chris'sBlog

Paignton – Day 5

chris_dixon — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 20:49:35 +0000

In a genius plan, Mr Dixon decided to integrate the transportation to our day 5 activity into the holiday proper. By parking in some side street and then walking to Paignton harbour we were able to save £7 and integrate an exciting boat ride into the schedule. Exciting it certainly was! The wind was very present and the sea state could easily be described as choppy. It was touch and go which way the kids would take 20mis of heaving about on the high seas and indeed Matthew had to transfer to Daddy’s knee for some reassurance, however the ride was great and we arrived at Torquay ready to disembark for our days entertainment, which as luck would have it was about 20 yards from our birthing point.
Our location for the day was to be the Torquay sea zoo. Now I’m sometimes (always) a bit sceptical of the “sea zoo” as I think it’s a chance to turn an easy profit at the expense our good selves. An example would be the sea life centres which are often overpriced and cramped, so it was with some trepidation that I entered the sea zoo. The first good sign was that it was twinned with Paignton Zoo, which as I recalled from other visits was excellent, and so it proved to be.
You start at the top of the zoo in an open flying area with cliff birds, penguins, puffins, seals and lots of other things. This gave you a very spacious feel and there were extremely regular information talks etc. etc. Another good thing was that there were kids activities at almost every point. Water, sand, colouring, play blocks, quizzes, comics etc. and this made it very easy to look after the kids. After the main open areas there is then a more indoor bit with fish, rays, octopus, underneath views of the seals and penguins and undersea walks. Now, the only thing that you get in a sea life centre are the sharks, but I’d rather have this version which was really well done. There was also a lovely café.
After a quick waltz round the harbour it was back on the only slightly calmer ferry to the caravan site, and another successful family day was had. Can this continue…

Paignton – Day 4

chris_dixon — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 20:48:59 +0000

So, back to the tourist trail we go. We turned over the decision as to our destination to the boys which was dangerous, but they decided on the Babbacombe model village. Now, model villages can sometimes be a bit poorly kept and frankly rubbish, but no so here. The guide outside said to leave at least 2 hours for your visit and with kids I was thinking this could be cut to about 20 minutes. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was a massive array of very interesting model themed bits. All were kept very well. Things that I can remember as I write were:
• Airport
• Football Stadium
• 3 model railways
• Backstage tour
• Wind farm
• Birds of prey display
• Town centre with trams
You could also come back at night and see the village lit up, although this is not a good idea with two small kids, so we skipped that.
After this fantastic success, we went to Oddicombe beach which rather handily was located at the end of a cliff railway, which was an additional unexpected attraction. So, add in some more swimming, a chicken Korma, more bingo (no wins, real or imagined this time), you’ve got Day 4 wrapped.

Paignton – Day 3

chris_dixon — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 20:48:12 +0000

Being a bank holiday Monday we made the (in hindsight) extremely sensible decision to give the major attractions a miss. This rationale was based on the fact that everyone else would be descending on them and that, staying local to our caravan, we would miss out on all the hassle, and so it proved to be.
Swimming is a must for holidays it seems, but normally ruined by the British weather. Not so here in the English Riviera where it’s nice and sunny, although I didn’t brave the outside pool (Emma, James and Matthew did, and came out looking a little cold. However, the holiday park also has an indoor swimming pool which was thankfully a lot warmer.
For lunch we decided to supplement our sandwiches with some chips and then decided on a walk to the local beach. Goodrington sands is a delightful beach, made only the better for the railway (See Day 2) which runs just at the top of the beach and was in full bank holiday dual engine flow. We had some more boogie boarding (well) and a great deal of fun being sandcastles.
Back at the caravan we dined out on McDonalds and then almost won £53 in the family bingo, but missed out when Emma didn’t realise that we had a line. Ah well… it’s only money.

Paignton – Day2

Administrator — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:24:14 +0000

Today we thought that the weather might not be 100% bright sunshine and warmth, and so it turned out to be. We had however, considered this in the planning and were going for a day out on the Dartmouth Steam Railway. Arriving at Paignton to find the train just leaving we could have been a bit miffed, but instead we took a very cold 45min open top bus ride. The kids enjoyed it for about the first 10 minutes and then after that we were entertaining them to stop them realising that they were cold. However, that diversion out of the way we were back at the station and ready for our trip.

The railway is a 7 mile run though some fantastic scenery, featuring some massive Brunelian viaducts and views over the river Dart. It’s well worth a ride, and even though it’s not the longest railway journey ever it’s certainly very beautiful.

At Dartmouth (I guess named as it’s the mouth of the Dart) we crossed the ferry and alighted at the harbour. There were a massive amount of boats of all shapes and sizes to watch although Dartmouth seemed to be a very funny place. A mixture of bars, cafés and shops all mangled together with a park, fountains and lots of other things. We were a bit lost and didn’t really know what to do and my suggestion of crabbing on the harbour wall did not go down well due to the impending health and safety issues this would cause…. However after an amount of tenseness we recovered and found a lovely shop which served cream teas and cakes, and thus after everyone was filled and the wallet emptied again we were ready to head back.

Back at Paignton we decided to buy James and boogie board that he had been wanting and let him have a go. I’m very concerned about swimming related activities, especially where the sea is involved, however Emma was able to supervise the initial attempts at boogie boarding (which seemed only to involve running in and out of the water) which hopefully might lead to some higher skill levels in the future.

After a visit to Sammy the Sea horse’s “story time” it was time to call it a night.

Paignton – Day1

Administrator — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:23:24 +0000

Navigation should be so much easier and ease the tension between husband and wife as they travel. However, even though armed with Google maps, a GPS, and some instructions from the holiday park we still fell out a little in the closing few miles, but hey ho, that’s all part of holidays. We set off at 5:20am as it was a bank holiday and the traffic could get nasty, and by gum it makes a difference. Our destination was the Hoburne holiday park at Paignton, Dorset. It took about 4.5 hours to do the journey and we arrived, collected our keys and settled down. The park itself is really nice. Outdoor and indoor pool, entertainment, adventure play, shows etc. etc.

Previous experience was in Scarborough in winter, so I was hoping that this one was going to be a little bit warmer.

Anyway, we spent an afternoon on the beach at Paignton whilst we waited for the caravan to be ready and it was really quite nice. There is something very British about the pier, donkey rides, ice cream shops, bingo etc. Indeed, we enjoyed most of them, with the kids getting excited about the prospect of future boogie board riding.

Whilst the kids got settled, I spent far too much in Sainsbury’s (where it is actually quite tricky to buy cheap things) and forgot a whole load of essential things, as well as spilling a jar of korma sauce at the checkout (I got another one free) and on my return found that already they had been swimming in the outside and inside pools.

In the evening we went to the welcome show and family bingo, which was interesting with James getting scared of the pirate, but Matthew vowing to return every day.

Garden Railway

Administrator — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 23:52:05 +0000

Some of you may know that I intend to build a garden railway, and also write about the experience. Perhaps one day a proper web site will exist, but until then I’ve create a page on the blog for it. You can read all about it, when I get round to updating it at: http://www.chrisdixon.net/?page_id=444 which as my mate Paul would say is a good numbered page.

JokiuSpot – Enabling this post from the No. 4 bus

Administrator — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:56:18 +0000

Ain’t technology brilliant.

Here I am sitting by the market in lancaster and I’m able to write a full, non mobile phone constrained blog post. OK, I know that you could achieve this with a 3G dongle quite succesfully, but what if you just have your Nokia E71 smartphone and you can’t be messed with all the setup to get it connected via bluetooth and all that jazz?

Well, JokiuSpot is a nifty utility for Nokia (and other) smartphones that sits inbetween your 3G connection (in this case Orange) and then turns your phone into a WiFi point. Yes, that’s right, a propper WiFi point that you can just connect to wirelessly with your PC / Mac whatever. The only downside seems to be that the phone turns red hot and that the battery starts draining as if you’d plugged a 3 bar electric fire into it, however job done.

The free version does this, and the premium (reasonable price) adds support for full encryption and VPN!

Happy days.

Zemanta – Enhancing this post.

chris_dixon — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 07:05:48 +0000

Via @mikepeat I came across this plugin called Zemanta. It sits alongside blogging tools (both online and hosted) and analyses your blog post, including spelling mistakes and the suggests other links and images that might be appropriate. If you do like the things that it finds, then you can just drag them straight into your post, which is pretty useful.

: Image via CrunchBase

As an example it’s currently provided the image that you can see on the RHS of this page, and it’s also added all the hyperlinks that show up in this post, which is pretty good, and the links at the bottom. At first glance it seems really easy to use, and as you type more it refines it’s suggestions and offers you new content. So, worth a try if you’re still blogging like the old days.

Blogging is fun again with Zemanta and Apture! (72suited.com)
Add Content To Your WordPress Blog with Zemanta (wpjedi.com)

Taylor Swift and the old man

Administrator — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:29:19 +0000

Last night I attended a gig, Taylor Swift at the MEN.
Now, I had a great time but boy did I feel a bit old.

Taylor Swift (2007 pic)

The good bit’s
I don’t really know why I like Taylor Swift. Perhaps subconciously it’s because she’s a nice looking 19 year old, but I’m not sure that is the reason. I do like the music. I’ve always kinda liked contry style music and she mixes this with some really catchy type pop stuff. Songs like “Our Song” and “Love story” are difficult not to like.
The concert was great, she’s not just a singer, but can play acoustic guitar pretty well and did so with some acoustic bits in the set. She got around the audience including one bit on a stage just in front of where we were sitting. The sound was good and well mixed and she did a really good 2 hours worth of material. There were ten costume changes and she certainly looked hot in all of them.

Taylor 2009 Fearless

Here’s a pic from the 2009 tour, to give you a flavour of the video used in the show, although at the MEN the centre screen was a 16:9 format, which was much more pleasing. There were a silly number of guitars (5 at one point) as well as a violin and some other random instruments at some point. For a mostly four piece style band lineup they made quite a full sound.

How I knew I was out of place

Most of the people at the concert, including those on our row (I took the wife, otherwise this would have been even worse) were teenage girls and were screaming their lungs off

The support act was a chap called Justin Bieber who appeared to be about 12 years old (although I suspect he might have been a bit older, but not much). This caused the girls to go mad and scream at an ear splitting volume which hurt my ears.

I was interested in the tech, and that’s sad. They had really nice back projection, projection onto the stage elements and an amazing waterfall effect at the end which was kind of the opposite of inkjet printing but with water drops. It spelled out words from the song whilst she stood under it getting wet… Cool (although not the 360deg version in the video).

I was anoyed by the girls shouting “we love you” every few seconds (well, every few minutes), when there was zero chance that anyone apart from the few rows around them could hear.

Of course, most of this starts to mark me out as a grumpy old man. However, I’m really glad that I went.. and for those who don’t mind a bit of no nonsence feel good music, the kind of people who take busted for what they really are and don’t get cross, then Taylor Swift might just be worth checking out.

What’s school like for a 5 year old?

chris_dixon — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:12:38 +0000

So, recently we marked a milestone in Mr and Mrs Dixons parenting. That being James’s first day at school. So what’s to be expected if you’re a parent and sending your child to build their future at your local primary school.

James prepares for first school day

Firstly, you should be quite prepared for a very annoying lot of messing around whilst the child “settles in”. Now in my day you dropped your little bundle of fun off at school, there were sometimes a few tears and then that was it untill you left full time eduction, possibly at university! However, nowadays things are not quite a simple. After two settling in sessions we then had four weeks (yes, you heard me right) of alternating mornings and afternoons. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a good idea to ease things for the children so that they settle in well. Perhaps for a few days or a week, but not four weeks! There are a couple of things that I think are wrong with this:
1) It’s a nightmare to find childcare for all the bits where they are not at school.
2) After four weeks of getting used to 15 children and a series of half days they are then hit with not only full days but twice as many children as there were previously.
This cannot make sense?
Secondly, you should prepare for the fact that your child may not actually tell you anything about school. Now I don’t know how this works, perhaps something about independance, but questions go something like “what did you do at school?”… “nothing” and various varients on a theme. This continued until a non family member asked the same question whereby a load more details were revealed. Things have improved somewhat, but I still wouldn’t say that the lines of communication were fully open.
Finally, it’s harder than it was when I was at school. Well, I can’t actually remember how hard it was, but homework and reading practice is tough. Think for a second how you actually go about teaching people to read, it’s very tricky. We’re currently doing phonics, which means capital letters are out and letter sounds are in.

Now the good thing is that there are useful things such as letters sent home from the school to actually tell you what your children are learning and lots of resources in the form of games and library books etc.
So, if you’re sending a little one off to school. good luck.