Well, now I appear to at last be building momentum towards my goal for 2007. My resolution for this year was to try and get my motorbike licence. As I had done nothing to progress towards this goal, other than pick up a form for the licence, I did not hold out much hope on actually achieving the goal! However, a couple of weeks ago, Aidy decided that he was going to look for a new bike! He has settled on a rather cool BMW R1200GS that would be my ideal bike one day too! He did suggest that his Bandit 600F would be ideal for me to use as a starter bike. The bike has had a very interesting past, but at least I know it’s history! Other than working out the finer details down at the pub, I think we have made a deal!

Now it is time to…

1. Get licence sorted
2. Buy helmet and other gear
3. Organise some insurance
4. Convince Aidy to show me how a bike works!
5. Book myself on the CBT (Compulsory Basic Training)
6. Rent a bike to use on CBT as 600cc is too much
7. Read more magazines so I can say biker stuff – like the vindaloo comment (private joke)!!

This might be easier than I thought. 10 minutes at our licence office during lunchtime has put me one step closer to my goal! With very little drama (none actually), they happily granted me a provisional licence for Category A (Motorbikes). Hopefully it will all come together this quickly… what’s next on the list?!?!

Well, now I appear to at last be building momentum towards my goal for 2007. My resolution for this year was to try and get my motorbike licence. As I had done nothing to progress towards this goal, other than pick up a form for the licence, I did not hold out much hope on actually achieving the goal! However, a couple of weeks ago, Aidy decided that he was going to look for a new bike! He has settled on a rather cool BMW R1200GS that would be my ideal bike one day too! He did suggest that his Bandit 600F would be ideal for me to use as a starter bike. The bike has had a very interesting past, but at least I know it’s history! Other than working out the finer details down at the pub, I think we have made a deal!

Now it is time to…

1. Get licence sorted
2. Buy helmet and other gear
3. Organise some insurance
4. Convince Aidy to show me how a bike works!
5. Book myself on the CBT (Compulsory Basic Training)
6. Rent a bike to use on CBT as 600cc is too much
7. Read more magazines so I can say biker stuff – like the vindaloo comment (private joke)!!

Since I have not posted for some time, I figured a bit of humour might not go amiss!! Here is a great insight into what it’s like when we get into some real manual work! In this case back in 2004 when we first renovated the boat! Click below to see it… or go to the media page to see this and more!
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For my first YouTube video upload ever, I have one of the funniest things I have seen in a long while… not for CS who is undoubtedly the star, but he survived so all is well! The Video shot on Brooky’s phone and quickly edited on my Mac… Click through to watch and be winded yourself by the “Ultimate Belly Flop”!!
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The live blogging idea didn’t really work out as planned on this trip! We were so busy driving, filming and taking photos that there was very little time for actually writing anything about the day. We are working on something for the articles section though, the video is being cut and the photos prepared for upload so check back soon!

It seems that Apple has gone absolutely mad with new product releases. New iMac… check out how slick and silver it is! New Mac Minis for the media centre. I am quite impressed with the new keyboards though they do not have a full width wireless option at this stage. If I am at my desk I prefer the number pad to be there!

Finally, iLife 08 and iWork08 have been released. I have iWork 07 and it is an excellent suite so I iwll certainly be upgrading soon. With the introduction of an Apple spreadsheet app and Microsoft Office compatibility, it’s a bit of a no brainer!

Not long now and we will be heading off for the first track day this year (and for this site) with Grants M3. Le Mans, here we come! The plan is to blog the trip here and post lap times and problems as they arise so that we can start to build a history of our experiences as they happen.

As my first real track day, I am quite excited about it… Hopefully I will be able to contain myself when I get back and not go out straight away to buy my own car… The 330 has to last a while longer!!

If there is one thing that I have discovered during my recent attempts to become organised is that the best way to success is to simplify things. As such I am going to slim down all of the things in life that take up a lot of time but don’t actually help me achieve anything. Being involved in a lot of projects and activities, I often feel that there is not enough time in the day to achieve all that I would like. I have to make some big cuts and I think that the decisions I will need to make are going to be hard! I want to do a lot, and I do actually “do” a lot, however, not everything can be done now.

There must be about 50 different things I would like to do that are based on the Internet. I have website ideas, article ideas, blogging ideas… but there is not enough time to complete everything. One good example is theGetFit application that I was making with Gringod . It is a really good idea, deserves some regular time to be spent on it and would certainly be useful for a lot of people. As he is not available regularly anymore for this type of thing, perhaps the project should be shelved along with the 50 other ideas we have so that we can focus on 1 thing like, for example, encaptured.com my photography site that we both contribute to. This would in theory generate better content that covers more and could give us more satisfaction in the long run.

The biggest step I have completed recently on my way to achieve a simplified life was simple yet surprisingly hard to do … I have reduced the number of feeds in my reader by about half. The hardest thing I did was decide to remove the most active feed in each of my categories then just figure out which other ones I just skimmed over. I can now tell you that this provided a real “breath of fresh air”. I now have time to read each entry rather than scroll down like a hamster on speed. I am getting more out by bringing less in! This initial success has me inspired enough to think about my next simplification task… which is a bit bigger and is taking some time to work through!

Having been playing with a new Macro lens that I received for my birthday, I felt it was time I updated the homepage photo. The tulip photo was taken with it during my testing and I am very impressed with the image quality! The magnification ratio is superb, though this particular image is taken from a distance away!

Here is a link to the gallery

Thanks to a chat with Gringod and my news feed, I have been deed’ed my own 128 bit number from Freedom to Tinker

70 7A 4F EE 1A A2 97 DB CD 1C 58 CB 83 FB 88 E5

This is all mine now so if I Google it and find someone using it… I will be after you faster than the DMCA can back me up and say ‘Yeaaah’ like a high school bully!

Alternatively if this whole post means nothing to you… feel free to appreciate my number but dont use it…anywhere!!

I have a number of network based drives that I access quite a lot on my home network. One of the problems I have experienced with “OS X Tiger” is when browsing these shares. It seems that the auto refresh does not always detect changes and/or new files. One great solution I have discovered is ‘Refresh Finder 1.1′ by S�derhavet

Very cool and tidy todo app from http://www.carpeaqua.com/software/checkoff/

I have updated my homepage photo with an image of the moon during the eclipse. This was taken a little before the full eclipse because the visibility deteriorated badly over a 20 minute period. By the time we left, the moon was no longer visible through the haze. Nonetheless, it was a good sight while it lasted and luckily for us, not too cold!

The evening was also full of adventure as Dave’s Range Rover got stuck in the middle of a big puddle… a small lake nearly. As Aidy had the benefit of a good view and a camera to hand… there may well be a picture online soon!

This may be obvious to every other Mac user out there, but as a new switcher, I need all the help I can get to try and memorise all the new things I learn about the platform.

My task for today was moving all of my 250GB of files from my old Windows backup onto a new HDD so that I could reformat the old drive for the MAC. Sounds easy but each time I tried to do the 16 hour Firewire->USB2 transfer, it would stop with an error. I have now manually copied across the files and folders but to ensure nothing was lost I needed to find a way of comparing the two directories.

Filemerge – Small app… big help

I was very lucky to be hunting around the computer and come across this great application that I think was installed with the Apple Xcode tools. It very easily allows you to compare two text documents and luckily…even two directories. What a gem! You get two lists that are colour coded showing the differences.

Icing on the cake

I found another great addition use for this tool, it can actually merge the two directories or files together. This very simple tool has a lot of power which is why I have made a note here for myself in he future!