life

Today I took part in the Shrewsbury Dragon Boat Race to help raise money for Shrewsbury Hospice. Our team made up of 17 people from our office (The Pump House), the majority representing Marches Energy Agency, I represented Information Solutions (and obviously world famous ImAFish).

Click on any picture to see a larger version on Flickr.

The boat we had to race.

 

The team lining up the boat. We are all dressed as superheroes (under our life jackets).

Much love to Jonnie (also representing ImAFish) for coming in at last minute to fill the team. You can see my superhero mask on my head.

Everyone was nervous that we might fall in.

Jo, Tessa, Sarah and Jeremy.

A discussion on climate change (I guess).

View the complete set on Flickr.

Much love to Laura for taking the photos.

June 5th 2008 - Shrewsbury based world famous ImAFish celebrates its seventh birthday today. The site's had a bumper year with over 250,000 visits with one of its features hitting the front page of Digg.com.

Site founder Pete White said "It's been the best year ever for ImAFish with such a huge number of visits and increasing revenue. It is a testament to the brand that ImAFish has survived for seven years and I can imagine it will be around for seven more. Our move to Drupal at the beginning of the year and our updated design have been a great move. We have recently launched two new sites to go along with ImAFish and have high hopes for both."

Some of the highlights of the year include:

Ei42.com - A Revolution In Cash Back?

Make Hundreds of Pounds Through Online Bingo

How To Handle The Jerk Next To You On An Airplane

Getting Dugg and Surviving - 70,000+ Hits in One Week

Comment Luv for Drupal

Pete’s Egyptian Diary

Please visit our about page to find out more.

In the past week I've moved office and moved house! I still have no Internet at home so I'm using my phone.

Last Thursday we moved office to The Pump House, an environmentally friendly building that gives us great new facilities and loads more space. The three of us had been crampt up in our old office for almost two years which means we can look to expand in the coming months.

 

On Friday I brought my first house with my lovely girl friend Laura, I've spent since then moving stuff in and sorting it all out. It's a slow process but we are finally getting there.

The office and house are only ten minutes walk apart meaning I can sleep in till 8:30 each morning and still get to work on time.

More coming soon once Plusnet activate my broadband.

Earlier today I went to the BBC Good Food show at the NEC in Birmingham, here are some photos from the day:

The show was packed with people and stands.

Benjie and Jack enjoyed sampling the wine.

These two sheep were on the Ireland stand.

I met Levi Roots - creator of the Reggae Reggae Sauce. Last year he successfully tamed the Dragons on BBC 2's The Dragons Den for investment in his sauce.

There were demonstrations all day from well known chefs.

The Well Hung Meat Company.

I sold my first item last night through Facebook Marketplace, my iMac G5. I would have most likely listed it on Ebay if Adam hadn't suggested listing it on Facebook first. The market place itself is a lot simpler than Ebay and has no security or buyer/seller protection but it is free.

Recently I've become more frustrated with high Ebay fees, in general 10% of the total cost of the item goes to Ebay in some way through listing fees, final value fees and PayPal fees. This would be close to £50 for my iMac. Facebook Marketplace offered an alternative that was free so I had nothing to lose by listing my item.

It was about a week before someone contacted me for some more information about my iMac which I was happy to provide. We bartered a little and he decided to come pick it up and pay cash (it was his first Mac as well). I will admit this is not normally how Ebay works and could be down to the testament of Facebook's perceived value of being a friendlier (safer?) place.

The transaction went smoothly, he had my iMac and I had money towards a new one. I'm not sure how good Facebook would be for other items - are people really searching there for mobile phone chargers or antiques yet? Perhaps this is all still to come, Facebook's demographics are in its favour as well, with the average user being better educated and earning more than users from other social networking sites such as Myspace and Bebo.

As for an Ebay killer well its too early to tell, but as I've seen over the past week the process certainly works. Has anyone else sold items on Facebook Marketplace or might give it a try after reading this? Any bad experiences?

It's that time of year again land lubbers where we get to talk like pirates! The 19th of September is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Avast, I wont be dressing as a pirate but I will be adding in as many pirate phrases as possible.

The official website has some common lingo and even pirate chat up lines for all ye beauties out there. Some common phrases to help you through the day.

Ahoy: Hey!
Avast: Stop!
Aye: Yes
Booty: treasure
Jolly Roger: the skull and crossbones, the pirate flag!
Landlubber: "Land-lover," someone not used to life onboard a ship.
Lily-livered: faint o' heart
Loaded to the Gunwales (pron. gunnels): drunk
Matey: A shipmate or a friend.
Me hearty: a friend or shipmate.
Pieces o' eight: pieces o' silver which can be cut into eights to be givin' small change.
Scallywag: A bad person. A scoundrel.
Scurvy dog!: a fine insult!
Shiver me timbers!: an exclamation of surprise, to be shouted most loud.
Swashbucklin': fightin' and carousin' on the high seas!
Yo-ho-ho: Pirate laughter

A full list here.

The theme for Nej's Birthday this year was Wrestling, I've never been a big fan but didn't want to turn down the opportunity to dress as a Sumo.

( Much love to Serena for the picture - I didn't want to smile, wasn't sure if Sumo's actually smile).

As you can see the realism of this costume is simply amazing, if you hadn't noticed everything below my head is fake. The suit is fan powered and is constantly filling up the inside with air (think how a bouncy castle works).

Walking around Shrewsbury town was an interesting experience and if you suffer from low confidence or self esteem then I would highly recommend drinking plenty first. I spent the night sober after drinking far too much on Friday night in Liverpool.

It was interesting all the attention the costume got, most people found the it funny and we turned heads in a number of restaurants we walked past, I guess this is how Tom Cruise must feel.

Here my costume is fully inflated. Much love to Nick for being my tag team partner. I was expecting more trouble from the costumer however even in a club most people just laughed.

The costumers came as a pair off Ebay for about £30 but it will never beat my transformers costume.

More photos on my Flickr account.

Last weekend Laura and myself booked a holiday to Hong Kong for 12 days going the 1st of October. I wanted to do something different this time rather than just spending a week on a beach or round a pool. I wanted to see some culture and visit a place completely different.

Hong Kong seemed an ideal place to book and I'm really excited! If anyone has been there before or lives there and can suggest any really good places to visit then please let me know.

I will be getting lots of pictures and will put a post up in my travel series once I get back. Until then check out some of my previous travel dairy entries in Egypt and Rhodes.

Knowing what to wear for a fancy dress party is always a pain, I normally try to keep to something topical. With the recent Transformers film out it was the perfect opportunity to come as Optimus Prime!

I recently came across this video which gave me the initial concept for my Transformer. The idea is that I could be both the robot and the truck of Optimus Prime.

Here is a video of how the costume worked.

It's basically made from one cardboard box split open apart from one hinge. I've then attached it to my back with a belt and added two other boxes to support it on my shoulders - this way its high enough above my head to close and the weight is evenly distributed.

I've then attached another bit of card to the shoulder boxes so that I can freely move up and down (if I had strapped it to my chest I wouldn't be able to bend and you would be able to see my feet.) The slots in the bottom of the card are so I can move my legs while crouching.

It looked the following while crouching:

Half way up:

And standing up:

Benjie had come as a giant Tetris piece - it made a handy drinks holder.

Here is a better picture of the side of the truck.

And again:

Who would ever have thought this was not a real truck...

Group photo - hint: I'm in the middle.

The giant wings proved difficult for getting through doors.

A full set of pictures of the evening can be found on my Flickr account.

Much love to Beanie and Nej for hosting the party.

I've been using Safari since I got a Mac, it's a nice browser and looks great within OS X. At work and on my laptop I use Firefox and now I've decided to ditch Safari for Firefox. The following reasons finally pulled me towards Firefox:

• Extensions - At work I love the Web development extensions, they make debugging so much easier and me so much more productive. On my laptop I love Stumble Upon, being able to sit there and just click one button to find an interesting web page is so effortless. Between work and home I have Google Browser Sync, this handy extension keeps all of my bookmarks, preferences and tabs synced.
• Speed - While Safari renders web pages very quickly there are some pages it struggles with. I'm not sure if anyone else has this problem but when browsing Digg.com the browser becomes unresponsive for 20-30 seconds while it loads a page (the more comments on a page the worse it is). Firefox doesn't have this problem and just loads the page as it would any other.
• Javascript - I write in Wordpress a lot for my blog and in Safari the Javascript formatting buttons do not work. I'm not sure if this is the browsers fault or Wordpress but it is annoying. Last time I checked the GMail contact chat did not work either in Safari.
• Search - This has been fixed in the Safari 3 beta but it bugs me how the search opens a small box rather than being integrated into the browser. This means when I search I have to click on the box to give it focus.