Pterodaktyl…

So much has been going on this year, and I’ve failed miserably when it comes to blogging most of it! Here’s a brief look back at the highlights of 2007, in a vaguely chronological order:

• Proposing to Lil in the bird hide overlooking the Otter Estuary - and her saying “yes”.
• Finally going back to Bath, the city where I spent so much time as a child - and seeing some of the wonderful buildings we never got round to visiting when we lived there.
• In June, Lil and I became the proud owners of our very first house - it’s so great not to be at the mercy of a landlord any more!
• Getting the chance to play around with one of Virgin’s full-size Voyager driver training simulators.
• Dawlish Airshow - a wonderful location (10 minutes walk from our front door!), spectacular flying, and a brand-new telephoto lens to play with.
• Camping on a beautiful organic farm and being woken at 5am by a cockerel right outside the tent.
• Getting married to Lil - both the ceremony (in a lovely old house in Exeter) and reception (on a boat cruising along our local World Heritage site) were as close to perfect as anyone could wish for, and we got to share it with family and friends!
• Our honeymoon in California - the Pacific coast, the giant trees, the mountains of Yosemite and the streets of San Francisco were all brilliant, and we can’t wait to go back! Our aunt and uncle housed, fed, entertained and chauffeured us for two weeks, as well as getting us a trip to Yosemite as a wedding present. We can’t say thank you enough!
• Demoing our upcoming product at the country’s biggest model railway show. It was great to meet potential customers face to face and see their enthusiasm.
• Finally getting our oven installed, just in time for Christmas dinner!

2008 should be fun - the past year has been wonderful, but it will be nice to live at a slightly more relaxed pace for a while, and get properly settled into our new home. We’re hoping to go on a wildlife-watching trip to Sweden in the summer though, so we’re not short of stuff to look forward to!

The sun is hot, the sky is pure blue, and a walk to the mailbox includes hummingbirds and ravens - yes, we’re in California!

The flights went well, apart from a minor hold-up at Schiphol while they conducted a drugs sweep of the aircraft. By the time we got here we’d been awake for 24 hours apart from a few dozes on the plane, and we were asleep within an hour of walking through the door. After 12 hours of sleep we’ve shaken off the worst of the jet-lag and are feeling much more human - sitting in the sun on the porch certainly helps!

Just going to have some lunch and then we’re heading into town to get some shopping - as always there’s one or two things we forgot to pack!

In 24 hours we should have the keys to our very first house! For those of you who want to see some footage of the town we’re moving to, as well as Lil’s new train journey to work, have a look here: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=16D1VrCQJYQ

We’re not actually moving until Friday (one of the benefits of moving out of a rented place!) and Lil’s parents have very kindly come down to help with cleaning and painting before we move in.

Everything’s pretty chaotic at the moment - our flat currently looks something like this:

After my previous post on the cost of Tweets if you’re a 3 mobile customer, I contacted Twitter support to see what they had to say on the matter. They replied that the previous UK number (the one in use before the switch to benefit Australian customers) was still live if I wished to use it.

I programmed the old number back into my phonebook, checked my account balance (3 has a very nice free-to-access mobile site which gives you near real-time info on your monthly spend) and sent a test tweet. It went through just fine, but when I checked my account again a minute later I had exactly the same number of free texts remaining and 25p more on my bill.

Puzzled, I dug out my itemised bills and went over them again. It seems that at some point between April 17th and May 3rd, the destination category for the old UK number changed from “Personal Numbering Service” to “Guernsey Mobile” and began to incur a 25p charge for every message.

I’ve contacted Twitter about this and they say that changes in fees are down to the carrier. Perhaps 3 noticed a large volume of texts to this number and decided to cash in by moving it out of the monthly allowance into a premium category? Let’s face it, Twitter probably doesn’t have the mobile carriers jumping for joy. Whereas you might once have had to send 10 texts to update 10 people on what you were up to, now it just takes one tweet to reach all 10 - and the carrier still has to deliver all 10 of those messages (OK, I realise the load will be spread between a bunch of companies, but it still equates to more deliveries than sends).

So tweeting by text is going to hurt your wallet if you are a 3 customer in the UK, but it’s not the end of the world, at least if you have a data plan. After my last post, Kevin Cawley pointed me in the direction of his J2ME app, TinyTwitter. This runs on any Java enabled mobile phone, and lets you send tweets (including direct ones), read and filter your friend’s tweets and do pretty much everything Twitter-related that you might care to think of. The only hitch for me is that, along with all J2ME apps on my phone, TinyTwitter can only connect to the ‘net when I’m in range of a 3G base station. Not much of a problem if you live in an urban area, but out here in the wilds of Devon 3G can be hard to find, even if you stand on a metal box. Luckily there is also the mobile version of the Twitter site at m.twitter.com which provides a useful backup.

After noticing yesterday that the balance of my 3 mobile account had dropped by several pounds, I spent the best part of an hour trying to figure out where the money could be going. My contract plan includes 75 minutes of talk time and 600 texts, and I hadn’t come close to using up either of those.

Finally, after checking the balance, trying different things and then checking again to see if it had changed, I found the culprit - Twitter. Every single tweet sent from my phone has been costing £0.25!

I’m pretty certain that when I started using Twitter I made quite sure the messages were free to send, so I’m guessing this is down to the new UK number they introduced last week.

The Twitter site has this to say on phone charges:

How Twitter will affect your phone bill depends on your phone plan, and text messaging allowance. Some people pay a per-message charge of ten cents or more. Some people have an allotted number of text messages monthly. Some (lucky!) people have unlimited text plans. Twitter can be addicting, so check your plan to make sure you don’t get a huge bill.

A special word of caution for International folks: some carriers (such as Orange) don’t charge an international fee to use the Twitter UK number. Others consider it an international number and charge up to .15 per message. Remember to check your phone plan for international rates; be aware that standard messaging rates vary by carrier, and do apply.

So I’m guessing they’ve switched from a number that 3 consider to be UK to one they have down as international. I’ll email the folks at Twitter and see whether they have any suggestions, in the meantime I won’t be sending many tweets when I’m out and about!

Update: I just dug out a bill, and yes, tweets to the old number are listed as free, so it’s definitely down to the new number.

We now have a website dedicated to our upcoming wedding at http://www.tomandlil.co.uk/.

At the moment it’s all very basic, but we’ll gradually be filling it up with useful info for guests. After the big day we’ll add pictures of the event, as well as updates from our honeymoon trip - California, here we come!

I’ve just moved the site from the old K2 based theme to Mandigo. K2 is a very powerful theme with some neat AJAX features, but it took a whole load of customisations to get the site looking the way I wanted - customisations which then had to be migrated to every new release of the theme.

Mandigo is rather simpler, but looks good (I think so anyway!) and beyond a new header image and a couple of colour tweaks it worked right out of the box.

The only thing I still have to sort is the Twitter Tools plugin - I have it installed, but the sidebar widget refuses to show up.

Constructive (or even destructive if you’ve had a bad day!) comment on the new theme is always welcome!

http://www.justflight.com/product.asp?pid=210

I created the models for the C17 Globemaster, Su27 Flanker and Eurofighter Typhoon.

Even though I’m not strictly from Devon, having only lived here 10 years, it seems a large number of these still apply (except the one about the second cousin)…

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Yesterday I finally proposed to Lil, who I’ve known for 2.5 years and loved since the moment I met her! We were planning to do it on the commons, which are one of the most beautiful areas of East Devon and our favourite place to spend a weekend, but the weather was rather unpredictable so instead it happened in the bird hide overlooking the Otter Estuary (luckily the rain had scared all the other birdwatchers away, and it was just us, a Kingfisher, a Raven and a Mandarin duck!).

I’ve very glad to say that she said “yes”, so now I feel like the luckiest guy in the world! We are so very much made for each other, and I’m looking forward to spending the rest of our lives together!