Even though our wedding is all paid off, I expect 2014 to be another expensive year for us – namely because we’re intending to buy a house. So far we’ve been renting, which is fine when you’re still getting established as a couple. But in the long term, it’s expensive (our mortgage repayments are likely to be less than we’re paying in rent), and it’s restrictive – we can’t really decorate, for example. We’d also like to move out of a flat and into a proper house with a garden.
My parents gave us quite a bit of money towards a mortgage deposit as a wedding present, but we’ll probably need a bit more. Also, something else has to happen before we can buy: we both need to learn to drive.
Learning to drive
Right now we’re restricted to living close to Sowerby Bridge railway station, and on a main bus route, as neither of us can drive a car. So we are both going to learn to drive this year, allowing us to choose a home a little further off the beaten track. Those of you who have read this blog for many years will know that I had driving lessons in 2006-7, however, after failing my practical test twice I gave up, and haven’t tried since. Though I won’t be starting from scratch, there’s a lot that I’ve forgotten in six years and so I’m not expecting to be qualified until the summer. I also need to re-take my theory test; though I passed it last time, it was only valid for two years and so has now expired, and it has got more difficult since.
So learning to drive will be one of my New Year’s Resolutions. Another will be going to the gym more, as that has fallen by the wayside somewhat since the wedding (not helped by a series of colds since September). Whilst giving up lactose has helped me feel less bloated (and so clothes fit better), I could still do with losing a bit of weight and improving my fitness.
May, as well as being our first wedding anniversary, will also play host to my 30th birthday. Which is a somewhat daunting prospect.
Weddings
We have been invited to two weddings this year – one in March, in Nottinghamshire, and another in the summer, in the Lake District. Hopefully one of us will be driving in time for the latter but we need to sort out transport for the former very soon. As many of our friends are at the same stage in life as us, I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up being invited to more weddings this year. I’m just pleased that I won’t have to organise one again.
We haven’t yet booked a holiday for this year but we’ve talked passively about a trip to Ireland. I’ve never been but Christine had family living there for a while so she has spent quite a bit of time there as a child. We also have tickets for a concert in Manchester in March. And we’ll be spending New Year’s Eve (i.e. this Tuesday) with friends, probably drinking the leftover champagne from our wedding.
So, to all of you reading this, I would like to wish you a very happy, prosperous and loving new year, and my best wishes.
This time every year I do a blog post looking back at the year that has just about finished, and all of the things I did. So this year it is the turn of 2013 to be analysed. You can read my previous posts from 2012, 2011, 2010 and 2009.
January
We started 2013 with friends near Blackpool, playing the tabletop game Last Night on Earth (the zombies won). We had a trip to Manchester, to visit the Peoples’ History Museum, and again later in the month to set up our wedding list at John Lewis in the Trafford Centre.
With two months to go until the wedding, we sorted out the flowers and received the remaining RSVPs from guests. We belatedly discovered The IT Crowd, and have since watched every episode (including the new, final episode broadcast this year). We later moved on to Black Books, and I got the complete box set of Father Ted for Christmas, to complete the Graham Linehan set.
At the beginning of April we went to a friends’ wedding in Greater Manchester – literally four weeks before our own. And at two weeks before Christine and I went on our respective hen and stag weekends, which we had been kept in the dark about right up until the day. We both had a good time and weren’t too embarrassed by our friends.
My soon-to-be mother in law gave me her first generation iPad that she was no longer using, which has proved very useful in the time since. However, with it only capable of running iOS 5, and an increasing number of apps no longer working, I may be looking for a newer model in the future.
At the end of the month we came over to York to make the final arrangements for the wedding.
May
Finally we made it to May, and our wedding on Saturday 4th. We both had a lovely day surrounded by friends and family, and the weather was nice enough for us to get plenty of good photos. That being said, we still haven’t ordered any prints, or our album as yet, so that’s a job for 2014. As is sending out the rest of the thank-you cards which we’re still working on.
Following the wedding, we went on honeymoon – five nights in Paris. I’ve been to Paris a number of times but it was Christine’s first visit. It was a relatively modest holiday – we stayed in a Holiday Inn, travelled in standard class on Eurostar and had to budget for meals – but we had a good time.
In July, my post at the university was re-graded upwards, resulting in a small pay rise. Having still got quite a lot of debt on my credit card from the wedding at this point, this was quite welcome. It was also during July that I discovered that I was lactose-intolerant, and so we started ordering our groceries online from Ocado because of their bigger selection of dairy-free products.
Christine turned 30, so we had a small party in our flat. Towards the end of the had a weekend in London, to visit friends and a couple of museums, and this included a stay in a lastminute.com ‘secret hotel’ which sadly wasn’t a great experience. The rest of the trip was good, though.
In October we went to yet another industrial museum, this time in Armley, near Leeds, for a Steampunk market. There was also a visit to a beer festival in Huddersfield, and another trip on the Transpennine Real Ale Trail, calling at some different pubs this time. And I went on the third of three stag weekends (the second being my own), this time in Birmingham.
I decided not to do Movember again this year, partly because in early November we went to another wedding, this time in Hertfordshire. I unfortunately had to miss the broadcast of the 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who due to a birthday (everybody seems to be turning 30 at the moment) but thankfully caught up the following morning on BBC iPlayer. Which meant going into complete social media hibernation in the intervening period to avoid any spoilers.
Following my grandfather moving into a nursing home earlier in the year (he’s in his nineties now), we sold his house and therefore inherited a few things. We now have a much bigger dining table and some nicer chairs, amongst other bits.
And finally to this month, which has featured three separate trips to York – one of which was a pub crawl, and another was for Christmas. I donated my fifth pint of blood, and somewhat surprisingly managed to get our Christmas shopping sorted quite early this year, in comparison. We also went to see The Hobbit Part 2 at the cinema, which I enjoyed despite some of the mixed reviews it got.
On Sunday I’ll post about what 2014 is likely to have in store.
I’m lucky that I can give regularly; I work near to a donor centre and am able to get time off work for donations. There are only 24 centres in England and some cities like York don’t have them. And I’m also lucky to be relatively healthy and don’t have any medical conditions that prevent me from giving blood.
I have had one failed donation; when the needle was inserted it somehow missed a vein. That meant having to re-arrange for a new appointment a couple of weeks later, which thankfully went fine. I now give blood from my right arm, even though I’m right-handed, as I seem to have better veins there. This does mean that I can’t really use my right arm for a couple of hours afterwards, so my appointments are in afternoons, after work. The failed donation also shows on my record, so I’ve had my ’5-9 donations’ card for a while even though at the time I had only donated four pints of blood.
Despite donating regularly, I still don’t like needles. I have learned how to cope with this and whilst it’s never a pleasant experience, once the needle is in and the blood starts flowing it doesn’t hurt. I have a similar coping mechanism for my annual ‘flu jabs. Sometimes I get a bruise on my arm as well.
I’ve also opted in to the Bone Marrow Registry, as this can be done at the same time as a donation.
At some point in future I may decide to donate platelets, which fewer people do. It’s a longer procedure, taking around 90 minutes, but can be done more frequently – as often as every two weeks in some cases. However, platelet donors can’t also give blood the regular way, so I wouldn’t be able to take part in the Interval study.
My next appointment is at the end of February, for pint number six.
Tomorrow, the 23rd November, is the 50th anniversary of the first episode of Doctor Who. A special extended episode, called The Day of the Doctor, will be broadcast simultaneously across the world, and in 3D at selected cinemas.
Sadly I will be out at a friend’s birthday tomorrow and so will have to avoid any spoilers until I get to watch it on BBC iPlayer on Sunday.
The build-up to the 50th anniversary has been huge – doctorwhosavetheday.com has been unlocking short clips once a certain number of tweets and status updates with the #savetheday hashtag have been posted. There have been a number of specially-commissioned TV shows, such as last week’s The Science of Doctor Who with Professor Brian Cox, and a documentary drama called An Adventure in Space and Time (iPlayer link). And miniature TARDISes have been popping up in other BBC programmes such as Eastenders and Holby City.
The biggest surprise of all was the release of the prequel to The Day of the Doctor, conveniently called The Night of the Doctor:
Without wanting to reveal too many spoilers, the mini-episode fills in some gaps in the Doctor’s timeline.
It’s a very different situation to ten years ago, at the fortieth anniversary in 2003. Back then, Doctor Who had been off our screens for several years, and had a reputation of being a low budget show with wobbly sets and cheesy special effects. Nowadays, the announcement of the new Doctor warrants a half hour special TV show, as happened earlier this year when Peter Capaldi was confirmed as the twelfth Doctor.
I was a bit too young to watch Doctor Who the first time around, so I picked it up with the revived series in 2005, and the ninth Doctor, Christopher Eccleston. And since then I’ve been hooked – never missing an episode and owning many of them on DVD and Blu-Ray. I even read up on some of the background information on the characters, on sites such as the TARDIS Data Core. And I’m not the only one, as many of my friends are fans of the show.
I’m really pleased that such a classic British show is still popular, and, if you excuse the pun, constantly ‘regenerating’ for new generations to enjoy. Let’s hope it’s still going in another fifty years. You never know, time travel may even be science fact in 2063, and not just science fiction… 🙂
But now I’ve moved on to Airmail. Like Sparrow, it has a clean and simple interface, support for a unified inbox, and it tries, where possible, to display pictures beside your emails. These can come from your address book, but Airmail also looks for a ‘apple-touch-icon.png’ file on the domain and will display that from time to time, hence the PayPal logo in the screenshot.
As well as supporting IMAP accounts, Airmail will also accept POP3 and even Exchange accounts. It also supports the various IMAP extensions used by Gmail. And like with Sparrow, attachments can be sent using Dropbox as well, although Airmail adds Google Drive, CloudApp and Droplr on top.
Most of all, Airmail seems very fast, light and stable. It opens quickly and doesn’t hang much. And it doesn’t slow your computer down so it’s fine to have running in the background whilst you do other things.
I really like Airmail and I’m happy to have it as my default email client on my Mac. It manages to tread the delicate balance between simplicity and depth of features very well.
Yesterday I upgraded to Windows 8.1. I run Windows in a virtual machine on my Mac using VirtualBox, and I upgraded it from Vista almost exactly a year ago. The process was reasonably smooth, in comparison to last year’s debacle, but it wasn’t without some minor incidents.
Getting started
First of all, I wasn’t quite sure how one would go about upgrading. So I opened up Internet Explorer and searched Bing, and it told me to open Windows Store, the app store for Windows 8. So I did, and… nothing. I couldn’t see anything that would suggest what to do next.
Thankfully this page came up with a possible solution. I hadn’t booted Windows 8 in a few months and so I was behind on installing fixes from Windows Update. 35 updates were presented to me; after the first run, all but 1 of these failed, so I rebooted and tried again. This time 4 installed correctly, but again, the others failed. Finally after another reboot I got the rest to install, and so I then rebooted again. This time, upon opening the Windows Store app a full-screen button for installing Windows 8.1 came up.
The first attempt at downloading the update failed, but then it got under way on the second attempt.
Installation
At this point I went to bed and left it to install overnight. I woke up to find the installer asking me to agree to the new license agreement, and to enter my details for my Microsoft Account. Then, it did a little housekeeping, and before long I was back at the Start screen, freshly upgraded. Post-upgrade, there are a couple of contextual tutorials that show you how to do things in the new ‘modern’ interface, which helps.
The verdict on Windows 8.1
I haven’t spent much time with Windows 8.1 post-upgrade but it does seem to be a minor improvement. You can do more things in the modern interface without dropping back to the Desktop – Control Panel, for example, has been largely replicated. However, I still find it harder to navigate than before, with some apps hidden away on the ‘All Apps’ menu, and it’s more difficult to find the ‘Shut Down’ button than on Windows 7. And the new interface is still over-optimised for touchscreen computers – even with an Apple Magic Mouse with sideways scrolling, it still takes longer to do things. Having to hold the mouse pointer in a small corner of the screen to then bring up menus is slow compared to clicking.
Using Windows 8.1 makes you realise why Apple keeps OS X on desktops and iOS and touchscreen devices. Having the old desktop and new modern interface in the same operating system feels like a kludge, especially when you get booted out of one into the other unexpectedly (which happens now and again). And trying to enable it for both touchscreens and mouse-controlled computers results in a compromise that disadvantages the latter, in my opinion.
I don’t think these problems are insurmountable, but let’s just say that I hope there’s a Windows 8.2 that fixes them.
On Saturday myself and a group of friends went to do the Transpennine Real Ale Trail. Many of the stations on the railway line between Leeds and Manchester via Huddersfield have pubs serving real ale either on the station or nearby, and eight of these form part of an official trail.
Though it’s been done for years, the trail grew in popularity following the broadcast of Oz and James Drink to Britain, a BBC TV show with Oz Clarke and Top Gear’s James May which was broadcast in 2009. The number of people attempting the real ale trail increased significantly, although sadly many weren’t in it for the real ale. Go back a to any Saturday afternoon earlier this year and you would expect to see large groups of people – mostly men – frequently in fancy dress, drinking lager and engaging in anti-social behaviour.
A particular problem point was the small and usually quiet village of Marsden. Though Marsden has a pub right by the railway station, conveniently called The Railway, many prefer to go into the village to the Riverhead Brewery Tap and others. This BBC News video gives you an idea of how bad it was last year.
Since then, many of the pubs on the route have stopped serving lager and spirits on Saturdays, and will refuse service to those in fancy dress. In other words, patrons have to drink real ale or soft drinks. And, based on our experiences, it seems to be working – whilst a Saturday in late October is bound to be less busy than in mid-summer, the route was much quieter and the people there were better behaved. At Slaithwaite (pronounced ‘slowwwit’) station, Northern Rail had provided a couple of marshals to manage the numbers of people on the small platforms. And at Huddersfield there were a number of British Transport Police officers around, but that may be more to do with the local football team playing local rivals Leeds United at home that day.
On our visit, we went to six of the eight ‘main’ pubs on the trail. Starting at Stalybridge, we then called at Greenfield, Marsden and Slaithwaite, before then skipping straight to Dewsbury and then back to Mirfield. By this point it was getting late, so we didn’t go to Huddersfield or Batley this time around.
I’ve done Huddersfield many times before though, and the station actually plays host to two pubs. They’re both on platform 1 – The Kings Head and The Head of Steam – although the introduction of ticket barriers means that you need to exist the station to access them now. The Head of Steam is my favourite and has the largest overall drinks selection (including a good cider menu) but real ale drinkers tend to prefer The Kings Head as its ale selection is stronger.
It’s a good way to spend an afternoon with friends and I’m pleased that the solution to the problems with rowdy drinkers seems to have worked. Other ale trails are available around the country and this month’s CAMRA magazine has a special feature on pubs at stations, which seem to be enjoying something of a renaissance of late. CAMRA also published a book last year; it’s out of stock on Amazon unfortunately but is available in CAMRA’s own shop, and members get £2 off.
Following Apple’s keynote presentation on Tuesday, OS X 10.9, aka ‘Mavericks’ was released. Apple broke its long-standing tradition of charging for OS X updates by offering Mavericks for free, and on any machine capable of running Lion. Furthermore, it looks like a direct upgrade from Snow Leopard to Mavericks is possible on those machines not yet updated, which may go some way in explaining why Mavericks is over five gigabytes in size.
By making Mavericks free, Apple can now dodge questions about whether the update is value for money. I know some felt that Mountain Lion wasn’t really worth the cost, even though it was only $20 and was already the cheapest OS X update to date (barring the ancient 10.1 ‘Cheetah’ update from 10.0). That being said, my early plays with it suggest that its value is at least that of Mountain Lion, and therefore a worthwhile update.
Installing Mavericks
Having been up at 5:45am on Tuesday (for work) I decided not to attempt to install Mavericks as soon as it came out, although I did watch most of Apple’s keynote live. Instead I waited until yesterday, and gave myself things to do whilst it installed, which, from beginning the download to completing installation, took around two hours on my early 2010-vintage Mac Mini. Then there were a raft of software updates to install afterwards – iPhoto, iTunes, XCode, a Digital Camera RAW update and improvements to some of the voices for the text-to-speech feature, plus various third-party apps. This took another hour or so but was technically optional.
Up and running
Once I had Mavericks up and running, it seemed to work fine. Well, no different to Mountain Lion, anyway. My Mac still takes quite a while to boot up but that’s probably to do with various apps and utilities that I have running. I did have to fiddle with the screen settings, as for some reason Mavericks decided to set my two screens to be an extended desktop and not mirrored like I prefer – my second screen is actually the living room television. Mavericks also changed some of my Magic Mouse’s settings so that left and right swiped no longer did anything. Frustrating, but easily changed back.
Scrolling seems smoother, which is nice, and Launchpad is now quite a bit faster – especially when opening stacks. This is a relief as it’s the main way I access apps that aren’t in the Dock.
Activity Monitor
The Activity Monitor saw major changes in Mavericks, with a new tabbed interface. I like it, and it feels simpler now, even though it shows more information. A new ‘Energy’ tab shows which apps are putting the most strain on your battery, if your Mac is a laptop – mine isn’t, but it’s still interesting to see which apps are power-hungry. Predictably Firefox was using the most energy whilst I was writing this but some background processes were also quite hungry too, so I may have to re-evaluate which apps run on startup.
It also tells you whether OS X is making use of one of its new features, Compressed Memory. When you start to run out of available RAM, OS X will now compress some of the data in RAM to make more available. This does add a bit of processing overhead, but it’s still faster than using a swap file (virtual memory) on a hard disk or even a solid state drive (SSD). I noticed that since installing Mavericks, OS X attempts to use as much RAM as possible to minimise swap file usage.
Maps
I had a brief play with the new Maps app. It’s basically the same as the iOS app, which sadly means it’s full of the same crappy data. A year on and there are still big problems with missing places (such as Bradford’s Alhambra Theatre), or places that have long-since closed.
I did note that my search history from my iPhone carried over to my Mac, which is interesting. However, I’ll be sticking to Google Maps for now.
Finder
Finder now has tabs in Mavericks; I’m sure some people will be overjoyed at this but I’m not too bothered. You can at least drag documents between tabs so I suppose I may use it from time to time. I don’t think I’ll use tags though, as I never used the labels that came before.
Miscellaneous points
The CPU coalescing feature is quite clever, but of limited use to a desktop user like me. I’ve heard that it is effective at extending battery life, which is good – it’s always nice to have a battery that lasts longer after an update than the more usual opposite.
The colours seem brighter on my screen, but that may be co-incidental with me changing the screen settings.
I like how newly-installed or updated apps sparkle in Launchpad.
I’m aware that there are major problems between Mail and Gmail accounts, however, I’ve recently stopped using Mail so thankfully I haven’t experienced this first hand.
LinkedIn is now supported alongside Twitter and Facebook. You can post status updates from the Notification Centre, and your connections will appear in Contacts. I wonder if iOS will follow suit in a forthcoming update.
I’ve turned on the iCloud Keychain. To enable it you have to also tell OS X to require a password to unlock your Mac if left idle, which isn’t done in a very intuitive way.
Users of older versions of Parallels desktop have found out that it doesn’t work on Mavericks. The latest version does but it’s a paid-for update. Consequentially my article about converting Parallels VMs to VirtualBox has been well-visited over the past few hours.
For me personally, it seems fine. Those wanting to err on the side of caution may want to wait for the inevitable 10.9.1 update which will follow in a few weeks (especially if you use Gmail in Mail), but I feel it’s good enough to take the plunge now. And you can’t argue with the price.
Our reason for visiting was for the twice-annual Leeds Steampunk Market. It had moved to Armley Mills from its usual venue of Left Bank near Burley Park. Rather than being arranged in one place in a main hall, this time the market was spread out across the museum and over the four floors, including outside. This made it seem less busy, but well over 600 people had come through the door on Saturday, and the numbers were looking similarly healthy on Sunday when we visited. A 50% discount for those who came dressed in costume may well have helped, and indeed Christine and I took advantage of this.
This was our third visit to the Steampunk market and we have now both amassed the basic Steampunk outfit. Sadly we didn’t take any photos this time (bar the Instagram image above) but my spray-painted gold goggles attached to a top hat made an outing. I suppose over time we’ll be able to come closer to some of the outfits that the more committed followers of the Steampunk subculture have. As usual there were some excellent costumes on show by other attendees.
As for the actual museum at Armley Mills, I managed to take a few photos (uploaded to Flickr of course) but to be honest we will need to go back and actually look at the exhibits properly next time. Especially as in some cases it was difficult to tell if something was a museum artefact or a piece of Steampunk art.
The next Steampunk market in Leeds will be at the White Cloth Gallery on November 30th and December 1st. I may be there.
