Life of Wiley

Got back from a great bank holiday trip up to Sheffield to visit my mum and pick up the kids. Unusually for a British bank holiday the weather wasn’t too bad; sunny on both the Saturday and Sunday.

We spent most of the weekend up at Cannon Hall Farm near Barnsley. There’s an open farm with a great play area for the children and plenty of animals for the kids to feed. The neighbouring farm also creates a maize maze for you to get lost in, as well as some terrific ice cream!

[Show as slideshow]

As it had been my mum’s birthday recently we took her to a Latin American restaurant in Sheffield called Las Iguanas. We were a bit unsure how the kids would get on with it but in fact it was great for the kids. They have a children’s menu from which they tried and liked the chicken chimichangas. The food, atmosphere and service were all excellent. We will be definitely going there again and would recommend it to anyone.

On the Sunday we went to Wisewood Methodist Church where a baptism took place. After the service the whole congregation were treated by the family to a lovely meal of traditional Ghanian and Gambian food.

Blog Action Day is coming on October 15th and for 2008 the theme is about raising awareness of the issues of poverty. I’ve blogged about poverty in the past when I attended a meeting with the then Secretary of State for International Development, Hilary Benn. Since that meeting I’ve subscribed to the departments Developments magazine to try and keep upto date with some of the things going on and the issues that still exist (of which there are many).

It’s encouraging to read in the latest issue of Developments magazine that Gordon Brown and Douglas Alexander, the new Secretary of State are still firmly behind the Millenium Development Goals that were announced at the UN Millenium Summit in 2000. They both acknowledge that there is still much to be done and they require people to keep up the pressure on their politicians to ensure that these goals do not slip from the UN’s agenda. With that in mind there is another UN summit taking place in New York on September 25th and I urge anyone reading this to e-mail, write or meet their politicians to make sure that they are doing what they can to ensure that these goals are met. In the UK you can use the list at the Parliament website to contact your local MP.

I don’t really understand why as I didn’t watch them that much when I was a kid, but for some reason I was delighted yesterday with the news that the Banana Splits were going to be back on our screens again. Well, not mine actually as they’ll be on the Cartoon Network which is not yet on Freeview:-)

My kids love the Banana Splits theme tune but the reaction seemed to be a bit muted when I announced to them yesterday that they were coming back on TV. In fact Eva, our 4 year old daughter, didn’t really have a clue what I was talking about! Kids today!

I’ve decided to put the whole of wileysworld.org into Wordpress and update the theme. I’m hoping that this might spur me into writing more posts to the blog and to keep the gallery upto date. I think this theme is quite good from Design Disease though I’d like to reduce the width of the first sidebar a little. The gallery is the NextGEN gallery plugin for wordpress which has lots of options for uploading images which makes the workflow relatively easy. Shame there isn’t a tool for importing from Gallery.

I’m still playing around with the theme and settings and will be slowly adding more recent pictures to the gallery before moving older pictures over. At some stage over this week I’ll move the whole thing to the top level directory. Any comments, please let me know.

I received an e-mail from Tripadvisor today indicating that they’ve just released their “2008 Travelers’ Choice Destination Awards” (pdf).
The list is broken out into the top 100 in the world and then the top 25 in the various global regions. It seems I’m a very well travelled man as I have been to 24 of the world’s top 100 destinations! At the end of this month I’ll be going to two more places I’ve never been before; Dallas, Texas and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Sadly neither of those are in the top 100.

It’s been a long time since I participated in a 10K race (I don’t say competed because I don’t enter to win). But I was persuaded to enter the Watford 10K last Monday which, in hindsight, was a little foolish considering I hadn’t done any training for it save for a few laps around Euan’s football training ground the Saturday before. Still, all things considered I didn’t do so bad; I finished the race, and in under an hour too, at 55:37.

I’ve started fiddling around with StumbleUpon and came across this little gem. I hope you like it too.

The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun

Found via dvorak.org/blog

Help construct a free online postcode database complete with geo-location information. New Popular Edition Maps are doing the building all you need to do is add postcodes you know about by clicking on the maps. There’s no worry about divulging where you live as there’s no information kept about who has submitted what postcode. The catch is that the maps are 1940s maps so your streets may not have been built yet!

Found via Tom Coates.

Technorati Tags: uk, postcodes, geo-location

So there’s been quite a lot going on that’s meant I’ve not had time to post here in a while. Well not until this week anyway.

The main thing has been that I’ve been working very hard on a new project…to get a new job! I’m pleased to say it has now been completed and I’m now into my third month with Mobeon, a Swedish company that produce voice and video mail systems for the telecommunications industry.

There are several benefits for me in this change:

1. I’m working with software.
2. I’m working with messaging software, i.e. e-mail servers and the like.
3. I get to work from home.
4. I get to travel around the world.
5. I get paid a bit more!

It’s not all roses though, the travel is quite extensive and can be at very short notice. So far, I’ve been to Sundsvall in Sweden (twice) and Jakarta, Indonesia. This can cause some problems with child care for Euan on the mornings when Louise works, but we’ve managed to work it out so far.

Working from home is cool, but I do have to be careful about not spending all my time working. It will be much better when I get a dedicated home office in which to work. At the moment I’m having to sit at the dining room table, so end up spending almost my entire day there!

Another reason why I’ve not had too much time for blogging is that I’ve been working quite a bit on the websites that I manage for various organisations. In particular, I’ve been working on one for the band I now play in, Northwood Volunteer Band. I’m particularly pleased with this one as it’s my first foray into content management systems, and it seems to work quite well with Joomla. However, now that I’ve been asked to do Euan’s school website I’ve discovered there some reasonably fundamental issues with both Joomla and Drupal. Joomla doesn’t have great frontend support for editors and both Drupal (at least the beta version of 5.0) and Joomla don’t have great permission/role frameworks, at least not natively. I’ll have to try the non-beta version of drupal plus extensions.