Spent last bank holiday weekend in Vienna with Sue for our anniversary. This city is spectacularly beautiful and has some of the best architecture.

Our first years wedding anniversary came up recently so I took the opportunity to take Sue to Venice since she has always wanted to go and you have to at least once in your life. The city is absolutely beautiful even if it is a little crowded and it is good to see it while you still can. I hear it is sinking and I am sure global warming isn’t helping that

While in Venice I got the chance to try out my newly aquired Cannon 70-300mm III telephoto lens. It is really good for long range shots:

and my new macro lens which my brother bought me from Singapore:

Appendicitis

A bad case of Appendicitis got the best of me this week. Actually, it hit me Thursday morning with this bloated feeling. By lunch time I was on the bed trying to sleep it off. By 19:00, I was in Hospital and by 23:00 I was under a general aesthetic having it taken out. I was out of theatre by 01:30 and back on the ward where Sue had been waiting. Sue slept in the chair by my bed and stayed all night with me. I was so glad to see her after my operation. They let me leave Friday evening because of my miraculous recovery. So the end result is:

* no football for 5 weeks
* no driving for 2 weeks
* no work for 1 week

On the bright side, I am one step closer to becoming an astronaut, since I hear the operation is a prerequisite.

It was good to get away from things for a bit.

If you check out images I have uploaded, you will notice that we also popped over the border to Spain and also to Gibraltar.

Chelsea Flower Show ’06

Recently I attended the Chelsea Flower Show for the second time and it didn’t disappoint, I took plenty of eye candy for all to enjoy and you can find it at the usual hot spot (http://www.curlybeast.net). One of my favourites has to be this aqualegia, most spectacular:

Gossip 0.11.1

Over the last 2 or 3 weeks Gossip has really had some work put into it and I would like to take this opportunity to thank Eitan Isaacson for the patches he sent in to get avatar support up and running – it r0cks! Looking good Jeff

During this time we have also spent time fixing some of the little things and adding general polish to make it sparkle, this has meant that Richard has upgraded his status from party hacker to real hacker!

Thanks again to all that has helped with the latest release, it is appreciated and your patches most welcome!

Oh – and I am in the middle of moving house at the moment too, woohoo, busy busy busy!

Last weekend, as well as relesing Gossip 0.10 I also managed to get out of the house to see Anglesey Abbey winter gardens which Sue said is quite beautiful this time of year. Of course we had to wait a couple of weekends for some good weather, since it isn’t on tap here in Britain. So my gallery has more aesthetics for all to enjoy

I have spent some time working on Glib recently to get sorting functionality working in async queues so that thread pools can be sorted by a user specified function. The main reason for this work was to remove the *very* old thread pool code that GnomeVFS was using (which was duplicated to some extent in gthreadpool.c).

I also added support threads to exit when they have been idle in the thread pool for a duration customisable by the application. This is an optimisation that was wanted to save resources on the Nokia 770.

Canon EOS 350D

OK, so for a while now I have been using an Olympus C460ZdelSol which is nothing special and I wanted to upgrade it to something more powerful, so I decided to get the Canon EOS 350D. I spent most the holidays with the laptop, manual and camera playing with the settings and understanding how it works. Now I think I will read it again

The Imendians are such a cool bunch!

I just got back from Stockholm where the Imendians got together for a conference. Amongst all this we got to do some fishing (which was a first for many of us) and I caught my first fish too. All in all a Superb experience!

I received my Nokia 770 this morning from the random selection at GUADEC. It is very cool and I can’t stop using it (neither can Sue stop using it for Ebay!).

Hej