I know this is going to mess up my ordering and ruin my next post but the weekend saw me preparing for this years crops. So rather than go on about that in this post I will just tell you that just after two days I have rocket shoots appearing in my heated propagators. Amazing really just how fast they have grown all ready.

Well tonight or tomorrow I will write my beginner’s guide to gardening! trust me, it will be great for beginner’s as this is my second year so I am the blind leading the blind with my advice

Not really, I got it right last year and had an amazing crop. So I hope with the experiences of last years season and this years improvements I can help more people get it right in their first year.

No one really has looked at my blog yet so might be talking to myself but hey, I have not actually posted much interesting stuff any how!

Yesterday saw the garden turn from sh!t hole to looking good in three hours. The cats in our road all poo on the lawn and with months of no one going out there to get rid of the poo they went made and left piles everywhere! all gone now but paprika might be needed!

I have been meaning to get my garden sorted for months. This year I want to have all my seeds nicely established for the summer season. Last year I was 6 weeks late and that affected my crop so badly. I had loads of stuff but I think the full potential of alot of my crop was not met. Thinks like the peppers never kicked off, the onions I have just chucked away as they had not formed and the tomatoes just did not get big.

So my plans for crop 2010:

1. Shorter rows, I will put the rows in a vertical fashion compared to last years long lines.
2. Two or three rows planted of each fruit / veg in one or two spots.
3. New plot where old tomatoes where.
4. Dedicated little pots for herbs with a automated watering set-up.
5. Early propagation.
6. Early preparation of the ground, this includes feeding and the de-weeding of these areas.
7. New and better propagation tunnels outside and more use of greenhouse.

So that is my steps to success this year? well lets hope so. I will be keeping a diary of the weekly progress with pictures and possibly a video diary to go with it but that is only a might be!

When I have my plan of the garden mapped out I will scan it and upload it.

Stay tuned….

After thinking about the poor broadband speed, the s!@£^y equipment and the poor customer service Sky provided me when the equipment with known issues and faults being used 24hrs a day decided to break. I have to give them credit, the energy monitor and discounted plan helped me get over initial anger but inside I was hurting

I always change, monitor, upgrade, service my own IT equipment as I can do that, if the router breaks, I pick up the spare one, plug it in and then get a new one to replace the backup! not with sky, they use their own routers with their own software leaving me with sod all I can do to get back on line. I waited only a day luckily but could have been up to 5 days without internet at home they reckoned. So the fact that I can not get myself back on track means, me and my business have to go else where! Its unfortunate as the nicely lady on the phone when I was leaving started offering me a good deal and was talking about having all my issues sorted, new router, high priority support team support and basically helping me out in order to stay!

50 MEG BROADBAND!!!!!!!!

Thats the reason I am leaving, well that and the other features. I have gone for it, almost the top package but not quite, top package is so expensive and I dont love watching sport enough any more to be able to dedicate my time to it and get my moneys worth. So what did I get then?

1. 50 Meg unlimited broadband.
2. 100 free prints per month via snap-fish
3. Free wireless N router and dongle
4. V-Stuff unlimited online storage
5. HD V+ box
6. Virgins XL tv package
7. Virgins phone package

So all of this is being sorted for me this weekend, ah boy this weekend the inner geek will be going mad, will be back online with another post reviewing my install and telling you just why you should be jealous or if you have Virgin TV, phone and broadband just stating the obvious! oh and my posts will be written just as slow but  when submitting them they will be about 6 times faster.

Well this is more a tail of how 1 digit in a meter reading makes all the difference. Last year around August, Southern Electric and Gas decided to pull me away from British Gas, I had some crap times and large bills with them so I thought that when the guy knocked at the door, offered me a better rate that I was going to be laughing to the bank. I was wrong, after the guy signed me up, he submitted a reading for me.

It meant that in two days I went from 8000 odd units to 2000 units and then when I submitted the readings this week I am back to 8000 odd. So intotal I used 25years of gas in just 3 months. This is all based on the average 2 bed semi! I can not for the life of me work out how I could use that lol, thats like my roads whole usage being dumped on me for those three months, infact I think it would include the road next to me, as I think that would add up to 100 2 bed houses.

I love some good stats and maths and had never worked out my gas usage and how changing a few digits could matter so much! trust me it does.

So make sure you submit your readings and not only that, you double check them and try to do them often online as that way little things like this wont come up, hopefully.

Just before I went away on holiday I invested in a lovely DAB radio and iPod docking station. The Hitachi Vertical DAB Micro with iPod Docking station was my chosen product due to having some great little features for a good price. Its currently retails on Argos at £120 (at time of writing) but I paid alot less than that and it was a real bargain. Thats not to say its perfect, it does have some minor issues which sound petty but hey, I would like better from this product in these areas but would not stop my recommending it at all.

Specs

• 2 x 10 watts RMS.
• 40 station presets (20 DAB plus 20FM).
• MP3 playback.
• USB port.
• 1 CD tray.
• Digital tuner.
• CD-R/CD-RW playback.
• 60 tracks CD / MP3 programmable.
• Play/pause, stop, skip/search-up, repeat, intro, skip/search-down, random function.
• 5 equalizers (Flat/Rock/Classic/Jazz/Pop).
• LCD display.
• ID3 tag.
• Clock/sleep timer.
• 2 way speakers.
• 1 x earphone, 1 x video out and 2 x speaker out sockets.
• Made for iPod.
• External AC-DC switching power adaptor supports various voltages, 100V-240V, line in function.
• Headphone socket.
• Remote control requires 2 x AAA batteries (not supplied).
• Size of main unit (H)40.0, (W)15.4, (D)21.1cm.
• Size of speaker (H)16.0, (W)15.4 (D)21.1cm.

Con’s

So the cons first, start with a low and finish on a high.

1. When turning it on for the first time, it picks up your stations, sets the time and works quite nicely. But as a radio I want it to turn on and work straight off without any user interaction, so that it can be used as a security measure, as a deterant! but thats not the case. Its comes on and goes to stand-by! bloody hate stand-by functions on things like this, once turned on, turn on proper and go onto stand by if I tell you too.
2. The next thing for me is the shabby remote you get. For £100 you expect the remote to be of good quality and by not doing so you get annoyed by pressing so hard it feels like it might break. Then actually finding the right part for the infa red signal is hard work too. I often dont know if I am not hitting the spot or the botton is not working right.
3. Lastly is the annoyingly short areal, digital signal is so hard to get in certain areas of the country right now, which means you need a good areal or atleast an easy way to add another areal or use and extension lead / areal on the the end of the one supplied. I had to add a coat hanger for now till I get a long lead to hide under my table or along the floor out of sight to actually get all the DAB stations I want.

Pro’s

Lots of them so lets keep the detail short….

1. Good price for features.
2. Looks great, not to big but big enough to look like a proper docking station and DAB radio.
3. Has both digital and analoge radio.
4. Input options are great, the fact you can use usb, sd card, ipod and cd sources is fantastic.
5. The slide left and right of the door on the ipod holder and the cd player is nice and slick ( does need some space to the left to open fully)
6. The Ipod control is far greater than I thought, it charges the ipod while allowing you to move through tracks, stop, play, fast forward and all the other functions you need via the remote ( when it works ), this was really nice and made me consider using it all the time, I used to listen to it via the mixer I use for DJing.
7. Blue screen lcd display looks very nice and modern.
8. Packaged well, if not a little bit to well packaged.
9. Speakers look good with or without their covers.
10. Speakers are very good for sound quality and can be enhanced with extra speakers via the other output port for headphones. Currently it has two mono outputs, one each side, an improvement would be having them together at the back to join up a sound system using stero leads, without having to play about splitting the lead to reach either side.

Overall I would recommend this and would possibly give it a 8/10, may be 7/10, I think its around that point. I would have possibly spent a bit more money to get a better system but it does what I wanted so inactual fact the price you pay for what you get is really really good value.

Now go buy one…..

I know this is very late, But this was meant to be the post to mark all of 2010’s new posts with a firm resolution that I would stick to. Thats to tweet and blog every day or as close as I could with interesting and not so interesting blog posts for both me and the Fish. I am going to kick it off today and see how it goes.

I have never been one for writing so may be thats why I have found it harder than taking to Twitter and Facebook. Dyslexia is a real bugger and hurts the type type tying alot. But the more you write and the more you read the easier it gets. If your dyslexic and fall upon my site and wish to chat about what helps to improve your English skills then please do, I got a grade C in English GCSE and 1st class degree in  hard degree with lots of writing so its very possible to do well with this disability.

So what is coming up, well my holiday pics and videos need to be uploaded with a little blog post about my holiday, so thats the first big task! In between that I think some garden news and some reviews will be hitting my blog and I will be launching the new site using Word-press in late 2010 so ideas and thoughts behind that very soon.

Other resolutions this year will include picking up my diet plan which I started towards the end of last year and I am going to reduce my web costs. I am currently spending to much money on hosting else where, so with Virgin installing 50 meg this month and a newish dell ubuntu server, I will be hosting my svn repositories and my development webserver at home. From there I can continue with my resellers account till the point I am happy enough with my skills to step up to the next level. Once there I will transfer all of my hosted sites to a virtual private server supplier, most likely Slicehost and only use what I need and upgrade as I go.  Realistically its going to be around  2011 that a full move over from the reseller account. The one thing I wont do is rush,  it will be at my own speed as I dont want to mess it up!

Another big resolution, is more time for other people in my life, plus the house DIY tasks must be fitted in too. 2007 till 2009 was so manic that my holiday to Florida is the only thing that slowed me down and has really settled me back down on planet earth. I was so stressed that 2009 was a shit year in some ways but 2010 has started alot happier and in a much better way.

I can happily say that I am a stress head that has aggression issues which I am very proud of??? I am planning my next holiday which is for Gemma’s 30th in-order to give me something to aim for and to again ground me when things get on top of me. 2010 brings controlled limits on Freelance work and that should kick in very soon, these are limits on time spent on freelance when I should be doing some me time or something just as important if not more so.

So thats 2010, it has resolutions but I dont like thinking that resolutions are limited to once a year, in a few months I might want to resolute my resolutions and try a different direction, thats just how I roll….

New sequel Pro, Ok, so its not new in terms of launch date as its been out a while but its not until now that I have actually bothered to upgrade. At first glance the UI has changed. Some nice little tweaks and really well thought out. The application runs faster and has eliminated some of the bad elements like loading all the table contents which can kill the machine. Export and Import runs smoother and the information on progress is more detailed and thus allot more constructive. My favorite aspect is the really nice way that in the query browser you can isolate the section of the code you want to run, run one statement or all the statements in the panel! very nice. All in all for free this is a sweet bit of software.

FTP, well, I love cyberduck cos its free and really easy to use, but my old favorite from Windows, Filezilla is on Mac! Thank god, the one major feature that gets me excited and happy about this software is the ability to upload or download files and choose to only overwrite if newer than destination file. In essence it works like sync but I just find it performs better than cyber ducks sync process.

Another pc and mac software I would recommend is Navicat, never wanted to pay for it till now! For a client project I needed it for mssql to mysql conversion and boy did it do that well, the software is just as good as most free mysql software but this package is alot more stable and faster. On top of that, it has a great little set of report tools for nice report generation to impress the clients.

Not a huge harvest this week but a nice little lot for this week. There are still plenty more fruit and veg to come so it wont be my last post.

I reckon that todays little lot would have been about £12 in the shops! so that with every thing else makes us break into profit! with more to come, plus all dead plants go in compostor and help me make compost for next years, 80 litres of compost to add to bounty.

Here is what I harvested:

todays potatoes harvest

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These are the few potatoes we harvested today. I recon we have about another 5 harvests this size.

Well Wizzy had a bit of a sad week this week! He lost 10 of his teeth. Bengal suffer from the runs and thus has spent his 7 years of life on wet food. If he had been on hard foods like treats and dry food then he might have had better teeth. Yesterday he went in for a teeth clean and came out with no teeth apart from the front ones. Mr Wizzy is actually alot happier! not the usual MOG that he is, MOG as in Miserable old git, not Mog as in Moggy (cat nickname).

In fact Wizzy was really excited and happy to be home. He walked around for a few hours drunk and with red eye but happy to say this morning he was really happy and back to his steady swagger. He has eaten two meals since and is really happy! long live the new Wizzy. I just hope that the teeth have not been making him really unhappy.

Will be posting some pics of the cats on here soon.

Ok so I thought I would work out what has been spent.

• Cains £40
• Pots £20
• Propagators £40
• Greenhouse £20
• Compost £30
• Seeds £40

So about £190’s to get going. I have loads of seeds left so I think seeds could come down to £20. So £170’s is alot but apart from compsost and seeds they will be usuable for next year! What crops do I think I have got so far:

• Tomatoes to date: 50 * 12 / 15 (per punet of shop baught) = 40, 40 * £1 = £40
• Cucumbers to date: 80, 80 * £1 = £80
• Potatoes: (not yet all picked) 12, 1 bag, £3
• Chillis: 4, 1 pack, £3
• Peppers, 8, 2 packs, £4
• Dwarf beans, 200, 10 packs, £30
• Runner beans, 80, 8 packs, £24

So without any of my other crops, onions, spring onions, sweet corn, betroot, carrots and loads of all the other to pick we are looking at an income / savings of: £184.

So I have all the equipment, seeds and still more crops to come and they have almost paid for themselfs!

Say ne more.