’t be building on foundations of sand.

Posted in My Life, Rant, Social Commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Pizza-Pasta, Pasta-Pizza

Posted on Friday 27 February 2009 by Mark
Pasta Hut

Pasta Hut

Well, hello there blog! Been a while hasn’t it?

Yes, yes, I know and I’m sorry. But as I have pointed out in a few of my recent posts, coursework comes before blogging. Or rather came before blogging. For now I’m proud to announce that at around 09:30am this morning I finally handed in the last piece of coursework on my degree course :D

As you can imagine, I am delighted to say the least. I’ve been working on this year’s coursework for the past two months, and I know my blogging has suffered for it, but I really hope that that is about to change now that it is over, done and out the way.

And so to today’s post, which I’m actually writing, proper old skool style, in Word, rather than in WordPress. Not by choice, I might add, but thanks to a bunch of greedy people using over 150Gb of bandwidth to download stuff from my servers this morning, my account has now been suspended for 24 hours, to let the servers recover. Which, by the way, is really, really annoying on the first evening in 2 months that I’ve been able to justify playing with my various websites.

Anyway, enough about that. What I actually wish to talk to you about today is a visit the Divine L and I made to Pizza Hut in Plymouth the other week. We’d fancied going for a while, especially given the whole Pizza/Pasta thing.

Actually on that note, it probably goes without saying, but that is one of the worst ideas in the history of retailing. Pizza Hut works. It makes good tasting, desirable pizzas at prices people are prepared to pay, in a wide enough range of options to satisfy everyone, save the strictly orthodox members of a cult, sworn to abstain from Pizza. It works really well. There was no need to waste all that money switching to Pasta Hut. Even if the idea wasn’t too stupid to try, the reality helped put aside any doubts on the issue I had.

We were, as I previously observed, keen to visit Pizza Hut to try the new pasta dishes. We’d acquired a 50% off voucher, in order to ease our bank accounts and, upon arriving, we found ourselves stuck between craving a pizza and wanting to try the new pasta offerings.

In the end we settled on one pizza and one pasta dish, to share between us. I forget which pizza we chose, as they are all rather nice, but I think it might have been the Chicken Supreme. The memory of the pasta will, I fear, never leave my memory though, for it was a disappointment from the first sorry mouthful until the last.

As it was a limited edition, we decided to try the Liz McClarnon Signature Pasta Dish. According to the menu, former Atomic Kitten Liz had recently won Celebrity Masterchef. If this is true then I can only assume that the judges had left their taste buds at home that day. Not that it would have made much difference. The dish was so bland that at first I thought I’d accidentally put a napkin in my mouth instead of the £7.99 pasta offering. It was like taking a microwave pasta meal and then somehow extracting what little flavour was left.

The pasta was tasteless.

The mascarpone sauce was tasteless.

The Italian Style sausage was tasteless.

The roasted tomatoes were, yep, you’ve guessed it, tasteless.

How could a meal be so bland? Was it just me? No, L was of exactly the same opinion. The pizza was lovely, but the pasta could have been made from cardboard. I could have been eating the table for all my taste buds knew!

What an utter disappointment, to build one’s hopes up so, only to have them dashed by such a miserable offering. If it hadn’t been for the 50% off voucher ensuring that we weren’t actually paying for the thing, we’d have probably demanded our money back, it was that poor. And L and I aren’t exactly known for complaining about food. Quite the reverse in fact.

Ladies and gentlemen, I implore you. If you feel the need to go to Pizza Hut, please do. If you feel the need to order a pizza, please do. If you feel the need to have a healthy salad with it, please, please do. But whatever you do, please do not waste your hard earned cash on a Pizza Hut pasta, they just aren’t worth it.

/rant

Posted in My Life, Social Commentary | Tagged , , | 4 Comments