Rattie Anniversary

A year ago yesterday these guys came into my life!

They certainly are a lot bigger then they were - but still just as cute - pictures of them a year ago are under the cut

A Busy Week

It’s been a rather busy week for me, but very much in a good way! (Though not really that interesting to a general reader – sorry!)

On Thursday I had an interview for a new job. It’s officially an admin role but in reality is much more as the size of the company means everyone mucks in! Fingers are very much crossed! In the afternoon I went and had my eyebrows waxed for the first time. I’m amazed how much less painful it is then plucking. I thought it was going to be much worse then it was!

Other then that I’ve been pretty social this weekend with varying degrees of success, was rather unimpressed by the Globe’s function room (or indeed their suspiciously transparent beer), though the band were good. And today was the Saturday Munch which was held in infinitely nicer surroundings at the City Gate.

Photopost: Riverside Ride

On Wednesday I decided to go for a bike ride. I caught the train to Exmouth and then rode along the new Exe Estuary Trail to Lympstone. A fairly short but scenic ride along the shore.



A few more pictures under the cut

Lovely Weather for it!

Took a trip to the parents yesterday evening, and stopped by the beach to try and get a couple of shots of the waves. I was quite impressed with how this set came out given the low light levels and spray!

Progress on Europe - Up to Jan 2011

create your personalized map of europe

So far I'm not going to improve on that this year as I'm booked to go to France in March and possibly Berlin later in the year. I do want to see more of France, Belgium and the Netherlands as I've only really transited though them on the way to other places. I don't think traffic jams on the Antwerp and Eindhoven ring roads convey the cultures of their respective countries. Mind you neither did the mass marked package holiday resorts of Spain and Greece with their 'English Bars" if I'm honest.

Initial Thoughts of TripIt

I've been playing with TripIt a bit recently and thought I'd share my thoughts so far.

The idea behind the program is that you forward your confirmation emails to them, and it automatically generates an itinerary for you, which you can access via mobile apps or export to Outlook or Google Calendar. They have a free mode and a premium. Premium adds more features like flight tracking and frequent flier management. But as I'm not flying (instead taking Eurostar) and don't fly enough for frequent flier programmes, I'm just using the free features.

So the much vaunted importation feature. I tried sending it Booking.com, Eurostar and First Great Western confirmations to the designated address and it did a reasonable job of parsing the hotel, but struggled with the trains. My Eurostar trip is in two parts - Exeter to London and London to Lille, it recognised there was a change of train in London, but couldn't parse it very well. I had to manually enter the departure time of the second train from London in both directions and correct the seat reservation details, which were listed under the wrong train. From the Great Western confirmation, it managed to work out the train times OK, but the trains were all duplicated. TripIt does provide a link to provide feedback about the accuracy of the imports.

The next problem I noticed was just after I imported to the calendar, it had got the time zones confused and assumed the whole journey was under Central European Time (CET) rather then GMT (Greenwich Mean Time). An annoyance as you have an enormous list of cities to scroll through when manually setting the time zone. It is more of a problem with the calendar exports, as they allow for the zone and therefore show all the wrong times.

I do like the way that it automatically adds a map showing your hotel, and shows the average weather for the duration of your trip. Hopefully this will update to actual weather as it gets closer to departure.It also stores all your booking references and allows space for other relevant info to be manually added.

The Android application is basic, providing access to the itinerary but has already proved itself useful when I forgot my confirmation codes when collecting my tickets from the machine at the station. Quick referral to the app, and I was good to go.

So my thoughts so far are generally good, but they do need to work more on the import of data. All the sites I used are listed as being fully supported, but I am thinking that it will work better on point to point flights then on a rail journey with multiple connections.

I'll come back to TripIt when I've had more chance to use it to its full potential.

Travel Style..

One thing I do hate about traveling abroad is passport control.

You see I'd rather travel like this.



But instead I'm going to have to work it so that I look like boi me rather then girl me. Or rather something like the awful and unflattering photo in my passport. Though thankfully Eurostar doesn't have the full security rigmarole of flying

Then again, how about trying for glamorous boi, black shirt, tie, trilby with subtle eyeliner

Though domestic travel is another matter completely, think I might have to over do it next time!

Still finding this picture was a good start to an otherwise dead early shift (the customers are having a lie in). It has given me an idea to aim for!

xoxo

Photopost: Meldon

Last Friday C and I took a photo trip up to Meldon Reservior on Dartmoor. The drive out was 'interesting', with torrential rain, but by the time we arrived the rain had stopped. Unfortunatly we didn't stay too long as with the bitterly wind it wasn't long until we couldn't feel our ears! It also looked like the next wave of rain was approaching and not wanting to get a soaking we beat a hasty retreat.

Hello!

Hello!

I thought I'd try and start a new public blog for myself but first a little and copy/pasted introduction.

I'm 27 and from Devon in the UK, and I sort of have two merging sides, boi and girl.

I'm pretty Gothy as you can probably tell, thinking back it was probably my destiny after I saw a Goth lady on the Underground back when I was seven. I just thought “Wow, I want to be like her!”, but it took me a fair while to find my musical niche. After I passed my driving test I started going to gigs a lot.

Fashion is another interest of mine, I always have developed my own style and my look has evolved over the years. It started out much more fetishy, but has eventually settled on a glamourous Gothic look. I’m very much a boot whore (think Imelda Marcos’ collection). I’ve always been quite feminine, so it wasn’t long before I was incorporating skirts and heels into my outfits and things just developed from there.

I now realise I’m towards the middle of the gender spectrum, not 100% boi or girl. This is a rather interesting place to be, though it can be confusing when you are ambivalent about wanting breasts and all the rest. I’m not closeted and am pretty open about my girl side, I would like to be full time fabulous though!

I’m also a total geek, very much into films and games as well as general techieness. A good example of this being New Years Eve 2009 where I cosplayed as Jesse from Pokémon’s Team Rocket.

I’ve also discovered the joys of rats. I currently own two beautiful dumbo ratties called Frankie and Rocky. They have certainly enriched my life and I love them dearly!

I'll be posting about a mix of things on here, some fashion, some geekery, some travellogs and some introspection.

So welcome and thank you for reading!

xoxo