Don’t you think that it’s always a sad day when you start the downhill slide towards Winter?
Since my last Swine Flu post Emily’s school was closed for a week because of it and Sophie was actually put on Tamiflu. Thankfully it was all a false alarm which will hopefully be the case for Swine Flu in general.
We went to Barcelona for a long weekend and I would highly recommend it to anyone.
E has just come back from a trip to Belgium and France visiting war graves so I hope to have some photos to upload soon.
I have updated the web site with some more social networking bits and bobs. You can now catch a glimse of what music I have been listening to, thanks to Last.FM, and I have added a Twitter feed. I can’t imagine that I’ll ever post anything to Twitter but it’s there just in case I do.
Summer is well and truly upon us and we haven’t booked a holiday yet.
Oh yes, Sophie is doing a sponsored walk in the Namib desert of Namibia. Should you feel so inclined then you can read about it here and sponsor her here.
It’s still far too early to say how bad this is going to get. The media are in overdrive, as usual, but I guess the fact that the WHO have just raised the threat level to 5 is an indication of the seriousnes.
There are some maps, here, and here, which give a good impression of the spread, and this describes many of the maps available.
I’ve embedded one of them below.
View 2009 H1N1 Flu Outbreak Map in a larger map
I’ve had a minor spring clean and given the web site a new look. I’ve upgraded to the latest version of WordPress and I’m now using the ‘atahualpa’ theme.
How to stop my children (or my husband) from viewing pornographic web sites? This is a common question that I am asked (actually no one has ever asked this question, but they might one day).
The answer is OpenDNS. This works by filtering the Domain Name requests that your PC makes every time you visit a web site.
First, register on the web site. Then you have to change the DNS settings for your PC or router to use the OpenDNS servers instead of the default DNS servers provided by your ISP. Details can be found here. It is better to update your router rather than a PC so that ALL PCs in your house are protected.
Next you have to tell OpenDNS what IP address you have been allocated by your ISP. You can do this here. Because the IP address that your ISP gives you can change you can install some software on your PC that will keep OpenDNS updated with your current address. OpenDNS provides the necessary software at the above site. Alternatively, your router might provide a DDNS option that does the same thing. My router (a Linksys WRT-54G) has this feature and I have set it up to use DNSomatic which keeps multiple sites updated with your IP address.
Finally you go here to set the level of protection that you want. I found that Low is adequate to stop any pornograpic web sites. You can also block categories like Social Networking to block things like Facebook, or P2P/Filesharing to stop illegal music downloads. It is also possible to block or allow specific web sites.
It works for me and I hope that it works for you too.
I thought it was time I treated myself to a new PC, one that was capable of playing the latest games easily. It is a bit of a monster, with a Core i7 Quad Core processor, 6Gb of memory, 2x250Gb disks, and an Nvidia GTX 295 graphics card. I also got a nice new screen, a Samsung T240 LCD display.
You can see some photos here.
I will write about the actual build process here.
I have decided to do do some Public Service Blogging, well, sort of.
I keep all my Bookmarks on an online bookmarking site called Delicious. This allows you to store your bookmarks online (Duh) and tag them so you can group links together. You can see all my tags and their associated links here.
It goes without saying that most of them are of no interest to any one but me but, some of them might be, so I have now created a tag called ‘interesting’ (can you see where I’m going with this yet?).
There is now a ‘Quite Interesting’ link over on the right to see a list of links to articles that I think someone else might be, err, interested in.
I don’t know if you will find them interesting or not, that is up to you. Either way, don’t bother telling me unless one of them changes your life in some unimaginable way.
Something else that is Quite Interesting is that once you start to store your bookmarks online then you can use the Delicious Firefox/IE addon from here to totally replace your normal bookmarks stored within your browser. Well, I like it even if you don’t.
Well it’s nearly over now.
We went to Castelmola in Sicily for a week and Emily also went to Spain with Clarissa for two weeks.
Celine, the daughter of Sophie’s friend Myriam, has just stayed for a week and while she was here we went to see Hairspray at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London and to see the birds at Bird World.
I also went to the Motor Show in London with Pat for the day which ended with a performance by Blondie. Great fun.
We hosted a BBQ for all our friends which was a bit over ambitious but worth it as we rarely see most of them.
This coming week we have the Weiss’s and Bluhm’s arriving for Uncle Martin’s party in Bexhill.
Before you know it Emily will be back at school, starting her GCSE course, and I’ll be on my own again during the day.
Lee.
I had a great day out with Arnie yesterday at Brooklands for the “Double Twelve” classic car event.
There was the usual mix of cars, including plenty of Aston Martin DB4s to celebrate their 50th anniversary.
As soon as we had parked a pretty young lady offered us free tickets to the Merc Off-Road experience which we happily accepted. Our mode of transport was a diesel 430 GL which was huge but easily coped with all the usual steep inclines, two wheels off the ground, deep water type of environments. Arnie asked the driver what sort of mpg it was doing, to which he replied “currently 7mpg and the overall average is 5mpg”.
All classes of cars had to complete various trials, including a hill climb, reverse parking, the Wiggle Woggle, etc.
The secret to the hill climb is to try and snatch 2nd gear as quickly as possible and stay there. Many smaller engined cars could only manage it in 1st gear. We were standing half way up the hill when an Invicta tried to change up but got it all wrong and bits of the engine were deposited on the track in front of us, as oil started to trickle back down the hill. An expensive mistake for the owner.
Lewis Hamilton made a guest appearance and after an interview with Tiff Needell he took last year’s McLaren F1 car around the small circuit for a few laps. The noise was amazing, you just don’t get the sound levels at all on TV.
You can see some photos and videos here.
If any of you want to build your own web site then Google has just opened it’s Sites builder to the general public and Webon also looks interesting. Both are free.
The eagle-eyed amongst you (and I know there is at least one) will have noticed that I made a change to this web site a few days ago as a prelude to moving over to the Drupal CMS.
Well I decided to revert back to my native WordPress for the time being as Drupal is a bit mind boggling and it’s easier if I just muck about with it on my PC rather than install it on my web site.
Something will change somewhere, eventually. Maybe.
