Cheltenham: Day 1

Currently sitting in my room at our holiday cottage in Cheltenham, after a rather long and tiring day.

Got up at a pretty standard time of about 8:30, and then had to pack all my stuff up like laptop, books and work that I need to do. We were meant to get out at 9:30, but as usual, everyone was massively behind so we didn’t get done until more like 10am.

Headed down the M25 which was unusually quiet, and drove for a few hours, whilst listening to my iPod, talking about various random subjects with the family and eating some somewhat bizarre sweets which apparently contained vitamins, bought from Upminster’s very old Aldi.

After a couple of hours, we decided to stop in Oxford since we need somewhere to eat, and it is a place which is of interest to the family since I am hoping to go to University there (if I am extremely lucky)!

We had a look around a couple of shops, namely Debenhams (mainly for a family toilet break) and Schuh (where I saw some blue Vans which I badly want). We then went to a little cafe that we found and had probably one of the nicest lunches I’ve ever had. It was just ridiculously nice – I had some epic crisps, a bottle of peach iced tea and a Parma Ham, Pesto and Mozzarella panini, followed by a stupidly nice piece of pecan pie. I could seriously eat that meal every day, forever. After that, we visited Trinity College, as that is the college which I am planning to apply to in order to study French. As ever, the grounds were lovely and it was all looking rather summery there.

After that, we had a quick continuation of our walk around the down, before heading back to the car park and hitting the road to go back to Cheltenham. After another hour or so, and some directional mishaps, we managed to arrive here and settle into our home for the week. Of note on site was the swimming pool, enclosed in a somewhat strange white tent, tennis courts and a gym with a ridiculously noisy crosstrainer and broken treadmill.

After a quick walk around the site, we came back to the cottage and had some dinner, before I retreated to my room to be unsociable for the rest of the evening. I didn’t really do much to be honest, just went on Facebook browsed the Internet, talked to Faith and watched an episode of 30 Rock that I brought with me.

I’m off to bed now. I suspect tomorrow will not be very exciting, got to go shopping (oh the joy!) and going to visit Cheltenham in the afternoon in all likelyhood.

This is a little bit late, and was written at 10pm-ish last night (20th August). I wrote it on my iPhone using my keyboard, but I couldn’t get it to publish so I’m publishing it now :)

Holiday to Cheltenham: Day 1

Currently sitting in my room at our holiday cottage in Cheltenham, after a rather long and tiring day.

Got up at a pretty standard time of about 8:30, and then had to pack all my stuff up like laptop, books and work that I need to do. We were meant to get out at 9:30, but as usual, everyone was massively behind so we didn’t get done until more like 10am.

Headed down the M25 which was unusually quiet, and drove for a few hours, whilst listening to my iPod, talking about various random subjects with the family and eating some somewhat bizarre sweets which apparently contained vitamins, bought from Upminster’s very old Aldi.

After a couple of hours, we decided to stop in Oxford since we need somewhere to eat, and it is a place which is of interest to the family since I am hoping to go to University there (if I am extremely lucky)!

We had a look around a couple of shops, namely Debenhams (mainly for a family toilet break) and Schuh (where I saw some blue Vans which I badly want). We then went to a little cafe that we found and had probably one of the nicest lunches I’ve ever had. It was just ridiculously nice – I had some epic crisps, a bottle of peach iced tea and a Parma Ham, Pesto and Mozzarella panini, followed by a stupidly nice piece of pecan pie. I could seriously eat that meal every day, forever. After that, we visited Trinity College, as that is the college which I am planning to apply to in order to study French. As ever, the grounds were lovely and it was all looking rather summery there.

After that, we had a quick continuation of our walk around the down, before heading back to the car park and hitting the road to go back to Cheltenham. After another hour or so, and some directional mishaps, we managed to arrive here and settle into our home for the week. Of note on site was the swimming pool, enclosed in a somewhat strange white tent, tennis courts and a gym with a ridiculously noisy crosstrainer and broken treadmill.

After a quick walk around the site, we came back to the cottage and had some dinner, before I retreated to my room to be unsociable for the rest of the evening. I didn’t really do much to be honest, just went on Facebook browsed the Internet, talked to Faith and watched an episode of 30 Rock that I brought with me.

I’m off to bed now. I suspect tomorrow will not be very exciting, got to go shopping (oh the joy!) and going to visit Cheltenham in the afternoon in all likelyhood.

Nothing Suits Me Like a Suit

This video from How I Mer Your Mother is legen…wait for it….dary. I love your Barney Stinson.

(not to all you non-geeks out there – to see YouTube in the new and far less crashy way, you need to enable HTML5 on YouTube, providing you’re running a recent browser like Safari 4, Chrome 4 or Firefox 3.6)

New site design

As you may have seen, in the last couple of days I have completely revamped all my personal websites with new designs. If you go to my main homepage, you can see that this time round (of many!) I have gone for a very minimalistic look made up principally of white, grey and pink.

On my main site, I’ve gone very simply for my name (which I’m sure you all now by now!) with a little navigation bar linking to the things I care about. I’ve then also added a little speech bubble, with an AJAX request to a PHP script to populate it with my latest tweet on Twitter (@timROGERS) and how long ago that tweet was posted.

After that, I cloned the design onto my blog and essentially created a WordPress theme out of it so that it would match and have some level of coherence. I’m quite happy with this theme, though as usual it totally lacks flexibility and doesn’t really support anything other than the very basic features. I would be rather happy if someone would buy a book on WordPress theme design haha ;)

This evening, I’ve just been making an iPad version of my site for some fun and practice. The current site works just fine, but I wanted to see what I could do if I tried to make an iPad specific version. I tried to follow iOS UI conventions with the toolbar, and use the 960GS grid system to create the layout. I’ve never used this approach to design before, and I found it very liberating actually, and it made it remarkably easy to put together my framework.

I’ve noticed recently that my CSS has improved a lot – I’m not just writing some load of crap with thousands of IDs and classes, but rather actually thinking about structure. But that’s for another day. Please, feel free to check out the new sites, particularly the iPad one (viewable in the screenshot below and here, ideally from an iPad).

London to Southampton

I’m currently on a coach, writing this brand new blog post, on the way from London Victoria to Southampton. You may be thinking “why are you telling me this?” – but there is good reason, I assure you.

This is far beyond any run of the mill coach which you are likely to have travelled on. It is operated under the brand Greyhound, which is a brand name which will no doubt be familiar to any readers in the United States. It is a new import to the UK, and is being run by UK bus conglomerate First Group.

This is a truly excellent coach. Each passenger has a very large reclining leather seat with masses of legroom, a free newspaper (The Independent, which I am quite looking forward to reading), two power sockets (perfect for charging my iPhone and iPad) and free wireless Internet. I can’t say I’m overly sure that I know how the internet works, but it does, and reasonably quickly for that matter – in fact, I am posting this post using it.

This coach will take me from London to the South coast in just under two and a half hours, all for a return price of £3.50. Absolute bloody *insert expletive here* bargain. I can tell you, I will be using this service again!

Have a good day everyone. I certainly intend to have some fun in Southampton, and shall be no doubt spending needless amounts of cash in the Westquay Shopping Centre!

(sorry for the blur on the pictures – silly fast moving coach!)