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London Bridge

For most of the last year I have been in an office with no natural light. Well, I say office. It was really a conference room with a dozen of us crammed in, two to a desk in my case. Cables everywhere; at one point they almost shut the project room down for health and safety violations.

But — getting to the point — a couple of months ago we moved. And not only was there natural light but I got a window seat. And what a view.

Oslo

I Have really fond memories of summer 1994 when I did a summer job in Ipswich. (Yes, I’m talking about Ipswich in a blog entitled “Oslo.” Bear with me.) Now Suffolk isn’t a glamorous location necessarily but it was a good time for me and it was a great, hot summer. A few years ago I stopped back in the town on the way back from a wedding. I really wish I hadn’t. Maybe it was the grey and the rain or maybe the years had not been kind, but Ipswich just wasn’t what I remembered.

Mountain Lion — The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

I’ve been using Mountain Lion, the new version of the Macintosh operating system, for less than a day so this isn’t intended to be detailed (see John Siracua’s review) or thorough. I have, however, kicked the proverbial tyres so here are a few, quick thoughts.

Good

  • Probably the most stable 10.x.0 release I’ve used
  • Little earth shattering but lots of really nice improvements, not all of which I’ve seen documented (for example, attachments in Mail now appear in the “All My Files” view in the Finder, multiple Time Machine disks)
  • Notification Center works well; AirPlay mirroring is going to be really useful
  • I’ve not found any software that worked in Lion that no longer works. That includes stuff like VMWare (scary because it’s low-level) and Photoshop Elements 6 which is not listed on Roaring Apps compatibility list

Bad

Deleting a Google Apps Domain

Imagine the scene…

Okay, that’s a bit dramatic.

Recall that I have an iPhone app called Yummy. It has, or rather had, a website called YummyApp.com. Last year I formed a company called Wandle Software and since then have been merging my various web “properties.” The website moved over to wandlesoftware.com earlier this year, email was the last thing that needed transferring.

My email is hosted using Google Apps — Gmail but without the gmail.com email address if you’ve not heard of it. What I wanted to do was move yummyapp.com from being a “proper” domain to what Google refer to as a domain alias for wandlesoftware.com.

Lake District

There are no guarantees when travelling in the UK. Even in May the weather can be all over the place, beautiful, bright and sunny one minute, drab, grey and miserable the next.

There are no guarantees when travelling with a five month old baby. They can be bright and cheery and laughing one minute and crying and screaming the next.

Boats on Windermere

Both of these things made my trip to the Lake District rather different to most of the travel I’ve ever done. Except when I travel with a tour group, I normally have a pretty relaxed schedule. That was more-or-less mandated this time!

Grandeur

Italian white wine bottle

Here is my entry for this weeks PhotoFriday challenge, “Grandeur.” For those that have been following the current series of The Apprentice, you’ll realise that this image represents English Sparkling Wine. In this case, I’ve stretched the concept even further. In the programme, it was a French word used to describe an English sparkling wine. Here, it’s a bottle of Italian, still wine. Never mind.