Another camping season is over for the Allen family. This year we managed three trips in our Pennine Pathfinder:

• Kingsbury Water Park, a Camping and Caravanning Club site near Sutton Coldfield.
• Long Beach Tenting and Touring, on the Norfolk coast.
• Highclere Farm in Buckingshire, close to Legoland.

We had a good time in all of our trips away this year. They were all very different. Kingsbury is close to us and less than one hour’s drive. We stayed for a long weekend and will almost certainly be visiting again next year. Our pitch at Long Beach was stunning. It overlooked the sand dunes and the sea. Next year we’ll be going to the west coast though as we prefer to watch the sun set over the ocean with a glass of wine. Highclere Farm was easily the cleanest site we’ve been to. It had excellent facilities and the kids loved the playground.

All in all a good season, I feel.

It snowed!

Jon and Ben have played out in it with their friends from the houses around us. Ben’s hands got too cold though, so he came in after half an hour. Jon stayed out for a fair old while though and really enjoyed playing.

This is the last day of the Easter holidays too as school and nursery start again tomorrow. This holiday, the main achievement has been the decoration of the downstairs cloakroom. Georgina did most of the work – all I did was rubbing down at the start and then painting the woodwork at the end. We’ve got a new blind for it and as this one rolls all the way up, the room is so much lighter! The new flooring is being laid tomorrow so that will be another room ticked off.

Georgina bought a bike yesterday, so we’ll be able to go riding as a family when we go camping. As a result, I dusted off my bike and repaired flat tyres, so we are all ready to go :) I’m going to have to work out how we are going to transport the bikes. Current plan is for roof bars and 4 bike attachments, but that seems quite expensive. We may go for a high level rack on the back of the car for 3 bikes and then store Ben’s in the trailer or boot.

My beautiful, wonderful wife is celebrating her birthday today!

Happy Birthday, my love.

Although I titled my last post “last day of stress”, in reality, the website that was the cause of it all actually went live last Thursday!

So… I’m back on the book and making good progress again and I have managed to put up some photos from Christmas day into the Photo Album.

Due to a deadline that’s much too close, this last week or so has been really stressful at work. We close for the break tomorrow lunchtime, so I’ll start looking forward to Christmas then!

We’re having Christmas at our house this year with G’s family, so are seeing my family this weekend and also intend to catch up with some friends which should be fun.

We put the Christmas decorations up today. The kids seemed to really enjoy it – especially putting the baubles onto the tree. We also have some Christmas soft toys which they love.

With only a week left, I’m beginning to think about Christmas now. Tomorrow we put the tree up and then there’s only 4 working days left! (We are having our work Christmas lunch next Friday).

The only fly in the ointment is that we have a deadline on a project that is 2nd January, and so we are working really hard in the office to get it done. No doubt, I’ll be putting in lots of extra hours to make sure we deploy something we can be proud of, but that’s the way it goes in a small company :)

I’m really enjoying photography at the moment. Generally, I only put up family pictures here on the-allens.net and use other services for my other images.

Most of the pictures that I upload go onto Flickr. It’s an eclectic collection as I take photos of whatever takes my fancy at the time.

For instance:

One thing I’m struggling with at the moment is coming up with an efficient work flow to actually get my images processed and uploaded. I find it quite time consuming at the moment and so don’t process that many photos. Last weekend we went to Clearwell Caves and saw Father Christmas. I took 32 pictures and haven’t yet processed any of them and there’s at least 5 that are worth doing.

Of course, by the time you read this, I’ve probably uploaded one or two from that trip…

I’ve updated the photo album on this site so that you can now view all photos in date order.

Go me!

Everyone should read Mark Pilgrims thoughts on E-books as it explains why DRM just doesn’t work.

With books especially, the ability to share is precious.

John Gruber also points out the problem of longevity:

Barring physical catastrophe, I expect that the real books I own — the ones printed on paper — will remain in good condition long after I am dead.1 With digital Kindle books, I’m not even sure they’ll be available 10 years from now. They’re only useful so long as you own Kindle-compatible hardware. What happens to these e-books if Amazon, having lost money on the endeavor, stops producing Kindle readers a few years from now? What are the odds that these files will be readable 50 years from now?

DRM protected e-books? No thanks.