In the footsteps of the Inca's ... and Paddington Bear.

This week we sorted out our holiday for 2006. We had talked about it long enough but every trip that we looked at just wasn't quite right so we found a company who let us design our own.

We are off to Latin America again but this time it 's Peru and the Galapagos Islands. Cuba gave us a taste for this part of the world and this tour provides an interesting and varied itinerary. It's certainly quite different from it's North American relative and that's probably the greatest attraction - it's a peek into the past with a way of life and a culture that has changed little in hundreds of years, whereas a visit to the good old US can sometimes give a sobering reminder of what the near future has in store for us. Looking through the brochures there are so many places that we would like to go including Bolivia, Chille and Argentina but perhaps that's for another time.

Thinking ahead, trying to possibly imagine how many photographs I will take on an 18 day holiday it's perhaps time to looks at some more storage. I have noticed that Hitachi have useful 4 and 6 GByte Microdrives at a very reasonable price. I am tempted but also know that patience will bring it's own rewards with regard to computer related equipment.

Finally on the subject of computers my second computer build didn't go the way I had planned and the 2nd hand MoBo wouldn't POST when I assembled it. I was tired of messing around with PC's by then so I moved the other Mobo from it's case to the new case I had bought, grabbed the 1Gbyte of memory and the 3 60 GByte hard drives to give the following spec for the second machine

1800 Mhz Celeron Processor
1 GByte Ram
3 x 60 GByte Hard Drives (System and Data)
1 x 160 GByte Hard Drive (Data Backup)
Not stunning I know but works well and is a good use of the spare bits and pieces.

The Cure for the Common Cold

Well at least temporarily that is... A few months ago I saw a demonstration of the new Panasonic Lumix Camera at John Lewis and very nice it was too, except that I didn't really want another camera, but there was a prize draw for a Panasonic DVD/Hard disk recorder which I duly filled in the form for and promptly forgot about. The last few days I have been in Leicester and as my cold has returned I have been feeling more than a little crap with a headache and really bad sore throat.

Got home this evening and checked the post to find a letter from Panasonic to say blah blah blah you have won a DVD recorder - in fact it was a DMR-EH60D which was nice! Strangely my cold feels better at the moment but I am sure that it won't last long though.

I'm still in a state of mild shock as I don't think I have ever won anything before at least of any value - hope this is the shape of things to come.

First Blog of the New Year

It's been just a year since I first started blogging and although I haven't blogged on regular basis it has been interesting to look back on some of the postings that I have made over the past 12 months.

The New year has come in with the typical bad weather and gray skies - with both Carol and I recovering from a late night and a little too much booze. Some resolutions made too - just can't recall what they were though.

This is Carol's final year at college and I'm sure that she is glad - although there is a bit of a way to go yet until June then she can start enjoying the summer. With holidays planned for later on in the year we again hope to do some camping this year as we didn't manage it last year. I see that my web site is stil unfinished so I suppose that ought to do something about that too. The immediate project though is to re-use the bits salvaged from the recent upgrade of my PC for the "loft PC" and work has started on this already.

Soon be back to work proper and although I am not really looking forward to it, I will be glad to get into the routine

Happy 2006...