Friday 23 January 2009

Tweet Tweet

I'm not sure how many of you will of heard of Twitter, but I would encourage you to join. Twitter basically is microblogging, each post made to Twitter is intended to be a short statement of what you are doing, or thinking about or a quick link to something interesting you have seen. It's also an extremely good way of getting (very up to date) news feeds on things that interest you. I was unsure of how useful or interesting it would be when I first started using it in December but I have to say I am hooked now and think its a very useful and very interesting tool, where I blog on here about once a week, I post on twitter multiple times per day.
Take a look and see what you think, Twitter is at http://www.twitter.com and I am at http://www.twitter.com/brettcarr when you have signed up you can select to follow me and then you will automaticallyt see all my updates. Apparently Stephen Fry will be talking about it on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross tonight.

Again Again

Hey the weekends here again, sometimes the weeks go so quickly and sometimes so slow, this one seemed to fly by but then maybe that was because I was out of the office for a day and a half. Tuesday afternoon I drove up to Manchester for a seminar on ZFS at Sun Microsystems, maybe a seperate post about this so as to not bore the non techies, suffice to say it was very interesting and taught me a thing or two. I stayed over in a hotel in Manchester for the night and so while I was there met up with Rosie and Michaela for some food and a few beers, we went to a very nice Greek restaraunt (funny thing is this is the first time I've been to one apart from in Greece itself) and had a top meal and then for a couple of drinks afterwards. Altogether a very nice trip. I also managed to achieve a few other important steps in some projects at work this week, complete the LDOM evaluation, close a couple of very long running tickets and write my first ever powershell script (well cobble something together from somebody elses scripts really but you know what I mean)

In support of one of my new years resolutions of getting back into music again, this week I bought my first copy of NME for about 10 years and am really enjoying it (this may become a regular thing). I've also downloaded some new albums this week, nothing too groundbreaking or exciting though (Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen) but more to follow. Oh also discovered a web music service called grooveshark (http://www.grooveshark.com/) this lets you search for music and stream it in very good quality across the net all from a very nice Web 2.0 flash interface, give it a try I think you'll be impressed. If anybody has any reccomendations of new music for me to listen to then leave a comment, and I'll take a listen and let you know what I think.

Right time for a beer I think. Enjoy the weekend everybody

Sunday 18 January 2009

TV Appearance

Some of the regular readers of this blog may remember a post I sent awhile ago regarding the Oxford Baby Wearers and a walk around Oxford during International Baby wearing week. This attracted some media attention at the time including a short appearence on ITV, I've now uploaded the clip to youtube you can find it here, it starts with a wonderful wave from Emma.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=7vBylyNVplw

Friday 9 January 2009

Back to Normality

Well it was a strange break. Christmas was really nice, Emma is really old enough to enjoy it now and hence we had a really good time.
Immediately following Xmas (well the 27th/28th) I came down with Flu (it might of been a bit mannish but I did feel quite bad) by the time new year came though I felt like I had turned a corner a bit which meant a few beers some champagne and a late night, Cath and I don't stop up until 2am very often these days and it was really nice.

New years day we did a less extravagant repeat of Christmas dinner but it was very nice indeed. Things started to go a little pear shaped later that day when I felt a little tired and Ill, at first I just thought it was the flu coming back to haunt me, but by 8pm I was in bed and by 10 I was throwing up quite badly, everybody else was fine though so we were trying to work out what I had eaten that nobody else had, all we could think of was some fresh orange juice I had bought from Tesco's the same day. Anyhow I was pretty sick all night and very weak the day after. On the Saturday we were due to drive up to my parents and have our third xmas day, we were thinking of cancelling it until the last minute when I felt a lot better so we went anyway, this turned out to be quite a bad move as Emma got the same sickness while we were away, this was quite scarey as she has always been so healthy and even as a very small baby she was hardly ever sick, she looked a little peaky the next morning but got over the after effects much quicker than I did, we did the drive home in a single 3.5 hour stint and Emma slept for the entire journey. By Tuesday Cath had the same Illness and was held up in bed so I had to take the day off to look after her and Emma.
It turned out we had the Norovirus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norovirus which apparently thousands of people get every year. It's pretty bad I can assure you and was the worst I had felt in 20 years. On a happier note I feel fine now and it's Friday so time for beer.
Have a great weekend.