Free Stuff

A school friend of mine, Steve, sent me an email during the week about the British Freebies web site. It maintains a list of websites which give away free things – like cinema tickets, disposable cameras, mouse mats etc.

I had a quick look on Tuesday and sent off for my free “Window on the UK 2000” CD. It arrived today and it’s really interesting. It’s a collection of images taken from space, and aircrafts during 1999 and seems to have pictures covering most of the UK to some level or other. They have some very clear and high resolution pictures of London, and they were obviously taken whilst both the Dome and the London Eye were under construction. Interesting stuff!

We ve bought new

The bird's eye view

We’ve bought a new kite. It’s a 3.1 metre squared Advance Janus, and this evening we’ve attached the lines to the kite and the handles. So it’s all ready to go. Woohoo!

ve just ordered my

I’ve just ordered my first replacement gadget. I’m getting a Sony SRF M95 digital radio to replace the mp3 player. I’ve ordered it from Purley Radios Ltdand it should be with me in 5 to 7 working days.

One of the cheques that the insurance company sent was made out to one of the companies that some of the previous gadgets have been bought from. I called them to see if they could order this radio for me, but they said that they didn’t deal with anything other than computer equipment and so they weren’t prepared to order anything in for me. I’m going to call the Nationwide next week to see if they will re-adjust the cheques if I explain the circumstances.

ve recently started using

I’ve recently started using Intellisync for yahoo to synchronise my palm to my yahoo calendar, address book and todo list, and so far it’s working really well. It means that when I do a hotsync from my Palm rather than synchonising with the palm desktop, it syncs with the yahoo software making my calendar etc available to me over the internet. What I especially like is the fact that I can choose which applications to sync with yahoo, so at the moment I have the calendar and to do list synchronising all the time that way. The Memos and Addresses I sync with the Palm desktop (at the moment) as they are more likely to be changed from home rather than on the fly. So far everything is going smoothly, and I’ve even got it working from work – so that my Outlook account exports calendar and synchronises task list data to yahoo (I’m only exporting calendar data rather than synching it because I don’t really want everyone at work to know what my social calendar is like…). This means that for finally I have my personal appointments and my work appointments all on the palm, but without having to type the work ones in.

This is of particular use at the moment as I haven’t found a new PDA yet and so am using a PalmPilot Professional. To be honest, PalmOS doesn’t seem to have changed much in the 4 years since this was bought (which is a bit dissapointing) but I find that the grafitti recognition is now too slow to be practical on this old machine. So, being able to update events in my yahoo calendar is a much bigger advantage.

Middle Wallop Kite and Buggy Festival

We headed off to Middle Wallop airfield on Saturday afternoon, and spent a great hour or so playing with our delta (before the rain set in) and watching lots and lots of buggiers and mountain boarders enjoying the vast space available at this festival. This is the third kite festival we’ve been to and this was undoubtedly the best. It wasn’t the most informative (the Dunstable one probably was), however, there was a huge amount of space available to play in and just watching such a large number of buggys and boards was great.

I also spotted some team fliers practicing their routine in a manner I hadn’t seen before. They all had small sticks with cut-out kites on and were using those to run through their routine. I thought that this was a really good idea and was quite fun to watch.

We plan to return next year and spend a bit longer there. We may even have our own buggy by then!

wandered to the bottom

I wandered to the bottom of the road this afternoon to see if things were getting back to normal. They weren’t. Police are everywhere and a large area is still closed off. And it’s very quiet. Normally in the day time our road is full of cars parking close to the tube station, and a few buses running up and down the street…but as everyone is being kept away none of that’s been happening.

had my driving licence

I had my driving licence sent back to me in the post yesterday. It’s a bit torn but at least that’s one thing less to replace. It was sent in a Royal Mail envelope with a return address of the Surcharge Unit at Gatwick Mail Centre. There was no note or anything inside, so, if someone from the Gatwick Mail Center happens to stumble across this. THANK YOU VERY MUCH.