Yak & Natter

Today was the first day on my c# course with Xpertise. I haven’t had an opportunity to work with .Net before so this is a great opportunity. So tonight I’ve installed the SDK. I don’t have a Visual Studio .Net license, so instead I downloaded #develop, a free development environment which so far appears to work okay. It comes with ndoc for documentation and #unit for unit testing, althought I’m probably going to use nunit instead.

If you need to take your car to France, seriously consider the Eurotunnel. You may have to try a few different departure times and dates to get a cheap price (we paid £34 for a day trip), but it’s worth it: 35 minutes from platform to platform, a very comfortable ride, and when you arrive you just drive off with no waiting (customs is all done at departure). I hope never to have to get on a channel ferry ever again.

We were in Castleford on Friday at the Xscape for some snowboarding, which was just great and, what with it being only an hour from Jane’s parents, I’m pretty sure we’ll be back there. Anyway… afterwards in Starbucks I had an innocent brand soft drink and the blurb on the side caught my eye:

The deepest well in Europe is 800 metres down. We know this because it’s where we get our spring water from. Apparently it’s very dark down there. We haven’t descended all the way because we’re a bit scared, but we found some monkeys who have hats with torches on them a bit like the ones miners wear. They take their buckets down to get the spring water, but they only do a 3 day week because they have a pretty strong union. Once we’ve got the water we mix in the fruit and some natural beet sugar, and the result is the nice refreshing drink you are now holding. We wanted to call them Monkey Water, but the market research came back looking bad, so please allow us to introduce Juicy Water. Hope you like it.

Surreal. Wonderful.

My snowboard bindings arrived yesterday, and very pleased I am too. I originally ordered some special “lady” flow bindings, but despite Robin Hood Watersports saying they had them to sell, they later emailed me to say they didn’t. So, I opted for some Pro 11 flow’s from edge2edge. I bought them when they were still at full price, but they sold them at their sale price – so I got £35 off them. Thank you edge2edge

This evening we attached our bindings to our boards (with not too much difficulty)- we just need to find some snow now…

Just a couple of things I saw in shop windows in Lewes last week…

1. A rather soothing poster:

”

2. I had no idea anyone would even bother trying to convert arcade games into board games. The text reads: Centipede, the family version of the arcade game.

“

Another snowboarding blog, from Wired News via Luke. 13 colleges in the US took part in the Department of Energy’s Energy Challenge competition last weekend which, this year, was to design, construct and race a snowboard constructed from paper based materials down the slopes at the Winter Park resort in Colorado.

Since coming back from

href="http://v1.janeandrichard.co.uk/travel/Canada2004">Canada we’ve bought a few

snowboarding magazines and books to tide us over and help us find a great resort for next

year. We bought the

href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1900916126/richarddallaway">World Snowboard

guide 2004 which has a useful looking

href="http://www.worldsnowboardguide.com/">accompanying site and seems pretty detailed

but the spelling mistakes let it down somewhat, also a copy of

href="http://www.sukmag.com/">Snowboard UK and a copy of

href="http://www.onboardmag.com/">Onboard. We’ve also ordered a year’s subscription to

the Snowboard Journal on

href="http://www.snowgo.com/archives/2004/03/09/more_on_the_snowboard_journal.php">Luke’s

recommendation but the shipping to the UK is sloooow (6 – 8 weeks) and so we haven’t

received our first issue yet.

I received a letter a month or so ago from a distant cousin who was interested in sharing some of her family tree research. This made me realise how long it has been since I did any work on the tree whatsoever. So this evening I decided to try out the 1901 census online. £5 later I’ve found out addresses for where 2 of my Grandparents were, along with more general information about the third’s parents. The fourth’s family, however, remains elusive. It’s a pretty good service, and seems to be pretty responsive when you consider the amount of people who are in the list.

If anyone happens to be looking for a George S Duffield (aged 6 months) or a John E Duffield (aged 26 years, lodging with the Catley family) in Hull in around 1901 then drop me a line as I have information on these people.

And if anyone happens to know anything about my Duffields then please get in touch.