Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Nature Corner - The European Hornet
We had a visitor to the office yesterday - a hornet. It was on it’s last legs and it was dead this morning, so I gave it a decent burial in a pile of dust in the corner of the building’s wall.
This one was about 25mm long.
You can see from the picture below that part of its wing was missing - maybe it came off worst in a fight, or got hit by a truck or something.
Monday, May 14, 2012
Can’t open PDF files in Acrobat from hyperlinks in Excel?
Are you, by any chance, using Acrobat Pro Version 7?
Then the risk free totally anonymous update to version 7.0.01
is just what you need to make your life worth living again.
The most common symptom of this is that Acrobat will flash on your screen for a moment, when you click the hyperlink to the PDF, then close again straight away.
This is an Adobe issue and not a Microsoft one…
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897755
You can try updating from the Help menu in Acrobat, but in my case this didn’t work so I had to download the update manually from the first link I’ve shown above.
I’ve had this problem more than once - it cropped up again when I installed Acrobat Professional Version 7 on a new machine.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Georgi’s gone to Armenia!
We were tipped off by a great friend of ours about a rehab centre in Yerevan (the capital of Armenia) so last weekend we rented a Dodge Caravan and headed down there - it’s only a 6-hour drive from Tbilisi.
The specialist here in Tbilisi had been to see him a few weeks ago and suggested that he needs an operation to straighten his legs, so we mentioned this place to him and he knew all about it, knew the specialist down there very well indeed, and urged us to take Georgi down there if possible as the therapy he could get there is like nothing he can get in Georgia.
Our friend in Armenia did a bit of groundwork for us - sorted an apartment out for us and made an appointment to see the specialist, though we didn’t know beforehand whether they could do anything for him.
I was very impressed by the professionalism and general “can-do” attitude we were met with in Armenia - so much different to Georgia where people are more interested in lining their own pockets by opening fancy clinics which look like hotels, but which fall well short of all the promises made on their websites when you scratch the surface.
In contrast the rehab centre we went to in Armenia was run as more of a public service (so it seemed) and the people who we saw there seemed to tick all the right boxes for me. They said they would give him physio & speech therapy for a month, and that I would definitely see some positive changes at the end of it. My wife’s certainly been impressed during the first few days of Georgi going there, and Georgi enjoys it too as there are lots of other children there and the place itself is set in it’s own little grounds with small cottages for parents and their children to stay in.
They’re going to use Botox on his legs (to relax the muscles from what I can tell). I was a bit surprised about this till I read up on it.
Fingers crossed it all works out. It was a bit of a gamble renting a place for a month and taking him down there, without knowing what they’d say, but so far so good.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
It’s all go at the moment!
My little soccer team Darlington F.C. (The Mighty Darlo) DID actually go bust yesterday and I was about to head down to the Hangar Bar and turn my Darlington scarf upside down, but the fans gathered round the body and resuscitated it…
Darlington go bust and then revived after fans raise £200,000
The club have NO staff (not even players) - they were all made redundant by the Administrator but the backroom staff are all volunteering to help stage the two next home games, the coach is working for free, and what players are still around are going to play on a match-by-match basis. The fans are collecting money to pay their wages while our “Rescue Group” tries to thrash out some sort of community-led business plan. The coach, Crag Liddle, deserves an OBE or something - he’s really the Youth Team coach who’s been looking after the first team for the past few weeks, he’s Darlington through-and-through and a monument to all that is good and decent about the game. I think he’s been the glue which has kept us all together - even the players who had to leave (they had to earn a living) were gutted at abandoning ship and many ex-players have sent messages of support or even donated to the… [Read more...]
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Recipe for Rice Creamola
If you’re a big fan of sugar and/or generally eating things that do you no good whatsoever but which leave you with a self-satisfied buzz, then this recipe is for you.
