davidflett.co.uk

Social Network Updates & Suchlike By David Aug 23, 2010 I’ve had that Bebo link on the left side here for ages, yet have not been on there for years. Time for an update. I’ve now put up links to my facebook, linkedin and twitter accounts instead, although I still cannot see the fascination with the latter! I’ve also dumped the Windows Live link, although this site is still powered from there. One day if I find time, I might change that to something else.
Edinburgh Trip By David Dec 20, 2009 Since this is mostly a holiday blog I thought I’d post up my latest holiday. All the long long way to Edinburgh. My sister has recently moved there, Christmas shopping had to be done and Andy Seaton was having a party so I thought, why not? I took the train down, since the last time I was there I only lasted two hours before having to go to the Police Station and report the bugger who scratched my car! It was foggy on the Friday and Saturday in Edinburgh, so I got no pictures taken. Did wander through most of the shops though. Met a bunch of my sister’s uni mates on the Friday night and they had been drinking all day. The Saturday night was Andy Seaton’s party. He has a terrific flat down there, and he seemed determined to enjoy his bottle of Bucky. Stopped in by Sandy Bells bar for the session on Saturday afternoon/evening. There was about ten musicians in the corner, all playing great tunes. Did the same on Sunday, but there was only a couple. The chap on the harmonicas was pretty good though. I stayed at a hostel down on the Grassmarket. It was quite fine, but my sleep was interrupted all night by two really loud snorers. On the Sunday I had to be up early to leave, so at around 3:30am I gave up and found a couch to sleep on the common room instead. On the Sunday morning I took a wander through town, where I encountered the slightly surreal sight of hundreds of Santas running through Princes Street Gardens. There was even a Santa Clause Pipe Band there! Anyhoo, that’s about all the important stuff about my trip. Been there again already since then to move my sister into her flat. All 200 boxes and bags of stuff and all…
Technical Post #1 By David Dec 20, 2009 I recoded a wee bit of the site today. Actually that’s a lie, I was meant to post this a month ago but I forgot about it. It now actually has dates on it so you can now see how long it has been since I last updated! The site is a single aspx page, where the content is taken from a Live Spaces Blog (I think that’s Microsoft’s current marketing name for it anyway). This single page reads in the RSS feed, and then redisplays it in the tidied up form you are reading now. Now before you point out the obvious, it is a little over engineered and slightly under featured. Spot the wee bit of LINQ in there which I’m starting to come around to now. We use it all the time at work now, and it has indeed cut down the number of foreach loops I seem to do. This is the code behind: and this is the page content: This is all there is to it. I wonder if any decent asp.net programmer will read this and let me know of everything I did wrong? I doubt it!
Shetland Trip By David Aug 20, 2009 I finally put pictures up from my trip to Shetland. 4 days from the 7th till the 10th of August. We stayed with Jennifer and George like we did before, who would be my Dad’s second cousins. I had my pipes up, and played for Auntie Maggie, as well as several times in the Boating Club on the Saturday night. That’s twice I’ve been in Shetland now, and twice where I’ve yet to hear any Shetland Fiddlers in Shetland! I didn’t take quite as many pictures as I did in Canada, only 500 or so, but we were only there the few days, plus mum had her camera too. Shetland is a lovely place, and full of lovely people. Dad and I are already planning our next trip back. Mum, well she probably would miss the shops! As before you can find all my images up here: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/david.flett
Home, Sweet Home By David Feb 15, 2009 Well I made it home. All the way to Buckie as it happens too. I landed back in Aberdeen on Tuesday and was back to work on Wednesday. No noticeable jet lag neither until last night and this morning, but a 15.5 hour sleep has sorted that out. I have been going through my photos tonight, all 2621 of them! Plus a few of Fiona’s too. Went through them with Ma & Pa and it took us the better part of three hours! I have been through them again now, using Picasa to mark my favourites and doing a little cropping and blemish removal on some others. My camera has managed to get a spec of dirt stuck on the sensor, so there was a consistent mark appearing on most my images since about Vancouver. They should all be sorted now and once uploaded to Picasa the albums should contain around 486 pictures. A much more manageable amount. What of the other 2000? There were a lot of duplicates, a lot where I was playing around with the camera features as it is only a few weeks since I got it, and a few that just did not come out very well at all. You can find all my images up here: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/david.flett.
Where in the World is David Flett? By David Feb 04, 2009 Well, Vancouver as it happens! I came down today on the Greyhound from Whistler. I’m staying at the HI-Downtown Hostel in Vancouver which actually has free Wireless Internet access (unlike the UBC Whistler Lodge where I’ve been for the past week). I had fancied taking in a Hockey game while I’m here, and as it turns out there was one tonight: Vancouver Canucks vs Carolina Hurricanes. I managed to get a ticket easy enough and the game was great. The Canucks have had a bit of a loosing streak as of late. They started off good, and led after the first period 2-0. However they started to loose it a bit in the second period. Carolina equalised in the third and the mood in the 18,630 crowd wasn’t great but in the last couple of minutes of the game the Canucks scored to regain the lead. The noise in the stadium at that point was incredible, and apparently that is what it was like all the time before this loosing streak. Anyway, they kept their lead and won the game 4-3. Overall, NHL is a fun experience. There’s lots of stalls and shops before the game, loud crazy looking fans/employees, a wide choice of food, beer (!), cute little kids playing at the interval, a dancing shark who goes around shooting prizes into the crowd… Oh and the game was fun to watch too. No fights today, but there was an amusing bit where a Carolina player was flipped over the side wall into the Canucks player’s bench area. The crowd loved it, as did the Carolina player when he realised where he was!
Canada Trip Picture Post #3 By David Feb 04, 2009 Well, I’m catching up a bit now, these pictures are only four days old from my birthday on Saturday. I took a break from skiing and Fiona and I did went Zip Trekking and Tubing instead. First though, we had a wander around town where there is a cool shop called Cows: With a cow outside it no less! Anyway the Zip Trekking was fun: I’ll have to figure out how to post the Videos from Fiona’s Camera for these. There's more pictures up on Picasa.
Canada Trip Picture Post #2 By David Feb 04, 2009 First off, from my third day of lessons, my idea of a decent slope for skiing: The Magic Carpet! But that didn’t last, so we went a bit higher: And then right to the top. This was the view (or lack thereof) from the Roundhouse at the top of the Whistler gondola: It was about an hour after this that I had enough of the skiing and gave up for the day. There’s a few more pictures on Picasa, but this is the best one from the Mongolie Grill that night:
How To: Waste $40 on rentals that hurt your feet in Whistler, BC By David Feb 03, 2009 Well, Whistler is nearly over. Skiing wise, it's been non existant these last couple of days. The last trek up the mountain must've bruised my feet something terrible. I tried rentals again yesterday, but even on just the slight slope of the magic carpet run I was in sheer agony. Oh well! I decided to go up the mountain today on a sightseeing ticket. I did not get the chance to do the Peak 2 Peak on Friday so I did it today, twice! Over to Blackcomb, back to Whistler to meet Fiona then back and forth again. I too some pictures, but it was rather cloudy. Knowing my luck it will be clear either tomorrow or Wednesday. Also, we went back to that Mongolie Grill tonight and again the food was delicious! Hopefully tomorrow I will be in a hostel with wireless access so I will be able to post some of those pics from the last few days.
How To: Getting a free Snowmobile ride in Whistler, BC By David Feb 01, 2009 Well, I've been here four days now. I've had three days of skiing. It's alright, and I can get down some of the hills. I went to the lessons again yesterday and the instructor took us up Whistler. We were going to take the Peak 2 Peak gondola, but it closed down due to high winds. It was extremely windy and snowy up there! After lunch we started to make it down the hill, however about a third of the way down my legs and my nerves gave up on me. The instructor called me a snowmobile to pick me up and take me down. That was just as terrifying as the steep hills though! That was the end of my lessons though. If I go back it'll be to the lower beginner slopes. Fiona and I went to the Mongoli Grill in Whistler Village last night. It's a chinese buffet where you pick the raw ingredients and then they stir fry them on a large hot plate while you watch. The food was fantastic, and the guys are fun to watch while they juggle with your ingredients during cooking! Today, it's my birthday and we took it a bit easier. We went on the Zip Trekking course here in town. It was great zipping across the valley amongst the trees suspended from a metal wire. Definately recommended! After that we went to the Tube park. Similar to what you get in a water park, you sit on a large rubber hoop and get launched down a hill. Again, fantastic fun, espescially when you go so fast you run off the end of the course and into the padded wall! Anyway, that's all for now.
Planes, No Trains, and many Automobiles By David Jan 29, 2009 Well, I made it to Whistler. The day started out less than well and barely made my Train. I say train, but due to a broken down freight train, it turned into a bus! Grr! Customs was slow to get through, probably because we were unexpected. Then the bus driver didn't quite know how to get to the station! So much for my scenic Vancouver Cascades trip! The bus to Whistler was also rather unscenic due to the snow and low clouds. I met up with Fiona at the bus stop though and we eventually found my hostel. All that snow though made today's Skiing quite good though. Just the Level 1 beginners today and probably tomorrow. Fiona's not terrible at Skiing though, she sped past us a couple of times on the magic carpet slope. We were just on Blackcomb today but Mike, the Ski instructor, said he'll probably take us on a bit of a tour over both mountains tomorrow. Hopefully I'll get a chance to properly access the net soon and might have some more pictures to upload by then.
(Not so) Sleepless in Seattle By David Jan 27, 2009 Well, I made it to Seattle. I’m just a tad tired as it's now 4am back home and I've been on the go since 9am. Flights were spot on, and it was easy enough to get to the hostel. Strangest thing so far is the underground bus network. It looks like a proper subway system but with busses! I took few shots from the plane as the views over Greenland and North America are great with all that snow. Then I took a few more shots as we crossed the mountains on the way into Seattle. 216 pictures in total! I've only put the better ones up for just now though. See all the others from this link. I’ll have a name that mountain contest! Anyway, an early night for me. I have the Vancouver train to catch at 7:40am. It sounds early but really that's twenty to four in the afternoon!
Obligatory Test Post #1 By David Jan 25, 2009 Well, I thought I’d try my hand at getting this website to do something useful again. First of all, this is a new URL, davidflett.co.uk. The old davidjamesflett.co.uk should redirect here in due course. I now have this hosted on a new provider too, UK based tsohost. It is cheaper, but I get much less storage space and bandwidth. That shouldn’t be a problem though since I never used the full amount before anyway! I will also host the buckiepipeband.co.uk website off of here eventually. Photos were the main thing which used up the space on my old server. Who needs that now? There are plenty of free dedicated services for that such as Flickr, Google Picassa Web Albums, Windows Live Photos etc… The list goes on. Here’s a test Image. It is hosted at Picassa. Can you see it? Good, then that’ll do nicely. That is St. Rule’s Tower in St. Andrews by the way. Also, previously I’ve used PHP and MySQL for various web site related things. I fancied a change, so I’m no using ASP.net since technically I should know it for work. It’s been a while since Codify had an ASP.net specific project so I’m a little rusty. I’ve also dispensed with the need for a database. Again, there are plenty of free blogging services. I’ve settled on Windows Live Spaces for just now. The RSS feed allows me to aggregate the posts onto the main website. Also the Windows Live Writer is supposed to be good. It seems alright thus far. Anyway more later!

Social Network Updates & Suchlike

By David
Aug 23, 2010

I’ve had that Bebo link on the left side here for ages, yet have not been on there for years. Time for an update.

I’ve now put up links to my facebook, linkedin and twitter accounts instead, although I still cannot see the fascination with the latter!

I’ve also dumped the Windows Live link, although this site is still powered from there. One day if I find time, I might change that to something else.

Edinburgh Trip

By David
Dec 20, 2009

Since this is mostly a holiday blog I thought I’d post up my latest holiday. All the long long way to Edinburgh. My sister has recently moved there, Christmas shopping had to be done and Andy Seaton was having a party so I thought, why not?

I took the train down, since the last time I was there I only lasted two hours before having to go to the Police Station and report the bugger who scratched my car!

It was foggy on the Friday and Saturday in Edinburgh, so I got no pictures taken. Did wander through most of the shops though.

Met a bunch of my sister’s uni mates on the Friday night and they had been drinking all day. The Saturday night was Andy Seaton’s party. He has a terrific flat down there, and he seemed determined to enjoy his bottle of Bucky.

Stopped in by Sandy Bells bar for the session on Saturday afternoon/evening. There was about ten musicians in the corner, all playing great tunes. Did the same on Sunday, but there was only a couple. The chap on the harmonicas was pretty good though.

I stayed at a hostel down on the Grassmarket. It was quite fine, but my sleep was interrupted all night by two really loud snorers. On the Sunday I had to be up early to leave, so at around 3:30am I gave up and found a couch to sleep on the common room instead.

On the Sunday morning I took a wander through town, where I encountered the slightly surreal sight of hundreds of Santas running through Princes Street Gardens. There was even a Santa Clause Pipe Band there!

Anyhoo, that’s about all the important stuff about my trip. Been there again already since then to move my sister into her flat. All 200 boxes and bags of stuff and all…

Technical Post #1

By David
Dec 20, 2009

I recoded a wee bit of the site today. Actually that’s a lie, I was meant to post this a month ago but I forgot about it. It now actually has dates on it so you can now see how long it has been since I last updated!

The site is a single aspx page, where the content is taken from a Live Spaces Blog (I think that’s Microsoft’s current marketing name for it anyway). This single page reads in the RSS feed, and then redisplays it in the tidied up form you are reading now.

Now before you point out the obvious, it is a little over engineered and slightly under featured. Spot the wee bit of LINQ in there which I’m starting to come around to now. We use it all the time at work now, and it has indeed cut down the number of foreach loops I seem to do.

This is the code behind:

and this is the page content:

This is all there is to it. I wonder if any decent asp.net programmer will read this and let me know of everything I did wrong? I doubt it!

Shetland Trip

By David
Aug 20, 2009

I finally put pictures up from my trip to Shetland. 4 days from the 7th till the 10th of August. We stayed with Jennifer and George like we did before, who would be my Dad’s second cousins. I had my pipes up, and played for Auntie Maggie, as well as several times in the Boating Club on the Saturday night. That’s twice I’ve been in Shetland now, and twice where I’ve yet to hear any Shetland Fiddlers in Shetland!

I didn’t take quite as many pictures as I did in Canada, only 500 or so, but we were only there the few days, plus mum had her camera too.

Shetland is a lovely place, and full of lovely people. Dad and I are already planning our next trip back. Mum, well she probably would miss the shops!

As before you can find all my images up here: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/david.flett

Home, Sweet Home

By David
Feb 15, 2009

Well I made it home. All the way to Buckie as it happens too. I landed back in Aberdeen on Tuesday and was back to work on Wednesday. No noticeable jet lag neither until last night and this morning, but a 15.5 hour sleep has sorted that out.

I have been going through my photos tonight, all 2621 of them! Plus a few of Fiona’s too. Went through them with Ma & Pa and it took us the better part of three hours!

I have been through them again now, using Picasa to mark my favourites and doing a little cropping and blemish removal on some others. My camera has managed to get a spec of dirt stuck on the sensor, so there was a consistent mark appearing on most my images since about Vancouver. They should all be sorted now and once uploaded to Picasa the albums should contain around 486 pictures. A much more manageable amount.

What of the other 2000? There were a lot of duplicates, a lot where I was playing around with the camera features as it is only a few weeks since I got it, and a few that just did not come out very well at all.

You can find all my images up here: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/david.flett.

Where in the World is David Flett?

By David
Feb 04, 2009

Well, Vancouver as it happens! I came down today on the Greyhound from Whistler. I’m staying at the HI-Downtown Hostel in Vancouver which actually has free Wireless Internet access (unlike the UBC Whistler Lodge where I’ve been for the past week). I had fancied taking in a Hockey game while I’m here, and as it turns out there was one tonight: Vancouver Canucks vs Carolina Hurricanes.

I managed to get a ticket easy enough and the game was great. The Canucks have had a bit of a loosing streak as of late. They started off good, and led after the first period 2-0. However they started to loose it a bit in the second period. Carolina equalised in the third and the mood in the 18,630 crowd wasn’t great but in the last couple of minutes of the game the Canucks scored to regain the lead. The noise in the stadium at that point was incredible, and apparently that is what it was like all the time before this loosing streak. Anyway, they kept their lead and won the game 4-3.

Overall, NHL is a fun experience. There’s lots of stalls and shops before the game, loud crazy looking fans/employees, a wide choice of food, beer (!), cute little kids playing at the interval, a dancing shark who goes around shooting prizes into the crowd… Oh and the game was fun to watch too. No fights today, but there was an amusing bit where a Carolina player was flipped over the side wall into the Canucks player’s bench area. The crowd loved it, as did the Carolina player when he realised where he was!

Canada Trip Picture Post #3

By David
Feb 04, 2009

Well, I’m catching up a bit now, these pictures are only four days old from my birthday on Saturday. I took a break from skiing and Fiona and I did went Zip Trekking and Tubing instead. First though, we had a wander around town where there is a cool shop called Cows:

With a cow outside it no less! Anyway the Zip Trekking was fun:

I’ll have to figure out how to post the Videos from Fiona’s Camera for these. There's more pictures up on Picasa.

Canada Trip Picture Post #2

By David
Feb 04, 2009

First off, from my third day of lessons, my idea of a decent slope for skiing: The Magic Carpet!

But that didn’t last, so we went a bit higher:

And then right to the top. This was the view (or lack thereof) from the Roundhouse at the top of the Whistler gondola:

It was about an hour after this that I had enough of the skiing and gave up for the day. There’s a few more pictures on Picasa, but this is the best one from the Mongolie Grill that night:

How To: Waste $40 on rentals that hurt your feet in Whistler, BC

By David
Feb 03, 2009

Well, Whistler is nearly over. Skiing wise, it's been non existant these last couple of days. The last trek up the mountain must've bruised my feet something terrible. I tried rentals again yesterday, but even on just the slight slope of the magic carpet run I was in sheer agony. Oh well!

I decided to go up the mountain today on a sightseeing ticket. I did not get the chance to do the Peak 2 Peak on Friday so I did it today, twice! Over to Blackcomb, back to Whistler to meet Fiona then back and forth again. I too some pictures, but it was rather cloudy. Knowing my luck it will be clear either tomorrow or Wednesday.

Also, we went back to that Mongolie Grill tonight and again the food was delicious!

Hopefully tomorrow I will be in a hostel with wireless access so I will be able to post some of those pics from the last few days.

How To: Getting a free Snowmobile ride in Whistler, BC

By David
Feb 01, 2009

Well, I've been here four days now. I've had three days of skiing. It's alright, and I can get down some of the hills. I went to the lessons again yesterday and the instructor took us up Whistler. We were going to take the Peak 2 Peak gondola, but it closed down due to high winds. It was extremely windy and snowy up there!

After lunch we started to make it down the hill, however about a third of the way down my legs and my nerves gave up on me. The instructor called me a snowmobile to pick me up and take me down. That was just as terrifying as the steep hills though! That was the end of my lessons though. If I go back it'll be to the lower beginner slopes.

Fiona and I went to the Mongoli Grill in Whistler Village last night. It's a chinese buffet where you pick the raw ingredients and then they stir fry them on a large hot plate while you watch. The food was fantastic, and the guys are fun to watch while they juggle with your ingredients during cooking!

Today, it's my birthday and we took it a bit easier. We went on the Zip Trekking course here in town. It was great zipping across the valley amongst the trees suspended from a metal wire. Definately recommended!

After that we went to the Tube park. Similar to what you get in a water park, you sit on a large rubber hoop and get launched down a hill. Again, fantastic fun, espescially when you go so fast you run off the end of the course and into the padded wall!

Anyway, that's all for now.

Planes, No Trains, and many Automobiles

By David
Jan 29, 2009

Well, I made it to Whistler. The day started out less than well and barely made my Train. I say train, but due to a broken down freight train, it turned into a bus! Grr!

Customs was slow to get through, probably because we were unexpected. Then the bus driver didn't quite know how to get to the station!

So much for my scenic Vancouver Cascades trip!

The bus to Whistler was also rather unscenic due to the snow and low clouds. I met up with Fiona at the bus stop though and we eventually found my hostel.

All that snow though made today's Skiing quite good though. Just the Level 1 beginners today and probably tomorrow. Fiona's not terrible at Skiing though, she sped past us a couple of times on the magic carpet slope. We were just on Blackcomb today but Mike, the Ski instructor, said he'll probably take us on a bit of a tour over both mountains tomorrow.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to properly access the net soon and might have some more pictures to upload by then.

(Not so) Sleepless in Seattle

By David
Jan 27, 2009

Well, I made it to Seattle. I’m just a tad tired as it's now 4am back home and I've been on the go since 9am. Flights were spot on, and it was easy enough to get to the hostel. Strangest thing so far is the underground bus network. It looks like a proper subway system but with busses!

I took few shots from the plane as the views over Greenland and North America are great with all that snow. Then I took a few more shots as we crossed the mountains on the way into Seattle. 216 pictures in total! I've only put the better ones up for just now though.

See all the others from this link. I’ll have a name that mountain contest!

Anyway, an early night for me. I have the Vancouver train to catch at 7:40am. It sounds early but really that's twenty to four in the afternoon!

Obligatory Test Post #1

By David
Jan 25, 2009

Well, I thought I’d try my hand at getting this website to do something useful again.

First of all, this is a new URL, davidflett.co.uk. The old davidjamesflett.co.uk should redirect here in due course.

I now have this hosted on a new provider too, UK based tsohost. It is cheaper, but I get much less storage space and bandwidth. That shouldn’t be a problem though since I never used the full amount before anyway! I will also host the buckiepipeband.co.uk website off of here eventually.

Photos were the main thing which used up the space on my old server. Who needs that now? There are plenty of free dedicated services for that such as Flickr, Google Picassa Web Albums, Windows Live Photos etc… The list goes on.

Here’s a test Image. It is hosted at Picassa. Can you see it? Good, then that’ll do nicely. That is St. Rule’s Tower in St. Andrews by the way.

Also, previously I’ve used PHP and MySQL for various web site related things. I fancied a change, so I’m no using ASP.net since technically I should know it for work. It’s been a while since Codify had an ASP.net specific project so I’m a little rusty. I’ve also dispensed with the need for a database. Again, there are plenty of free blogging services. I’ve settled on Windows Live Spaces for just now. The RSS feed allows me to aggregate the posts onto the main website. Also the Windows Live Writer is supposed to be good. It seems alright thus far.

Anyway more later!