For the second year running, Daisy and I entered the UKA Salsa medal tests at our local class. Every year UKA teachers are pushed to make their students enter the medal tests. It’s a way for the UKA to recoup some money, really, as the tests cost us about £10 each to enter, and we entered 2 each!

The format is that the line dancers that our teacher also dances would do their routines while the examiner, who this year came all the way from South Wales, would examine them on Posture and Deportment, Technique, Confidence, Rhythm and Timing and Potential. Then it would be the salsa beginners turn, and then eventually us, as salsa intermediates.

As pretty much every time, the examinations were running behind time, so we sat in the bar from 8 o’clock until about 9:15 chatting with the other salseros. When our time came the music hadn’t been organised too well, so we ended up dancing to something different, but as long as it’s 4/4 time and a reasonable tempo we’re pretty much ok with it. It all went off ok; I wasn’t nervous but I think Daisy was a bit.

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Our fellow Salseros, Karl and Elaine, enjoying a dance

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Daisy and myself looking rather hot!

I just found a wonderful website that you could spend hours browsing around on a slow afternoon (like I just did!),
The Speech Accent Archive. Native and non-native speakers of English read out a set piece of text to compare the differences in their accents. Hmm, I’ve managed to make it sound really dull but it’s really good, honest! Especially if you are at all interested in languages and wordy stuff.

Blimey, well it’s about time I updated, isn’t it?

Things have been rushing by in a veritable blur, recently. What with Easter and work, I’ve hardly had time to think about this blog.

So, unfortunately, a week and a half ago my blog turned 1 year old without even a fairy cake and candle. Poor blog. Happy birthday blog. Hope your second year will.. well, be a full one, to be honest.

On my blog’s birthday Daisy and I were out walking around on a beach about 10 miles from where we live. My mother-in-law wanted photo to put on her wall, so I went out to Shell Bay with the specific intention of getting a photo that I had in my mind that I thought she’d like. This is what I came up with:

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Daisy’s photos of our trip are on her flickr page of Dorset.

Anyway, it was a short week after that on which I got me a new laptop (bought by my work of course). It’s a cutesy little thing – very light and just what I wanted. It’s got all the bells and whistles though, and a nice clear screen; best of all the battery lasts quite a few hours. Tis a Sony Vaio TX2XP:

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My new laptop

On Wednesday evening we travelled up to Wales for Easter. Usually travelling to Wales means a nice relaxing, lazy, food-filled time for us, however we’d decided to travel to the Elan Valley to gets some nice photos (Daisy’s getting flickr-mania). When Mother-in-Law heard she suggested a few other places, so we ended up spending a day in the Brecon Beacons, a day on a mountain called The Blorenge near Abergavenny, and a day in the Elan Valley. We managed to get lots of nice photos. Here’s some of mine:

Brecon Beacons

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The view from Talybont Reservoir

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Waterfall at Blaen-y-Glyn

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The Reservoir at Pontsticill.

The Blorenge

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Where we parked prior to our 3-and-a-half mile walk

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An OS Trig point on the top of the Blorenge

Elan Valley

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The enormous dam as viewed from the Visitor’s Centre at Caban-Coch.

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Another enormous dam – the Claerwen Dam, further upstream in the Elan Valley

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Wild Red-Kite flying over the Claerwen Dam

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Panorama from the top of the Claerwen Dam (from 4 photos)

You can see more from Daisy at her flickr page.

So, we got back from Wales on Monday, and I had Tuesday off, so this week has also been nice and short. However, I was surprised to find out yesterday I had to go to London this morning. Anyway, pretty tired now, so it’s back to… er.. watching the Two Ronnies.

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It’s been a manic week, as seems usual these days, but I wanted to mention that we’d been to see Dara O’Briain at the Bournemouth Pavilion, last Sunday. For those who don’t know, he’s an Irish stand-up comedian, but has become relatively popular over here in the UK for various TV shows, most notably Mock the Week.

Anyway, his stand-up show was very interactive, relying alot on the front-row of the audience to help him out. However, it was pretty well controlled and went through various topics, like how you choose beds, and our learned stereotypes of certain cultures.

This is an incredibly crap photo, but this is the view we had from our seats in the circle:

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This week I’ve also been doing a strange survey that required me to drink a prototype drink and answer questions on it. The drink was sent to me through the post and I have to fill in a website about it, now that I’ve completed the paper survey. All very weird; but I must say it was a very nice drink!

Yesterday I was lucky enough to acquire a berimbau from a mate at work, who clearly wanted rid of it. It’s a strange musical instrument from Brazil that’s used in the rituals associated with their local martial art, called capoeira. The instrument is like a long bow, and you hit the string with a stick and change it’s pitch by using a small stone against the string. I don’t quite have the hang of it yet!

This week’s been busy setting up new computers at work, that we bought for the new projects we’re starting. I have a new super-thin laptop on order too, but it’s not arrived yet The new project also provided a new webcam, which means you can see me sitting, looking bored, and picking my nose in super clear detail

Anyway, enough blathering – it’s bedtime!

We’ve been busy this morning out in the garden. Our neighbour came around on Friday to tell me that she’d seen a rat in her garden and had called the Rat Man around. He’d apparantly followed a run into our garden but couldn’t come around without our permission. He told our neighbour he’d return on Monday, so we phoned them up and asked them to come and see us too, on that day. So he is. Unfortunately, our garden’s been in a bit of mess since we hacked down the trees, so we needed to get out there and tidy up a bit so we wouldn’t be quite so embarrassed about someone seeing it. It is a good excuse to get it done, anyway. So it’s looking better now. We’ve moved one of our compost bins so it’s more amenable to being infiltrated by worms from the ground, and tidied up sticks and leaves that have been hanging around in various places. We’ve started to move the bags of mulch we created from the trees, and it’s starting to look better. We have another compost bin to move, and I need to finish diggin the veg patch (bloody hard work where the grass has grown into it). So, better get back out there, now lunch is down, and get it finished… come on Daisy….

I was horrified two days ago when I found I’d racked up £60 in excess bandwidth charges within the last 2 weeks! At first I thought it was this page with all the Barcelona photos on it, however after a lot of investigations I found out that one of my wife’s photos from our honeymoon was being hot-linked from myspace.com. Hot-linking is when someone else uses something from your site directly in their own pages, and this photo was put up on HotFreeStuff.com by some guy called Jesse. Being on HotFreeStuff means that other people can also use the photo as part of a layout on their sites too. HotFreeStuff says that the layout using the photo has been used on 24,782 people’s websites! The number of hits on that photo was reaching around 20,000 in a day, building up over 1.6Gb of bandwidth use per day. That costs me about £9 a day. Having found the problem, I was able to fix it by blocking access to images from myspace.com, meaning I broke a load of people’s webpages Oh well.

If you’re interested in the nitty gritty, read my other blog post.