A Simple Life of Luxury

Every cloud has a silver lining I guess.. I have been planning to hide some geocaches in some nearby hills where caches were a little thin on the ground for a few months now. I’d been waiting for the right weather to spend a day up there with Steve hiding the caches and it looked as though this Saturday would be the day. So, I got the maps out and started planning our route of attack. Then I thought I’d checking geocaching.com to see if there were any nearby caches we could do on the way there and would you believe it, there are several caches right where I anted to hide mine!… They weren’t there last time I checked but now they are.

Oh well, it looks as though we’ll have a weekend searching for caches instead! Lets hope the weather holds out.

We had a nice early start yesterday, Impi arrived at 5.30 am to catch the tide and the wind and we were on the water not long after.

The wind was a little fickle to start with but filled in and the water flattened off for some amazing speed runs on our big kit. Despite the wind hitting 30 knots we were hanging onto 6.7 and 7m sails and a speed battle developed. Impi had the upper hand to start with when the wind was lighter. I though I had him beaten for a while with a top speed of 33.1knots and then 33.8 knots but in the end he beat me by a whole knot with a new speed record of 34.8 knots… Time for some faster kit.

I’ve embedded the following video before, but here is Impi windsurfing in the estuary here at Ynyslas

Whilst working in the garden the other day I spotted a geocacher finding my ‘On the Bog’ cache so had a little chat with him. he was an expat now living in America but was back here in Borth visiting family. It was good to see someone finding my cache, which as usual with this cache had him a little worried to start with.

Then, last night I noticed a new cache had been placed in Borth, just 2.7 miles from here. I almost went out to find it there and then, but in the end decided to be patient and wait until this morning. I’ve just been into Borth now, put some washing on in the launderette and then took a stroll up to the new cache. It was a nice easy find and I was still the First to Find, so after a quick FTF dance i filled in the log book and headed home.

Another cache in Borth, the cache density is increasing around here. As per usual I forgot to take a photo though.

We had a nice day yesterday. First we took Morgan swimming, which is something we have neglected to do for ages. He loved it and got on really well. He was quite happy floating around with his armbands on and climbing onto the various floats that were scattered around the pool.He was reluctant to get out even after an hour of spalshing about. Luckily the pool at clarach is pretty warm!

We then headed off towards Nanteos Mansion to find a geocache, again something we haven’t done for a while. The cache was found without too many problems and being a ‘Travel Bug Hotel’ it was full of little travel bugs to discover. Travel Bugs are trackable items that geocachers set off on missions to travel from cache to cache, often with a well defined goal. The Aber-cachers currently have a travel bug race taking place’.

Whilst there I also investigated the nearby nature reserve which is home to the tallest tree in Ceredigion, a Red Sequoia which although pretty tall is (in true Ceredgion fashion) pretty unspectacular!

Next it was off to Llety Parc in Aberystwyth for Sunday lunch before home to do lots of DIY jobs that Anna had been saving up for me!!.. We now have a shower curtain, french doors that stay open and functioning gates on the deck!! What more could you want from a Sunday!

Friday and Saturday were as good as they get here… Friday afternoon saw 30-40 knot winds, glorious sunshine and some big waves. I was out windsurfing from the beach just in front of our house and having a whale of a time. To start with I was on my own and playing it fairly safe in the big conditions, but Larry turned up later and came out kitesurfing. Once Larry was on the water I even went for a couple of forward loops… Quite an occasion as I haven’t tried any for over a year and thought that maybe I’d lost the bottle!

Saturday wasn’t anywhere near as windy, but the sun was still shining and the waves were bigger. There was also a whole load of kitesurfers in the beach as it was the weekend. Another great day, once again as good as it gets anywhere!

Unfortunately I didn’t get any photos though so here is one from a much smaller and less windy day several years ago… Well, at least it as at Borth!

Living out here in the sticks does mean that we don’t necessarily see various members of our family as often as we would otherwise. However, living by the sea does mean that as soon as the sun comes out and the weather warms up they suddenly all want to visit us!!

My parents were here this time last week. My dad was helping sort out a PC for the weather station for me, but with limited success, and of course they were here to see Morgan. The weather didn’t play ball though so didn’t get up to much else. We did have Sunday lunch in the Railway Inn in Borth. We hadn’t been there for years and it was quite nice. The food was good and the surroundings nice. Nothing special, but there was nothing to complain about either.

Anna’s Mum is arriving later this week and staying for quite a while. We’ll have to make sure she doesn’t spoil Morgan too much and hopefully she’ll be pleased to see that some of the plant cuttings she has supplied us with are doing well in the garden.

My brother (Jay) and his mob are then coming up this time next week. I think there is currently 6 of them and a dog!… Thankfully they are all staying in a tent in the back garden… No offence Jay, but there wouldn’t be much room in our bungalow with us, Pat and your lot!.. Jay has been getting into geocaching lately so I’ll try to organise a day off while they are here to get out to some caches with them.

Lets hope the weather stays fine for the next batch of visitors so that we can show off Borth at its best!

It’s not often that anything news-worthy happens around here, but there was an armed police raid in Borth last night.

We knew nothing of it but apparently there were around 20 police officers including dog handlers, polic in full riot gear and even some armed police called to a house in Borth to arrest a man on charge under the telecommunications act…

Exciting stuff!!.. BBC News article here.

Sometime website development can be very frustrating, and as a freelance web developer with few people to turn to when I come across a problem I really get to experience the highs and lows.

Just the other day whilst working on a fairly complex project that I have on at the moment I came across a bug in my coding. The application I’m developing requires members to register and be logged in before they can access the data. This was all working well, the sign up process worked perfectly and the restrictions were in place, but then we noticed that when members tried to go to the 2nd page of a series of results they were logged out of the system and couldn’t access them. If they then logged in again they were free to go wherever they wished within the site as they should be.

It took me over four hours to track down the bug. I rewrote loads of things, checked that the sessions and cookies were getting written properly, tested, re-tested and tested again but all with no joy until I noticed a missing hyphen in a URL. All of that trouble due to a single missing hyphen, just a pesky little - !!!

For those in the know, what was happening was that my scripts were writing sessions and cookies associated with a domain with a hyphen, but the script that generated the links to the various pages were getting the base URL from a database. When entering the URL into the database I had omitted the hyphen.

Now, normally this would have been easy to diagnose as the incorrect URL would have thrown up a ‘domain not found’ or ‘page not found’ error. However, in this case, my client had also registered the hyphen-less domain name and had it pointing to the same server. This meant that the page was being found on the other domain but the user was logged out as the session / cookies had been written for the domain with the hyphen.

I have to admit though it was quite satisfying when I did eventually find the error, fixed it, tested it and all was working! I guess without little problems such as these there wouldn’t be any satisfaction to be gained from such activities.

Well, I have just been out in my lunchbreak to get some potty training supplies incase Morgan decides that this really in the real thing.

I got some ‘big boy’ pants (7 for £1.50 from Bwise), some stickers and a new spiderman as a present (and because Daddy stood on the last on enad broke it!).  I also got some pull-up pants so that we can actually leave the house.  I’ve just worked it out though, the pull-up pants were 20 for £5.29 so the big boy pants are actually cheaper so maybe I should stick to using them and just chuck any that I can ‘t be bothered to wash.

I don’t really think the pull up pants will be much help either as to Morgan they will just feel like a nappy so why should he bother doing anything different.

Morgan is full of surprises!  I was just starting to think it was about time I started thinking about potty training and it looks like Morgan might have done it on his own! 

Last night, another lovely warm evening, Morgan had a little bit of nappy rash so I was just letting him run about without a nappy for a bit.  I just mentioned that if he needed a wee to let me know and I would get his potty out and the next minute he’s asking for a pair of pants to wear and then on his potty doing a wee.  Since then all wees (apart from overnight) have been done in his potty and he has asked to go each time……What a clever little boy.  Of course it could all be a one day wonder but we have a long weekend at home this weekend so I suppose I should persevere and see how we get on.

Wish us good luck, and not too many puddles on the carpet!