signs of autumn


signs of autumn
Originally uploaded by ramtops.

this weekend is geoffcampbell’s annual Summer Camp, a gathering of bikers, bofhen, and friends; it’s one of our absolutely favourite weekends of the year, and heralds the end of the summer for me.

stalking Iggy round the garden with the camera this lunchtime (without much success in terms of good photographs), I noticed that the Virginia Creeper we planted to cover up the hideous pebbledash on the shed is just starting to turn. And there’s a nip in the air morning and evening. Autumn seems to be arriving a little earlier this year, and that suits me fine.

the leylandii are gone!


sunrise
Originally uploaded by ramtops.

and this is the view from our back garden at 6.56 this morning. I’ve never seen this before, due to the density of the bloody confiferous things.

admiration

how to deal with financial companies, from fabulist’s journal here.

Protected: how I hate this

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I quite like the conclusion to this

gacked from yonmei, which swear word am I?

aaargh

a headline from Snowmail

one flu’ over the cuckoo’s nest

and despite this appalling play on words, I still commend it to you – it’s a very useful precis of the day’s news, and a teaser for C4 news at 7 (best news on TV, IMO).

memememememe

gacked from surliminalmindmap

this weekend …

I have been mostly writing code. Not for clients, but for myself.

for a long time, I’ve wanted a way to track the recipes I use – I have a lot of cookbooks, loads of URLs file away, and can never find what I want. I also wanted a way to look through my recipe resources for given ingredients.

I know there are software products about that do this, but none of them did what I want, so I’ve been meaning to write one for *ages*.

and yesterday I made a start on it – I have ColdFusion talking to Amazon’s web services, and pulling data straight onto web pages, I’ve adapted some code we had to do the tagging thing, and I’m extremely pleased with myself (preens).

it’ll be a long time before it sees the light of day – there’s a lot more to do, lots of data to enter, and £920* odd to find to upgrade our ColdFusion to the latest version . But it must be done, and so I’m writing this stuff as a sort of test case; parsing the Amazon API stuff would be a hideous nightmare in our version of CF.

* or about £740 if you bought it direct from Macromedia US. But they won’t allow you to if you’re in the UK. Bastards.

what I haven’t done this weekend is what I should have been doing, i.e. doing some Extreme Housework before kalunina comes to stay – briefly – on Thursday, before we all trundle up to geoffcampbell’s for the bank holiday weekend. And I have a load of stuff to do work-wise this week.

it’s probably extremely sad that I’d rather code than go out and enjoy the sunshine …

begone …

our crabby old* neighbour moved out yesterday, taking her horrible loud music with her, and leaving the 20 odd ft high Leylandii. Well, I suppose they would be difficult to pack.

the new people knocked on the door this afternoon – almost the first thing they asked was did we mind if they chopped down the trees. Mind? We’re deliriously happy. Thrilled, in fact.

they seem very nice too, which is a plus. Wonder if they like feeding cats for neighbours …

*actually, she wasn’t that old. But she was crabby.

memememememe

as spotted on winter_lily’s LJ, here is my friends’ list collage.