A new wedding venue

Posted by on 12 July, 2011 No comments

Emily and I visited a wedding venue today – Launde Abbey. I think it’s going to be a contender!

30 Years Old…

Posted by on 10 July, 2011 No comments

Today is my 30th Birthday. 30… That sounds old. 5 years since my Mum passed away. 9 years since I left University. 12 years since I finished my A-Levels and left school. 2.5 years years since I met my now fiancee Emily. A lot has happened.

I was intending just going out for lunch Emily and then coming over and inviting a few people over for a few drinks. But Emily and my brother Jonny had other plans… Emily and I left our house yesterday lunch time and started driving. She was taking me to some secret location. After we went passed a the turn offs and places where I thought we were going, I started getting a little worried. Did she know where we were going?

Eventually we arrived at ‘The Marquess of Exeter’ in Lyddington. We parked in the car park and made our way in to reception, where we got directed through to the bar. As I walk into the bar I looked to the left to be greeted by about 12 of my friends all shouting ‘Happy Birthday’! I was completely shocked. I absolutely had no idea. Not one. Apparently Jonny and Emily had had secret conversations and arranged a 3 course meal at this small Rutland village pub/restaurant. Cheeky buggers!

After a lovely meal, an unprepared speech and a strawberry and sponge birthday cake we all headed by to my house for drinks and then a buffet of sandwiches I had prepared the night before, not knowing what I’d be doing for lunch that day.

The usual consumption of alcoholic beverages continued through to about 9pm when we all then decided to get taxis and go out in Stamford.

Thanks everyone involved for the surprise party. Especially Emily and Jonny.

Foo Fighters, Milton Keynes

Posted by on 3 July, 2011 No comments

As I was turning 30, my brother Jonny had tickets to see the Foo Fighters at Milton Keynes and decided to take me along with him. Foo Fighters are one of my favourite bands, ever. I was seeing Take That at Wembley the day before so was unsure of being too worn out to enjoy it. But after a second offer by Jonny I decided why not! And I’m glad I did.

It would be unfair to compare the Foo Fighters with Take That. They are completely different. But if you asked me which one I enjoyed more, it would absolutely be Foo Fighters. They were absolutely awesome.

The gig took place at Milton Keynes Bowl which is basically a huge grass bowl with a stage at the bottom. The place had about 40,000 people at it was packed. Some of the warm up acts I didn’t really like the much. Biffy Clyro was bad. I’d only heard a few of their song and thought they were quite a mellow band. I was wrong!

After Jonny and I had a few beers, seen the support acts it was time for the Foos. They started with their new album, Wasting Light, and mixed it up a bit with a few of their ‘oldies’. Every few songs Dave Grohl would have a little ‘chat’ with us making him seem just a ‘normal guy’ and seemed genuinely gracious of the support of us fans.

About halfway through Dave announced a ‘special guest’ – none other than Roger Taylor, the drummer from Queen. He played a few songs with them, which again, we awesome.

Dave and the rest of the band played a few more songs and then announced ANOTHER special guest – Alice Cooper! No one could believe it. They went on to play School’s Out for Summer and Feed My Frankenstein. Amazing!

Thanks Foo Fighters for not disappointing me, and confirming, in my mind at least, you are THE best band in the World. Oh, and thanks Jonny for getting the tickets ;)

Take That Progress at Wembley

Posted by on 2 July, 2011 No comments

This was my first time to the new Wembley stadium. My brother Jonny and I had been to the old one many years ago. We even go to go out on the pitch and stand on the centre spot! The new Wembley stadium is very impressive. The huge arch over the top can be seen for miles around.

I bought the tickets for Emily at Christmas time. Our friends Steve and Lauren also came with us too. We got there around mid-day and parked in the car park right outside. Much better that catching trains and tubes to get there. And it wasn’t too pricey either. After a walk round the stadium and a few teas and a hot dog we decided to queue up. Some people had be camped out for many hours before us. Some even had portable picnic tables! The hard concrete floors were a little uncomfortable, but with regular walking breaks it wasn’t too bad.

After 2 or so hours of queuing we looked behind us along Olympic Way to see about a mile of queues. It was unbelievable! Glad we got there a few hours early!

After going through the automatic ticket booths we got into Wembley Stadium and went straight in to the main standing area. There weren’t that many people in by then so got to the front. We then um-ed and ah-ed, and decided standing for hours on end would be too much, so went to find some seats close to the left hand side of the stage.

There was a few more hours wait after getting seats. After Steve and I have several beers, at extortionate prices, the supporting group came on – The Pet Shop Boys! Neil Tennant put on a good show, although all his dancers we wearing strange outfits with cube parts on them.

There was another break after The Pet Shop Boys, so time for a few more beers.

Then, some crazy Professor type guy came our, pressed a few buttons on a giant computer keyboard which was controlling a computer screen on the main stage video wall. He started a 1 minute count down for Take That…

5, 4, 3, 2, 1… What you have to realise is, about 80% of the crowd were women. So when Gary, Jason, Howard and Mark came out on the stage there were deafening screams. 80,000 people all screaming. That’s quite a noise.

The four boys the sang the songs they release after Take That got back together (the one’s without Robbie). There was an interesting one with a giant caterpillar… which was a bit trippy.

Then the 4 of them left the stage… Next was Robbie, who gave quite an impressive entrance. If you thought the welcoming Gary, Jason, Howard and Mark got was loud, this was nothing compared to what Robbie got.

Now despite what you think of Robbie Williams, he is a born entertainer. And the 30 or so minutes he was on was probably the best.

After Robbie’s solo performance he was joined by the other 4 when they did all their recent songs with the 5 of them, followed by the favourite old school Take That songs.

Throughout the performance a large mechanical man came out of the stage at certain points. By the end of the show it had come right out into the crowd and was stood up. Not quite sure what it was signifying, but was impressive.

After the show had finished, leaving the actual stadium wasn’t as bad as I thought. The real problem came when it took us over an hour to get out the car park. The car park wardens didn’t have a clue about traffic control meaning everyone just headed straight to the two lane exit. It was a complete joke.

Several hours later we were back home after a long, tiring, but great day. Thanks guys.

Playing with iOS 5

Posted by on 9 June, 2011 No comments

As an iOS Developer and a keen interest in all geeky stuff, I downloaded the beta version of iOS 5 for my iPhone and iPad after it’s release at Apple’s WWDC event on Monday. For those of you who didn’t understand that last sentence, iOS 5 is the latest update for your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch device. After a few days of playing around with it, much to my girlfriend’s annoyance, I thought I’d write about my experiences.

First off, it’s not a finished product, so I have experienced a few bugs and crashes. But on the whole, they’ve added quite a few nice new features. You can read all about them on Apple’s site. Here’s just a few I really liked:

  • iCloud integration
  • Notification Center
  • iMessages
  • Reminders
  • Twitter integration

iCloud integration

For the last 3 years I’ve been a Mobile Me member. This is a service from Apple which keeps all your contacts, calendars and bookmarks in sync with all your devices (including your Mac/PC). It also kept in sync your Mac desktop machines in sync with each other too. iCloud integration is replacing this, for FREE! But not only does iCloud sync your contacts and calendars, it also allows you to backup your device to it. What does this mean? Well, instead of having to plug your iPhone into your Mac/PC and sync/backup it up your iPhone will automatically do it for you to iCloud. This means if you lose your phone or get a new one, you enter in your Apple ID and password into your new device and restore everything to it – Contacts, Calendar, settings… everything.

Notification Center

Currently, if you receive a notification on your iDevice you get a pop up alert which stops you doing anything until you press a button to remove it. And on the lock screen if you receive a message, missed call etc. they are all listed in a box. Once you unlock your device there’s no way of finding out what those messages were. This whole idea of alerts has been one of iOS’s biggest criticisms compared to say the Android platform.

Apple has now fixed this problem with what’s called Notification Center. Instead of getting a pop up for an alert, you get a small bar across the top of your screen telling you of the alert, which most importantly doesn’t stop you doing whatever it is you’re doing. Then, if you want to see a list of all your notifications or alerts, simple swipe from top to bottom on your screen and the notification center slides down showing you all of your alerts.

iMessages

Simply put – BlackBerry Messenger for iOS. You can now send messages, for free, including pictures and videos, to other iOS devices. And best of all, it’s so so simple to use, you probably won’t even know you’re using it instead of sending a normal SMS or MMS messages. All you need to do is open up your Messages App, enter someone’s phone number of e-mail address in the To field. Your iPhone will then ask Apple if this number or e-mail address can be used for iMessages. If it can, then it sends it with iMessage, if not it sends it as normal (unless you’re on a Wi-Fi only iPad or iPod Touch). I think this is going to really take off and will be another nail in the coffin for BlackBerry and its owning company, RIM.

Reminders

Reminders are like a powerful To-Do list. You can set a reminder as part of a list (e.g. a shopping list) or to alert you at some specific time. But what’s really neat is you can get it to alert you when you arrive or leave a particular location. Let’s say you want to be reminded to call the wife when you leave work, but don’t know what time you’re leaving. All you do is create a new reminder and set it to alert you when you leave the office. What is does is create a ‘geo-fence’ around your office. When you pass through this fence your iPhone will alert you.

Twitter

I’m not a really a user of Twitter. I’m more of a Facebook person myself. But for all those keen tweeters out there, Twitter is built into iOS allowing you to tweet from anywhere be it a link to a web page or a picture you’ve just taken.

There are many other new features but I just thought I’d write about the ones that have impressed me the most. When Apple release this in ‘The Fall’ (that’s American for Autumn) this is going to be a big hit. Especially now they are pushing the whole cloud concept to the ‘normal’ user. Once again, Apple leaves the other mobile platforms for dust.

Updating WordPress hosted by 1&1

Posted by on 2 June, 2011 No comments

For a few weeks now WordPress has been telling me I need to update a theme and WordPress itself. But when I clicked on the links it presented me, I would get a page saying:

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-3.1.3.zip

And that would be it. Nothing… No update. No error message. Nothing.

Getting fed up of this I decided to do a quick Google and found that for Linux based packages from 1&1 which host WordPress blogs, you need to add a new content-type to you .htaccess file for php5:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

I ftp-ed the change to my site and also removed:

/wp-content/upgrades

/wp-content/*.tmp

I then returned to my blog, clicked update and as if by magic… WordPress updated itself.

I’m guessing that this fix also works for updating themes or plug-ins, as I now have no problem updating anything.

Neglect and a visit to the cinema

Posted by on 1 June, 2011 No comments

Being busy blogging about my new App on Apple’s App Store I seemed to have neglected my personal blog for a week or two. Having made a promise to make an effort with posting regularly, I’m back!

Having just returned from the cinema I thought I’d write some words on what I thought of the film.

X-Men: First Class

It doesn’t officially come out until Friday, but the ‘local’ cinema (20 miles away) had a preview screening. The Showcase cinema we go to is one that could do with a bit of modernising. Bigger screens, better sound system, nice seats. But the screen we were in did have a new digital projector which made quite a difference to the picture quality.

After being told the film would actually start at 7pm (usually when they say 7pm they actually mean about 7:30pm after all the adverts and trailers have played) I was pleasantly surprised. I hate having to sit through all the junk first before the film. But I wasn’t surprised for long… They showed about 15 minutes of trailers and some stupid Orange ‘mo-bul’ phone advert twice! It was the one where they provide their own subtitles to a film. Annoying! There were a few trailers that looked good though. Captain American, Cowboys & Aliens (with Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford) and a Steven Spielberg film called Super 8.

So, eventually, after the trailers had finished, bags of pop corn stopped rustling, the annoying kid behind me had stopped kicking my chair, the film began…

I won’t go into the plot in great detail in case you want to see it, so he’s a few bits that hopefully won’t spoil the storyline too much. The film tells us how Eric Lenchur (Michael Fassbender) and Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) find each other and become close friends, both wanting humanity to accept them and their kind. Kevin Bacon plays Sebastian Shaw who’s the ‘bad guy’ of the film who is behind the Cuban Missile Crisis – the time frame of the film. There’s even a quick and funny cameo roll for Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.

In all, the fiancée and I thought it was an enjoyable film. James MacAvory plays a young Prof. X very well. If you’re a fan of X-Men you’ll obviously know the story and characters. This makes the film (and other prequels) different because you roughly ‘know’ what’s going to happen, just not ‘how’ it’s going to happen. We know Prof. X and Magneto don’t stay teamed up together. We know Prof. X looses the use of his legs and ends up in a wheelchair. And piece by piece the film tells us ‘how’. It reminded me of the Star Wars prequels. We ‘know’ Anakin Skywalker turns to the dark side becomes Darth Vader, and the film shows us ‘how’.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Screening at your local cinema from Friday.

Petrol Prices

Posted by on 19 May, 2011 No comments

I work about 35 miles from where I live. That’s 70 miles round trip, 4 times a week. I get through about a tank of fuel a week. A few years ago I used to be able to fill up for under £50 which was ‘ok’. I’ve just filled up my car now and the price was £65 (give or take a few pennies). It’s absolutely crazy! I read this article last week about American fuel prices any how they are up in arms about it. Then I read their petrol prices are less than half that of ours! And they’re complaining! WTF? The reason it’s so cheap is because they hardly pay any tax on it, unlike the rest of us. Every single year in this country fuel duty goes up. 1p here. 2p there… And it’s gotten to a point when enough is enough. It’s not like that’s all we have to pay to own a car. You have road tax, MOT and insurance too. This video from BBC News shocked me at where our money goes when buying petrol.

Think about this: The Government is trying to get everyone to lower pollution by driving less or use electric cars, not to smoke and cut down on drinking. If everyone did this the country would have no money to collect from tax and duty.

Ok, rant over…

I did like this joke about the whole subject though:

Apparently it’s been revealed that petrol stations will start playing porn movies at the pumps. The purpose behind the idea is so you can see someone else getting screwed at the same time as you.

House back on the market soon

Posted by on 18 May, 2011 No comments

Just over a year ago we put the house on the market. It was about a month before they scrapped the HIP, or Home Information Pack. Yeah, we were please about this too! But despite being on the market for till the end of last year, having lots of people come look round, we only have one offer on the house. Well, I say ‘offer’ – it was more of a joke really. Some little old lady came well under the asking price and crept up and up. Apparently she had pissed off all the estate agent workers too with phoning up all the time and asking stupid questions. But we were in no need to rush and sell the house at well under the actual value of the house. So we took it off the market with the aim of doing a bit of DIY and freshening the place up a bit.

After 3 or 4 months we are finally there with tarting the house up. Repainted the kitchen, completely gutted the utility room and fitted a new worktop (thanks Grandad) and put the fridge, washing machine and tumble dryer in there. Pictures can be found here. The cats even have their own little place for there food too. We also, with a few mishaps along the way, managed to fit a wall unit. The main mishap was the unit falling off the wall and whacking the fiancee in the face! Opps! One thing I was proud of was all the tiling I did. It’s something I’ve never done before and heard it was quite hard.

Along with the kitchen we repainted the bathroom and our bedroom. We thought the bedroom would be an easy thing to do. Much easier than the kitchen as it was literally just painting. No DIY work needed. But when actually starting we saw that most of the wallpaper had gotten damp and need stripping. It was that wood-chip stuff. Suppose to be really hard to get off. Not for us! It just came straight off with little effort. It was what was underneath that caused the problems. The plaster had crack in some places and the walls were all uneven as there was patches of horrible green paint everywhere. They had to be sanded down and filled. If you have never sanded walls you know the amount of dust it produces. It went absolutely everywhere! And since the paint on the wall was green everything was covered in a fine green dust. Our poor old Henry vacuum cleaner didn’t like it one bit. He had to be cleaned out several times.

We also decided to tidy up the rear garden a bit. I’ve never been a gardener. It just doesn’t appeal to me. But we got on with it and I painted some of the fascias too.

After a busy few months it’s finally time to get back on the market. After working on the house for so long it’s kind of sad to then sell it. But that’s been our aim since the start. The fiancee and I are getting married so need somewhere a little bigger and closer to where we work. I trying to look at it as practice for when we do move. It made me see the potential in a lot more houses now. Even just a simple coat of paint can transform a room. So this time round I won’t be put off as easily if a house has disgusting coloured walls. And to be honest, I really got into the whole DIYing thing. But you we found you have to stick at it. If you relax and say you’ll take a break halfway through a room, it’s a real effort to get yourself motivated again and finish it off.

So, estate agent has been round, done a valuation and they’re coming back to take pictures next week. So this weekend is going to be a busy one. Making the finishing touches and cleaning the house top to bottom. A well earned drink will be needed Saturday night I’m sure.

Let’s hope this time round and with our cosmetic changes, we can actually get a sale!

I’ve submitted my first iPhone App to the App Store

Posted by on 17 May, 2011 No comments
App Store Icon

I’ve finally done it. I’ve submitted my first iPhone App to the App Store. It takes a few days for the guys at Apple to reviewed, but hopefully in a few days it will be passed and available on the App Store. Exciting stuff.

For more information, read my other blog http://apps.adam-young.co.uk which goes into detail a little more.