Anyways, what to do with my new found wealth? I had a look around the sports section and decided I’d have a bet on next weekends Six Nations fixtures, just to make it that little bit more interesting. Rather than bet sensibly and try and turn my £48.63 into £61 by backing the favourites, I decided to go for the long shot. 

My Bets –

1. France v Scotland (Backing  Scotland @ 9.5)
2. Wales v England (Backing  England @ 4.41)
3. Italy v Ireland (Backing  Italy @ 7.22)

I put on 3 x doubles at £12.00 each - 

then used the change on the 1 x treble!

Total Backer’s Stake: £48.63

Your total potential win: £5478.55

Obviously the chances are slim, but it’ll have me chewing my nails if the treble is still on by Sunday!

Shift forward a year and pretty much it was still the same, save the odd search through boxes for a stapler, envelopes etc.

I had finally ordered a new PC as my old faithful DELL was making strange grinding noises regularly and trying to run GTalk on it was like communicating with someone en-route to Saturn. 

So at the weekend I picked up my new PC from Happy (who’d ordered all the bits and stuck it all together). I decided to finally gut out /un-box my office/study on Monday to celebrate the arrival of new PC, otherwise it just wouldn’t fit!

Here’s the new set up! It’s very tempting to try some gaming, but I’m trying my best to avoid!

Still need to sort out all the wiring, but it’s a much nicer workspace now. Having the three monitors makes a huge difference, with everything easily viewable in an instant.

Centre screen is whatever I’m currently working on; left screen is both my Gmail accounts (one in Chrome, the other in Firefox) and FTP client is usually there too; right screen is all my other “comms” – Gtalk, Messenger, TweetDeck, RSS Feeder.

The white boxes under the monitors – router on the left, Time Capsule on the right.

My old DELL is now the media server for the house, running iTunes for our AppleTV. More on that another time!

For the geeks, here’s the new PC details -

• Kingston 4GB (2×2GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 HyperX Memory Non-ECC CL5 – Qty: 1
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Socket AM2 2.7GHz Energy Efficient L2 1MB (2×512KB) Retail Boxed Processor – Qty: 1
• Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 Socket AM2 Nvidia MCP55P PCI-E 8 Channel audio ATX Motherboard – Qty: 1
• Samsung HD753LJ 750GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm *32MB Cache* – OEM – Qty: 1
• Antec Sonata III Piano Black Quiet Mid Tower Case – With 500W EarthWatts PSU – Qty: 1
• XFX 9800GT XXX Edition 512MB DDR3 Dual DVI HDTV Out PCI-E Graphics Card – Qty: 2
• Sony DRU-190A 20X DVD±RW DL & DVD-RAM IDE internal – Retail With Multi Bezel & Nero – Qty: 1
• Samsung SM2243BW 22″ TFT Monitor 1680x 8000:1 300cd/m2 5ms Response H/Adjust VGA/DVI Silver 3 Years On-Site Warranty – Qty: 3
• Microsoft Wireless Laser Desktop 7000 – USB – Qty: 1
• Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate w/SP1 – Complete package – 1 PC – DVD – English International – Qty: 1

all from ebuyer.com

January

at some point we’ll release our affiliate incentive based on winning places on AF’s Barbados trip in June.

30th One year anniversary since we put pen to paper with Tripadvisor to sell Holiday Watchdog! Time flies…

31st Chris Brown’s 30th Birthday Party.

February

16th Our sunPress competition ran by Joost closes. Get your entry in now – theme, addon, widget, whatever!

March

7th Think Visibility conference in Leeds. Organised by Dominic Hodgson it’s come from nowhere and looks like one of the not to be missed events of the year!

April

28th-29th A4uexpo Europe in Amsterdam. Really looking forward to this as there’s no pressure this time!

May

Two week family holiday to the brand new Animal Kingdom Villas!

June

2nd The a4uAwards. We’re sponsoring the Affiliate Marketing Blog category again. Will Kieron make it 3 in a row? I won’t be defending my Affiliate Manager title from last year as it’s not a listed category this year!

24th British and Irish Lions in South Africa to see the 2nd and 3rd Test! Going with livingwiththelions.co.uk

July

7th Back home from SA.

August

7th Sister #1 getting married in Italy.

September

Nada. (ok, one thing but it’s secret atm).

October

13th-14th A4uexpo London.

November

9th-12th World Travel Market. Will make an effort to go this year.

December

Back to Florida to see Disney at Christmas (provisional).

Sometime in 2009

There should also be three new sites released this year from the sunshine family, no idea when exactly but they are on the list.

If there are any events missing that I should be attending, let me know!

I experimented with various positions for the wireless router, but it just didn’t seem to cover all three points very well. I had a look at wireless extenders but nothing seemed to guarantee success. Finally I found these little beauties which proved to be the answer -

the ZyXEL PLA-401 Twin Pack PowerLine HomePlug AV 200Mbps Ethernet Adapters.

Basically, you plug a patch cable from your router into one of the adapters and plug it into a nearby power socket. Then you plug another adapter into a power socket near your device that isn’t within reach of your wi-fi and use a patch cable to complete the Ethernet network. It really was plug and play, nothing else required. Your electrical circuits throughout your house now become a hard wired network! You can have up to 16 adapters around your home.

Most of the reviews on Amazon, e-buyer and Dabs all do recommend buying separate patch cables as the ones supplied tend not to be any good!

Why am I blogging about them? Well it took me months to accidentally stumble onto them, even though they aren’t particularly new, then when I showed them to Happy he said, “Oh yea, I’ve got something similar”; so my months of poor wi-fi could have been sorted a while back with the right knowledge!

The good lady wife has her birthday and Xmas all in the same week, which makes buying pressies a bit like cramming for exams. She does her best to drop subtle hints (which I usually miss), but this year’s want is a cracker!

I remind you Lorna is celebrating her 35th birthday next week, but this is her chosen gift! Biscuit the Dog, a FurReal robotic-dog-thing. For a full guide to what Biscuit can do, have a look at John Lewis’ “Toy Demonstrator” video.

I’m sure she’ll love it, but it shows the power of advertising and that we watch way too much Playhouse Disney and Nickelodeon.

P.S. Anyone who actually knows Lorna, keep this to yourself! She doesn’t know she’s definitely getting it yet

Our hotel was actually in Indiana, with Valhalla an hour and 20 minutes bus ride each way, so other than having a lie in on Sunday, we were up at 5am most days and returned to our hotel around 9pm most nights. Add walking several miles a day in 86 degree heat it’s the most tiring holiday I’ve ever had!

The highlight for me was the Saturday afternoon session, where Europe gained some momentum and 3 of the games finished on the 18th. I was standing about 10 yards away from the pin and the atmosphere was electric.

Now I love the USA. We holiday there every year and it’s people generally couldn’t be any nicer. But Oh My God if you’re ever supporting the away team prepare yourself. “Partisan” doesn’t begin to describe the crowd, there were a few times where you would start to feel very uncomfortable cheering on Europe within the mob. Despite golf etiquette being a fundamental part of appreciating the game, it didn’t stop the locals cheering every time something went wrong for one of the “Euros” as they deemed to call us.

Another highlight was Sunday on the 1st tee. A hundred or so “Euro” fans had squeezed into one of the stands beside the tee and gave the home support a lesson in singing. The standard response to any attempt by us aliens to get chanting was to be drowned out by “USA, USA, USA” ad nauseum. Better prepared by this time, the home fans were treated to a handful of songs from the Europeans in the stand. You’ll find a good description of the events here.

Also worth sharing, course radios were sold with 2 channels, one which gave the audio to the giant screens piping NBC and the other was BBC’s own Five Live coverage, which seemed very popular even with the home support. This could also have been something to do with the fact that NBC seemed to break for adverts every 4 minutes.

I’m greatly looking forward to Wales in 2010, if only for the opportunity to be as smug to the visiting fans when Europe reclaim the cup!

Top Quotes heard around the course from our American cousins -

“F**king Spaniard, get back to Britain”

“Communists!”

D#1: Mummy, come here, there’s a spider!

W#1: Where is it?

D#1: On it’s web-site!

Heh!

I am a little worried however Doug’s blog may have been hacked, and someone with a political agenda and proper spelling and grammer appears to have taken over!

So while I may have been lazy with my recent blogging, at least I’m still writing them myself!

Chris calling Doug out.

Aswell as being a rather nifty gadget for the home, it also has an Open Interface so you can do all sorts of cool and geeky things to it. It’s not all that new, but loads of hacks and apps linked from here. There’s also a version called Scooba that mops and hoovers!

Location: South Lanarkshire, Scotland

Occupation: Affiliate Manager for sunshine.co.uk

Why This Blog?: Sometimes I have thoughts, opinions and general ramblings that aren’t really suitable for the company blog.

Why pfft?: Mostly because meh wasn’t available.

Experience: This used to be me, I built this with him and then we did this with it, and now I mostly do this.

That’s a quick summation of why I have a new blog, please feel free to subscribe to my feed and you’ll see a regular post every couple of months!

Now…a theme.