So its been over a week that dragondrop has been off line. It feels odd. Writing this blog to ‘nobody’. I have always thought of dragondrop audience as an entity, an amalgamated body who I am related to, who I don’t know at all. Who I’m close friends with, yet I’ve never met. A client, a prospect, a hero an enemy, me, you everybody.

I started blogging in 2002. Back then nobody knew what a blog was now everyone is a Blogger (of sorts – Facebook et al). Whist dragondrop is offline I have thought about using the time for a period of reflection. It’s been quite startling (and heartwarming) some of the concerns from all over the world I have had relating to the vanishing act dragondrop has gone through.

Whilst I think of the dragondrop audience as many things I also think of dragondrop.org itself as an entity. It’s been everywhere with me. I have shared so many thoughts and ideas over the years with it that I genuinely do miss it and am pining for it.

I won’t go into the why of dragondrop.org offline but I will say I am aiming to get it back up towards the end of march. Till then I have a temporary version at http://dragondropdrop.blogspot.com

Having major problems with DragonDrop – going to dump the rough notes of this for now and tidy it up as I go along…

A while ago I’d mused that I’d like to explore Scotland and thanks to some freebies through work it happened. We were very surprised to find ourselves in Glasgow by 10am on the Saturday.

I’d said “right – we’ll set off nice and early – thinking the inevitable delays and procrastinations would render our progress muted, however we got on the road by 06:30!
(I’m putting at least some of that down to my recent ‘Get Things Done’ life hacking adjustments.) After a brief foray into Glasgow where we found the biggest sweetshops I’d ever seen a quick flick through the Lonely Planet I’d picked up at ‘Free Amazon’ (or “The Library” as some people call it) revealed an activity that I’d actually been meaning to have a look at for some time – The Glasgow Science Centre.

The was a fantastic place. They have really designed it specifically with the for not just the enquiring minds, but also their poking fingers counterparts. Several floors of fascinating things to do – they have taken interactive to a new level and perhaps due to its location, the time of day and its comparatively expensive entrance fee, it was quiet. We (and a handful of other people who seemed to be outnumbered by the staff) had the run of the place. Themed areas allowing all of our little ones to have a head full of fascinating inspiring info. Would really recommend it (yes, even from Harrogate – the drive was quite a joy – empty roads all the way!)

Our first abode was up in the Highlands ‘proper’ in a cosy wood lodge on the bank of Loch Oich. From where I typed the first draft of this blog I could glance up over the loch and snow capped mountains beyond. Absolutely stunning scenery.

A spectacular drive down from the highlands early on the Tuesday morning took us to pad #2.

Our second abode was in ‘Big Tree Country’ – Perthshire – just outside Dunkeld. We were staying in a beautiful Hilton Lodge on the banks of the River Tay. Lovely blue sky weather. Distillery visits, walks by the river, Beatrix Potter museum and a Sauna with a window looking out over the valley was the icing on the cake.

The only let down with the curry house in Dunkeld – Darjeeling Creative Cuisine. A cold reception from the surly waiter who asked if we would like to order 3 times in the time it took eirene to go to the toilet as soon as we got there.
No draft beers. Seemingly high priced bottles. Big grr when we asked for a jug of water and were told no. No tap water. I asked him to confirm and he said they didn’t have any taps. Just (£3 PER BOTTLE) water.

Eirene ordered pakora for starter, baji was what was served. Waiter called them pakora!

Anyway – seeing red squirrel and osprey in the wild made up for trivialities like that.

A bunch of photos here::

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I’ve recently finished reading the Horatio Hornblower books by C.S.Forester. 11 books indispersed around all the other books I’ve read over the last 6 months. After a while I realised I was addicted to a finite resource so I spread them amongst other reading. The series following the life of a Royal Naval officer from the late 1700′s to the erly 1800′s – around the time Nepoleon was making a nuisance of himself. Never before has a series of literature captured me like this.

The story as a whole tracked Hornblower from his first appointment as a Midshipman through the ranks of Lieutenant, Commander, Captain, Commodore, Admiral and and Sea Lord. An inspirational character who’s battles with the French, the elements and himself wrapped up toether in an amazing tale of adventure, anthropology, geography and science. Hornblower and The Atropos was my favourite book but each book had its own special parts, each had its own character.

The questions cropped up recently, in a psychological profile course I was on “Which person do you admire, and why” I chose Michael Palin as it happens but Hornblower was a very close second mainly due to his granite constitution and his problem solving logic.

I was really pleased to hear, during an interview on The Chris Evans Breakfast Show that Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope who is The First Sealord and Equerry to The Queen was a big Hornblower fan. I’ll sleep well in my bed knowing that he’s in charge of the Royal Navy. In the same interview Mark went on to describe how he went on to read all the Jack Aubrey novels (by Patrick O’Brian – known most famously for the ‘Master and Commander’ title) which I’ve just started. So far, so good. Quite odd getting my head round this different character in the same ‘shoes’ as Hornblower. Aubrey likes music for a start – Hornblower’s Achilles heel was his utter tone deafness.

I’ll miss Hornblower. He was a great chap to have around over the last 6 months. A candidate for a DragonDrop Adventure T-Shirt if ever the chance should arise.

little man zapped II, originally uploaded by DragonDrop.

Cloud computing sounds partially dull, partially too techy to be interesting but it’s another thing that’s made my life easier.

It’s all about having all the info I need wherever I am. A lot of my personal data is stored in the Google cloud. For instance, all of my contacts are centralised in google mail. Emails as well as phone numbers, addresses, etc. are all stored there. I’ve recently amalgamated all my contacts to the one location – in the Google cloud. I can access these contacts via my phone (which, thanks to it being Android) automatically synchronises with ‘the cloud’ – ie if add a new contact on my phone, it automatically backs up to the cloud and I can access it via any online computer. My diary is synchronised with my Google Diary so if I put something in my outlook calandar at work it automatically gets onto my Google calendar which I can view and edit on any online computer as well as on my phone.

Google Docs is another one. Everything from spreadsheets, word processed documents, presentations, files, PDF’s etc – I can access them all from where ever I am – create, edit, save ahd share them all from the cloud.

For bigger files / zips / folders of content, I’ve been using Microsoft Sky Drive – which does what it says on the tin – provides your own ‘hard drive’ (where you can securely store what ever you need) in the Microsoft cloud.

I’ve been doing it for years to some degree – keeping my photo album online – flickr. Every time I get a good photo I’ll stick it up on flickr. I’ve not got nearly 5000 photos up there that I can search and retrieve.

I do the same thing with my bookmarks. Google chrome has just enabled synchronised Google bookmarking recently and although the phone end of this isn’t quite as neat, I can still access my bookmarks / save a new bookmark where ever I am.

I’ve been doing the same thing with my tasks (using the Remember The Milk - the only paid for app out of all the cloud things I use) tool as mentioned in an earlier blog and recently I’ve discovered snaptic / (and it’s phone ‘notes’ interface) 3 banana – a brilliant tool that’s essentially a private blog where you can mash down thoughts (from your browser / phone ) and they save on a personal blog page ready for you to copy / paste / edit / use later – I’m at this moment sketching this idea out in snaptic with the idea of tidying it up and blogging with it later.

It’s all good and by and large, its all free.