You can find me at goodreads, and also at LibraryThing. Goodreads keeps track of the “number of books read” type of statistics that I want. But LibraryThing has a great recommendations engine. No matter what I tried to do with LibraryThing I couldn’t get it to import my “date read” of each book, and it’s also lost the majority of my ~1000 book writeups. Whereas Goodreads has just randomly missed books out when I’ve imported books to it….. Neither is perfect for my needs so I’m combining both and ironing out the flaws as I go.

LibraryThing is turning into a list of “every book I’ve ever read” – it’s definitely not just my “home library”. Goodreads is more of a tracking thing. So far.

In time I hope to get the “books read” lists on this sites back in sync with what I’ve actually read. One day.

Another new place to find me in on pinterest, which is some kind of communal pinboard for pretty things. I’m neither quite sure what it is or what it’s for, I’m just enjoying it as I find it!

So we went and picked strawberries. The strawberries were lovely – planted up on tables under poly tunnels – no back breaking leaning down to ground level and loads of just ripe fruit.

Then we went and got a few raspberries. I’m not such a fan of raspberry jam so these were intended for  breakfast with yoghurt.

And then my five year old fruit fiend wanted to know what other fruit we could pick. So we ended up picking a portion of gooseberries and some blackcurrants too. We got mildly confused because the currently yielding crop was red gooseberries. I rather expected Miranda to turn her nose up at the gooseberries as I wasn’t at all sure I liked them myself, but she turned out to love them, as indeed did I. Maybe this variety weren’t as tart as I remembered them.

We arrived home with our haul.

I’d already earmarked the unexpectedly nice gooseberries for gooseberry fool – with only a vague idea of how to make a fool. [I more or less followed this recipe, you just fold together whipped cream, cold custard & gooseberry puree.] I wondered what to do with the blackcurrants. I googled for a recipe for blackcurrant jelly… and got sidetracked by a recipe for cassis….

I know people make flavoured vodkas with soft fruits – I’ve mostly heard of it as a way of using up a glut of hedgerow blackberries – but I’d never tried it myself or realised you could use any old spirit and/or turn these into liqueurs at  a later date. Plus I think I had it in the same box as home brewing and winemaking – which I like but can’t currently be bothered with the ins and outs of.

A quick flick through numerous recipes led me to believe that there was no right or wrong way to go about making liqueurs. The basic recipe seems to be

• a) cover fruit in a spirit,
• b) agitate over several months decreasing frequency with time,
• c) decant liquid (you can stop at this point and drink the flavoured spirit)
• d) stick in a saucepan, add sugar and reduce down to sticky liqueur consistency,
• e) drink, on it’s own, over ice, with wine, champagne, sparkling water, whatever!

The recipes I found were all over the shop with regard to quantities, but the only major variations seemed to be whether you included the sugar in step a) or waited until step d).

I played it by ear and made up some blackcurrant vodka, some raspberry vodka, and then acting on random internet post decided to try half white rum & half vodka with the strawberries. I’m already thinking blackberry brandy might be a good future addition.

The plan is to leave the bottles until sometime before Christmas and then see about carrying on at step c), probably following d) for some of the produce and certainly partaking of step e).

I’m very pleased with the results of my (and Miranda’s) labour and am planning on going back for more fruit now!

found that they were only giving me ten characters (set with “maxlength=10″ in the source code) to tell them!

Doesn’t leave much to do apart from swear at them! Certainly no space for the treatise on international trade and the digital economy that I had in mind. I’d rather they didn’t ask at all.

So I was ecstatic when I saw that they’d built a “Legoland Discovery Centre” in Manchester, less than an hours drive from us. Obviously it’s tons smaller than Windsor, it’s all indoors, the tickets are a third of the price but we still expected it to have that special Lego spark in abundance.

As it only opened a few weeks ago I thought I’d write up our impressions of it for anyone who’s thinking of going.

Lego Factory – nice entrance to the centre but not that exciting. see plastic pretend to turn into lego bricks while kids in the group turn dials and spin levers. get a lego brick at the end.

Kingdom Quest – the only ride. you don’t seem to be able to go back for another go round. staff putting you on it don’t explain that you have a laser gun each to shoot things so you spend half the ride figuring that out and then trying to get the guns to work. fun but we’d have liked another go once we’d figured out what to do.

Lego Studios – 4D cinema – that’s a 3D cinema plus wind, rain etc. we liked this at Windsor and this was the same thing and just as good. pleased we saw a different film here though – this one was Bob the Builder building a roller coaster.

Miniland – bits of the north of england built out of lego. nice to see manchester, liverpool, blackpool, canals etc but there was a lot less than I was expecting and various scenes seemed to have been damaged already.

Fire Academy – bog standard playgym, didn’t look to have any lego customisation, miranda came straight out again.

Lego Racers Build & Test – build a lego vehicle and test it on the track. there didn’t seem to be enough wheels to go round. the track was neat and let five vehicles race against each other but could have done with a staff member to supervise. miranda’s vehicle got knocked out of her hand in the rush to get one of the five spaces on the track leading to tears. it looked like the same group of older kids were dominating it and we couldn’t be bothered to fight them really.

Duplo village – build with duplo. think miranda enjoyed this as much as anything as it was quieter and she could build in peace. you could also build on plates that would then shake like an earthquake which we all enjoyed!

Master Model Builder – this was a show with a leader taking you through building a lego model i think. it was full everytime we looked and the displayed showtimes were clearly wrong so we didn’t get to have a go at it. as there were clearly limited spaces some kind of queueing system would have helped.

Princess Palace – Miranda didn’t go near it but i think it was just bins of lego to build with an excess of the girly coloured pieces.

Cafe – didn’t look to be anything great. tables all taken up by adults waiting around for playing kids rather than people eating. we went over to the Trafford Centre to eat.

On the way out to the shop there was a game to play – stomping on lights on the floor to solve a puzzle. don’t think the stomping and the puzzle solving bore any relation to each other though.

Shop – shop seemed low on stock. pick a brick department looked depleted and build a minifigure section had no bodies left. prices weren’t displayed on shelves and were hard to find on the boxes. of course we left with several boxes of lego but would have liked to have had more choice and there was nothing like the range of souvenirs that they have at windsor.

Overall it didn’t make a good impression on us. At £33 for a family of three it wasn’t a cheap day out, and nor was it even a “day out” as we’d stretched our visit out to make it fill a couple of hours. Of course Legoland at Windsor costs more than that just for one adult but there’s so much more to do at Windsor that you can’t really compare the two.

Staff were wearing t-shirts saying “ask me about unlimited annual passes” and I’d like to have wanted to but there was nothing here to make us want to visit more than once every couple of years at most.

On the positive side it wasn’t too crowded, they look to be selling out on pre-booked tickets and not trying to pack in thousands, there was plenty of lego to play with, the ride and the cinema are good. It’d be a good place to visit on a rainy day and we could have spent ages building lego models, but then we could stay at home on a rainy day and tip all our lego onto the table….

We’ll make the pilgrimage to Windsor again, but the Manchester centre is a poor substitute. We enjoyed ourselves there for sure, but left vaguely disappointed at the experience.

In 2007 I’d been running a web company for nearly a decade and had spent the whole time leaping from one internet connection to the next, borrowing computers from friends and family, hulking around a heavy laptop and trying to keep connected on the move, patching together Palm organizers and Nokia phones to get a flaky internet connection and try to keep my web servers up and running at all times. I’d made myself ill worrying about my business’s welfare in the midst of moving house and I’d pretty much given up on the mobile internet malarkey and had decided that I’d had enough of the cutting edge of technology.

It was only when I began to stumble over comments like

So in conclusion, the iPhone is nice from start to finish, but Safari is really the thing that turns it from a phone into a mini-laptop.

from Matt Haughey that I began to realise that this might just be the thing I’d been waiting for.

I had to wait until the phone arrived in the UK in November 2007 when the iPhone became the first gadget I ever went out to buy on release day. This was the original 2G version before the launch of the app store. A pretty looking mobile phone with a standard set of apps on it. Safari however was all I wanted. The web in my pocket – more than that – my web in my pocket. I loved it and have barely been separated from it since.

It’s difficult to explain to people who don’t live in a web based world, or even a web based small business world how much this working mobile connectivity means to me. It’s not just a fancy gadget. Pretty much everything I need to do on a daily basis I do in a web browser and having my iPhone in my pocket has kept me sane and improved my life no end over the past couple of years.

As the iPhone has developed I’ve added apps and upgraded. My little phone that can is now my satnav when I’m driving, my music player (I never saw the point in the iPod after an early encounter with a Diamond Rio player), my main email sorting client, my main news reading device, my main games machine, my recipe book, my notebook, and I could keep adding to this list for some time.

I was quite excited about the launch of what everyone hoped would be Apple’s stunning new tablet PC. What I thought I wanted was jazzy new software to make the iPhone better. I don’t like the “search through the icon laden desktop” style of app organization and use the Spotlight search to find what I want 95% of the time. I don’t like not being able to do two things simultaneously. I want multitasking so I can keep an iSSH terminal session open while I check web pages in Safari. I don’t mind being limited to 8 open web pages in Safari, I wouldn’t mind being limited to 2 or 3 open apps.

The iPad as oversized iPhone initially underwhelmed me. I wanted a more powerful, better looking operating system and I didn’t want another system that was locked down to only running Apple approved applications.

Despite this I still want an iPad. Why? It only took a little thought for me to realise that a good web browser is really all I want. And a bigger screen will make everything that much easier. Easier for me to write my own personalised web apps to do exactly what I want to do. Back to where I started with the iPhone really.

Another minor detail that makes a difference: Chargers have been the bane of my life when travelling for too long. I’m really pleased to see that the iPad uses the same little charger as my iPhone – no big chunky plug to drag around. My MacBook’s charger is small-ish compared with the huge bricks previous laptops have had but is still a pain to transport.

One thing I’m not happy with is that it doesn’t look like the iPad will support a Dvorak keyboard layout. My iPhone supports a shed load of foreign keyboard layouts but not this variation on an English keyboard. It doesn’t make any difference on the iPhone as you can’t touch type on it but it will make a difference to typing on an iPad.

There’s been a lot of talk about the iPad – good talk, bad talk and indifferent talk – and I’m looking forward to seeing what really happens when people start to get their hands on them. Including me, I think.

I’ve always found flickr’s own map of your pictures frustrating as it seems to just present a smattering of my pics from places no matter how I fiddle with it. This app is far more what I envisage when I think of a map of my pictures. I like how there keep being more blanks as I zoom in – which sounds backwards but it makes me think how many more places there are to visit and enjoy, not just on a “there are whole continents out there!” level but right down to the “walking distance from home” level.

Virtual info informing real world enjoyment – that’s what I like.

See in fullscreen mode

Boys & Girls

This amused me no end. I clicked through to the “Stocking Filler” section of the Lego shop. And found one of those annoying “boys would like these stereotypical items and girls would like these stereotypical items” splits. Except in this case it seems girls and boys both like Lego. “Well, duh!” is about the most coherent analysis I can come up with.

To be fair once you clicked through to the gender biased sections they made it clear that boys must like Lego more than girls (not in this house) and that girls probably like pink stuff (again, not in this house) but the initial “let’s all get Lego animals and play games!” bit is pretty good all the same.

I think I’ve about finished messing around with the site for now. I’m quite happy with the way the new theme has worked out and given me new ideas about what should be here and how it should look. A major reason I wanted to get the whole Google Reader notes thing working properly was because I’ve never really been happy just posting “here is a link” – I much prefer to say “here is a link and here is what I think or why I find it interesting”. After all that’s the whole reason I started a weblog to start with. Without commentary it’s very difficult to post something you disagree with too – it’s like you confer your blessing on anything you link to.

And I’ve got my scrapbook over at Tumblr linked in as well. I always quite liked the service but it was a bit stuck out on a limb.

Plus I’m getting through writing up the reading backlog which also makes me happy. Having things written down about everything I’ve read in the last decade is fabulous and it’s not a habit I want to break.

So now I just need to return to normal service levels – at the moment I want to write everything all at once, link to everything I find good – but I don’t want to end up burnt out with a ghost of a website again next week or next month.

Now I think it might be time to come back over here and start looking after things a bit more often. I keep having thoughts that I can’t squeeze into 140 characters for Twitter. I’ve been wishing I had somewhere to post these – like I didn’t know I already had somewhere.

So, I’ve given the place a bit of a mini-makeover – excuse anywhere it’s not looking quite right as I haven’t quite tweaked the rather lovely wordpress theme into my own ugly concept of how I want things yet. Better to get going with it more or less working than sit around manicuring it forever and never getting back to the writing I think.

I have a huge backlog of books read to add to the weblog. I declared bankruptcy on book posts back in June and then promptly ran up another series of reading debts. Ho hum.

Anyway – I just wanted to say excuse any mess while I redecorate really!