You know those country walk books? They usually start at a pub and end at a pub, its great! Well we thought we’d do a very bizarre route today, it’s odd because it snakes around Sheffield City Centre, not very country. Anyway, got some nice photo’s of the place en route.

Nice bus stop, see that number?  I think it’s a mobile number, maybe virgin.  Anyway, darez you to call it.  Remember if you’re international to prefix 044 and knock off the first 0.

It was a bittersweet walk for Eddie, the urban sites and sounds were interesting for him, but through the people busy thoroughfare’s (and the sales are on) he got a bit stressed out and went into this odd clearing-his-nose fit that he does when he’s really freaked out.  Actually, speaking of this, can any vet’s explain to me what he’s doing?

This is the christmas card we sent to family and friends this year and it went down really really well.

Almost everyone it was sent to phoned up to say “OMG I loved the card!”.

Problem is now we’ve done it once, we’re going to have to make a custom christmas card every year from now on.

I’ve forgotten to add the first letter style to the new theme, I like having a chunky first letter. All Olde English. Oh heck. Ah well. I was going to quickly write some things I’ve been meaning to blog but all of a suddenly my mind has gone blank. I discovered a bottle of nicely chilled white wine rather too early in the day…. Not to mention the Leffe. Oh Jez I think I’m an alchoholic.

Eddie does a good Che Guevara.. My newly found obsession with photography is getting more expensive. I now have the DSLR, the kit 14-45mm lens, a tripod and from today a remote control so that I can take pictures on the tripod without risking shaking the camera when pressing the shutter release. The next purchase will be a 45-150mm lens. And then maybe even a macro. Crikey. Well, I say expensive but I’m still a tight arse, I saved a fiver, yes 5 square pounds by purchasing the remote second hand on Ebay. I’m slightly regretting being so stingy though because I’m not finding it to be terribly reliable. I dunno if the battery is running low or what, but I doubt that because it’s supposed to last 5 years and an obscene amount of uses before the battery fails. Hmm, I suppose it’s possible it has been pressed continuously during transit or storage. Also, the zoom and exposure buttons don’t do anything, only the shutter button, I don’t need them though so I don’t care about this. Also, it didn’t come with the instructions and I had to scour the t’internet for a PDF.

KDE on Mac. Someone, or some people have ported KDE, and the QT foundation to Mac OS X. This is more than just an X11 recompile and I’m quite excited about the possiblities. When you launch one of the KDE apps it fits in really well with the Mac environment, the app’s icon is displayed in the Dock as it should be and the app’s menu bar correctly uses the mac’s at the top of the screen rather than being contained within the window. This is a great step in the right direction for a true cross-platform GUI, and one that doesn’t rely on some smelly, slow interperated language. I think this was it but now i’m not entirely sure because i tried it a week or so ago and forgot to note the URL. Sorry Susan.
Tesco Office. Tesco, the UK’s #1 supermarket, a shop which makes me shudder… is going to be selling it’s own branded cut-price software, including an Office clone and some anti-virus security bundle. When I first heard about this I thought oooooh I bet it’s OpenOffice, that’ll do the open source crowd some great PR. Unfortunately it isn’t, Tesco’s Office is going to be based on Ability Office, which as far as I can tell is a Windows only wanky shameful MS Office rip-off.

The other day I had an absolute nightmare walking Eddie.

We were half the way around a circlular route in the woods, probably about half a mile into it when this other dog comes bolting up to me barking its mouth off and Eddie, ever dutiful in protecting his owner fled the scene.  2 Women arrived apologising and saying they’ll put their barking dog on the lead ‘cos its in a funny mood.

Eddie was nowhere to be seen so I stood there and waited for him to come back whilst occasionally calling out.  After what felt like forever I gave up waiting and went off running back in search of him.  I caught up with the 2 women, their dog was still yapping at everything and the bitches had gone and let it back of the lead!  Stupid, because obviously Eddie will have carried on running away from it.  So I carried on running past them and Eddie was still nowhere to be seen even as I reached the entrance to the woodland, I thought ’shit’ cos I released he might have aimed to cross a road on the way back home.  So I carried on, ran accross the busy road and this guy calls out to me, “hey, is that your dog?!” and there he was, staring at me from down this school path I use to get to the woods.  When I got to him he cried out desperately as he made a fuss of me.  I bet he had run straight across the road without looking, and I wish there was footage because I wager he will have narrowly missed being run over

I’m really feeling the new iTunes, the grouped with artwork view is very effective.  Best of all is the gapless play, a feature I’ve been waiting for for a good while, it didn’t do too good a job of scanning my library for gapless LP’s though, the first one I tried it on, Mew’s “And The Glass Handed Kites”, which incidentally is in my opinion the best LP so far this year, was not tagged as gapless, but it’s easy to correct by selecting all the tracks and setting the gapless option in their info dialog.  I do not like the new colour scheme though, it looks like a goth got their dirty mitts on it.

A stork visited my brother and his wife on Tuesday, a wee girl with rosey red cheeks and is as sweet as a little baby can be.  I’d post some photo’s but I don’t post photo’s of people without their permission (unless they’re animal) and i’m not asking permission because then i’d have to mention the blog and that would be damned embarrassing.  Not to mention all this baby can do is gurgle and scream.

I started a Flickr group today called “Basset Griffon Vendéen.”  Bet ya can’t guess what it’s about?  It’s already got 4 members, although admittedly 2 of them are me, one to set it up and one to test that its joinable lol.  Thing is, the 2 people who have joined have already posted enough photo’s to knock poor Eddie off the first page!

The funnest thing about it though is that you can rename “admin” and “member”.  I’ve called them “Grand” and “Petit” (a breed joke), but it’s a little ironic because that means I’m “Grand” because i’m the Admin but the photo’s I’ve added are of Eddie, who’s a “Petit”.

I urge everyone to take a look at this group because this breed is still very much unknown to the extent of being rare and yet every single specimen is cuter than the cutest thing you can imagine! And I wish to spread the word and make this breed more well known because do you know what?  It’s so unknown that some breeders amazingly have trouble selling an entire litter and they end up having to hold on to some of them beyond their puppy years and the older the puppy is the harder it is to sell.  And I dread to think what becomes of them.

I’ve admired Bleep.com for a long time but I never think to check there for music, because their catalogue is far from exhaustive and it’s mainly dance/electronic based, of which there hasn’t been an awful lot i’m interested in recently.

Anyway, today I went to iTunes to purchase “So This Is Goodbye” by Junior Boys and then I stopped for a second to wonder what the alternative online stores are, I checked Bleep.com and am sooooo glad I did. Not only was it a pound cheaper, 6.99 rather than 7.99 at iTunes but it’s encoded at 320kbit/s (almost obscenely high!) and without any DRM, and this isn’t any dodgy Russian thing, the artists get the royalties they deserve. I also bought the new singles/b-sides compilation by Tortoise, it’s 3cd’s of music and just 8.99! bargain. Also, you can pay by paypal so you you don’t have to go through too much torture in the way of registering.

We took Eddie for another country walk, this walk was from bakewell to hadden hall and back and offered plenty of scenery to try out my camera, I’m still far from a photography expert though. Tell you what, what I’ve noticed now that there’s more photo’s in iPhoto made on it, when you scroll up and down through the thumbnails its really really obvious which are from the DSLR and which are from the compact because the DSLR ones through and through have more vivid colour, the ones from the compact look kind of pastel compared.

I bought a registration for FlickrExport a few weeks go and I realised today that it’s a bit silly to have paid for FlickrExport and yet be using a free Flickr account. So I’ve finally paid for a pro one today, however I didn’t upgrade the account I have been using because it isn’t included in public searches and tag pools, I occasionally upload screenshots to it and these are considered copyrighted material, if they notice they flag your account to not be made public. So, i’ve setup a new account, a pro one for photo’s and I’ll use the free one for screenshots and dodgy things I guess.
The Scobe or whatever he’s affectionately known has been praising some beta software by Microsoft, Codename Max (sounds way to much like Mac’s), I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is so I was intrigued to try it out. It has a flashy interface which requires a good 3D card I think, so I have to boot into bootcamp for that. So I booted into Vista to download Max and install it, and do you know what? The Installer told me I need XP! OMG! In fact, even better it told me to “upgrade” to XP.

I haven’t posted any photo’s of Eddie in an age, we went on a walk in Derbyshire that was very pleasant indeed.

The walk started at the Druids Inn, or at least I think that was what the pub/restaurant is called, its a swanky place which has recently been taken over the same guy who runs the Thyme restaurant in Sheffield, if the nosh is only even half as good as Thyme it would be well worth checking out, and you couldn’t possibly ask for more idelic surroundings.

There were some Bronze Age stones laid out in a circler manor half through the walk, possibly meant to be the highlight but it just looked like some weathered stones to me, still you do get the eerie feeling that some witchcraft had taken place and Eddie seemed right in there.

More Derbyshire pr0n. Speaking of Eddie, he’s got some mysterious growth in between the pads of one of his paws and he gets vicious if you fiddle with it, I think it might be a blister, but it’s most unlike any blister i’ve ever had. Still, I think I’d have weird growths on my feet if I walked everywhere bare-foot. It’s his own silly fault for being a dog.

I didn’t really finish writing up the holiday, hmm but even though It’s only been 10 odd days since coming back the memories have already become an incoherent mess inside my head. I’m such a scatterbrain. All mushed up. Lemmie see.

North Devon has lovely country walks and such but it doesn’t tend to have those charming cobbled harbour towns that you get a lot of in south devon and cornwell. Still, the nicest town we visited was Ilfracombe, really pretty town, lots of pensioners about and its really well kept and has some kind of homely quality. Strange claim to fame there, they have a restaurant called The Quay owned by Damien Hurst, we did happen to pass it but there wasn’t anything in formaldehyde on the menu so we didn’t bother, plus it wasn’t dinner time. Nope a more incredible thing was, we bumped into a PBGV!!! The first fellow PBGV Eddie has seen since the kennel and he couldn’t give two hoots lol. It was a bitch and was the colours we actually wanted originally (sorry eddie lol), it was white + blonde/going on ginger. Ack it had a really adorable coat. But OMG, her folks had a heartbreaking story to tell us! When she was 4 they discovered she’d developed glaucoma and it was too far gone to save and at 6 she had to have her eyes taken out! The gits got us all round up as well, they actually said to us, (paraphrasing) “You know, with this breed still being quite uncommon we’ve always wondered if the risk of glaucoma is in the breed but hasn’t been publicised”, Well thanks! What a thing to say to get us all worried about Eddie’s future. LOL, also they kind of implied to us that Eddie’s over-weight, just cos their’s was quite svelte. Hey, its a chubby breed I swear, theres was just freakishly thin!

Stupid car on that photo.

Still here in North Devon for one more day after tonight and then off back to sheffield saturday morning in a mad dash to catch the footie.

I think I’ll run through some of the towns and wot not we’ve visited. After Westwood Ho! came Appledore, which wasn’t much better frankly but becomes interesting slightly when you weigh in the bizarre factor, i really was quite weirded out. It’s a small harbour town, and most of it is all bunched up like a rabbit warren on a slope going up from the harbour. The streets were so narrow that all the inhabitants seem have given up trying park cars up them and so they’re all running along the harbour, and some homes seem to be wedged between the back of others. The people who live there are rather odd too. One home had the recipe to fish stew attached to the door all decorated with some painted pottery of fish on a plate and something like “Gary’s Fish Stew” in huge lettering above it. We looked for somewhere to drink but the only pub was empty but for a folk trio who had set up and were waiting for a least one person to play to, because we gawped at the window and carried on walking someone pocked their head out and shouted something at us, obviously frustrated. “Save our library” had been plastered on every spare window, so many that anyone would think it was insanely popular, but ifs its closing that cannot be the case. Strangest of all the place seemed abandoned, no one at all were out that night.

Clovelly is a real curiosity. It’s a village, sort of built on the side of a coast, the whole thing being quite steep down to the beach, its very isolated but the really nice thing is that the whole village is now owned by a family and they’ve kept it as it’s always been, so to be totally unspoit and in good condition. In a way it’s a little like Portmerrion, but different because it wasn’t purpose built and there are people actually living there, although I can’t imagine how they cope with all the tourists gushing past every day. Cars can’t get around it and in a odd twist they have donkeys to cart things on sledges (why sledges and not carts i dunno).

Oooh, whilst leaving clovelly an Australian couple approached to take a look at Eddie, they said they wanted a PBGV but couldn’t get hold of a single breeder in Australia. Hehe, i dunno why but that made me feel quite chuffed.