As is tradition, here is my final blog entry for the year - and this time, the final one for the decade.

Blogs all over the internet seem to be doing it, so I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon and take a look back over the last ten years, from a personal point of view, on how things have changed.

Back in December 1999, I was just 17 years old and awaiting the turn of the the popular millennium. (Of course this didn't really happen until 2001 but why let technicalities get in the way of a good party? The roll-over of 4 figures seems much more significant anyway). I remember all the comments: where's our flying cars, jet packs and silver suits so often dipicted in futuristic novels and films. Of course none of these came about, but a lot has developed in technology. Things that may have been unthinkable at the time.

I'm looking around my living room at the tech that sits in front of me. Computers, digital photography, a big screen High Definition television, blu-ray, Sky+HD ... Really all amazing things that probably most people would take for granted nowaday.

The Computer

Ten years ago, I didn't have my own PC - the most powerful computer system I owned was a Sony Playstation. The desktop machine was a shared family machine running Windows 98. I don't know what it's spec was but obviously it was nothing compared to now. Internet connectivity was via dialup modem - the cheapest way to get online was via congested 0800 services such as IC24. No networking, multimedia consisted of poor quality video and 128kbps MP3s.

It wasn't until 2001 that I could afford to build my first desktop computer - a measly 1GHz Intel Duron machine running Windows ME before changing to Windows 2000. There was still no networking so I had my own modem in order to get online.

2002 was the year I first became connected to broadband at the seamingly blisteringly fast speeds of 512kbps down/256kbps up. Of course nowadays these speeds can be achieved by mobile phone and the thought of speeds like this on a fixed line would be sneered at. It was 2002 that the connected world meant I could start properly developing my website.

From then it's been more computers, the addition of wired and then wireless networks leading to the sitation now where I operate a home server, a desktop machine used as a media centre, a desktop machine used for amateur radio and general use, the laptop computer and a 3G/WiFi connected mobile phone.

Gaming

I've always been a bit behind the times when it's come to computer games. I've never had a machine of high enough specification to seriously consider PC gaming bar the odd game here and there, so it's been left to the games console. In 1999 I'd saved up enough to buy my own Playstation and I remember being amazed at the visuals of games like Tomb Raider, Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII. Of course by now this machine was already aging - the Playstation 2 was only two years away.

The later machine I didn't purchase until 2006 and it is this machine that sits under my TV. As of now, I'm still working my way through Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Even comparing the PS2 to the original machine though, the visuals are vastly superior and the games more immersive. I know the Xbox 360 and PS3 will be a huge leap again but I don't intend to get the latest Microsoft console until later in 2010 - 5 years after it was originally released.

Talking of the players in gaming ten years ago, the likes of Sony, Sega and Nintendo where the big three. Since then Sega has dropped out of manufacturing, and Microsoft came onto the Scene with the original XBox machine. Nintendo looked shaky with it's first machine of the noughties (Game Cube) but was now stormed ahead with the Wii - the first mainstream machine to feature motion control.

Multimedia

The CRT was king for television back in 1999. I had my own personal 14" TV/VHS combi and the family unit was a 28" (I think) beast. Over the air signals were mainly analogue with me not experiencing Freeview until 2002.

Now, my screen is a 32" LCD and I like the idea of upping the size to 42". Such screen sizes would not be possible ten years ago - imagine how much room a CRT of such a size would be!

Of course VHS just didn't cut it anymore. The DVD was released in 1999 and I got my first disk in 2002 which I played through my first computer - not a dedicated player. Now I barely touch the old tapes. I have however bought myself a Video Recorder for the pricely sum of £2 in order to dub some old cassettes.

Now I'm again experiencing a format change with the move from DVD to Blu-ray. Okay it's not as dramatic since I can still play my older DVD collection, but the appeal of High Definition video is too great to resist. Sky HD provides superb broadcast picture quality compared to the often poor standard definition equivalent.

Whilst broadcast picture quality may have decreased with the introduction of digital to terrestrial broadcast and Sky; the number of channels available now is staggering. Compare Freeview today to analogue television a liittle over 10 years ago, featuring just 4-5 stations. For better or worse, no-one can argue that today we are all spoilt for choice.

Photography

Taking photographs has had such a radical change over the last decade. Ten years ago the idea of having a digital camera was completely unrealistic - much too expensive. I had a compact Praktica camera taking 35mm film allowing for 24 or 36 exposures per film. Photography was not a cheap hobby for the casual photographer. The cost of film and development had to be considered each time that shutter was clicked. I like to think that this forced me to consider each shot more carefully but I don't really think this is true - I didn't know what made a good picture so just took the snaps that appealed to me.

Nowadays, there is little if any choice in film cameras for the casual photographer. Many compact cameras now are digital, small and cheap. Where the digital cameras of ten years ago featured perhaps a maximum of 2mp, todays cameras range from 8mp upwards. We are in the situation where those who don't know just believe more megapixels equals better quality photographs. The camera in the mobile phone has now reached 8mp and more despite not having the optics to support it.

My first digital camera was the Sony DSC-P200 - a high end (at the time) 7mp camera. This suited me until 2008 when I bought a Casio Exilim EX1080 10mp compact camera. It features little in the way of manual control, but is good for quick snaps. It was also in 2008 that I bought my first DSLR - the Nikon D80, and started taking photography much more seriously than before. I'm sure I've got a long way to go but my picture taking is vastly better than pre-2008 and a world away from 1999.

Digital photographs have also led to the reduction of printing (for me anyway). Most of my pictures are on my server's hard drive and are shown in a slide show on my general computer screen. One of my presents to my partner Kate was a digital photo frame. Ten years ago, I never would have thought that by the end of the noughties a device would exist that allows easy viewing of those files - a complete album or more on show on a bookshelf with pictures changing every 15 minutes. That's so much better than a static printed picture in a frame.

The Mobile Phone

I don't know if there is another device that has changed so much in ten years that it is almost unrecongisable compared to the earlier devices.

Ten years ago, my experience of the mobile was a device with a monochrome screen, simple games like snake and the best ways of communicating with it were by voice call on the 2G GSM mobile network or by SMS text message which became popular in the late 90's.

Within a year I had experienced the first stage of mobile internet connectivity via WAP. Looking back, this was pretty pointless but at the time I thought it was amazing. I could get online and look at websites designed solely for the mobile phone. I remember speaking to a work colleague in the early 2000s who simply did not believe that getting online via a mobile phone was possible. Yes it was crude and slow but it did work. Of course HTML browsing didn't exist on the mobile for a few more years, but by using a PDA such as a Psion Revo to connect via the mobile using it's infra-red connection did allow access to the full interent (albeit in low resolution monochrome).

Nowaday's my mobile has an always on internet connection either over the 3G mobile network or via WiFi. The phone (HTC T-Mobile G1) features a full colour touchscreen display, can play high quality audio files, play certain video files, take photographs and low quality video, automatically poll my Google account for emails, calendar updates and RSS reader updates and automatically receives updates to Twitter and Identi.ca. In short, the full internet is accessible via the built in browser with very few exceptions. Nowadays, a significant percentage of my internet time is via mobile phone.

Honourable Mentions

Obviously I can't talk in-depth about every technological development, so just to mention other things that have developed in the last decade:

Music downloads; online on-demand media (BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 4OD etc., spotify, last fm and others.); worldwide internet gaming via consoles; casual online games such as flash games; the portable media player (NOT just the iPod, but all of the others); eBooks; and presumably many other things that have slipped my mind

Technology - Where next?

I'm not going to fall in to the trap of trying to predict what technology and the 21st century lifestyle will be like in another 10 years. I think the last decade has proven how difficult that would be. We'll likely see new technologies that very few of us can imagine. Existing technologies will be developed further. I can say with some confidence that computers will continue to become more powerful and mobile phones will do more further decreasing the need to sit at a desk to be connected to the online world.

Personally, I don't know where technology will be for me more than 2 years into the future. I'll likely obtain a surround sound amp and speakers to go with it before 2012 and also upgrade from a PS2 to Xbox 360. More than that though, I just don't know.

The last ten years personally

Outside of technology, the noughties has been very interesting for me. I started working in telesales before quickly starting work in an off-licence in April 2000. 3 1/2 years later, I found myself working for the local council via a temping agency and then in 2005 I became a permanent member of staff at my current job.

I passed my driving test in 2003 and have since bought and disposed of two cars - the first a Ford Fiesta which almost literally fell apart, and the second a Peaugot 405 which I sold for scrap when I no longer needed it or had anywhere to keep it. Now I'm back to not owning a vehicle although I do still drive.

I have moved home three times with Kate, in all cases moving into rented accomodation, before settling into our current flat which has for the most part served us well since 2007.

After a number of years listening to and using CB radio, I obtained my first amateur radio licence on 2001 before obtaining my full licence in 2007.

Happy New Year...Happy New Decade

So with that, what has become quite an essay for me, I'll sign-off with a Happy New Year for 2010 and a Happy New Decade for the Tens. Oh, and for the record I'll be saying twenty-ten.

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Tags: gadgets, opinion, it's my life

Time to explain why I've been so quiet lately. Over the past few weeks I have been busy moving apartments!

After two years of living in South Essex, Kate and I decided that we'd had enough of the noisy upstairs neighbours; noisy chavvy cars driving by disturbing the peace; and the occasional bar brawl outside of our window, so we decided not to renew our tennancy and look to live someplace else.

So after looking at a suprising small number of properties, we found an apartment we liked and put our request in to become the new tennants. That was back on the 21 July which gave us just over 3 weeks to get everything sorted before we had to hand back the keys to the original apartment.

Three weeks really isn't a long time to organise everything including completing the packing; clearing out what wasn't wanted any more; notifying companies and organisations of the change of address; arranging a removals company to move all the larger items such as heavy boxes and furniture and the most important thing of all - get the keys to the new place.

Once all the reference checks had gone through and the deposit paid, it was Saturday 4 August when we obtained the keys and knew for certain that this apartment was ours. Before then, if the referencing had fallen through for any particular reason it would have been a mad rush to try and resolve problems or get somewhere else. Fortunately this didn't happen and we could finally start moving things in, just over one week before the original keys had to be handed back.

Luckily we managed to arrange for a removal company to do the move on the following Tuesday so by the end of that day, our old apartment was empty save for the broadband equipment and server which we didn't move until Sunday 12 August in order to minimise downtime of my website and to ensure we still had internet access should we have needed it (and it did prove useful).

With the move of most things completed, we now had the oh-so-exciting task of cleaning the old apartment to try to get as much of the deposit back as possible. So for the entire of the following weekend, Kate and I were cleaning, scrubbing and hoovering the place, trying to make it look reasonable. As it happens, on the final inspection they still weren't happy with the carpet or oven. They also marked us down for damaged blinds (they were cheap and nasty and literally fell apart) and marks on the wall (note: white walls mark very easily when one accidentally catches the edge of furniture on them). To be fair though, it was pretty much what we expected to be marked down on. The flat was never going to look quite as nice as when we had moved in. It was brand new then, and is two years older now.

So as of the end of last Monday, we had completed the move into another brand new apartment. This time it's a top floor (second floor) apartment so there are no noisy upstairs neighbours to worry about. It's much bigger than the old place with the living room still echoing slightly even with all our stuff in it. There is more space in both the main bedroom which includes an en-suite bathroom, and the second bedroom which I am again using as an office.

There are small things which make a lot of difference too. The office has a telephone point which means the broadband equipment doesn't need to be in the living room any more and I don't need to use a wireless network for the main computers (just for Kate's laptop and my iPaq); there are two satellite sockets in the living room which means I can get Sky+ (I've wanted that for a while); there is also a socket in the living room that I can plug the RF output of the sky box into, so that whatever is being watched on Sky can be viewed in the bedroom; there is loft space which we should have access to as soon as we are given the key to open it, so there should be less boxes in the office; the front door shuts in it's frame better so it doesn't rattle when there's a draft or someone else opens their front door; and there is a building-wide fire alarm system. The transport links are excellent as well with easy access to the bus and train.

There is still only one allocated parking space though, and the opportunity to park a second car on the surrounding streets is very small so I made the decision to get rid of my car. So on Sunday 12 August, I took my old Peugeot 405 to a car salvage company in West Hanningfield where I let them have it, minus the tax disc, for £50. I know I would have gotton a bit more for it if I had sold it, but there wasn't a lot of time to go through the selling process and it was getting on a bit. So I am now without a car and am mainly using public transport to get to work which works very well unless I have to pay with a £10 note and get a miserable bus driver like I did on the first day. He still took it though.

Whilst I'm on the subject of the car, I have to mention what a weird place the salvage yard was. Four blokes sitting around chatting. At least one of them was drinking Tennants Super - the beer of choice for alcoholics. I did feel that I needed to watch my back just a little bit whilst there, but there wasn't any problems.

So today marks 4 weeks since we chose this apartment and everything is pretty much done. The phone line is connected and the broadband came on today (top marks to BT - it wasn't due until Wednesday). There are a couple of boxes still to unpack and others to go in the loft once we have access to it. That loft access; an issue with a non-working energy saving lightbulb with an odd connecter (BC3 Bayonet); and the boiler being wired up slightly incorrectly are the only outstanding 'niggles' that I can think of and they're not exactly pressing issues.

It has definitely been a busy few weeks though, and I am glad it's done.

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Tags: it's my life

I just wanted to put a small note on here to say that I have started a course at university. 7 years after leaving the education system, I'm now taking a course called the University Certificate in Advanced Office IT Applications.

Okay, it's not a degree or anything, but unlike other courses and qualifications I've done which have all been inside my work place, this one is run by my local university and I am officially classed as a student. I can join the Student Union if I want, and even become a Student Rep (although I won't).

The course is a progression on from the basic ECDL that I completed (if I recall correctly) early this year. It incorporates the Advanced ECDL but also has an extra module added on which requires that I develop an IT solution to a real world business problem.

It's classed as a 1 year part-time course, but it's expected to be completed by just after Christmas so it's not a long term thing. My favourite bit is that on completion of the course, not only can I apply for a further certificate called ECDL Expert, but I can become an Associate member of the British Computer Society (BCS), and put the initials AMBCS after my name!

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Tags: it's my life

It was Valentine's day yesterday. In my opinion one of the most commercialised days in the year - more so than Christmas.

Even so, Kate and myself went out for dinner at The Fox & Raven in Chelmsford. The food there was delicious. The only problem was the wait. I ordered the food at 8.20pm and was told that there would be a wait of about 45 minutes. I thought that was okay since it was a busy evening.

At about 8:40pm, our starter arrived. I had some very nice battered mushrooms, while Kate had chicken satey. So far so good.

Ten minutes later, the starters where cleared, and then began the wait. Eventually one hour after the starters where cleared, our main course arrived. Just in time too as I was about to ask what was going on.

Once we'd finished, I think we had spent the longest time ever in a restaurant. Like I said though, the food was nice so all is forgiven. Well this time anyway.

In the news recently it's been revealed that another police woman has been shot in the line of duty. This time in Nottingham. The question has to be asked now - should the police be routinely armed? It's something that people say will change the police force forever but if gun crime is going to keep on rising, I say go for it. It's about time this country got it's act together and started fighting back against the apparent increase in crime.

Also, the news yesterday the smoking in all bars, restaurants, pubs, clubs etc will be banned is very welcome. Finally I'll be able to venture into any of the above without being suffocated. During the work Christmas meal in 2005, we decided to go to a Wetherspoons restaurant for a drink. When we got in there, none of us could breathe easily and the entire place was filled with a smokey fog. It'll be nice when that situation will never happen again (from Summer 2007).

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Tags: opinion, it's my life

I took an interesting phone call at work today. Can't really say what it was though. Actually, I was only taking a message from another department like mine. It's what the message was relating to that was interesting, plus some enquiries I made after the call.

Let's just say it was relating to someone I have worked for within the last few years.

Wasn't much point in writing anything really was there? It's a mystery (to you anyway, not me!)

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Tags: it's my life

The ADSL has returned!

I was right. I didn't get it back on Monday, but today is better than I expected. I spoke to Freeola who said they needed to get on to BT to run various tests and that it could take 3-5 days. This was last night at about 7pm. The signal had actually reappeared by 4:55am (the time of first access to my website).

Wish I knew what went wrong though. I can't imagine BT did any repairs that early in the morning.

It's was Kate and my fourth anniversary yesterday so we went out for dinner to "Back In Time" - an american themed restaurant serving steaks, burgers etc. The food was very nice. I had soup of the day to start - potato and leak which was nicer than it looked since it had very large lumps of potato which I'm not used to. For the main course I had a steak with curly chips, fried onions and salad, and I finished my meal off with a nice large Cappuchino.

The only problem with the restaurant was in the first 5 minutes of our visit. The stupid bartender (who has little idea of customer relations in my opinion and is a little hyperactive) decided it was illegal to serve soft drinks at the bar to be paid for there and then in cash. So I had to summon the manager and explain that there is no law against selling soft drinks and that it only applies to alcoholic drinks. The manager understood that, but the bartender bloke didn't and threw some off hand comment my way.

Twit.

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Tags: broadband, this website, it's my life

It was Eurovision night again last night. This year the contest was held in Kiev - the capital city of last years winners Ukraine. As usual most of the acts seemed a little crazy, with plenty of mad outfits and bizarre music, and of course the political voting at the end.
This year the UK came third from last with 18 points. Quite poor considering the song (Javine - Light My Fire) wasn't too bad.
It was a fun event though, something I watch every year, and Charlie came over for a beer too, but no Chinese this year.

It was Kate's birthday last Thursday, so I've had a long weekend taking both Thursday and Friday off from work. We went to London for the day and visited the London Dungeons. They were good but they were not scary, unless you're a 10 year old maybe. After that we spent the rest of the day mainly sightseeing, taking a visit to St Paul's Cathedral, the Cutty Sark at Maritime Greenwich, walking under the Thames and back just because we could, taking a boat to Embankment and taking a good look at the Palace of Westminster whilst peering in to all the cars coming in and out of the grounds to see if we could spot any famous politicians (we didn't).

We were going to go for dinner that evening when back in Chelmsford but considering we didn't get back until 9pm and the restaurant closed at 10pm, we postponed that until Friday when we went to Tucano's at about 7pm. It's a Brazilian style restaurant where you pay a set price of around £15 and you can eat all you can. There is a salad bar which you can visit as many times as you wish, and the waiters bring over meats on large skewers which you can either take or pass on. There are about 13 different meats and they will keep coming up until you tell them to stop. It's certainly not a restaurant you would visit if you're a vegetarian. I'm not though and neither is Kate so we both liked it. Although I do have one criticism about it - the music was too loud and bassy. It made the waiters quite difficult to understand some times.

I spent a lot of cash at E-Buyer and Quiet PC yesterday getting the following:

• Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000g S478 I865PE ATX Sound GIG LAN USB 2.0 FSB800 SATA100 Retail Box

• Processor: Intel Celeron® D320 2.4GHz Skt478 FSB533 256KB Cache Retail Boxed CPU

• RAM: Crucial CT6464Z40B 512mb DDR 400MHz PC3200 CL=3 Memory Module

• DVD: LG 16x52 DVD-Rom Drive - OEM Biege

• Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar SE 250GB UIDE 100 7200rpm 8mb Cache- OEM

• CPU Cooler: Zalman CNPS6500B-ALCU Pentium 4 S478 Flower Cooler

The motherboard, processor, cooler, RAM and DVD will all go into my new machine which will be fitted with the 60GB hard drive, 128Mb graphics card and the 3 sound cards from my current 1GHz Duron, which will receive an old 32Mb graphics card and the new 250Gb hard drive. The old machine will then be put to use as a server, holding all files and operating the web server, therefore replacing the AMD 400MHz PC which is currently fulfilling that role.
These parts should be with me by Tuesday so I will have lots of fun putting the computer together.

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Tags: eurovision, computers, it's my life

The clocks went back an hour today. It's when that happens you know Christmas really isn't that far off! It's 5:20 now and pretty much dark outside - this is what it's going to be like when I get home from work (Ok it's cloudy tonight so it might not be quite so bad).

I've been listening to Chris Moyles over the weekend, for the first time in ages using the Listen Again thingamy on Radio One Online. I don't usually listen much anymore since he does the Breakfast Show and I'm usually off to work before I can listen to 1/2 an hour.
I thought I'd have a listen to Wednesday's show because of the sad news announced midday Tuesday that John Peel died. It was quite a good show still with lots of memories from Chris and his team, and people texting in with their thoughts - and some half decent music.
Anyway, after listening to that, I decided to listen to listen to other shows from last week and they're still not to bad.

Other than that, it's been a quiet weekend. Went round Charlie's yesterday to assist with the assembling of some connectors in preparation for the new studio installation at HRC. Today has mostly consisted of tidying up my room and tiny re-arrangements - I moved my air cooler from my left side next to the computer cupboard to my right hand side next to the desk which is a bit more accessible me being right handed, plus it also creates a nice place for Kate's bean bag (which I tend to trip over when entering my room in the dark). I've also tucked the telephone extension cable under the carpet so it all looks a bit tidier now!

Later...NOT with Jools Holland... :-)

Kate found this rather amusing game about a drunken German (which means the language is German too - but don't worry you should be able to figure it out.)

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Tags: broadcasting, it's my life

Video entry. See Videos section

Transcript
So its absolutely chucking it down at the moment. It's been a really nice day all day long. Even managed to get a nice walk in the park before Kate had to go back to Oxford this evening. She phoned me up to let me know she got back at about 7:30 - 7:45 and she said "hey did you have a thunder storm"? I said "Nope. Quite nice here"
"Did you have a huge rain storm"?
"no nothing like that".
5 minutes after hanging up the skies opened. There you go it's been chucking it down.

Just having a look at the processor as the levels were a little bit high so I've just turned them down a little bit if you were wondering what I was doing looking at something else. But hey, that's by-the-by.

Yesterday I was bored out of my mind.
Kate was at work until six and it was a reasonable day as I recall. Being bored I didn't pay much attention to the weather.
Or was it?
Perhaps it was a bit dull. There was a reason I didn't go for a walk. I was going to go out for a walk so it might have been raining or cold or windy or something. There was a reason I didn't go for a walk. Or maybe I didn't want to go on my own because Kate was at work until six. Going for walk on your own can be a bit tedious even if you have an hours worth of music with you.

Yesterday I was a bit bored. When Kate got back we had a game of Jenga - the game where you have a stack of bricks and you pull out the bricks until it falls down.
We watched a film - K-Pax. What's the name of the actor? Kevin Spacey. He was starring. Quite a good film. I saw it at the cinema a couple of years ago, when it came out. One of those ones that in my opinion a lot of people overlooked coz I seem to remember it wasn't on at the cinema very long and it is a good film about a person who believes he is from a planet 1000 light years away called K-Pax. What is actually the case is he is a psychiatric patient. A traumatic event 5 years ago had given him with an alternate persona if you like, trying to block out what had happened in his past. So it was quite an interesting film. I quite liked it but maybe one that a lot of people overlooked. Who knows.

So we watched that - a couple of bottles of beer and Kettle Chips to go with it. So quite a nice little evening, a quiet day. A lot of yesterday evening, I just sat in my chair listening to Classic FM. Quite relaxing doing nothing else.

Today the weather hasn't been to bad. Quite clear. Didn't do much really. It's good isn't it? I can't even remember what I've been doing day-to-day. I definitely went for a walk. That was mid afternoon. Went for a walk through Admirals Park. Quite a nice little stroll for 45 minutes roughly. Of course I've got this pedometer that I mentioned earlier in the Lifeblog and your supposed to do 10,000 steps a day and it doesn't happen. I did 4000 steps in that 45 minutes. I worked out that to do 10,000 steps I recon you've got to do 2 hours of walking and your supposed to do that a day. How on earth I'm supposed to do that when I've got work, I don't know. I could walk to work but that would probably take a couple of hours - no an hour. I don't know actually how long it would take. It would take a while anyway. Longer than I really want to spend walking to work. I don't want to get up that early - I don't want to get home that late either. So that's not really an option. I've got to figure something out. As I said earlier in the Lifeblog it's going to be tricky but something's got to be worked out. Perhaps I'll give some serious consideration to going to Riverside gym. Not going back to Fitness First it's too expensive. But if I can do a pay as you go thing it will be a bit more reasonable maybe.

So we did the walk in the park, came back, Kate went off to Oxford about 6 and I've been sitting in here doing various bits on the computer. Playing around with video recording just compressing a few down to reclaim some disc space because it takes an immense amount of space to do this sort of thing.

That's pretty much it. I've been mirroring the NASA website fort the Mars Rovers that have been going on. At the moment it's been going for 1 day 6hours 16 minutes and 27 seconds. Stored 1.77Gb and I think it's going to go for a while yet as well so I'm not going to sit and watch that go. Nice to have a little archive of things that go on.

So that's today. I'm going to have a Pizza. That's my dinner and for this evening I don't have a clue. Sounds like fun doesn't it.

Ta-ra

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Tags: it's my life

Went on another castle trip yesterday, and back to Kent too.

This time our visit was to Dover Castle - oddly enough in Dover. I have to say before I say anything else, that I did not think much of Dover. It seemed very cluttered. Especially with a huge sixties style block of a building dropped in the middle of it. I suppose the clutter is what you get a places like that, what with the port and all but I wouldn't live there.

The castle was nice though. Sitting high on top of a cliff overlooking the town and the coast. Parts of it are almost 2000 years old, stretching back to when the Romans roamed our land. And it has served a purpose from then right through to only 20 years ago in the mid eighties when underground chambers and tunnels where used as a government base where officials would have ruled Kent in the event of a nuclear attack.

Obviously, being in such a front line position (France being a mere 22 miles away), the castle was huge. Considering we arrived at about 1pm, our afternoon was certainly packed. We had a look around most of the grounds, went into the main castle keep, took a walk in the medieval underground passages and took a look at where WW2 weapons were positioned.

When we left at about 5pm, there was still things to do such as visit the WW2 underground command centre and hospital (which we were going to do but decided on the medieval tunnels instead), the battlement walk - a trek around the perimeter of the castle and something called the admiralty lookout. I think another visit will be in order one day to finish these bits.

See Photo Album

Charlie paid a visit yesterday evening too. Kate bought the Monopoly board game a few weeks ago an we have played a couple of games - all of which I won. So of course Charlie had to be challenged to beat me. Which he didn't - Kate did instead. Darn & blast.

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Tags: days out, it's my life