Going to the Chapel

Hey folks - sorry it's been a while, once again not a great deal going on other than the every day razzmatazz! That said we do have some big news, and that is that, Gavin & Stacey is back on tonight at 9pm!!

No seriously, we have finally booked our wedding for Friday 29th October 2010. We will be having a Civil Ceremony (it could turn uncivil depending how much Matt and the best man have to drink the night before!) and it will be held in Hull.

Preparation is already underway, lists have been made up, frocks have been purchased and colours have been agreed!!! It's all extremely exciting, and to be honest i didn't realise just how much I wanted to marry Matt.

We are both looking forward to it, unfortunately we cannot invite everybody to the ceremony but we will be inviting as many people to the evening reception as we can (afford!!) Invites will be going out after Christmas so I will be contacting you all after Christmas for your addresses.

On a more mundane note, not a great deal else going on at the moment.
We will soon be celebrating my 40th Birthday, me and Matt are going to York and staying over at a nice hotel and then going out to dinner in the evening, so really looking forward to that, I've also got a night with the girls which my beautiful bezzy Anna has been busily organising, can't wait for that either, there are quite a few of us going so that should be a giggle! So many social events to attend in December, and so few outfits to wear!!!

Matt has been very busy too with his new websites that he is helping to design, and playing his new PS3 game, and spending every other spare minute on the internet. We have also been watching the Sex and the city box set that Nicola kindly lent to us the last time we were over there, it is a fantastic series and I would urge anybody to watch it, it is embarassingly hilarious at times, but really good fun and entertaining to watch.

Matt got a new SLR camera for his birthday but we haven't had much opportunity to get out and use it yet, so no interesting pics on Flckr just yet (watch this space)

Anyway, that's about it from me... more on the wedding to follow in the coming months (for those of you that are interested ;-))

If you can't beat them, join them....

Well it's getting close to the end of the month again and one of us needs to write a blog. (EDITOR'S NOTE - Michelle did actually write a blog the other weekend, but I threw a tantrum and made her delete it. Not exactly freedom of speech and democracy is it. Anyway I went into a strop but we’re over it now. What was the blog about I hear you ask? Well it was about my obsessive compulsive disorder of buying gadgets and electronic equipment which as you know is completely unfounded and probably potentially libellous. Anyway we settled out of court so let’s move on!!)

This leads me neatly on to the topic of this blog..... yes, yes, yes ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT AND GADGETS (hahahahaa). No not really. While we’re on the subject though, I just wanted to categorically say that I have bought my last gadget (of this year anyway) so you can all rest easy at night. I finished off my collection with a lovely black Onkyo HTX22HD 2.1 Digital Surround System. I decided that rather than spending about £800 on a fully operational 5.1 Surround system I’d go for the more compact one. It has all these features; 2 HDMI inputs, 1 output (with support for up to 1080p, Deep Color, x.v.Color, Lip Sync, DTS-HD Master Audio, DTS-HD High Resolution Audio, Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Digital Plus, SACD, and multichannel PCM) but I don’t know what any of this means; Stewart does and he said it’s cracking. Anyway the main thing is that now films sound really good, we don’t need to watch them with the subtitles on anymore, there’s no wires trailing all through the house which would have been the case with a 5.1 system AND most importantly X Factor in HD will now be accompanied by cinema quality sound! (Is that really a bonus?)

Oh by the way, we also ordered a wardrobe and a dresser a few weeks ago, too. It’s pine, has two sections, one triple and a single, hand-made in Beverley, sports 4 HDMI inputs, has a built-in upscaling DVD player, has Audyssey Dynamic EQ for loudness correction and you can hang your coats in it. Obviously not all of the “features” are present, but I’ll let you decide which ones I’ve added.

Well it’s about 7 weeks to our holiday to Sri Lanka and it can’t come soon enough! It seems ages since we went anywhere and it will be a well earned rest. I’m not sure 2 weeks will be long enough though really; last time we went away abroad we had 10 months to do what we wanted. I’m really looking forward to the food too. Obviously being so close to India, curry features heavily on the menu, in fact it will probably feature in every one of my 4 meals a day. Yes, that’s right, I eat 4 meals a day, so what? Interestingly enough, Michelle has now ordered us both a Nintendo Gameboy from eBay. I think Michelle has just got sick and tired of watching me play LittleBigPlanet on the PS3 and thought if you can’t beat them join them.

Anyway, just a short one from me today, I’ll try and think of something interesting to say next time, and I promise I won’t mention technology once!

Adios

Technophobes unite

I thought I'd put a girly blog on as Matt seems to be getting ahead of himself with all this technical crap that I for one am not the slightest bit interested in. I am sick of hearing TLA's (three letter abbreviations) relating to TV/PS3/DVD. We have enough cable in our hoose to go the full length of the British Isles, we also have more remote controls than Corby RDC. We have tech magazines laying around all over the place, every other bookmark on the web browser is of a TV/Audio site or a PS3 blog. I am SICK of hearing the words 'look at the picture on that' ' look at the graphics on this game' etc etc. Me and Matt have had a few words about his over use of the PS3 (if you spoke to Matt he would say he NEVER gets to play on it!) He went through a particularly obsessive phase a couple of weeks ago, at which point I decided to call a PS3 crisis meeting. We have agreed now that PS3 is ok in moderation.

We have just come back from a weekend in London catching up with Matt's UNI mates (Al and Wigan) and girlfriends (Jenny and Kate) We went down on the train yesterday and met up with them late afternoon for a few beers and a Polish/Mexican meal last night(!) I know you must all be wondering how you can combine Polish Cuisine with Mexican, and the fact is, you can't. Me being Veggie was never happy about going here anyway and after much unsuccessful nagging at Matt to try and get the restaurant changed decided that I would just have to go along as everybody else seemed quite satisfied at this strange choice of Al's. Me and Matt started drinking about 12.30 yesterday lunch time which was quite foolish in view of the fact that it was going to be quite a late one. I did manage to down a few soft drinks in between pints and halves so when 5 o'clock came I was still relatively sober. After the introductions and a lot off cooing over engagement rings the drinking got underway once more.
A good night was had by all, even more so by Matt who was bordering on paralysis when we all departed each others company around midnight. I took great delight in being sober the next day and reminding Matt just what an animal he had been, needless to say he had no recollection of the past 12 hours! It was a lovely sight from the coffee shop in Kings X seeing Matt slumped over the railings breathing in the traffic fumes. Never one to say I told you say I'm just glad that I insisted that Jenny didn't buy him a Jamiesons whisky in the last pub!
It was a good night though and it was good to see Al in a more civilised environment as opposed to our first meeting at Reading!

Last Wednesday I had my first works night out with my new boss Trevor and the rest of the team, we went to The Westwood which is a swanky restaurant in Beverley, there was about 20 of us in total. At the beginning of the night Trevor told us to drink as much wine and beer as we could and to enjoy ourselves, so, we did! I was so drunk I don't even remember getting home, not to mention going to the bank on the way home to get some cash to pay the cab (that Keelie had already paid once!!) We were drinking a lovely NZ red and I don't think I realised just how much I'd consumed... until I tried to get up on Thursday... and couldn't!! I was still drunk, I felt shocking, I couldn't even stand up! Luckily it was my day off so I popped a couple of headache tablets and crawled back into bed to die in peace. I resurfaced at 1.30pm took two more tablets and laid on the couch for another hour, before then getting in the bath and laying down for another hour, by this time it was almost time to go back to bed. It's fair to say I wasted a very valuable day off!

I've been doing my bit for nature by filling up the bird table in Stew's garden. Stew always complained that he never got any birds (in the garden!) and I told him it's because he's not putting the correct food out. He thinks if he throws a full slice of Warburton Toastie on the garage roof once a week that we will get a myriad of birds flocking round. Well after watching numerous nature programmes and even before that actually I knew we were never gonna have a Blue Peter garden throwing random slices of bread out, so that's when I went to Wilko and got the biggest sack of bird food that I could carry. It took a week or so for the birds to start coming in (I think they wanted to finish the bread on the garage roof first) but they are coming thick and fast now. We've got Robins, Blue Tit's, Great Tit's, Hedge Sparrows, Blackbird's, White Collared Doves, the ubiquitous pigeon and even a squirrel is frequenting the table. It is so funny to watch them all coming in, it gets really busy and I think we might even have to start organising two sittings. The squirrel is the funniest of all, he has to jump up on the plant pots, across onto the recycling bin and then he hops onto the table. I think he must have a family as he fills his face up with nuts and then scurries off down the garden and under the fence, to God knows where, and then within minutes he's back again repeating the sequence.

Parking is proving to be a bit of a nightmare while we're staying at Stew's, luckily for Stew and Kirsty they have car parking space for 2 cars outside their house, but we have to park on the road. Because the houses are so big down the avenues just about every house has 2+ cars so parking is sometimes impossible. So much so that the other night when I parked I was actually 1/3 on double yellows. I didn't give it too much thought as I was more off them than on. I was mortified to find a parking ticket on the windscreen the next day! I have disputed the ticket, and have provided a pic of how I was parked so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I get off with it?!?!?!

Just going back to the subject of remote controls. I once read in one of those silly magazines that chavs read (I must have read it in the dentist's waiting room) that if you have trouble with remote controls and you keep losing them down the back of the couch or under the chair, that you should instead get an old pair of oven gloves and hang them over the arm of your chair to safely store your remote controls!!

If you don’t like computers or technology then don’t read this!

Now then! It has been an absolute age since I've blogged, in fact I know exactly when it was, the 22nd Dec 2007. Michelle has blogged a massive 16 times since then and as usual her blogs are a lot more interesting than mine. In fact ‘I’m getting bored just trying to write this and I’m only 3 sentences in! I remember reading “Palace Fans Blog” a while back, where he said he’s getting quite “blogged down” with all this blogging business; “nothing interesting to say”, “can’t be bothered telling people about mundane, every day life stuff”, “not allowed to slag off work as some regular readers are from work, and I might get sacked”, etc.etc. Well I’m not stupid enough to slag off work on here, and to be perfectly honest, I’ve got nothing to slag work off about (at the moment!) as things are going well. I promised myself I wouldn’t get (as) cynical as I used to be and definitely wouldn’t get stressed anymore. There’s people in Bolivia who live at 4500m above sea level in concrete huts, with no running water, heating, let alone a 50inch plasma tv and 4 computers under one roof (more on later!)

So what shall I write about then? Well there’s not a lot I can write about except maybe my new PS3!!. At this point I have to apologise in advance to Michelle and Kirsty as to be honest they’re getting sick to the back teeth of me and Stewart talking about gadgets, tv, computers, routers, WEP, DLNA, PVD, BluRay, HD, etc. So, sorry girls.

So on we go. You probably don’t know this but a vast amount of my time during the last two weeks in Chiang Mai was talking and thinking about technology with Alan (from eComet). The remainder of my time was spent sunbathing, eating Thai food, and drinking Chang beer usually in that order. Anyway, back to technology. Alan is, like myself, and Palace Fan for that matter, an Apple geek. We love to talk, think, live, breathe and dream about Apple computers, iPods, iPhones, and iAnything. I can understand Michelle showing no interest in these conversations and to be fair I show no interest in shopping conversations, or discussions about applying foundation cream before blusher. In case your wondering we do have a lot of things in common though, we both love travelling, obviously, reading, watching films, walking, eating, drinking, sleeping, I could go on. Another point worth mentioning is that Alan is such an Apple lover that even his wife is called Apple! And along a similar line, Palace Fan called his first-born Max, get it Macs, Max?

Anyway, back to Chiang Mai. One of the things I promised myself when we got back and had earned some money was a games machine of some sort, be it an XBOX360 or a PS3. Now I’ve always favoured Sony Playstations and have owned all of them at some point. I sold my PS2 before we left for the bargain price of £30 to Wellsy from eComet. I hadn’t used it for ages and knew that it would be obsolete by the time we returned. There seems to be a massive debate at the moment in various forums over which of the two games machines are better, XBOX or PS3. There are all sorts of factors, which I won’t bore you with here, to consider. To be honest I think the XBOX is probably winning at the moment, for two very good reasons; there are more games out and the Live/Online play looks better than the PS3. New games are usually written for the XBOX and then ported across to PS3, with the old PS2 this was the other way round. However, one of the main reasons I opted for the PS3 was the Bluray player. Anyone who is remotely interested in TV/DVD will know that Bluray was declared the victor in the High Definition DVD wars (not to be confused with the War on terror that has probably had less coverage!). So, now that Toshiba has thrown in the towel it seemed a good idea to opt for a games machine with a built-in player. It’s worth noting too, that the Bluray player in the PS3 is by all accounts a pretty damn fine one. I remember when I bought my PS2, with build-in DVD player, and DVD was really taking off at the time. However the player in the PS2 was absolute sh*te; every film watched through it had a slight green tinge. This worked fine with the George Romero classic “Dawn of the Dead” as he purposely filmed it to give everything a green tinge, but anything else was appalling. I suppose Shrek would have looked quite decent though!

I’ve read that not many of the games out currently stretch the PS3 to it’s limits, but this will change over the next 12 months, when the developers get to grips with all the technology. Incidentally, the games that I’ve played on the PS3 look pretty damn fine, so I’m looking forward to the next 12 months. It’s not just about the games though anymore, as now this black box is supposed to be the centre of your universe, or as they call it a media hub. You can surf the net, look at your photos, watch tv through it (or you can when Sony release the Play TV attachment in a couple of months), stream music/video from your PC/Mac. Now this topic deserves another blog on it’s own and that would be really boring. I spent most of last week trying to get the streaming working from the iMac to the PS3. This is where XBOX wins again as this is a lot easier to do. I’ve seen Ben’s working and it is pretty cool. Obviously a Mac isn’t as straightforward as a PC and of course it didn’t connect to the PS3. I even had to download some software (Nullrivers Medialink) which I got working but only intermittently. I’ve still not finished tinkering so maybe on my next blog, sometime in May at my current rate, I’ll have sorted it. I’m sure it’s something on the router, and my theory is that the traffic coming from the PS3 is caning the router which thinks it’s a Denial of Service attack and then just blocks it.

So, the PS3 is sitting underneath Stewarts brand new 50” Pioneer plasma TV. The picture quality on the games is absolutely stunning and the TV is not even full HD. It’s only 720p, the maximum is 1080p, although this is a bit of a sore point in the house, as it means Stew will be wanting another TV in about 12 months. (If Kirsty’s reading this, which I doubt as it’s turned into a rant about technology, she’s probably cursing me at this point! Sorry Kirsty!). I’ve been playing a game called Heavenly Sword last week in between fiddling with the router settings. It’s the usual story; lots of hacking and slashing, fighting medieval-type knights with huge swords, and generally trashing everything in sight. There’s one scene where you can smash food-laden tables up, and then pick up the food and throw it at the enemies. I picked up what looked like a grapefruit, threw it at a huge shield bearing knight. Needless to say it did little damage and he followed up with a skull-crushing blow to my head. Oh yeah, the main character in this game is a girl, I can’t remember her name, who wears a bikini (or something similar) and wields, yes you’ve guessed it a Heavenly Sword. She is hard as nails and some of the moves she pulls off are fantastic. I don’t know how she does it though as I’m just pressing buttons as fast as I can in any order. It seems to work though as I’m on the 6th level now.

The Bluray movies look even better. I’ve rented the BBC Planet Earth series, the one that BBC constantly broadcast on the BBC HD preview channel on SKY. I’m not that much of an AV geek like Stewart is and will settle for a fairly decent picture on a TV, but when you see this it just blows you away. You find yourself not really concentrating on the DVD itself, but just marvelling over the picture quality. “Look at that ant in the background, look how detailed it looks, you can even see the hairs on its legs”. This reminds me of a classic Carry on Film joke; it’s the one when they’re all going on holiday. One guy Bernard Bresslaw, I think, says to another, possibly Kenneth Williams, whilst sitting on the plane and looking out of the window, “Look at those people down there they look like ants”. The other replies “They are ants, we haven’t taken off yet! Classic.

The only downer is that Bluray disks cost about £20, so it’s not even worth thinking about upgrading all your existing DVDs to Bluray, like everyone upgraded VHS to DVD. I’ll probably wait a while before I buy any Bluray disks to be honest as I’m not willing to pay anymore than £10 for a film. Currently I/We rent them from Lovefilm.com which works out pretty well. You can rent games from them too, so even better. You can have any 2 films at home for as long as you want. You send them back when you’ve finished with them and then the next 2 off your list turn up. All the postage is free too. You can add what you want to your list and prioritise them. Most of the time they do send you what you want in the right order, although sometimes if you have a 5 disk series in your list, like Lost for instance, they send you them in the wrong order. You end up watching the end of the series finale before you’ve seen the start, although in the case of Lost I don’t think it makes much difference do you?

So that’s about it really; turned out to be one of my longer blogs, but I’m sure most of you are thinking it’s my dullest blog. Maybe I should have called it “If you don’t like computers or technology then don’t read this!”. In fact that’s what I’ll do, I’ll call it that and hope that only Palace Fan, Stew, Geoff, Ben and Alan reads it! If you have got this far down and you don’t like technology then sorry, but to quote Little Britain “ I did warn you!”

Adios

P.S. There’s over 1600 words in this blog! I used to struggle in GCSE English to write 400 words on “Discuss Wilfred Owen’s poetry and his use of alliteration and onomatopoeic phrases in relation to the First World War”. It’s amazing how much you can write when you’re not put under pressure or the subject is boring!