Jaclyn's Spectacular Birthday Night Out Extraordinare and Weekend of Real Life!

Well... the weekend of real life kinda ended on Sunday morning.... but yeah.

It was Jax' 23'rd birthday on Friday - so the celebratory night out was required...

I got a gorgeous designer bracelet sent as a gift from the lovely Hayley Menzies (http://www.hayleymenzies.com)... I promised to blog and show a picture... so ta da!!

So, we started off in Cape and decided we couldn't be bothered with the live band, so headed down to the Kilted Kangaroo... (previously Outback) and basically set up a wee corner of the pub for ourselves and our hijinx. Then off to Dusk nightclub... Tee-he!

There's tons of photos on my flickr account, but really, I'll upgrade to put even more on soon. Here is a small selection of the photos...

Me and Kai

Me and Martin... yes, he likes to lick

Jaclyn, Martin, Mike, Me

Stefan, Jax, Martin (in a state of euphoria apparently) and Moi

Me and Alisdair - he's got some pout!

YMCA fail

I had a wicked time and as designated driver - I had no hangover to get over! Huzzah! Although catching up on sleep - that's another thing completely. It was really nice to see everyone and have a great night out with some brilliant friends.

So... after a fairly short sleep - (6 hours) I headed out to the east coast to Dunbar to visit my big bro (who was on holiday with the wife and kids) and my aunty Linda that lives out there. I took my mum out there and had a lovely road-trip with the nice weather and Katie and dog. Linda's home was idylic... when I retire - I totally want to live somewhere like that!

Saturday Night consisted of Captain America with Kai and Steve! Nothing like comic based American patriotism to cheer up a Saturday night... the patriotic likes of which hasn't been seen since the last series of 24. I loved it. Can't wait for the Avengers film (yes, I waited till the end of the credits to see the trailer)

So once I got home, I focussed on sorting the photos from Friday (just getting rid of red eye and resizing) but today - it's a chill out day - possibly with a bit of Stumbleupon and google+ness and lots of old Smallville.

Rampage Networking and the Worlds Longest Hangout

After a full afternoon of taking apart my network in the house (yes, it's big because we have the business machines connected as well as all the technology around the house) I finally fixed the issue of non-connectivity in the kenkai office. Not great for a web-based company to lose connection.

Annoyingly, if I'd tried restarting the lan hub at my feet, I think I would have had it sorted a whole lot quicker. *sigh* Oh well, doing tech support for myself isn't nearly as easy as it is for my clients... On the up side, cables are tidy and plugs are now clearly marked for the next time I need to rampage through the house fixing things :)

The weather yesterday was back to Scottish standard... rain, with a side portion of rain. The ducks on the canal would have had a blast... I'm sure.

Anyway - I've been hanging out on the google+ hangouts. I have my regular buddies that pop on and introduce me to new people around the world (who apparently all love the Scottish accent I have) so yesterday, I ended up on the world's longest hangout... so far till now, it's on its 9th day. You can check out the live stream on http://hangoutongplus.com

Last night I took a turn at being hostess with the mostest... leading conversation towards films, books, music and general chit chat about cultures around the world.

I fact - we even had some musical entertainment - +Jared Mecham and his ukulele and +Christopher Bill... both of which thoroughly entertained us with their party tricks on the instruments. I sang a couple traditional Scottish songs, but next time I might go down the musical route... or I'll get them to pick out a genre of the songs I can sing.

Here's a piccy :) And yes, pip-boy enjoyed the performance too!

Right, I'd better go catch up on some of that work I missed out on yesterday afternoon... tomorrow, if I have some good photos of Jacq's birthday night out tonight, I'll post them up ^_^

Tíoraidh an-drásta! (bye for now!)

Me... and the Microsoft Red Chilli Plant

Well, what's a Microsoft Red Chilli Plant, I hear you ask....

To explain, I need to go a bit further back than the start of the plant story... in the small business we have, we use the Microsoft Action Pack. A great tool for small businesses to be able to essentially rent Microsoft products. Worth its weight in gold really.

Occasionally they send us adverts to new or improved products.

At one point, they sent us a grand looking package... inside was a pebble. Kai decided to cut the microsoft logo from the letter they sent and blue-tac'd it to the stone.

From then on, it has been our pet mascot rock, aptly named Microsoft Stone.

We've had quite a few interesting things sent to us by Microsoft... the most interesting seems to be the Red Chilli Plant seeds (pre-potted in a plant-tube) to promote their product Microsoft Umbraco CMS.

It's taken an age for the little guy to sprout... probably since the office isn't the best place for it to grow... but he's finally got leaves! Huzzah! I'll repot him in a few weeks time. I have no idea why the plant's a he... but he just is. I've still not named him though... Suggestions in the comments!

But I am still looking forward to the next promotional gift we get from Microsoft. They do tend to send something that either gives us a giggle, or at least sparks a little discussion.

Google+

So.... Google+... If you haven't heard about it by now, Google's new social networking section - you've probably been under a rock.

But I am one of the lucky ones that managed to get a Google+ invite a few days ago - so I thought I'd let you guys have a little look around my little section of Google+.

That shiny +Dolidh (or whatever your username is) appearing on the top bar of Google when you're logged in is pretty unobtrusive to the searching of Google.

Clicking on the +Dolidh link sends you off to your own Stream.

Circles allow you to add friends into groups and share specific messages to specific circles. The other nifty thing about circles are that people can't tell what circle you've put them in, so you can share more personal stuff in friends and family circles - yet leaving aquaintances out of the loop... improving your security and general well being. I love.

To add someone to a circle, hit the circles button at the top, search for the Name or Email address of the friend you want to put somewhere, then drag and drop them into the circle of your choice. Easy peasy. You can even create new circles - like the one I did with my twitter friends :

The Stream lets you see everyone in all of your circles posts - whether it be video's, images, text (kinda like status in facebook) and notification of live or who's been using hangouts.

Hangouts are basically video-call chat rooms. Of which I'm loving right now. You can add either specific people to your hangout, make it just a couple of circles or make it public so that anyone that isn't in any of your circles can nip into your hangout.

I'll get a picture up for you as soon as I get another hangout up and running ^_^

This is super easy to share youtube clips, links and pictures and easy to keep real life and work seperate. But for the moment, good luck on getting an invite - as google are only sparingly giving them out.

So if you're on google+ add me from https://plus.google.com/?tab=XX#103038287804535196503/posts

Happy Hair day!

So, after being awake for a rediculous amount of time last night researching Google Merchant stuff (for those that aren't in the know... it's the Shopping Section that Google does)

Anyway, today was my haircut day! Huzzah! To fringe or not to fringe was my question of the day.... photo later on - but yes... I fringed up :)

So last night I completely got so wrapped up in work that I never got the chance to edit the new JustBeautifully vlog on a new product range they're about to launch on the site called IdHair (a group of very yummy smelling hair waxes). So the footage is still on the camera, waiting patiently for me to ramble on about the waxes, post styling Kai's hair.

Oh, since running off to meet up with friends in the last paragraph - the very lovely Steve will be helping me to top-off my hair-styling-wax vlog. Apparently this stuff is amazing - and Steve hair doesn't just defy gravity, it actively enforces it - we'll see who the winner is.

I had a lovely night at Aimee and Chris's... although Everly was already asleep by the time we got over there... I was super naughty and had some ice-cream... totally against my intolerances... but meh... I'm not fussed about being mega spotty right now anyway.

Other than that, not much going on today - just been playing with the quite rightly-awesome Google Plus. If you're on, please join me on https://plus.google.com/103038287804535196503

I'm pretty hyped up and in uber geek mode having had just an invite to see what Google Plus is all about. I tried to tell two of my non-techie friends out (at the same time) and they looked at me blankly, telling me how I managed to geek-up their day. It's true that I don't tend to geek-out unless there's something I really really really want, but never expect to get - but this time, I managed to score an invite pretty quick and was up and running by the end of breakfast.

So... Google + or Google Plus as other people refer to it - what's that all about?

Basically, it's a section of google that stores information about you that you want to share.

Elaborating, you can store photos, pictures, statuses and the new format of groups - in the plus, referred to as Circles.

You open up into a Stream of what the people in your circles have been up to quite similarly to Facebook, only for the moment without the annoying Farmville stuff (yes, I'm aware - hypocrite - I play farmville - but with minimal wall crap)

Plus seems not completely polished yet. And they are still restricting the invites - but I can see it going somewhere - even if it's just somewhere new for http://phillyd.tv to pimp out his new youtube vids.

Right, I'm off to sleep before I collapse... although tomorrow, I hope to have at least an hour and a half playing Spore... without anyone objecing.

Tíoraidh xx