It’s a Blog ! Not a Log !

tonight turning the centre of Manchester in a multi-coloured German wonderland with its traditional chalets serving all those Christmas gifts your after, ok maybe not the ones your actually after, but theres bound to be something there your after.

And if you cant find anything to buy as a present theres always the Mulled wine and extra large sausages to keep you happy, more details can be found here

this time they’ve been helping the members of a local Age Concern keep fit and healthy, heres a few pictures and the press release :

FIT WITH THE OLD FOLKS!

Members from a Manchester based Age Concern group turn to the Wii Fit to help keep active

Members from Out in the City, a local Age Concern group have struck upon a novel way of keeping fit.  Leisurely walks, bowls and swimming have been usurped in favour of a new hi-tech training tool – the Wii Fit.

Four members, aged in their late 50s, 60s and 70s, visited the new wireless lite Carphone Warehouse store at the Trafford Centre this week and were given a demonstration in the popular game.

After the demonstration, the store donated the Wii Fit console and game to Age Concern so that members will regularly be able to use the different Wii fitness games, helping to keep themselves active and agile.

Thanks to the games console, they will now be able to regularly participate in Tai Chi, fitness programmes and can even monitor their posture and BMI.  For those wanting something a little more strenuous, snowboarding, skiing and dance classes are the order of the day!

Jane Barcoe of Age Concern said, “The members love keeping active and doing something different!  This is a great gift from The Carphone Warehouse and I’m sure we’ll have no shortage of people who want to use the Wii Fit.  This is a really innovative way to help our members interact and keep fit!”

Neil Sears, Store Manger of  The Carphone Warehouse at the Trafford Centre, said, “Technology can be a great way to connect with other people and in this instance a perfect way to keep fit too.  The range of technology on the market is expanding, and age shouldn’t be a barrier so our aim is to breakdown the walls and make gadgets simple for everyone.”

The ‘wireless lite’ Carphone Warehouse at the Trafford Centre offers a wider range of mobile communications such as laptops and gaming products too.  The store is one of four to be trialled across England and offering a new format, with expert advice and counsel given on all manner of high-tech issues and gadgets.

Seems a young lad of 11 fell into a pond somewhere between Davyhulme and the Trafford Centre tonight around 6:00pm, we heard all the Police cars responding to a call out, there must have been about 3 vans and a couple of cars go flying down Broadway trying to figure out how to get to where the lad was, at one point a Police helicopter joined the search for the boy
Seems the lad was with a few mates playing around the edge of an old pond when he slipped in and went under, Fire and Rescue teams turned up, but didn’t find his body until a good few hours later
Such a sad waste of a young life, but things like this will always happen when theres bored kids around on the summer hoildays looking for things to do and adventures to go on, condolences to his family from me and mine.

Been a slightly stressful day and a 1/2 at work for me, had to set up some PC’s in the office and transfer data onto them from the PC’s there replacing, now this may not seem very stressful I know, but when you spend 1/2 day trying to figure out why you cant load an operating system onto the PC’s even though you’ve contacted Dell’s Mumbai Support Centre 8 times and each of those 8 times they tell you that these instructions will resolve the matter and 8 times they don’t your bound to be a little stressed.

After finally giving up on getting any sort of help from Dell I eventually found a response on a forum detailing what was causing the problem (it was the SATA settings for the hard-drive in system setup) and resolving it I finally got round to installing Win XP on the 1st of the PC’s.

So I’ve the got the OS installed now all I need to do is back up the PST file from the PC its replacing, copy any files that the user has stored on their PC onto the Server and than replace the PC, copy all the data back onto the new PC, import the PST file into Outlook and Bob’s ya uncle so to speak . . . well again nothings ever easy. First off the PST file is nearly 4 Gig in size (seems the users kept every single email they’ve sent/received in the past 3-4 years, so after 40-60 min’s of exporting I finally start to look for the data files that the user wants me to copy across to the new PC, kindly enough the user has put them all into a folder on his desktop to make it easier for me, so I copy the move the PST file I’ve just exported and drop it inside the folder and prepare to copy it onto the server . . thinking that its not going to take real long, its 4 Gig file and some word/excel documents, surely that won’t take long, how wrong could I be, seems that the copying over the networks going to take 2hrs ! Upon investigating the folder with all the docs in he wants me to copy I find there’s 11 Gig of data in there even before I add the 4 Gig PST file (yep 15 Gig of data), this explains the long time to copy across the network.

So thats why its been a stressful  day and a 1/2 thus far, I’ve not even finished yet either, still got a shed load of windows updates to download and install yet and I’ve yet to copy the data back onto the users new PC . . oh joy.

You know whats really annoying about the whole thing . . . this could have been so much easier, for a start we have a server that gets backed up every night that this person could have been storing their 11 Gig of data on, which if they had would have saved me a good few hours of work, they could have even maybe occasionally gone through there emails and deleted any they don’t need anymore (we keep a backup of incoming/outgoing emails in MailMarshal so people can delete emails, but nobody does).  If they’d just done one of these it would have saved me at least a couple of hours work, but alas no such luck

2 Very Tired Passengers

Well actually got back Sunday night but just not been arsed to post about it . .

What happened then ? Well we arrived at Adam’s early Saturday morning, made ourselves welcome and just chilled for a couple of hours, the afternoon was spent wondering up and down the Thames near Hampton Court waiting for Blue to do her little bit before returning to the Braggs household where we were treated to Adam showing us his fine BBQ skills, these skills were greatly helped by the handy Butchers down the road which sold what I class as some of the finest sausages I’ve ever had, they also did a nice sideline in chive and onion cheese.

It was good to see Adam as not seen him in about 8-12 months I reckon, also got the opportunity to meet the latest edition to the household Francesca, gorgeous child, she’s definitely got Sam’s looks, it also gave Mel the chance to get acquitted with the kiddiwinks, seems Ava there eldest was hooked on Mel, spent most of the weekend latched onto her, which was kind of cute in a non broody way.

Other house guests for the weekend were Jenny, again someone I’d not seen in a long while, probably about 4yrs ago was the last time I saw her, she’s just returned from working in New Zealand and was crashing at there place until she found work/lodgings I’m guessing.

Anyway the evening was spent drinking and watching a movie or 2, then it was off to bed.

Sunday was another early start and we left Adam and co around 9:30am to make our way to Essex for the Cane Corso day, actually thought we’d get there fairly quickly, but due to that horrible road the M25 it took us about 2.5hrs to travel 100 odd miles, arriving about 1:00pm, the event started around about 1:30pm so we headed to the local pub for a few beers and some food, I went for the Plough-mans Bacon sarnie (Don’t ask), Mel decided she wasnt all that hungry.

Anyway after relaxing with a beer for about 1/2hr we headed to the event, it was held in an equestrian centre just outside Wix and when we got there it was fairly bustling with people and their Cane Corso, never have I seen so many dogs of one breed in one place at one time, it was a sight to behold, and the difference’s in sizes, colours and temperaments of all the gathered Corso’s was amazing, before this event we’d only ever met one other Cane Corso and that was a puppy called Koo in Cornwall and now we were faced with about 50+ of them, but even though I do say it myself Blue was indeed the prettiest princess on the block, she gotta few admiring glances I reckon from all the dogs there lol.

We entered Blue in a few of the competitions, but alas she didn’t walk away with any prizes this time, which was a shame as it would have made up for the 700 miles we must have put in over the weekend just to get there and back, but all in all it was a fun day, though Mel was a little put off it all due to another Cane Corso wanting to take a bite out of Blue, but that’s to be expected when you have over 50+ of these magnificent beasts in one place. So after bidding our farewells we set off home around about 3:30pm, eventually arriving home about 8:30pm, I got myself off to bed and Mel did the same a couple of hours later and that was the end of a very hectic driving weekend.

Well I’ve lived in Manchester for over 10yrs now and in all that time I’d never heard of this before, but it seems theres a Farmers Market held the 2nd and 4th weekend of every month.

Think me and Mel will be checking this out tomorrow to see if we can pick up any nice food without having to pay a supermarkets running costs at the same time, I’m hoping they have lots of cheese’s, mmmmm cheese.

Will attempt to post from twitter while were there tomorrow and twitpic some photo’s of the place.

Its situated near the  fountain and the statue of Queen Victoria at Piccadilly Gardens, in Manchester city centre, so if you see some guy texting on his mobile while trying to control a rather large  dog and at the same time being harrased by a woman, that’ll be me, so come say Hi and maybe buy me some cheese

P.s. must thank the twitter/blogger  Manchesteriace for pointing this out to me as otherwise I’d have never come across it thank you

is the place  . . . we’ll be tomorrow if all goes according to plan, the idea is we’ll take Blue for her usual Saturday morning walk round Ivy Green, have breakfast at Orlando’s and then head into town and see the delights on offer at the German Market, this will be only my 3rd visit to it in the 10yrs I’ve lived in Manchester, don’t know why I never bothered going before, just never seemed to get around to it, think its not living near the city centre I expect.

Anyway this year Mel’s actually going to come into town with me to visit the Market, we’re going to take Blue as well as we think that the crowds might help her with her socialisation skills, though then again she might just be the normal little shy girl she is and just be a little confused by all the 2 legs rushing by her, but once she gets everyone saying what a beautiful girl she is, she’ll be fine.

Thing I’m most looking forward to at the Market is the German Sausages and Mulled wine, top notch both of them, think I managed 3 sausages last year and boy where they big sausages

The Market turns St Ann’s Square into a little piece of wintery German traditional Market with its brightly lit wooden chalets selling everything from Sausages, Mulled Wine, Cheese, unusal presents and just about anything that could be associated with food and Christmas

The Market Runs from:

18th Nov – 21st Dec 2008 at St Ann’s Square and its open dailey from 10am-8pm (9pm in Albert Square)

But don’t just be drawn to St Ann’s Square as there are parts of the Market dotted all around the ajoining streets and roads, so go check them all out and enjoy it, I know we will

No doubt I’ll post a few videos of what we did and ate

Trafford Centre, just way way way to many people bustling about shopping till they drop

I filmed this one Saturday in there while waiting for Mel to finish her shopping.

All these people spending there Saturdays running round shops buying stuff they dont really need, but are made to think they need it by the mass advertising and playing to peoples fears that if they dont own one of those there some how inferior to everyone else, consumerism at its height, thats what the Trafford Centre is

Watching back this footage I saw quite a mad thing for the Trafford Centre (or maybe its not), kept seeing a set of girls walking around in coloured Tu-Tu’s and at first thought I was seeing things, but they appeared again and realised there really were people in there in fluorescent Tu-Tu’s mixing with the Shopper on saturday . .  weird place indeed

Finally my 18 months with my N95 has come to an end and I’ve finally been able to upgrade my phone to something a little snazzier

What phone have I decided to upgrade to ?  well after much thought and deliberation I’ve decided to go for the Samsung SGH-F480V, a rather natty little phone with touch screen technology

Picked it up last night from the Vodafone shop in the Trafford centre, though I spent about 2 hrs deciding whether to get this phone or get the HTC Touch Diamond, I liked the HTC phone a lot, but found it just a little bit to fiddly to use, especially for someone with sausage fingers like my own.

So what do you get for your money with the F480V then well here’s here’s some of the specs for it

• 2.8″ touch screen
• Intuitive navigation
• 5.0 Megapixel camera
• Autofocus, image stabilisation and LED flash
• MP3 Music player
• 3G HSDPA connection
• Dimensions: 96 x 55 x 12mm Weight: 91g
• Standby time: 250 hours
• Talk time: 3 hours

As well as the above it has a very easy to use touch-screen interface which after a few minutes use is easy to navigate, it also has on its main screen widgets similar to those found in Mac OSX, there’s a music widget so you can start playing tunes straight away without having to find your way through the menu, there’s a photo widget which allows you to change your desktop/screen-saver to another picture with 2 easy taps of the screen, there’s even a birthday widget which as long as you have your contacts birthdays listed in your calendar will remind you when the time to buy a present is, something that will greatly assist me in keeping on the good side of Mel and a few friends.

So all in all I think its a pretty decent phone, though I’m yet to test its connectivity with my Apple Macs, something I’ll be trying later today.

Oh I just love getting new gadgets 

Sit in a Cafe in the Trafford Centre and Surf the net and eat bagels while Hrs HP does all her shopping or girly things, this place normally cracks me within about 15 mins, but now I got the net I can just sit down and ignore the consumers masse’s running around like the world revolves around the latest fashion statement. .

I love you Wi-Fi

I also love bagels

Anyway whil I’m sat here I’ve set up the time-lapse camera and got it pointed at one of the walk ways, so hoping I’ll get some good time-lapse captures of people running around like mad little rats in a maze, will hopefully post some of the footage tonight after I’ve played about with it in Final Cut.

Heres one I made earlier using the Line Art filter

Please feel free to comment on it and let me kow what you think