Paul Hammond's Blog

I had the pleasure of watching my twins Dylan and Niamh play the steel pans (you might know them as steel drums) in their school's summer concert this evening.  They have only been learning for 10 weeks, but they have come on enormously.  You can see them playing in the Soapbox video below.

(BTW, I misheard the name of the second song and captioned it wrong in the video; it should be "Janey Girl".  I didn't notice until after the edits had finished processing, and I didn't want to wait while it encoded it again!)

At the end of the concert, the head teacher came on stage to thank all the staff.  He thanked the recorder teacher, adding that she had also helped out the brass teacher this term; trumpets and tenor horns and the like.  She acted very modestly as if she had done nothing special, and then tried to validate her coyness by shouting out to the audience "I'm very good at fingering, I just can't blow".

I thought my head would explode from the pressure of keeping the laughter inside!

Most people know that you should probably shop around for insurance when your renewal is due.  It doesn’t matter what type of insurance – car, house, pet, life – you should always do the due diligence around renewal time to ensure you are getting the best deal for the right kind of cover.  Now, normally I am not so good at taking my own advice, since I have tendencies towards procrastination when it comes to that kind of thing.  This year was different.

The house insurance renewal quote came in the post (building and contents under the same policy) and I was quite surprised at how expensive it was.  It was up 10% from the previous year, and was in the £800+ range.  I asked my wife to check out some of the comparison sites on the Internet to see what other companies might charge.  She managed to find some quotes of £250-£300, which was obviously quite a difference!  I presumed this was because the cover was different, and that these quotes were somehow inferior.  To check, I asked her to get a quote from our current company.  Once she’d selected all the same options we currently have, the website told her it would cost us £310 to insure our home.

Wait a second.  Let’s review those numbers again.

Renewal quote: £825.  New customer quote: £310.  That’s a saving of around 62% on the initial quote.

I called the retention department to complain.  I was told that there were large discounts for getting a quote online, and that there were numerous “free” portions of the insurance right now for new customers.  In fact, the whole insurance industry in the UK right now seems to be geared towards customer acquisition and not customer retention.  Even so, no-one could explain where such a huge difference came from.  What was worse was that the retention team could not match the online quote – their software simply wouldn’t allow an adjustment of that much.

Then the helpful lady told me that I should simply cancel my current policy and take out the new, cheaper one.  Which is what I did.  So, I have exactly the same insurance with exactly the same company (that I am very happy with, by the way), at 38% of the cost.  Scary.

Ladies and gentlemen, check your policy renewal prices!

I am going on holiday with my family in August, and the last part of our trip will see us in Boston.  Being a big Red Sox fan, I wanted to take my family along to a Red Sox vs Toronto Blue Jays game.  A few weeks ago I searched on Ebay for tickets (since all home games at Fenway Park are sold out for the season), and through that stumbled across a link to StubHub.com.

StubHub has loads of tickets available for the game I want to attend.  The site has some great security features for the wary ticket purchaser, including guarantees that you will get the tickets you pay for etc.  It all seems very professional.  With tickets hovering around $250 each, I wanted to feel confident that it was going to be a genuine purchase, and I was very pleased to have found a great looking solution to my ticket-purchasing desires.

Well, I finalised my travel details today, so decided to choose and buy some seats while there was still a good choice.  I found some excellent seats in the right price range, and proceeded to the checkout.  Now, as part of the checkout screen, there is an option to select your country of residence (and billing address) that includes the following items:

Naturally, I selected “United Kingdom”, entered the rest of my address details and pressed “Next”.  At this point, the page reloaded with the following error:

Just in case, I tried re-entering the post code without a space; this sometimes works.  Same error.  I was pretty much blocked completely!

I called the helpline to ask what I should do next.  The helpful lady on the phone informed me that I cannot order anything off the StubHub.com site unless I use a credit card that has a US billing address, and I have a US address to ship the tickets to!  I asked her why there were options for other countries, but she didn’t know.  All she could do was repeat that I needed US-based shipping and billing details in order to proceed.  So that is it.  The end of the road for me and StubHub.

I’ve looked everywhere on the site, and unless I am being useless (which is, of course, completely possible!) I cannot find a single reference to the fact that you can only purchase from the US.  Not even deep in the help files or the FAQ is it mentioned.  Why didn’t the error just say “I am sorry, you cannot purchase from this site unless you are in the US”.

Sites that restrict sales to “US only” generally frustrate me to a point, but I do recognise that there are often reasons for doing so – perhaps licensing laws (in the case of iTunes or radio services), or shipping difficulties for bulky items etc.  What annoyed me about this situation was the fact that the website lists the UK (and other countries) both during account registration and purchase, with the direct implication that I am perfectly fine to go ahead and spend a large amount of money with them.  I spent probably an hour in total checking out tickets, looking up the view from the seats on various other websites etc.  That is a wasted hour.  To get to the last hurdle and be presented with a particularly cryptic error message that required me to make an international phone call to address is completely unacceptable to me as a user.  To have wasted an hour on a site that could have told me up front that I was not able to ultimately use its features is doubly unacceptable.

Oh, and it means I don’t really have any options for buying Red Sox tickets either.  Which is going to upset my kids more than this experience has upset me!  Any ideas on where I *can* buy tickets from the UK, blogosphere?

I am wondering if it is only me that was confused by this, so I thought I'd post a picture and ask everyone out there what they think.

My satellite TV DVR has been playing up the last few weeks, often marking a programme as "not recorded due to no signal".  I went in to the settings of the system, and check the signal strength.  The screen is shown below, click for a larger version of the image.

Without thinking too much about it, what do you think my "Input 1 Signal Strength" is?  Is it high or low?  Please leave me a comment with what you thought.

Apparently, the very light gray is the "positive" colour, and it turns out that I have a very high signal strength for input 1.  However, for days I was fiddling around with the dish and the cables, because I believed I had a really *low* signal strength as indicated by the small dark blue portion of the box.  The dark blue colour was a much more obvious "positive" colour to me.  The predominantly dark blue areas for the Lock Indicator, Network ID and Transport Stream drew my eye to the dark blue of the strength and quality scales.  Without any cues as to the correct way to read this, I got confused.

My wife tells me I am being pretty daft, that reading the bars "left to right" is totally obvious, and that the light gray is obviously the "content" colour (see the 07d4 on the Transport Stream for example - the background is blue, the content gray).  I've asked two other people, and they also said the gray was the measure colour.

Even knowing the correct way to view this, I *still* see the dark blue of the indicators first.

So what did you think?  Is this easy, and I am just nuts?  Or is this a confusing UI?  Leave me a comment, let me know!

Niamh had a friend stay over last night.  At one point during the evening, in between computer games and movies and popcorn, the three of them disappeared upstairs for a while.  They were very quiet.

The next thing I know they burst into my office growling and hissing and looking like this:

I thought it was quite an impressive job!

If you prefer your conclusions as a mathematical equation:
unattended_8_years_olds + make_up = zombies for all known values of unattended_8_year_olds.

I have a question for you all.

I am in the HAVE LOST bucket.  The few times I have lost data in the past have certainly contributed to my current backup strategy.  More recently though, the shear amount of important data I have has shaped my backup strategy even more.

I have a single 500Gb disk that holds my entire "My Documents" directory.  When I look at it in detail, the drive contains:

• 23,665 photos, stretching over 9 years; this includes ALL the photos and videos of my kids first 8 years of life (75.4Gb).
• 2,090 video files from my DV camera and my HD camera, also going back 9 years (172Gb).
• 15,062 MP3 and M4A audio files from my iTunes catalog (65.7Gb).
• Many MIDI and Audio files from my music composition and production.
• Documents, Financial files etc.

As you can see, "My Documents" = "Almost My Entire Digital Life".  Losing any of this data would have been depressing.  Losing all of it would be completely heart-breaking.

While I was away on business, at some point this data drive died.  Completely.  No hope of connecting it to copy off whatever I could salvage.  It was simply unreadable.  Dead.

At this point, think about how you would feel, given the above data.  Would you be a little sad?  Sobbing?  Suicidal?  Or mildly annoyed?  Thankfully, I was simply "mildly annoyed".

Restoring My Data

Twenty four hours after arriving home, I am now back up and running with very little pain (apart from the cost of a new drive to replace the dead one).  My attention to a backup strategy completely saved my backside on this occasion.  However, this failure has also made me aware of another round of tweaking that I need to do to ensure total and flawless recovery the next time this happens.  AND REST ASSURED, IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN.

So, what is my current approach?  I have a single drive that holds all of my data, as you have seen.  You could have multiple drives, this works just the same.

• I use the online backup service Mozy (http://www.mozy.com/) to backup most of my data.  This guarantees that I have off-site copies of my files.  An alternative service I have also used in the past is Carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com/).  Both have good features, and are reasonably priced.
• I use FolderShare (http://www.foldershare.com/) to create multiple copies of my most important files, or files that I use daily on my multiple home and work machines.
• I have a nightly backup that runs, which copies all of the files from the system and data drives to an external 1Tb drive.  I use a product called Retrospect that came with one of my external drives.  There is a great alternative called SyncBack that is either freeware (v3) or a very cheap option (v4).

In this particular case, it was from the 1Tb backup drive that I was able to salvage my data.  If that had failed, I would have resorted to a combination of Mozy.com data and FolderShare'd data on my other machines.  I attached both my 1Tb backup drive and the new drive to my laptop, and copied the data back to the new drive to create an identical version of what was there before.  Then I reattached the drive back to my desktop and booted up.  Once logged in, I simply reset the ownership and permissions of the "My Documents" directories to the correct settings.

Potential Flaws

There are a couple of possible issues with the above that I have been considering since the failure occurred.  Luckily they didn't occur this time, but I will be altering my approach to cater for these.

1. When the drive died, it disappeared from Windows.  The Mozy client then decided the files had been deleted, and proceeded to remove them from the current online backup set.  Luckily I can go back to older backup sets, but "deleted" files are only kept for 30 days.  If I had been away for a longer period of time, they may have been purged.
2. My nightly backup currently does a "mirror" of my filesystems, with no history.  Files that are added are added to the backup, and files that are deleted are removed.  Luckily, in this case, the software recognized that the drive was missing and skipped the backup.  If it had seen the drive and decided the files were no longer there (as Mozy did), it would have proceeded to wipe the data off the backup too.  I need to look at the options I have for my backup software to keep historical versions of files.

I mitigated the possible issues above by simply powering down the machine remotely to ensure no further damage could occur until I could be back at home there to figure things out!

Side Note 1: Windows Home Server

This incident has also made me think more seriously about buying a Windows Home Server.  One of the great features about this solution is the backup software.  It can backup complete machines, and has historical backups so you can get at older versions of your files if you need to.  Scott Hanselman did a review of Home Server that you can find here: Review - HP MediaSmart Windows Home Server

Side Note 2: FolderShare and Off-Site Backups For Family

One other thing I use FolderShare for is to backup data from various family machines.  I set FolderShare up on their machines and then invited my own FolderShare account to share their key folders.  The files get copied to my machine here.  That way, they benefit from having an off-site backup as well as duplicate data via my nightly backup.

Go And Do It.  Now.

Let me finish by saying this.  WHOEVER YOU ARE, WHATEVER YOU DO WITH YOUR COMPUTER, WHATEVER FILES YOU HAVE, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP STRATEGY THAT SAFEGUARDS *ALL* OF YOUR DATA.  Do it now.  Turn the TV off, and get working.  Don't stop until you have everything backed up, preferably in more than one place.  Your data drive could fail tonight.  It won't give you any helpful warnings before it does.  Make data loss an event of "mild annoyance", not complete despair.

If any of you checked out Sara Bareilles from one of my earlier posts and enjoyed what you heard, you should also take a listen to Colbie Caillat.  More great song-writing, great lyrics, and a fabulous voice.

Once again, Walmart has a Soundcheck session that you can watch.

I snapped these two pictures of Ruby the other night while she was snoring away on the sofa.  How is that a comfortable position to be sleeping in?  It must be, because it is pretty much her default position, even when sleeping on the hardwood floor.  I often find her upside down, right up against the front door!

Click on the images for a larger version.

[P.S. please excuse the state of the sofa - she was playing in the mud all day and decided our sofas needed some light brown highlights.]

It has been a while since I posted about an artist I am enjoying listening to.  Frankly, there aren't that many that strike me enough to warrant a blog post!  However, after stumbling across some videos of Sara Bareilles playing acoustic sets of her music, I decided that I really wanted to tell the world to run (not walk) to the CD store and buy "Little Voice".

I first discovered Sara when I heard the song "Love Song".  This song is about as perfect a pop song as you could wish to write.  It has fantastic lyrics, a kick ass chorus that you'll hum for hours after hearing it, and her voice is just perfect.  The song prompted me to seek out the album, and it turned out to be my "album of 2007", resoundingly so.

There isn't a single "album filler" track on the entire CD.  Every single song is well written, both musically and lyrically.  Some of the harmonies make the hairs on your arms and neck stand up straight when they kick in.  The production is great.  And Sara's voice is anything but "little".

A great test of an artist for me is usually when I see them playing in a really stripped down acoustic environment - it tells me whether they are for real, or just well produced.  I stumbled across the following video linked to via the Sara Bareilles Facebook fan page.  The music pretty much speaks for itself, so I won't even try!

Watch Sara's acoustic set for Walmart's Soundcheck site (particularly "Morningside" and "Gravity").

Is the world going mad?  From this article at FoxNews.com, it is reported that:

"People who have been injured while walking and texting on their cell phones may be in luck.  A London street is experimenting with padded lampposts to protect those not paying attention from banging into them, ITN reports."

I have a whole other solution.  DON'T TEXT WHILE YOU ARE WALKING.  Stop and move to the side.  There is a reason why they have banned mobile phone use in cars in the UK, and it is mostly because people are completely incapable of any other cognitive function once a mobile phone is introduced into the mix.  Even just talking on a phone can render a person incapable of sensing their surroundings.

The report goes on to say:

"In a study, more than a quarter of respondents wanted lines on the pavement to create routes for texters to walk while using their phones."

Mad I tell you.  Completely insane.

Last week, through a friends blog, I stumbled across a Flickr group called 365 Days.  Since writing a novel for National Novel Writing Month last November, I have been looking for something new and creative to challenge me.  I don't feel that I have been spending enough time with my camera of late, so this particular challenge appealed to me.

Very simply, to quote the 365 Days rules page: "the 365 Days group is a project in which members submit one self portrait each day for a year".  There is further clarification on the site on what counts etc., but that is pretty much the essence of the project.  Again, I quote, "the main thing is that you are both the photographer and the subject. For the purposes of this group, any photo which you took that contains any part of your body counts".

If you'd like to follow my progress, here is my 365 Days Flickr photo set.  Alternatively you can follow in your feed reader, via the RSS feed here.

For day 1, I couldn't decide on a specific photo, so I ended up creating a collage.  It looks a bit like this:

As the year goes on, it'd be great to hear your feedback.  You can comment on the photos over at the Flickr photo set.

I bought my son a new Lego set on my recent trip to Seattle; gifts are a mandatory bribe for the whole family when I go away for twelve days!  This time I chose a Technic Dune Buggy (item 8296 for those who follow that kind of thing), which is a smaller version of a set I have had since I was about his age.

Saturday afternoon, we set about building the set together.  For a long while, Lego kits would involve Dylan impatiently watching me build, because for him it was mostly about playing with the finished article.  More recently though, I have enjoyed getting Lego for him a lot more than I used to.  This is because he now has both the dexterity and patience to work through the instructions by himself, with occasional guidance by me as necessary.

He got about half way through construction, and was putting together the assembly that would make the rack and pinion steering.  We both searched for a while in the remaining unused pieces for two funky looking Lego bricks that were to hold the wheels in place.  Nothing.  After 5 minutes, Dylan got bored of looking so I sorted through the remaining pieces one by one to make sure we weren't being silly.  Still nothing.

This surprised me - I don't think I have ever had a Lego kit that was missing pieces before.  I headed over to the Lego website to see if they had a customer service phone number.  I found that they actually had something much better than that, a simple online service!  You simply select "I have missing pieces in a new kit" from the options, enter the code number of the set you purchased, and it gives you a list of the pieces that should be in the box including pictures of the pieces.  You select how many of each item you need, enter your mailing address and sit back and wait.  Genius.

I received a confirmation mail not long after ordering that said "We are sorry to hear that your new LEGO set was incomplete. Our production checks are rigorous. We even weigh the boxes electronically before they're shipped to check that there's nothing missing. However, from time to time one or two pieces can be missing from a set, and of course we're happy to replace them immediately".

I love it when a company makes it ridiculously simple to deal with simple enquiries.  Good stuff Lego.

A couple of weeks ago, Laura and I took a trip to Las Vegas.  Neither of us had been there before, so we weren't totally sure what to expect.  Turns out, Vegas is a fun city, and I'd definitely like to go back there soon.

We left the kids at home early on a Tuesday morning (thanks to my Dad and Martie for kid/puppy-sitting!), and headed to Heathrow.  I'd cashed in a bunch of air miles, and we were lucky enough to be flying British Airways First Class to Los Angeles where we were going to pick up a car and drive the 280-odd miles across the Mojave desert to Las Vegas.

First Class was a fun experience.  I am fortunate enough to be able to travel Business Class on some of my work trips, so I am a used to the larger seats and better food.  For me, First didn't seem to warrant the large difference in price you would pay over traveling Business.  For Laura, who doesn't regularly travel, I think the experience was a lot more exciting.  Or perhaps that was just the champagne they *insisted* on making her drink, over and over again! 

Our car ended up being a Ford Mustang convertible.  Fun car.  It was the cheapest deal they had for something that wasn't a 2-door compact, would you believe!  The drive from LA to LV took a while - about 6 hours in all I think, with a stop at In and Out Burger and a car refueling break on the way.  It was dark by the time we got out of Los Angeles, so there wasn't a lot to see along the way.

We stayed at the Wynn Hotel.  I was surprised at how cheap the rooms were for a luxury hotel.  I guess they make their money elsewhere - the shopping and gambling were both extravagant and ubiquitous.  The opulent stage was set on first arrival with the Ferrari / Maserati garage at the hotel entrance and the shopping parade that included Dior, Vuitton and Rolex among its tenants.  We had a "regular" room, which measured 640 square feet - that's huge for a hotel room in my experience - for a little over $200 a night.  Having walked through many of the other hotels whilst we were there, I really came to like the vibe of the Wynn - it isn't really themed as such, and just has a mellow, luxurious quality to it.  I highly recommend it to anyone who is thinking of visiting.

We took a helicopter tour to the Grand Canyon which was fantastic.  We used a very professional company called Maverick Helicopters, which again, I recommend highly.  Taking off from the airport, we headed east over suburban Las Vegas, over Lake Mead, a quick view of the Hoover dam, then over to the Canyon.  We landed deep in the Canyon at a spot perhaps 300ft above the Colorado river.  It was a perfect day, visibility over 100 miles.  It is hard to describe (or even capture with a photograph) how awe inspiring the views were.  Wow.

Something else we'd never done before was to visit a shooting range.  We both took turns using a 9mm pistol to shoot holes in paper targets.  You see hand guns used in TV shows all the time, read about them in books.  You can't get a feel for what it is really like until you've actually picked one up and pulled the trigger.  Everyone should try it at least once.  The place we went to was appropriately called The Gun Store.  If you're feeling more adventurous, they offer machine gun rentals too...

Of course we spent time touring the Strip, checking out the various fun things each hotel had to offer.  We rode rides (kudos to Laura for riding all three at the top of the Stratosphere - I only managed one of them), ate great food, watched shows, shopped.  We really liked the steak restaurant Gallagher's at New York New York; the steaks are all dry aged on display in the window of the restaurant.  The Bellagio fountains are very impressive even if their choice of accompanying music is sometimes a little on the lame side.  The LE RÊVE show at the Wynn was incredible; the logistics of presenting a show that is predominantly in or under water fascinate me.

I'd foolishly decided up front that a 6 day trip to Vegas where the flights were virtually "free" would be a cheap holiday.  Forget that.  The food is fabulous, the shopping is great (especially with the £/$ conversion) and the gambling is a little too much fun.  If you're going to go to Vegas, pack an extra wallet, and make sure it is full of cash.

All in all, a great time in a great city.  I feel like we only scratched the surface of what it has to offer.  What would you recommend we see next time we go?

I went skiing yesterday with my colleagues Elliot and Arran up at Crystal Mountain here in Washington state.  Crystal Mountain is the largest ski area in Washington, and is located about 70 miles south east of Seattle.  It has the base at 4,400ft and a summit at 7,012ft.  In contrast, for those who know the area a little, Mount Rainier's summit is at 14,411ft.

Prior to yesterday, I had only skied once before (for 3 days in the run up to my sister's wedding on top of the mountain at Courchevel in France).  I have also never had any lessons which meant I was relying on the few technique tips I could remember that my sister's husband had given me back in April 2006.  As a result, I was finding the green runs at Crystal pretty hard going at first.  With my fitness at its current low state, my legs were soon screaming at me for the punishment I was giving them!

But perseverance is key I always find, and before too long I was snow ploughing less, getting up some decent speed and cornering more smoothly.  I was still finding the steeper sections hard, and the longer I skied the less power I had in my legs to correct myself when things started to go awry.  I definitely fell over more in the later part of the day as a result.

After a total of 4 days skiing in my life, I have decided that I must take lessons the next time I visit a ski slope - I don't want to end up with bad habits that are too ingrained to change.  In the meantime, I will enjoy the muscle pain from the exertion, and the dull throbbing of the various bruises I gained from wiping out, knowing that I'm marginally better at skiing today than I was on Saturday.

I've been a fan of the Moleskine notebook for a while now.  Used in days gone past by the likes of Hemingway and Picasso, they are described as "notebooks covered in hard-wearing oilcloth-covered cardboard (Moleskine)".  I am not convinced about the hard-wearing bit.

I use a large lined notebook.  It is about A5 sized, and has 240 pages all ready for note taking goodness.  However, I have never made it to the end of a notebook without the cover cracking or splitting in some way.  My latest notebook didn't even last until the middle, as you can see in the first picture below where the black elastic marks my "current page".  The second picture is a close-up of the split along the edge of the spine, and the third is a larger image showing where I crudely patched up the initial cracking with tape.

Yesterday, I finally had to buy a roll of gaffa tape and replace the shoddy tape with a decent "top to bottom" taped up spine.  It has given the notebook back a spine, but boy does it look ugly!

When I see other people's notebooks, they always look pristine.  Is it just me?  Am I particularly hard on my Moleskines?  I don't feel like I am; I'm not deliberately mistreating them in cruel ways.  I bet Hemingway and Picasso didn't have to gaffa tape THEIR notebooks!

Oh well.  The paper is still great quality and the notebooks sit nice and flat when you open them due to the way they are stitched, so I guess I'll just have to make do with my custom repair work to keep the outsides as good as the insides.

Having purged over 1Gb of Temp Files after writing my last blog post about iTunes using lots of disk space, 5 days later I was back up to 1Gb again.

This time I noticed that the Temp Files were all timed at either 2 or 3 minutes past the hour, which made me suspect something specific was triggering the new file creation.  I checked my PodCast update schedule, and found it was set to run hourly, at 2 minutes past the hour.  Coincidence?  I think not.

I set PodCast updates to be daily, and the Temp File creation has become more of a daily occurrence.  Still annoying, but at least I won't have to purge the files so often.

[4:53am, Shanghai - jet lag can be nasty sometimes]

I discovered an issue with iTunes a little while ago while performing a routine clean-up of my hard disks.  Essentially, when iTunes tries to save your "iTunes Music Library.xml" file, it appears to create a temporary file first that it renames once it is successfully saved.

The issue is that iTunes doesn't clean up these temporary files, for some reason.  When I didn't have many songs in iTunes, that didn't seem to matter so much, but now I have 65 Gigs of music (approximately 12,000 songs and counting) my Library XML file is 20Mb in size.  Every temporary file it creates is the same size - 20Mb - and that soon adds up.  iTunes is supposed to delete these files when you exit the software, but (a) it doesn't and (b) I never quit iTunes anyway as I leave it running to download PodCasts.

What is worse, is that it seems to be adding between 5 and 8 copies of this file every day.  Here is a screen shot of my current iTunes folder.  I cleaned it up 5 or 6 days ago.  I am already back up to 1 Gig of used space in "Temp File X" files already.

I have had to set up a nightly job that emails me the size of this folder so that I know when to go and purge it.  Ridiculous.

There is an Apple help file on this that you can find here: "iTunes: Multiple Temp Files in iTunes Folder".  Incredibly, this has been happening since version 3 of iTunes.  *Surely* iTunes knows when it isn't using a particular "Temp File X" and can just go and delete it for me?  Oh well.

So, go and check your "My Music\iTunes" folder to see if you can reclaim any of your disk space!

It is good to know that I have brought up my baby girl with a well-rounded approach to Christmas.

Well, after 29 days of writing, I submitted a 50,025 word novel to the NaNoWriMo website and their word-count bots verified my masterpiece.  Then they let me pick up my "Winner" award.  That's right, I get a small graphic that I can post to my blog and send to my mum and dad.  Oh, and of course, I get the satisfaction of having succeeded at something.

For those who are interested, I used an Agile approach to my writing.  To prove it, here is my burn-up chart for the month.  As you can see, I had a nerve-wracking few days around the 23rd due to sickness.  The 28th was a word frenzy as I caught up!

Little things can sometimes make me very very happy.  I was just checking out the new options in v4 of ClearContext and stumbled across the "Mark message(s) as read when filing" option.  I have been waiting for this simple feature forever!

Usually, I would have to select each message in a thread individually and mark it as read manually before filing it.  Now I can just click "File Thread" on any message in that thread and know that it is cleanly filed away.  That will save me a ton of time and keystrokes when managing my inbox.

Yey!

Having temporarily turned this blog into the Ruby-blog when we bought our puppy, I am now turning it into the Novel-blog.  Sorry...!

Midnight last night marked the halfway point of the month.  15 days gone, 15 days to go.  To be on track I needed to be at 25,000 words by bedtime last night.

I am pleased to say I am at 25,911 words, just keeping the word count slightly ahead of the game.  The better news is that I *think* I have the rest of the story planned out in my head now, and I *think* it will be enough to fill the remaining 24,000-odd words.

Now, who wants to read it when I'm done?

So, I am seven complete days in now, and I should be at 11,667 words.  I am at 11,292, which is pretty close.  I am finding it a little easier to write than I did on days 1 and 2, and the words are definitely flowing better.  There is no guarantee that they are any good, of course, but at least I am getting them down "on paper".

In the process, I have found a nice editor that allows me to focus just on the novel - Dark Room.  They describe the tool as follows:

"Dark Room is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, Dark Room is just about you and your text."

By default, it runs full screen, and is completely black.  The text is green.  It allows you to focus on only your writing, without screen clutter or distractions.  Give it a go.

My friend Casper is also working on a novel, and his word count currently stands at 1,859 according the the NaNoWriMo site.  I hope he has written more than this and has just neglected his online count, otherwise he may struggle to hit the finish line!

Also, Drew Miller has started writing, after seeing tweets (either mine or Casper's I guess) about this on http://twitter.com.  Scarily, he started on day 3, and then trashed his first effort yesterday on day 7 and started again.  He now has to write 2,175 words a day to succeed.  Doubly scary is the fact he is posting every chapter to a blog as he finishes it - I just don't have the guts for that!  Check out Drew's work here.

An update to my favourite Outlook add-in has been released today - check out the ClearContext press release here, and then run (don't walk) to download ClearContext here.

November is National Novel Writing Month.  I initially found out about this a couple of years ago, but never felt that I had the time to spend writing 50,000 words in 30 days.

This year though, having just returned from a relaxing holiday in the Caribbean and believing I had just enough spare time to do it, I thought I would bite the bullet and have a go.

The idea is to write 50,000 words in November to "win".  The only prize is your own sense of self-achievement.  Think "running a marathon" for lazy types who prefer to exercise their fingers.  You have to just let the words come, with minimal editing.  It isn't even all that important to have the plot lined up in advance (at least I hope it isn't, since I don't have a clue where mine is going).

So here I am on day 5, with 4,593 words under my belt.  45,407 to go.

Makes you wonder what the heck I am doing wasting time and words writing to you folks reading my blog!  Get back to the novel Paul, time is ticking...

Anyway, it isn't too late to catch up - you can still get 50,000 words in if you start in the next day or so.  Go on, challenge yourself...

At the risk of turning this blog into a "Ruby-blog", here are a couple of recent videos!  These will be the last for a while, I promise. 

The first one is from the day she came home with us:

Video: Ruby Comes Home

The second one was the first time she barked - apparently she thought she could fight the mop and win!

Video: Ruby vs Mop

Last weekend we took our kids to see the quarter finals of the British Basketball League, where Guildford Heat took on London United.

I have been to see the Seattle Supersonics play a few times at the Key Arena, and saw the Boston Celtics a long while back, and have had great fun every time.  Somehow though, it was much more fun watching Guildford play.

• Maybe it was because they are effectively my "local" team?
• Maybe it was watching my 7 year old daughter eat a foot long hot dog while my son banged the noisy blow up sticks together (do those things have a name?!)?
• Maybe it was because Guildford trailed by 16 at the half, but managed to pull it back in exciting 3rd and 4th quarters to win 71-68 and go through to the semi-finals?
• Maybe it was because the 1,000 strong crowd had a surprising amount of passion for the team?

Anyway, whatever the reason, we all had a blast.  We will definitely be trying to catch a few home games when the season returns in October.  If you live near a town that has a British Basketball League team, I highly recommend going along to check them out.

We are now at the end of the 9th week of construction on the extension to our house.  It has been quite a transformation so far, but I am already getting frustrated with the constant dust sheen over everything, as well as having to live in our dining room.

A few weeks ago I added some pictures to my photo album that showed the initial construction of the new outer walls.  You can see those here.

Since then, things have drastically changed.  All of the windows are in, as well as the conservatory glass.  The new roof is on, and many of the inner walls have come down.  We are just waiting on the new steels that will prevent the house falling down before the final wall is knocked out.  We can really see just how big our new kitchen will be now, although I am not sure the photos really convey this.  Anyway, check them out here.

We're getting a puppy.  After years of badgering, I finally gave in.  We went to visit the litter this morning, and I managed to take some video of Ruby, soon-to-be our flat-coated retriever puppy.  She's about 6 weeks old in this video - ain't she as cute as a button?!?

Video: Visiting Ruby

We'll be able to pick her up in a couple of weeks, and we are all looking forward to it a lot.  Except me.  The kids have dished out puppy-chores and guess who got "poo and pee duties"... 

I was in the kitchen the other day, washing up. I heard a noisy banging on the stairs.  This was shortly followed by my daughter appearing, dragging a small wheelie suitcase behind her.

"What are you up to, honey?", I asked.

"Nothing Daddy, just getting my hair bobbles."

Come again?  Surely she can't have that many...?  Sure enough, the case is pretty full.

I hope it is a while before the "handbags-and-shoes" phase kicks in...

I was skim-reading USA Today last night while waiting on dinner at my Paris hotel, and one particular story caught my eye.  It led with a headline about Phoenix embarking on a project to widen the Interstate 10 highway from 14 lanes to 24.  Yes, 24.  That's 12 each way.

In the UK, I think the widest motorway is 10 lanes - the M25 Heathrow stretch to the West of London - it lasts for maybe 10 miles.  Comprehending a highway that is 2.5 times as wide is amazing to me!

But it seems this is becoming more common in the US.  The article goes on to talk about some other significant developments:

An interstate highway wider than the length of a football field is not as rare as it was 10 years ago, when the El Toro interchange of Interstates 5 and 405 in Orange County, Calif., opened with 26 lanes.

The Katy Freeway, a stretch of I-10 from the Houston suburb of Katy to downtown. It's being widened to nine lanes in each direction.

A public-private plan to widen a stretch of Interstate 75 north of Atlanta to 23 lanes. Work could begin in 2008.

Incredible!  Read the USA Today article here.

We are having our house extended to create a larger living space downstairs.  The whole back wall of the house is moving 6 feet further out, and we are adding a conservatory on the back.

The first phase will involve building the new outer shell.  For the time being we are relatively unaffected by it all.  As soon as the outer shell is constructed though, the rooms currently being used as our kitchen and my office will be completely destroyed.  We are having fun trying to figure out what to do with all our stuff!

Current scheduled completion date - June 4th.  Four months of dirt and dust, with no cooking facilities.  Pity us!

Week 1 pictures can be see here by clicking here.

I got my inbox back to a zero email bounce over the weekend.  For some reason I have had a little trouble keeping the count down for the last couple of months, so it feels great to have an empty inbox again.

A twelve hour flight from Shanghai definitely has it's productivity plus points...!