Ah, the gorging, feasting and binging is over. Actually, I didn't G,F or B to any great extent at all.
On the day itself, we had the obligatory Roast Turkey at the M-i-L's, preceded by a few cheesy nibbles and polished off with a small chunck of crimble pud, custard and cream. We missed out on 'tea' entirely, feeling too full after the roast.
On Boxing Day, we took a short drive up to St Albans to see the Mummers perform the short (20 minute) traditional play, whereby St George kills the dragon, the Turk and the Giant, after being brought back to life by the Doctor. All good fun! I video'ed the entire performance, but at 450Mb it's a bit too large to put online via any of the usual services.My video editing skills leave something to be desired, so I'll leave that project for another day. We then visited friends, and I somehow managed to polish off a bottle of red wine before sitting down to a fine meal of cold turkey, mashed spuds and peas. Food of the gods!
In comparison, the last two days have been utter relaxation. Yesterday, we didn't leave the house, but just vegged around - I did some surfing on the net without actually achieving anything. Today was much of the same, except we had to do some food shopping first.
Ah, but tomorrow! Our Boxing Day friends spend a great deal of their lives running around pleasing their teenage children, and make very little time for themselves, so we plan to 'kidnap' them and take them out to the wilds of Oxfordshire for a relaxing day away from home. They can't believe the miles we cover in our usual weekend awayday trips, so we're hoping to give them a taste of the good life :-)
I did rather better than expected on Christmas morning. When I awoke, I had the following items awaiting me:
Jawbone bluetooth headset (for driving)
Nokia BH 501 headphones (for commuting on the train)
Nokia DT-22 Tripod (for experimenting with HDR photography - my next step)
Simpsons DVD - Series 10
Red Dwarf DVD - Series 1-3 'The Bodysnatcher Collection'
Book - Thames, Sacred River by Peter Ackroyd.
All excellent stuff!! I'm one happy bunny ;-)
Having let all the crowds disperse after the Solstice celebrations, we headed down to Wiltshire yesterday in the fog to take a latest look at the state of Silbury Hill, and to meet up with friends from Heritage Action for a drink in the red Lion at Avebury.
The drive down was somewhat hazardous, as the fog was quite thick in places, and spray from the road was coating the windscreen in gunk - not the most pleasant way to drive! Stopping for petrol, I took the opportunity to clean the windows with a sponge and water bucket, but this turned out to be a mistake as it merely smeared the windows with a water/petrol mix which made things worse instead of better!
Thankfully, as we passed Newbury the weather seemed to clear, and by the time we got to Slbury, the weather had perked up considerably. The hill looked very forlorn, and somewhat slumped on the west side - no doubt an effect of all the recent secretive works that have gone on inside, and which continue (see the Heritage Action web site for details of their campaign for openness about the works)
Continuing into Avebury, I took a short sojourn around the circle of stones before repairing to the pub for the meeting.
Despite only being early afternoon, the light was failing fast, and the fog closed in once again when we neared Newbury and the motorway. In fact, driving conditions were so bad that we only managed an average speed in the high 30s mph, and it took us nearly 3 hours to travel the 100 miles or so to get home.
I had a really early appointment at the hospital today, just as the sun was making an appearance.
This was taken at 7:25am. By 8:30am, there will be no space left in the car park. The white car in the centre of the picture was deeply encrusted with frost, having been left there all night.
Ok, I've had this for a few weeks now, so thought it was time to write about my experiences to date.
First off, actually getting one seems to be fraught with difficulty. I'd searched multiple web sites, trying to find someone who had them in stock. I trawled around countless mobile phone shops, all of whom looked at me as if I was speaking Martian when I asked if they had a Bluetooth keyboard.
Eventually, I placed an order with Expansys, a reputable vendor, who had it listed as awaiting stock: 28 day delivery. And I sat back and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Each time I checked on the progress of the order, it was still reading as 28 days delivery. After three months I cancelled the order (patient huh?) and checked on Ebay.co.uk. I found someone who had a brand new unit on Buy-it-Now for £50, as opposed to the £68-£70 advertised price. I jumped at it, and in a few days had the unit in my hand at last.
It fits nicely into the side pocket of my combats when folded, so is easy to carry and coupling the unit to my N95 was a breeze. I was set.
Initial use was restricted to a few text messages, but a sterner test occurred a couple of weeks ago, when I attended an all day meeting, at which I had to take notes. I tentatively left my laptop at home... I was concerned about relying on the N95 battery having BT active all day - even with a Proporta backup battery. I needn't have worried. Despite having BT active from 10am to 5pm, with a short period of web browsing at lunch, Jaiku running all day and a couple of calls and texts, the battery indicator hardly dropped.
The keyboard has a rest for the phone built in, but I found it easier to have both flat on the desk. I don't have a writable version of QuickOffice on the N95 (yet), so used the Notes facility to document the meeting. This worked well.
Problems? I found that the timeout on the keyboard during periods of inactivity meant that I had to keep switching the power back on and reconnecting. This isn't a bad thing of itself, but was slightly inconvenient when I suddenly wanted to note something only to find the keyboard totally unresponsive!
The only ongoing difficulty I have is with numerics and special characters such as @£#%& etc. To type a number, the Fn key must be used. to get the special characters, Shift-Fn must be used. This takes some getting used to. Plus I have quite large fingers, and find myself frequently inadvertently pressing CapsLock. This leads to a complete jumble of capitals, numerics and characters appearing from time to time, which then have to be deleted and retyped correctly. I'm not a touch typist, and tend to look at the keyboard when typing, so you can imagine the frustration this causes!
Overall, am I happy? Yes. The keyboard isn't something I use every day, but for those times when I need to type a longer text message, Jaiku, Vox entry or Note, then it's 100 times better than using the keypad on the phone. I've never got the hang of predictive text, and use the multi click approach to get the letters I need. With this keyboard, I'm so much faster!
Wake, Commute, Work, Commute, Eat, Sleep
:sigh:
My Groups
-
Voxaholic Updated: 40 minutes ago
-
Vox Mobile Updated: 1 hour ago
-
UK Voxers Updated: 1 hour ago
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
