Mark Dalton

After a week of teasing and fiendish clues it was time for my Birthday Surprise. As instructed by my sister I was up and ready for a 09:00 start and I will admit slightly nervous as we set off. It was a lovely day, but she wasn’t going to give in and tell me where we were going, despite my constant questioning. I tried to follow our route on the maps application on my iPhone, hoping to be able to identify our destination, but it couldn’t really keep up with us and I was none the wiser. I still didn’t have a clue when we arrived at Moors Valley County Park.

We grabbed a coffee and it was only then Katrina said that we were booked to start at 11:00. I was intrigued, but still no nearer identifying why we were here. On the way to the coffee shop I had seen the little hut with the big “Ape” statue, and asked if we were going to see relatives, but Katrina still wasn’t giving in and I hadn’t put the clues together. We had our coffee, biscuits, and chatted, me still probing for more information.

At 10:50 we started walking towards the hut, and I was starting to get really nervous. It was only when we arrived and I saw the signage and harnesses I realised what I was in for, and I swallowed hard.

“Go Ape“

After being asked to read an instruction card and sign a disclaimer (that always makes me wary) we had a 30 minute induction that took us through the basic safety aspects. We were then taken to the start of the course.

Well, this was my opportunity to get a little pay back and when the instructor asked for a volunteer I kindly volunteered Katrina. With about 10 of us sat watching Katrina had to go through attaching the harness to the safety lines, rigging the pulley system, and then traversing the obstacle. She was very nervous, but completed it without any problems and at the end got a big round of applause. We were then let lose on our own!

Katrina and I were at the front of the group and we worked our way around the course. Mum had asked Katrina to get lots of photos but when I reminded her of this she wasn’t very polite in advising me that she was to busy holding on. We slowly progressed getting a little more confident as we went.

It was after we completed the third obstacle, about an hour in, we saw a sign saying exit. We started back towards the hut where we had picked up our gear congratulating ourselves and saying what fun it had been. It was only on arriving one of the “Go Ape” team advised us we had walked past the last two obstacles. Opps! We made our way back up the path feeling a little silly, but grateful for the rest and found the forth and fifth obstacles, although by the time we reached the forth we had been over taken. The last two were harder than the first three and at this point we both wanted a drink and a cigarette. Our arms were starting to feel heavy, and pulling ourselves up was getting harder and harder. The final obstacle ended with a long wire bridge and then a long zip slide back to the hut, and the smiling assistant that had made us walk back earlier.

We both stepped out of the harnesses with a sigh of relief and big smiles and headed towards the picnic area for a well deserved packed lunch, which we both inhaled sat next to one of the Moors Valley County Park Lakes. It was a fantastic day and one I would recommend to anyone not afraid of heights.

More photo’s Here.

Okay so I have been very lazy the last few weeks and haven’t bothered to update the blog! Well, I have taken a well deserved rest this weekend and recharged my batteries so to speak, so hopefully will be picking up my game a little.

So last weekend was Easter and a four day weekend to-boot. The sun didn’t show up until Monday but it was a good chance to get things done. Friday I caught up with house stuff and personal paperwork. It was nice to get that all out of the way and still feel like there was a weekend ahead. Saturday I met up with Dad for a spot of lunch and a catch up and bumped into a very pregnant Anna and Dave. Both fed up of waiting for Baby Birkett to show up. We had a good chat and caught up with all the gossip, and made some up when we had run out of people to pick on. Sunday we all ventured down to Katrina & Rob’s for a lovely Sunday roast and to wind the kids up to the point they exploded! (Pictures Here) Monday was another catchup day, but I chose to spend it playing around with the computer and scanning in more of the old family pictures (Pictures Here).

Last week was fairly mixed. It was a little manic mainly due to the fact it was a short week, but Thursday and Friday were slow, a sign that some of the projects haven’t really kicked off, and an indicator maybe that it’s going to get really busy soon! I had an all day senior managers meeting on Wednesday which further shortened the week. It wasn’t really my kind of thing, but it was a good opportunity to catch up with the other senior managers who I tend to speak to on a regular basis, but not really interact with in any other way other than work.

Yesterday was another catch up day at home, not that I really got much done. Today looks like going the same way. I did pop round to Mum & Dad’s this morning and install some power line network extenders to try and boost there wireless signal downstairs, however I think I am going to chill out for the rest of the day.

So after the normal busy and non desrcript week at work I was looking forward to the weekend. The week showed promise with the sun poking its head out enough to stop wearing a jumper and brave a short sleeve shirt, although I still took a coat as the mornings were chilly. Hey comfort over fashion these days! That”s just the way I roll

The weekend didn”t fail to disappoint! Saturday was wonderful and I sacrificed getting completely hammered Friday night (called it a day after three glasses of wine) on the promise of sunshine. The boy did good! I didn”t rush up, but awoke leisurely at 09:00 ish, burbled around, and then headed out. I had most of my to-do list done by 11:00 and then took the car for a run. I do like a drive to nowhere session when it”s sunny and you can turn the music up and wind the window”s down. I popped by Mum and Dad”s to say hello and even jet washed the car (Not doing it again — that”s a rant). I am not quite sure where the rest of the day went but all I know is I didn”t stop until about 19:00. Saturday night I decided to chill in front of the TV but a million sky channels (another rant) and I still couldn”t sit still or find anything worth watching. So even though I said to myself I wouldn”t I ended up in front of the computer. I decided I still need to do *something* useful so I set about scanning more of the old family photos. I decided to concentrate on some of the ones that Mum had shown me, and as “Mothers Day” was on the horizon I couldn”t say no. It was actually quite cool as these were old black and white photo”s of my Nan and Grandads family, so as well as being interesting they gave me a chance to play as most of them were very faded and some were damaged.

Sunday morning I was awake with the birds, I did the few job”s that I had and then headed to Mum & Dad”s. I hadn”t been their long and Lisa and Andy turned up, closely followed by Katrina, Rob, and the kids. Coffee was the first order of the day and a good catchup. It wasn”t long and we started on the vino and hops. We sat around, chatted, and generally caught up. It was a very pleasant day but a little chilly and we moved between the garden and the lounge. We all enjoyed a fantastic roast beef dinner, cooked by Mum (Guilt) and sat around chewing the fat, before finally conceding to the real world and heading home to ready ourselves for work on Monday morning. Dam these weekends get shorter!

You can find the Photo”s here.

Okay so the first part of the “Family Photo Archive Project” is complete.

I spent the weekend scanning in a few hundred photo’s that Mum had handed me in a biscuit tin. The first thing I wanted to do was confirm how this was all going to work and I must say my plan worked very well. Firstly I scanned through all the photo’s with a glass of wine and sorted them into groups. Once this was done I started to lay them out on the scanner one at a time, and time how long it took. Well from beginning to end it took about 3 minutes to scan the picture, open it in PixelMator, make sure it was the right way up, and then save it to a known location.

Now given the number of photo’s this was going to take a long time so I had to find a few short cuts. Through trial and error I found that I could put multiple pictures on the scanner and the scanner software and PixelMator managed to tell that their were multiple photo’s rather than a collage. This significantly increased the throughput as I was now able to handle four pictures in 3 minutes. After a while, as I got used to the key presses and shortcuts this came down to about a minute and a half for four pictures, or about 22.5 seconds per picture.

Now the first run didn’t include any tidying up of the photo’s other than rotating them so they were the right way up. The next thing I will be doing is playing with PixelMator and iPhoto 09 to try and enhance the older photo’s and tidy up any inconsistencies that have crept in.

In the mean time you can find the first batch of photo’s by clicking here. What I would ask is if you have any information about who anyone is or where a picture was taken then can you post it as a comment to the photo.

Well some people have emailed asking what happened to the Photo Gallery. Well when I moved the site over to WordPress I also moved to a new Linux based server with a new service provider. My previous supplier was a friend and wasn’t too worried about the amount of disk space used so it wasn’t a major issue uploading all my photo’s. However when I moved to my new provider the package I signed up for came with a fixed amount of disk space. I could upgrade this but at a cost and as my Photo Library just keeps growing and growing the costs would eventually become prohibitive. So I started to look at alternatives, inevitably arriving at Flickr.

I then started looking at plugin’s for WordPress that would allow me to display my Flickr photo’s as part of the site. I found one that I like in Slickr Gallery and all was working fine until I upgraded to WordPress 2.7, which somehow broke the custom Permalinks meaning that I had to go back to the default Permalink setting which broke the Slickr Gallery Plugin that required the Permalink setting be set to anything other than the default. Doh!

So at this point in time the Photo Gallery isn’t viewable directly on the site and wont be until I fix the Permalink issue. What’s even more frustrating it that WordPress has been upgraded to 2.7.1 which I am hoping fixes the issue, but I now have problems upgrading to WordPress 2.7.1.

In the meantime my photo’s are available directly via my Flickr Page.