My family and I visited the Paris Olympics this week. We watched a women's volleyball match between Brasil and Kenya on Monday followed by tennis on Tuesday. The tennis matches we saw were Coco Gauff versus Donna Vecic then Alexander Zverva versus a Czech player on Court Phillipe Chartier then …
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Visit to Lisbon
I have been working for the same client for several years but yesterday I had the opportunity to visit the client's offices in Lisbon and meet people in person for the first time.
The official reason for the visit was a workshop to discuss plans for the coming year particularly …
git credentials
At work we use GitLab as our source code repository. GitLab is configured to use single sign-on with our corporate credentials, which means we have to use access tokens when using the git on the command line or in an IDE. The corporate policy is to use Windows rather than …
Advent window 2023
For Advent this year, we have created a display in our hall window. Our window is celebrating the donkey in the nativity story.
The window is one of 24 windows being displayed around the village. I am not sure whose idea it was or even what level of organisation was …
How has a year gone by?
It is official. I must be the worst blogger of all time. I consider writting something on the blog occaisionally but actually doing so is not happening given the last update was over a year ago.
Installing Pelican on a Raspberry Pi
A while back I decided to move where I write my blog to a Raspberry Pi. The main reason for having it on a Raspberry Pi was to make it accessible from different devices in the hope that I would update it more often. However, I discovered that the version …
Silver anniversary
I have been married to my lovely wife for 25 years. Our original plans for celebrating the anniversary have had to be abandoned due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead we are going to visit Stourhead followed by a stay at the Castle Hotel in Taunton where we spent our first …
COVID-19 vaccination
A couple of days ago I got a message from my GP inviting me to have a COVID-19 vaccination. I have to admit that I was a little surprised. Given my age and not having any underlying health conditions, I am not a high priority (according to the governments priority …
work anniversary
Today is the twentieth anniversary of when I started work for my current employer.
When I joined twenty years ago I was not sure how long I would want to work for the company This was mainly because I was not sure that I could manage the commute after being …
New Year's Day run
The Coronavirus pandemic means there is no parkrun in the United Kingdom at present and therefore I could not run at a local parkrun this year. I did manage to go out for a slow run around our local common land.
Sadly it appears that the run was too much …
Expenses template for SWVA
As treasurer of the South West Volleyball Association I have updated its expense claim form as the people were sending their claims to the previous treasurer (as the form had his address on it).
Rather than simply change the address I took the opportunity to simplify the form restricting which …
Christmas present from my employer
I had a nice surpise today. I received an unexpected parcel which contained a present from my employer.
The box contained chocolate, shortbread biscuits, honey and an onion relish. It had been done through a company called Social Stories Club, which is a company I had not come across before …
Broadband problems
For the last couple of days our household has been experiencing problems with our broadband with disconnections occurring several times a day (and usually accompianed by shouts of "the WiFi is not working").
Looking in the router logs, I could see some messages occurring each time we had noticed a …
Inspired by colleagues
A couple of weeks ago I was talking with one of my colleagues and discovered that not only did she write a blog (about her experiences as a parent of a child with allegeries) but also she got a lot of feedback. She also mentioned that another one of my …
Exporting addresses from Evolution
I have some contact details stored in Evolution but recently needed to provide some of them in CSV format. After a bit of searching I discovered there is a command called addressbook-export that can be used to do this. On Fedora I found the command in directory /usr/libexec/evolution-data-server …
Midnight Communion
For a variety of reasons it has been a few years since I last went to Midnight Communion on Christmas Eve at our local church. As my children are getting older, I suggested to my wife that attending Midnight Communion would be a good way to start Christmas. Fortunately I …
Doughnuts at school
One of my daughters has a double lesson at school today. It might be a sign of getting old that I was shocked last night when she informed me that she was taking doughnuts to school today because the pupils had a rota to bring in cake for this double …
Pony Club camp video of Harriet
Harriet has been at Pony Club all week. Today was the final day and I went along to watch her show-jumping and going around a cross-country course. This is the video I took of her.
15 years service
In January 2001 I joined my current employer. Back then the company I joined was CMG Admiral (CMG had bought Admiral six months earlier but the two companies had only started operating as one only at the turn off the year). Since then Logica acquired CMG (the name Admiral was …
Bike maintenance course
Today I went to Cardiff to attend a Essential Bike Maintenance course run by Cycle Training Wales.
There were five of us on the course, three men and two ladies. Most of us were experienced cyclists but novices when it came to repairing a bike. The instructor was Nick Canham …
Blossom
My wife and I had a discussion at lunch time whether the blossom was late this year. The small apple tree in our garden is just starting to blossom, although the cherry tree next to it has been in full blossom for about a week.
On the radio I had …
Solar Eclipse
The weather forecast was accurate and it was not possible to view the solar eclipse in Newbury today where I was working. While I was driving through Marlborugh on my way to work the sun had briefly broken through the clouds but there was no such luck during the eclipse …
Email from the police
My father forwarded me an email earlier. The email had come from his local police force and judging by the subject of the email was a warning about a postcode scam. I am not certain what the email was about because the email simply said "Please find attached Postcode parcel …
New Year 2015
Aims for the Year
As I general rule I do not make resolutions at New Year because I do not like the idea of waiting before starting something. However I do have a couple of aims for this year: 1. Getting fitter; I have already been working on getting fitter …
Daughters' alliance
Daughters' alliance
Last night the family was playing Tri-ominous (dominoes but with three-sided pieces). We had played two rounds which my wife and I had won. In the third round, my eldest daughter was on a good run and was clearly going to win the round. Seeing this my younger …
What is sport?
My daughters were recently watching BBC Sports Personality of the Year. When Lewis Hamilton won they were outraged (to the extent that they stormed out of the room). They had been hoping that Charlotte Dujardin would win and when it was announced that the winner competed in what they felt …
Week ending 30 November in review
Family
My daughters' school was closed for a teacher training day on Friday. Having not been able to visit my parents during the half-term holiday due to work commitments, we took the opportunity to go see them for the weekend. I could not call it a long weekend because the …
Week ending 09 November in review
Sport
Running
I tried to run the parkrun in Chippenham on Saturday morning but pulled out after a mile with a sore calf in my left leg.
Volleyball
On Thursday I played for Calne Asteroids against Swinton Engineers (who have joined the Wiltshire Mixed League this season). The Meteorites had …
Week ending 09 November in review
Sport
Volleyball
I refereed two fixtures in the BUCS league this week and a National Cup fixture. The latter was significant for me in that it was the first time that I had officiated in a match involving a top-flight team (Team South Wales). In addition I captained Calne Meteorites …