Boardmad

I’ve been working recently on a couple of pretty interesting aspects of MI Reporting in my day job…you know the stuff about how our organisation generates reports or information or data for our customers to get at in a timely manner.

So while researching and reading up on more interactive connectivity and programmatic access to our data in a consumer-agnostic fashion I’ve been delving into the world of SOAP, RPC and the like. And I came across this brilliant, brilliant explanation of REST. Enjoy !

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Just a little bit of tinkering with the GoogleMaps API and some geocoding stuff…should show a googlemap centered on home on which you then search for other locations, get directions etc etc

About 10 days ago Mrs.B took the minx (TM) to a holistic health place in Edinburgh. Now I’m a pretty pragmatic chap and generally unswayed by homeopathy, Chi and such (having said that I have seen and felt very weird things hapen and various martial arts events I’ve attended) but the test done on TM sounded like bare naked bollockery !

However the results were conclusive my girl’s dairy intolerant - badly and fairly sensitive to preservatives,  colourings and general food additives. Spool forward a few days to start of last week and the beginning of the new non-dairy and no-precessed foods regimen for the girl. She took the changes with almost no upset (bless her) and in the space of a week the change was (and I speak with no hyperbole here) staggering.

Which brings me to the basis of this posting…have you any idea what went into your meal this evening ? I do now only because of the experience of the last 10 days, but before then it was a kids chemistry set of crap I was shovelling in my cakehole (sic!) and the kids were getting the same. And this is frustratingly down to the people that sell us our food, I’m thinking of those M&S ads dubbed with a positively erotic soundtrack. And combined with lifestyle and increasing affordability…but how’s it affordable..because it’s laden with flavourings, salt, sugar, MSG, preservatives and additives to keep you coming back for more and for added shelf longevity.

We went looking for alternate milk products for breakfast, soy milk, rice milk…etc everything has a gotcha. Flavourings, added sugar, no added sugar (which means sweeteners), preservatives or Enumbers. Our foodstuffs have become completely and utterly adulterated by the manufacturers and we just trot along like sheep. The yeast we bought this afternoon to make additive and preservative-free bread (every manufactured loaf in the local Tesco had additives - and the bakery confirmed they also added ‘things’ to even their organic loafs) has an E number in it…Yeast…WTF ! And it’s an ester of Sorbitol…a sweetener for goodness sake.

Sigh…vegan-life style here we come.

Settling and clearing out the weeks clutter and a couple of undisturbed days with the family ! I’m just back a couple of weeks from a fortnight off - first hold in 6months this year…not good planning !! Still spent part of the first week here and had a great time…highly recommend it if you like wild, unusual places to holiday :0)

General pottering and family related stuff ensued the remainder of the week and getting ready for the big trip later on next month to France…going camping in style and we’re getting very very excited !! Mrs. B and I used to go camping years ago B.B. (Before Babies) and had loads of fun - still have the tent actually - we’re thinking something marginally bigger may be in order this time ! What else…oh yeah the facebook phenomenon has finally caught up with me. And I’ve found friends from school nearly 25 years since last we spoke…gulp ! Amazing to see where people have ended up from the dismal and dreich depths of south lanarkshire ?! There’s still a few I’ve yet to track down but they’re either in disguise or keeping an incredibly low profile ! Someone knows where Bongy and Rod McPherson are these days ?!

Oh and first week back hitting the bike for the commute - the bypass round Edina’s a joke, they’ve dug up Sherriffhall r/about and the dalkeith bypass is nearly complete - makes me want to cry - what a mess ?! Still 20mls a day on the bike and not pumping car fumes into the atmos = happy old me. wow…I haven’t done this in ages !? Amazing how good some sleep can make you feel !?

Mainshill to Drem
Find more Bike Rides in Haddington, United Kingdom

All geared up for an overnight flight back to the UK last night and sat waiting to get boarded when the plane outside gets closed up and the lights go out…Uh oh ! Sure enough the flight’s been cancelled due to the inbound leg getting struck by lighting as it came in to land…Nice !

So off we trot to the airport hotel and spend the night while some engineers busily fixed the problem (I hope !) and we’re due off just 10hrs or so late.

That’ll teach me for putting my watch back onto UK before I was in the air…I put a whammy on the trip home ! Hardest part’s been not getting back to the family for another day. We explained to my eldest why daddy wasn’t getting home when we said because we’re stuck in the snow and she promptly informed us she’ll come and rescue me and fix my plane…bless !

Just arrived in Terminal5 on my way to Vancouver for a week’s workshops on a new project I’m taking on and other than the odd bit of hastily erected hoarding to shield one’s eye’s from unfinished partitioning the place seems pretty much done to me !

Firstly and of particular interest to me, is it’s internal scale. In a previous life I once bandied aesthetics and the troubles the human condition suffers in the urban fabric with architects and fellow planners. They (the architects) invariably felt this was of secondary importance to the nature of the architectural statement being made. I argued at length and vociferously in opposition :0) I can’t stand Stansted, it’s amuckle great modernist cowshed of a place with fragments of humanity sloshing about at the bottom of this great container like day old coffee dregs, there’s no sense of scale, you feel (and are in every sense) dwarfed my it’s grandeur and that irks me somewhere deep down inside ! Archtectural statements of this scale remind me of the great state rooms of the modernising Qin dynasty of China designed to awe and demand respect and obedience…maybe there’s something of the rebel in me that illicits these feelings

Back to Terminal 5 then…it’s light and airy with a ‘just new out the showroom’ smell to it still ! Good range of shops but definitely verging on the pricey side…I can’t recall the last time I felt compelled at an airport to by a £250 pair of Bulgari cufflinks but there you go…I am Scots ! Facilities that I’ve sampled are excellent (sat in the BA lounge atm!) and overall I’m much impressed and not surpried to find that the British press hysterical ramblings are largely unfounded. Having said that I’ll blog again once I get to Vancouver and I have my luggage in my hand !

More soon

Arrived safely in YVR and after a mahoosive wait in line to get through immigration there’s my luggage checked right through from Edinburgh. So much for all the hysteria !

Having a tough time getting my @rse in gear and doing much exercise…time for a change I think !

Apple has recently polished up it’s Safari for Windows browser codebase into some less reminiscent of an alpha-hackfest (much like it was when i tried their original release on a clean vista machine some months back) and have now slipped it in below the radar on many people’s machines as an automatic download/update on iTunes & Quicktime.

However the disclaimer and EULA you have to sign up for is a beaut…

Now click accept on that in good faith…:0)