The morning after the night before

Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors — and miss.
- The Master

Bit of a thick(er than usual) head this morning, can't think why. Possibly related to the five pints of beer I enjoyed at Babelas last night, followed by a large Lamb and Doner* Mixed, washed down by a couple of large whiskey and sodas before bedtime. Or maybe I'm just getting a cold.

Good blogging day yesterday. Thanks to a mention on Laura's site my traffic went up 2700 percent! (that's from 1 view per day to 27! impressive huh?) - maybe I'm 'going viral'?

That could explain the headache.

Actually, a big thanks to all those who popped over from Laura's site and left comments, much appreciated, at least I know someone's out there. Is it too early do you think, to start monetising this site?

Similar thanks, (though less sincere) to the drunken wazzack (AKA The Cardigan Kid) who posted the two ski related comments on the iPhone thread. That should of course have been 'a ROLLING minky gathers no moss' but I suppose even drunken drivel has its place, and if so that place could well be here.

Laura's thinking of starting a new blog 'Sh*t my dad slurs'  - Sounds promishing.

TTFN

* For our German reader - this has nothing to do with Thunder

Buttons and Domains

America: It's like Britain, only with buttons
- Ringo Starr 

Ok so after only  half a day of footling about with domain names and html, I managed to not only bag the domain www.mygrumbles.com (which, I feel, is a pretty cool domain) but more importantly create a button for my blog!

The domain thing was actually pretty easy, I just bought it from Google, biggest surprise was that noone had already bagged it!

The button thing was a LOT harder. Back when I was last writing code, java was an island in Southeast Asia, and the web was that thing stretched across the door of my garden shed.

Fortunately however, in one of my more enlightened moments, sometime back in October 1988, I started a process that resulted in me today having access to my own blogging and html technical support guru. How far sighted of me was that?

So a big thank-you goes out to Laura Jane at Needles Pins and Baking Tins for providing me with the button code (as well as numerous quilts, cushions, mug rugs and delicious and no doubt nourishing puddings). Some investments really do pay off!

Here's a pic.

I think she was just working out where to put the href tags.

 

Grumbles from the iPhone

Ok if it works from the iPad I guess it has to work from the phone right?

Yep looks like it does.

Ok cancel the moan. Like everything in life these days. There's an app for it :-)

Think I'll just test the image uploader. Can I post a pic taken right now in the phone? That would be moderately cool.

Ok here goes.....

What a great view, although it looks like things could change...

 

Of course my real view is of the fishpond in the garden..

 

and yes I can take a pic and post it so pretty cool overall.

Grumbles from the iPad

Thought I'd find out if I can blog from iPad. Seems I can, but only using the iPhone app. Why it doesn't work in safari on iPad beats me. Not really worth a Grumble though. A small moan or minor whinge is probably all it merits.

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.  
- One of Murphy's Laws of Technology


Ok a real Grumble now, the first but unlikely to be the last, (the post about Devon weather wasn't a Grumble - just a whinge - important distinction).


So, Aperture on the Apple Mac, a fine piece of software, powerful, friendly, great for retouching photos and also for cataloging them, and cheaper than Photoshop (although not much cheaper than Photoshop Elements, but that's another Grumble). Aperture also integrates seamlessly with Flickr making it easy to publish your pix - or does it?


No it fecking doesn't! Whoever designed that 'integration' should be taken out and beaten senseless with a cucumber. It's not just bad, it's abysmal! 

What's wrong you ask? (well you did didn't you?), I'll tell you (you knew I would):


For a start it just doesn't work. Most (but not all) of the time, when you 'share' your latest snaps to Flickr it takes an age, and then duplicates or triplicates most of them. Feck knows what it thinks it's doing, but you end up with three times as many copies as you started with or wanted.

Buts that's not the worst part, oh no!


It doesn't just 'publish' your pix and forget them like a good little uploader, it keeps track of them and maintains a link to the original. Which means that if you change the original it re-publishes it replacing the one you published earlier. Now what wombat thought that was a good idea? If I publish a copy of a pic I don't want some over enthusiastic, interfering little software busybody changing it without my knowledge or permission. I want it to stay how I published it. Even worse if I accidentally delete it from my Aperture album I DON'T want it deleting from Flickr - but that's exactly what happens.


Worst of all, every little change to the pic results in the Flickr copy being 'replaced' with a new copy, at a new Flickr address. A new address that is NOT the same as the one I used when I linked another website (say, this one) to the Flickr pic. So if I tighten the crop on a picture of my cat (in Aperture), after I have published it to Flickr, and linked to it from here, the link will be broken the next time Aperture 'synchs' with Flickr and I can't stop it happening.


Whoever thought this was a good way to manage the 'link' should be disemboweled using the cucumber mentioned above. 


It really is very bad, it's wasted hours of my life and probably pushed my systolic and diastolic through the ceiling.


Fortunately there is an answer, one that doesn't have to involve cucumbers.


A little program called FlickrExport by Connected Flow. It costs all of 14 quid, is only about 1.6Mb to download (remember the days when most apps were smaller than a 1.44Mb floppy?) and it works. 

It does , as they say, what it says on the tin. Once it's installed as an Aperture plug in, it sits quietly under the File->Export menu waiting for your instructions to publish your chosen snaps to Flickr. 

No 'two way integration' Bollux, no 'maintaining an active link' Malarky, just export to Flickr and forget. It will even pre-tag your pix for you and do lots of other houskeepingy things that you would normally not be arsed with. Excellent bit of kit. The developers should be allowed to watch while the  wazzacks from Apple who wrote the Aperture link are ravished with blunt vegetables.

"To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive..." 
- Robert Louis Stevenson


Robert had obviously just been to Devon in September.


No,  really, we had a great week (again), but if the phrase 'into every life a little rain must fall' strikes you as a beautiful metaphor perfectly encompassing our  romantic but  'triste' existence, then spend a week in Devon while it's blowing a gale and stair rodding it down. You'll soon discover that there is bugger all romance in being rained on for 7 days solid.


Fortunately, we had books, guitars, games, and a small lake of port to keep us entertained - any port in a storm :-).


We endured, nay, we enjoyed! Although I think my liver may have suffered (yet more) permanent damage.


In fact it didn't rain every day, (just five out of seven) and the tail end of Hurricane Feckin' Irene made for some interesting sunsets.

Here's the slideshow, next year we're going to Feckin' Spain! :-)


Our Shangri-La

"Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up. "
- Ernest Hemingway


Thursday morning, and a wonderful sunny day in store. It's also pack-up day for our extended family trip to Bideford. 14 of us staying in a big house with pool, A/V room and about 2 dozen bottles of port (plus wine and beer) for a week. We had a great time last year, cycling the Tarka trail, swimming in the sea at Putsborough, and lazing round the house.

It almost doesn't matter what the weather does, although a bit of sun would be nice.

Here's a couple of pix from last September:

Jane slicing onions (under Kathy's supervision), note cunning use of snorkel gear to avoid tears.

Otis looking goooood!

Cycling on the Tarka Trail

Eating - we did a lot of this!

So fingers crossed for another good week!