Happy Birthday Harry James!

Congratulations to Dom and Ellie who have just had a baby boy called Harry James Inman. Pictures and story on their website: (http://members.optusnet.com.au/domandellie/Frontpage.htm)

I have to adjust to being an Uncle!

Like a Beartown with a sore head!

The third annual Congleton Beer Festival took place last weekend and was a massive success. The poor weather probably helped because we weren't competing with back garden barbecues. The people of Beartown managed to consume 48 barrels of bear, 6 Ciders and a fair number of bottles of wine and soft drinks.

I think it's fair to say that Sunday morning was a bit quiet for many people in Congleton but the beer festival organisers were out on the field clearing up and getting it back into shape.

Pictures and a longer writeup on the website - http://www.congletonroundtable.org.uk (when I get a chance to update it!). A fairly short Flickr stream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielinman/sets/72157600591298144/

Cosford Airshow

I have uploaded my pictures from the Cosford Airshow to Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielinman/sets/72157600390112379/

This selection gives an idea of the air show and the flying displays that took place. I took many more photos but I guess that there are only so many times that you can show the Red Arrows in various formations!

The day itself was warm but the cloud was quite low for the first half of the flying displays. This resulted in the majority of displays being "Flat" to keep under the clouds. The Red Arrows' display was truncated because some idiot flew a microlight into the exclusion zone around the airfield.

All in all - a good day!

Round Table Website and Beer Festival

I have finally been given the domain administration details for the Congleton Round Table website and e-mail system. I have set up the skeleton of a website at the moment in order to have a landing page that we can connect to from the National and Area websites. It also advertises the Congleton Summer Beer Festival that Table is running in association with Ladies Circle. the event takes place on June 30th in the field behind Congleton Leisure Centre.

Happy Hogget's watch

Mum and Dad visited over the weekend and brought a Welsh Hogget for us to roast and eat on Saturday. Hoggets are last year's lambs. One year old, but before they grow their first two adult teeth. The weekend was very pleasant. Sunny with a bit of a breeze to keep things cool. We were joined by Niki's parents on Sunday for a Barbecue.

Busy week

Started the week with two days in London. A solid days meetings for the first day followed by morning meetings, an early trip home and then the Table AGM in the evening. Down in London again tomorrow and off to Italy with Congleton Table on Friday. The plane leaves at 6.30 in the morning so it's another early start! The itinerary looks good though. Mr Hogg has certainly done well with the organising. More from Italy when I get back.

Home from Amsterdam

I have just returned from a couple of days in Amsterdam. I went out on Wednesday on the 0605 KLM flight out of Manchester. It isn't great getting up at that time in the morning but the local taxi company (b-tax) got me to the airport on time and I had no problems checking in.

I checked my rucksack in as hold luggage but when I went through security it was apparent that other people were carrying larger bags. As a learning point, it's worth trying to get your bag on with you rather than check it in. As it happened, my bag was the first off at the other end. I also need to remember to pack small containers of toiletries in a transparent bag. I had my shaving gel and deodorant seized (not really, the Dutch are so nice) by security officials at Schipol because the Dutch only allow 100ml containers.

The first day's meetings were in the main Amsterdam office for the entire day with a sandwich lunch. Things looked up in the evening when our host took us on a walking tour of Amsterdam city (including the inevitable Red Light District) followed by a dinner at an Italian restaurant. I stayed in the Hotel Pulitzer and recovered from my early start in this prize winning hotel.

We went out to BSL computing (http://www.brightside.nl/) on the second day to look at the news feed management system that they are putting together for us. I was very impressed. The system takes a number of in bound feeds from dedicated suppliers or RSS feeds and stores the information in a database for later retrieval and publishing in news letters, RSS feeds etc.

My trip finished with a meal at a Japanese restaurant on the outskirts of town. Another note to self - don't sit down for a fancy, multi-course prepared as you eat meal when you have a plane to catch. The taxi driver was very good though and got me to the airport quickly.

Bone Idol in Cambridge

I spent most of last week in sunny (and slightly foggy) Cambridge attending training on Autonomy IDOL version 7. The training course was held at Autonomy HQ in Cambridge and was attended by a mixed bunch of contractors and consultants. Matt Nevada gave the course and was also happy to extol the virtues of the Grafton centre and Yorkshire Tea.

The weather was warm and sunny which allowed for a little exploring with some of the other attendees after the course had finished. Cambridge seemed nice but the hotel (University Arms) was a let down.

Updated Links for Nat and Martin's Wedding

The Photographer has uploaded the photos: http://www.pbase.com/distantsun/natalie__martin
Dom and Ellie have also added a link to the main site on their web page (http://members.optusnet.com.au/domandellie/Frontpage.htm). I have sent a DVD of the photos and video to Kent, Aberdovey and Umina Beach. Anyone else who would like a copy should drop me a line.

Mr. and Mrs. Sheehy

This weekend saw the wedding of Natalie and Martin. My little sister became Mrs. Sheehy and everyone had a great time.
I took around 300 pictures and over half an hour of video. I have uploaded the pictures to Fickr as a set - Natalie and Martin's Wedding
These are only a few of the pictures that I have uploaded so far. The main photos need to be converted from Raw.

The professional photographer will be posting her pictures at her website - http://www.weddingphotos2u.co.uk/aliveandclicking

Up and Running

I seem to have got everything sorted out. My domain hosting providers (Easily.co.uk) were able to sort out the CNAME redirection on my DNS entry and point it to the Blogger servers. They had to do this by hand because their self serve dashboard only handles IP addresses and the blogger host is distributed so it needs a DNS.

The details of how to do the set up are OK but they need to be put together fin a single "How to connect your Domain to your blogger account" helpd page. The gist of the exercise is as follows:

1. Register domain
2. Create blogger blog
3. Set the CNAME part of the domain DNS record to point to the blogger servers (instructions on http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=58317 or just search for blogger cname)
   
4. Go into the blog settings and tell blogger the domain name that you will be using.
   

As you can see, I set up blog.danielinman.com as the blog redirection. I may get round to using www but don't count on it.

Next task - how do I create flickr.danielinman.com ...

First Post

The journey has to begin somewhere. To be fair, this is better than "testing 123" as a first post.