And still it goes on…

Being busy that is but with an added dimension. Some people might consider it foolhardy – I am beginning to - when I decided to relay the front drive of the house. The existing drive is tatty and in need of a makeover so off with the old and on with the new. 2 weekends later and I have removed all of the tarmac and dug out most of the drive ready to add the hardcore next weekend. The weather has been great for it, if not a little hot, and the combination of a Bank Holiday and an extra few days off has allowed me to progress quite well. Still lots to do though but hopefully not as labour intensive as the first part.

Yesterday we went looking for Pavers and I have a bit of CAD work to do today so that I can send a drawing of the drive to the supplier to calculate quantities of blocks.

Work has been frantic again with a week long trip to Doha (in Qatar) a couple of weeks ago where the temperatures were warming up to around 38 centigrade (due to rise to around 50 C later in the year)

These activities have curtailed the Gym a little but I have started running with a local running club based at Esporta and I try to get along there on Thursday nights (6 mile run) and Saturday mornings (8-9 mile run). I need to though as I have signed up for the Bristol half Marathon after running the Bristol 10k in May at a slightly better time of 49m 45s. Of course any activity wouldn’t be complete without some sort of technology so I bought this the other day it’s a Garmin Forerunner 301 which is a wrist watch GPS. I tried it out yesterday in the pouring rain on our run and it works very well.

Went sailing yesterday and the conditions were very good if not a little chilly. the wind was constant in direction and speed and it made for some good sailing.

On the Techie side I now have an Edgestore 5 bay DAS drive with 4x 1 Terrabyte drives (in 2 raid 1 configurations and a spare 320 GByte (soon to be replaced). This is the central repository for all of my backup data and is sitting in the loft connected to my XP machine. There will perhaps be a reconfiguration  to  a single raid 5 array when I get the last drive – Birthday perhaps?.

And if this weren't enough then I am in the slow process of ripping all of my CD collection to hard disk in an uncompressed format. The idea is that I sell / dispose of the CD’s that I don’t want to keep but have a copy of whereas the favourite CD’s can be kept in the loft to make some space in the computer room – for more junk.

Carol’s birthday is coming up and I have sorted out the presents but soon after that is our wedding anniversary and I have planned a small trip for that too.

looking forward I have a mind to buy a new bike (pedal not motor). There is a cycle scheme at work which gives around a 50% discount on the purchase and interest free credit. The scheme has been suspended at the moment but is due to start up soon again so I am looking out for that.

Anyway off to do some more digging now…