The inestimable Ian, he of the Messy Desk, recently linked to workFRIENDLY, a site that renders websites as very passable imitations of Word documents. If you cannot for the life of you see why one would want to do this, you have either i) eyes in the back of your head, ii) an understanding boss or iii) no job.
Disclaimer:Â No, it wasn’t me that said you could goof off at work.
David Gray’s The Lifehacker’s Dilemma over at 43 Folders lends a Da Vinci-like touch to the life of the modern productivity geek. Great fun!
I am terrible. I have no restraint. No sooner have I got settled to using Vienna as my RSS reader than a glance at a post in a Google group nudges me to look at Newshutch. Lean, clean and does the job very nicely indeed; importing my OPML file took seconds and all feeds updated and worked fine. Of course, there’s no real conflict issue as I’ll use Vienna on my iBook and Newshutch elsewhere but I am a shameless seeker of the proverbial silver bullet app, whatever the need.
It is not often I am unable to finish my breakfast but this morning I have no stomach for it. Browsing through my news subscriptions in my feed reader, I am confronted by the events of a year ago and realise just how far away, physically and emotionally, I am from those events and the places in which they happened. Without the slow build-up I am sure there has been in the UK media, the events I blogged feel raw and fresh and I am struck by the void that must now exist in the lives of fifty two families and the continuing trauma of those who survived. In the same breath, I am thankful that we had the courage and self-belief to pack up and move to a different environment where we could build a different life. As I go through my day, preparing to move to a new family home in the community we have chosen to live in, my thoughts are with those who were on the train just two minutes behind the one I was on this time last year.
I haven’t posted for a long while. Since I last posted, the All Blacks have won their first three games of the season, the World Cup has begun in Germany and winter storms have ravaged many parts of new Zealand. As for the absence, to cut a long story short, I messed up the migration from Blogger to WordPress a few weeks back, threw my toys out of the pram and gave up trying to fix it. Yesterday, a few kind words of advice and encouragement from my long-suffering friend and host, Chuck, prompted me to sort the mess out. Given my tendancy to let my blogging lapse, I doubt that anyone out there still reads my posts; if you have kept my feed intact, I salute and thank you.
Effective though my DLink wifi router is, it isn’t quite powerful enough for me to get a decent signal in my bedroom. This is a shame as I’d love to prop myself up in bed on lazy winter mornings and enjoy the pastoral view from the windows whilst reading email and feeds. As someone who lives in a country that prides itself on ingenious pocket money solutions, I think I have found the answer to my wifi woes.
The fifth birthday of No.4 was celebrated in style on a bright sunny day with fun & games on the tramp and an outdoor birthday tea. The guest list included just one brave lad who, undaunted by the 7 to 1 girl/boy ratio, held his own against the pink masses all afternoon.
It’s pink, was made with heaps of chocolate and things, has heaps of chocolate buttons on top and had five candles on it. The look says it all – why on Earth would anyone in their right mind want to share this heavenly cake with their family, let alone friends.
Though the natives say that this year’s Easter Show at Auckland Show Grounds was not as good as in previous years, we still had a fun day out. No.3 was adamant that, despite having eaten a large cone of chips just minutes before, the mini-bungee was a great idea.
SWMBO is a great lover of horses and has spoken of happy childhood evenings spent watching the Horse Of The Year Show on television, so she was keen to take in the eliminator final of 1.40 metre showjumping, which proved to be an exciting jump-off.
Sadly, the same couldn’t be said of the Madagascar stage show we queued up to watch. With the usual tacky merchandising and actors in suits miming to a soundtrack of B-side pop songs, it didn’t take long for the children in the audience to tire and vote with their feet.
The week after Easter, I took my first few day’s leave from work. We loaded up the trailer and headed North to Waipu Cove where we camped for the first time as a family, just a few metres from the Pacific. It was a great place and we plan to return there next summer.
While friends in England are enjoying the flowers and warming weather, here we are slowly moving into autumn, leaving for work in darkness and arriving home at dusk. Our evenings are now spent in front of fires made with tea tree and pine, which we chopped and stacked in our garage before the autumn rains began.
More than seven months have passed since we flew into Auckland from the Cook Islands. With the routines of work and schools, our lives are moving from those of unsettled people in transit to people who live in and are part of a community. Our days are gradually taking on a comforting semblance of normality. We rarely stop to convert everyday prices, our accents are taking on the trademark Kiwi upward inflection and our terms of reference are slowly changing with the help of new friends and acquaintances. There are a good many things that we miss and friends we’d love to see but these feelings are balanced by the sense that the lives that we are building for ourselves are good and worth the efforts we’re taking.
Late last night, I made one of those ‘why didn’t I look for this months ago?’ finds on the web. I have flip-flopped between del.icio.us and Furl for ages, liking both del.icio.us’ simplicity and Furl’s ability to cache a page. As a merge of these two tools is unlikely, I have found that Alan’s Marklet Maker site submission multi tool provides me with the next best thing: one toolbar button for the creation of two parallel submissions – I just add tags and save. The tools offers the user the choice to combine up to 20 popular social bookmarking/tagging tools in one bookmarklet, though I’d imagine generating more than three or four entry forms would be a little unwieldly and self-defeating.
In days gone by, bicycle saddle bags rested neatly on the rear stays which were, by and large, less acutely angled than they are today and provided stable storage for waterproofs and lunch. Likewise, conventional handlebars provided an ideal location for a handlebar bag into which small loads can be stuffed and on which maps can be stashed for easy reference.
However, on unconventional bikes like my Brompton, the handle bars are of an unusual design and there are no rear stays as such. This means standard handlebar bag fixings don’t fit and saddle bags either swing wildly from the strap loops on the saddle or need to be supported by an expensive saddle bag support mechanism. Although Bromptons have a range of panniers, the phrase ‘Brompton pannier’ is perhaps a little misleading in that they actually attach at right angles to a bracket on the head tube, rather than the rear rack (which not all models have). My large Brompton touring pannier is really too large and wind-resistant for simple day/club day rides and my Carradice saddle bag swings into my thighs when I’m riding.
Pondering on these annoyances last night, I hit upon the idea of removing the frame from the large touring pannier (designed to do so for cleaning etc), mounting it on the front of the B and attaching the saddlebag to it. In this way, I get the stable carrying capacity I want on day rides in an accessible position. A brief Good Friday test ride through the deserted local township early was enough to prove the hack was worthwhile and worked as hoped for. The only improvement/tweak I want to try is to fashion a lightweight interior frame from a discarded realtor’s sign (the corrugated plastic type) to provided a tad more shape and rigidity to the bag.
