There has been all sorts of activity in the aviary over the last week or so, particularly with the females. They have been in and out of the boxes that are in the enclosed part and acting very strangely. It is clearly that time of year.By time of year I of course mean that it is getting towards the breeding season for budgies and we are hoping that there will be some baby budgies in the not to distant future. Daphne in particular has been very different and keeps going in and out of several nesting boxes, perhaps looking for the right one for her. Time will tell!

Remember when you were a kid and you used to go around to the corner for them Penny sweets that were half a penny and a penny. Well one of the favourites amongst them were the teddy bear little gummy sweets. Because of them Haribo was born.

Now we have all had Haribo before I am sure. You get the large bags and even boxes in the supermarkets and especially at the cash and carry places. We often end up sampling them at work in the office as they are used for rewards with the children. But this week we have all become addicted to a new type of Haribo. A Haribo Fizz.

I have had them before. They are the ones with the fizzy, sugary coating on the outside and then have a real zing with them when you eat them. They are one of those funny foods really. When you first put them in your mouth you have this urge to spit it out straight away, and then almost immediately you get this sense of satisfaction when the fizz kicks in. The best ones are the ones that make you wink uncontrollably, or as my family would call them ‘a bit seem lucky’. Why I will never know but when someone says that we all know exactly what they mean.

If you haven’t tried them I would strongly urge you not to as one will lead to two, which will lead to half a pack which will then lead to a full packets and possibly one of those great big bucket fulls of the things. This surely cannot be good for you. We need help!

Last night I went to bed early to watch some TV.  In fact I had recorded a few film on the Sky+ box, one of then being Die Hard with a Vengence.  During the film Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson are set a series of tasks in order to prevent a bomb going off.  One of them included weighing out a certain amount of water.  It got me thinking so much that I missed the second half of the film trying to work it out!

So here it is.  You have a bottle which holds 3 litres and a bottle that holds 5 litres.  You have a pond (in the middle of a park in New York) holding lots of water.  What you have to do is make it so that there is 4 litres of water in one of the bottles and then place the bottle onto a scale which will defuse a bomb.  You have to be accurate and so filling then to a quarter or third full will just not do!

See if you can work it out.  It took me about 35 minutes!  I think there is more than one solution, and no cheating looking it up on the internet.  Answer to follow soon.

With it being the holiday weekend and me being pretty boring and staying in all day working on the computer (yes more websites I know), I decided that it was about time that George and Jeremy were let out around the garden. I took some photographs of them.

We have quite a large garden. So you would think that 2 rabbits that are kept in the aviary (about the size of the downstairs of a house if we scale it up to human terms) would want to take a stroll and run around the garden until their hearts are content. You would be wrong. After a quick run around all they wanted to do was site. George in his favourite spot under the wheel barrow and Jeremy behind the aviary in a gap no wider than the width of my foot.

Still I managed to get some photographs of the boys out in the garden. They do seem to enjoy it as what little running around we saw was full of joy. George does a rather cute grass version of an ice skaters triple salko. Why I will never know but it obviously makes him happy.

Since Christmas I have been working hard on other things, hence the lack of posts that have been written here in comparison to last year. A few weeks ago I launched Webmark Design, my web design venture in the local area. Well this has turned into a great success, so much so that I have formed a partnership to produce our new web design company. I give you Equal Design.

We are offering affordable web design to small and medium sized businesses including advert sites, information based sites and content management systems. We are also offering eCommerce solutions to business too.

Check out our website at equaldesign.co.uk.

Well I finally made my mind up in that I was going to buy a new PC rather than convert my older Mac into a Windows machine. And here it is, in all its glory. My Dell Inspiron Desktop.

The machine is a bit of a beast when it comes to specification as I always said if I am going to buy one I am going to make sure that it is a top spec machine and then it will last me a few years. It is fully equipped with an Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0GHz processor, 4 GB RAM (of which applications can only use 3.26GB for some reason!), and a 500GB hard drive (SATA of course!). It also came with a fantastic 22inch widescreen flat panel monitor which really does transform your computing experience.

I suppose one of the biggest changes that I have noticed with the machine is Vista. I was wondering for a long time whether or not to get it with Vista on and finally decided that it would be a step backward if I didn’t. However there are already compatibility issues with Vista. I use a little program called PQDVD for getting DVDs onto the iPod which will simply not run using Vista. Then Macromedia Studio 8 gave me a compatibility warning when installing saying that there are known problems, none of which I have yet come across. It seems as though there are too many pieces of software that will just not run on Vista which is disappointing.

Apart from that Vista seems OK. Once you get passed the annoying “Are you sure that you want to do that?” and “Are you really sure you want to do that?” messages and the fact that some basic things have changed, like the up one folder button in explorer then you get used to it. The interface and everything is actually quite good.

Anyway I will keep you posted on my Vista experiences in terms of software compatibility.

On Friday morning we had the arrival of the home gym that is eventually going to do in the garage (when the garden is done and the garage is no longer a building site!). Today I constructed and treadmill and a cross-trainer.

The treadmill has to be the noisiest thing ever. When just walking on it, it sounds like you are coming through the ceiling!

I am writing this post in order to help me make a decision on what computer I should by.  Let me explain.

First of all, as many of you probably know I use a Mac.  An iMac 17inch Intel Core Cuo 11.83GHz with a gig of RAM  and a 160GB HD to be precise about it.  Although I adore Macs and would never go fully back to a Windows PC, there are a number of things that I am finding that I need a Windows machines for.  There are a number of pieces of software that just don’t run on the Mac or they are maid specifically for PC.  The two main examples being Internet Explorer 7 (which I hate with a passion) and Macromedia Captivate.  For those that don’t know this is a very good educational tool for creating on screen tutorials (a bit like Camtasia Studio).

I know what you are going to say and you are right - “Macs can run windows”.  Yes, and indeed I have bootcamped my iMac very successfully.  Its a doddle.  However the very fact that you need to restart every time can be both time consuming and annotating.  Especially if it is just to check that a website design looks OK in IE7 (which by the way as I may already have mentioned I hate with a passion!).

Therefore I have been on the look out for a Windows machine and I thought if I am going to buy one I may as well buy a top spec model and therefore it will last a while as it is not my main computer. I have found a good one at a decent price on Dell.com.  It is an Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0GHz with Windows Vista Home Premium, 2Gb RAM, 500gb HD and a 22inch Flat Panel monitor for £570.

So what’s the dilemma then? Well my iMac is now 2 years old and therefore I am going to want to replace that in about 8 or 9 months.  So do I buy the PC now and then the sell my iMac in 8 or 9 months to buy the new iMac or do I buy a new iMac (20inch 2.4GHz model) now and then use my old iMac as a Windows machine using Bootcamp?  I really don’t know what to do.

What would you do and what do you think I should do?  Please help.

The date was mid March 1998. I was a healthy, happy 18 year old student attending university at Lancaster. I was around six foot two inches and 12 stone. A healthy weight for someone of that height. Since then life has never been the same, but I finally feel that the battle is now won.

What battle you might be asking yourself? Well it was around 6 months later (Sept ‘98) that I was in a doctors examination room being diagnosed with anorexia. The battle had just begun. Little did I know at the time that it was a battle that was going to take the best part of 10 years to overcome and eventually get back to a normal weight.

Having gotten down to 7 stone during the worst times of battling my anorexia, I have been a fairly healthy weight now for the past 5 years. Indeed in 2003 I was 10 stone 7lb which was still a lot on the skinny side, but things were under control and I was dealing with the illness well. From then until now I have been somewhere between 10 stone 7lb and 11 stone 7lb, but I was finding it harder and harder to get that last little bit on.

It was November 2007 that I finally made a conscious decision to try and gain the last 8 or 9 lb or so. It was extremely hard. In many ways I went back to how I was when I was anorexic, thinking about what I was eating all the time, not, this time has how many calories was in a food, but how few. It seemed that no matter what I ate nothing seemed to add those extra pounds that I needed in order to get back to the weight I was some 10 years early.

Today I decided to get on the scales. What the hell? Maybe the last 4 months weight gain effort had made the difference and I would be back up to the weight that I was some 10 years ago? Well glancing down at the scales, I couldn’t believe my eyes. 12 stone exactly. Finely I had reached the milestone. What a journey but I was there! It is funny because back in 1998 and 1999 when I was as low as can be, if you had asked me will you ever weigh 12 stone again I would have thought never. Just goes to show what determination and great support from friends and family can achieve. Anorexia is a horrible illness, but it doesn’t always have to win. You can beat it. I did!

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Anorexia - My Story