Well, I’m away up north to get married followed by a week of travelling around Scotland. We decided that since we do a lot of long-haul travelling (we’re off to Australia in December for example) it would be a great opportunity to drag my good lady around some of the more interesting and mountainous parts of Scotland that I spent my younger days hiking. It’ll be a trip down memory lane and a chance to thrash my car around twisty roads.

Since I’ve left everything until the last minute I haven’t packed yet - I’ll do it when I get home after work. Then I’ll head north. Fortunately this has finally given me the opportunity to do something useful with Google Spreadsheets. Powerful though spreadsheets are, I never have a need for them, but when you’re writing a list of everything you need to pack, they’re ideal:

What was even cooler was when my good lady logged onto it from home and could check it over, make changes that I immediately saw, and we could send messages to each other. Very slick indeed.

Anyway, I’ll be radio silent for the next week or so as I’ll be far away from the internet. I just hope this weather holds!

With a couple of days to go before I get married you'd expect I'd be waking up in a cold sweat as a result of any of the following nightmares:

• It's the wedding day and I'm walking down the aisle in my pyjamas / pants / birthday suit - I've forgotten my suit and everybody is laughing at me.
• My car's broken down on the way to the venue, it's torrentially raining and my mobile phone is dead - she's going to think I stood her up!
• I fall down the stairs and sprain my ankle walking to the venue. I spend the rest of the day with my foot up and ice on my ankle - not exactly ideal.
• The minister doesn't turn up / is blind drunk (might be funny) / gets into a fight with my brother / me / my girlfriend / Auntie Jane.
• Some crazy ex-girlfriend / stalker turns up at the "does anybody know any reason why this couple shouldn't wed?" bit and has my baby in her arms / screams that she loves me and I love her / gets into a fight with my brother / me / my girlfriend / Auntie Jane / the minister / all of the above.
• I walk to the venue, see a flash of lightning and suddenly I've been thrown ten years into the future. Everybody thinks I'd stood her up, she met some tanned hunk and married him instead and I'm stuck in a world where I'm completely lost and out of place.
• A gang of long-haired European, terrorists take over the castle and hold us hostage while stealing some bearer bonds from the vault.
• Someone spills red wine over my suit (that'll make sense when I upload some wedding photos after the event).

But no, none of those have forced me to wake up and think "thank God, it was only a dream!". Instead I found myself in a barbers in Dundee. It was a large, empty room with a chair in the middle which I was sitting in. It looked like a sunny day outside but my main concern was with the guy that was cutting my hair.

"Right, I just want a tidy up - whatever you do don't cut much off it" I instructed. But I could see a look in his eye so I felt I had to clarify: "I know you think it'll look great if you cut more off, but trust me I'll hate it - don't even think about it".

At this point he started laying into my fringe and that was my cue to go ballistic. I was on my feet yelling at him using every four letter word and insult I could think of. I touched my forehead and realised that my fringe was far far too high up - this just got me angrier. I was enraged!

Of course then I woke up and realised it was all a dream. I felt relieved. Then I thought "what the hell am I worrying about my hair for? I've still got to write my damned speech!". Which reminds me, I've still got to write my damned speech… 

I'm rapidly approaching the finish line for John's Background Switcher 2.5 and am getting quite pleased with what I've done. Progress had initially been slow as I just didn't have enough free time to dedicate to it but lately I've been on a roll. One of the cool things I've just implemented is Mosaic mode. I've seen this feature around and decided to put it into JBS. In short, it lets you automatically create backgrounds on your PC using whatever search criteria you like from Flickr like this (which is interesting photos from the last 7 days):

Instead of downloading one photo and setting it as your background, it downloads a load of thumbnails from Flickr and builds up a mosaic image. Other implementations of this sort of functionality I've seen are pretty inefficient as they download one thumbnail at a time, thereby taking an eternity to build the picture. So I've spent a good bit of effort making it fast and smart to the point where it takes around 45 seconds to generate the picture you see above and makes as few calls to Flickr's servers as possible.

It's fun writing clever multithreaded, caching thumbnail downloading code, but it's much more fun to use the resulting mosaic functionality to build up a picture of cat portraits or guinea pigs! In a couple of weeks you'll be able to do it too!

Back in 1998 I had the pleasure of spending a couple of weeks travelling around Lebanon:

I have to say it was one of the most beautiful, awe-inspiring and friendly places I've ever been. The scenery can be breath-taking, from sandy beaches to mountains to forests to deserts, it's got the lot. There are ancient ruins built at the height of the Roman empire (which means they're the biggest) including the largest standing columns on earth. My jaw was on the floor looking at some of these monuments in Baalbek. And the people were not what I'd expected at all. After years of war I thought I'd find people with their heads down, battle-hardened and bitter. But I found people young and old with a bright, optimistic outlook on life who were amazingly friendly and more westernised than me! In fact I'd rate the people I met above New Zealanders on the friendliness scale - and that's saying something.

But the one thing I took away from the trip was that the picture I had in my head before going of what Lebanon was going to be like, especially with the friction with Israel over the border (which I went to - quite an intimidating area with all the razor wire and UN troops) from the western media was completely different to what I actually saw. Up until then I assumed that people like the BBC would bring you the truth but there's no such thing as the truth, just someone's opinion on a series of events. And they won't necessarily be your opinions if you're there on the ground. Plus the media have to watch what they say, they can't go taking sides - even if they're right - especially against large, powerful nations, so they take the middle ground. It was eye opening to see things first-hand without the media bias. Don't believe all you hear!

However the fact that Lebanon was no longer a place to be feared and looked to have a bright future with Israel pulling their troops out, peace throughout the country and Beirut being rebuilt made me happy. Lebanon deserved a break from once being the Paris of the Middle East to a war-torn nation. The people deserved it.

So it won't surprise you to learn how sad I was to see it all kicking off again. I'm not going to take sides and say Israel are wrong for bombing Lebanon (which they are - Hezbollah having munitions in civilian areas? ask yourself who's telling you that's the truth and if it's just an excuse), and I'm not going to say it's wrong for Hezbollah to launch rocket attacks at Israel (which they are - what do you expect to happen if you do that?). The time for saying who's to blame is long passed. After decades of terrorism in Northern Ireland it was abundantly clear that at some stage or another people were going to have to just stop fighting and move on. No amount of bombing, military presence, arrests or anything was going to stop it. You can't make one side give up by intimidating them - especially when it's on their home soil.

It doesn't matter who throws the first stone. If someone gets hurt, then retaliates and someone gets hurt on the other side, then it just goes on from there from one side to the other. For every civilian that gets killed in an Israeli bombing raid you're creating more Lebanese who hate Israelis. For every rocket that kills an Israeli you're going to create more Israelis who want blood spilled to even the score. It's human nature. And it's completely self-defeating.

It's disappointing to see the international might of countries like the USA and UK just standing by watching without attempting to intervene. Although to be fair, Israel is a nuclear power who don't have to listen to people like the USA if they don't want to. But if Israel end up occupying Lebanon again then you can expect many more years of war - and it's so obvious that's the outcome it amazes me the Israeli leaders think it's the best approach to meet their goals.

I just feel badly for the people. It's always the innocent civilians that get caught in the crossfire in situations like this. If someone was bombing my town and my family was killed, you can bet I'll pick up arms against them. And I won't care if what they're doing is just in their eyes, my hurt and pain will motivate my revenge plenty. And since violence begets violence, it'll never end. And if I can think that way, then so can anybody, no matter how friendly, positive and hospitable they are. War is easy. Peace is very very hard. Never take the easy option.

I've noticed a change in me since I moved down from Scotland 7 years ago. I never used to feel the cold in the Winter and I always used to suffer in the heat come Summer. Now I seem to be the other way round! Visiting my brother in Edinburgh last Winter felt like I was in the Arctic and the scorching weather of this weekend and week has felt just right and I've not been overheating at all.

A scene like this (from Sunday) would have made me search for the shade out of the sun a few years ago but now I didn't even notice the baking heat beating down on me - and I certainly didn't feel drained of life as I used to.

Of course that has a lot to do with my car's air conditioning and being able to get out of the heat. Up until a few years ago the thought of air conditioning in a car in the UK under £50,000 was ridiculous. Now pretty much every new car you can buy has it as standard. I've had it in the last 3 cars and while I might have thought it a luxury before, my friend Jon's Ford Focus proved once and for all that you can't live without it. Following a biking trip on a hot Summer's day where he drove I started car hunting not because I wanted a new car but because I needed air conditioning!

It's great to escape from the hot temperatures outside to the icy coolness of my car and feel refreshed. But since I've turned into a southern softie I have to watch it doesn't get too cold!

I went with my girlfriend and a couple of friends to see Snow Patrol play on Saturday night at the Millenium Square in Leeds. We turned up a bit early so went for something to eat in a nearby Thai restaurant (where I proceeded to eat the finest salad I’ve eaten in my entire life - in fact it may well be the finest dish I’ve eaten in my entire life, but that’s another story). We stuck our heads out the door a couple of times to make sure they weren’t on - although that salad was so good I’d have happily missed the gig to lick the plate clean.

Once the food was eaten we went across the road to the venue. I saw Embrace play there last year and once again was surprised how many people you can fit in the square. It wasn’t too long before they came on and started playing some of their trademark songs.

We weren’t too far away from the stage and were pretty close to one of the speaker towers so it was a good vantage point (and as we were near the edge we managed to avoid most of the glasses of beer being thrown around).

They played a selection of songs mostly drawn from their current and previous albums with one from their second.

Gary, the lead singer, had lost his voice on tour and this was the second gig since they started up again so he apologised for the quality of his singing! To be fair he was a bit croaky to start but within a couple of songs was happily hitting the high notes!

I was really looking forward to seeing them as I’ve listened to Final Straw over and over since it came out - an instant classic. Then their new album Eyes Open came out and it’s even better!

They certainly didn’t disappoint - they played really well and the stage banter was entertaining too. Before I knew it they’d played their last song and it was time to go home. On a hair related note I see he decided to cut off his long curly locks in a John Conners way, but I’m sure he wasn’t copying me.

Highlight of the evening? Ben drove us and when he parked outside the venue he said “do you want the bad news or the bad news?”. With little choice I replied “the bad news”. It turned out the bad news was that he’d dropped his car keys down a drain! So in true MacGuyver style we had a look in the back of his car and found the shoulder strap for a bag. We broke the spring clip off the end to leave a small hook-shaped end. While one held the drain cover up Ben reached his arm down into the abyss, hooked the keys and brought them to the surface. Success! And nobody got hurt!

One of my colleagues was looking for a ruler and as is always the case, nobody had one or could find one. Why is it that there's never a ruler when you need one? The number of times I end up using the stupidly short ruler on my Swiss Army knife to measure things is ridiculous. I could go out and buy one, but then the Sock Monster would go and steal it and we'd be back at square one.

So my colleague then said "I'll go and print one out". A quick Google search and lo and behold, you can download a variety of rulers to print. Genius! You need never be without one again:

I was going to a friend's house after work yesterday to do some light fittings. This required me to bring along a selection of power tools and my toolbox in addition to the kit I normally bring into work. I never leave home without my camera in its bag and I also have a rucksack with work-related things in it (including my snacks for the day).

Since I have a pretty small car, boot space isn't something I have in abundance. My other problem is that I hate things rattling as I go around corners so I have to make sure the boot is packed neatly and with everything balanced in perfect harmony. Fortunately I've spent a long time playing Tetris and this enabled me to easily fit everything in place so snugly that nothing could move under heavy cornering or braking:

I swear I could hear the incessant music that you get from a Gameboy when you play Tetris as I was loading up. And to think, parents are always complaining about all the time kids spend playing video games! Never did me any harm. Well, except that Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, but that's another story…

I'm very particular about washing my clothes and for good reason. I have a laundry basket where all my dirty clothes go. Each week it's about full so I take the whole lot, put it in the washing machine and put it on a 40 degree wash. Once that's done, I transfer it all to the tumble dryer (unless it's a sunny day when I'll put it on the washing line). At each stage I carefully check that no socks or pants have fallen out - this is vitally important. I can't stress that enough.

When my clothes are dry I take them in their entirety back into the house and fold them up then put them away. Because I've followed this system and been careful that no clothes fell out of the basket between the house and washing machine, the washing machine and the dryer, the dryer and my house, I know that when I come to match up my pairs of socks there will be none missing. But I never get complacent because I know that the Sock Monster is waiting patiently for me to make a mistake…

Sometimes my girlfriend decides to "do me a favour". Maybe she doesn't have a full load to put in the washing machine so she'll take some of my clothes and put them in too. This is a critical mistake and I make a point of lecturing her about it whenever it happens. You see the Sock Monster pounces on confusion - as soon as you split up your laundry its razor-sharp cotton teeth will sink into one of your socks and you'll be left with odd socks. Make this mistake too often and you'll have a drawer full of them.

The only key to beating the Sock Monster is routine and attention to detail. If you stick to the program he won't even get a look in. But take your foot off the pedal and bang! You'll have given him what he wants. You think I'm crazy? That there's no such thing as the Sock Monster? Well you give me an explanation why I have a drawer full on non-matching socks. See? There isn't one!

Just because you can't see him doesn't mean he's not there… Lurking in the darkness… With the smell of socks on his breath… His eyes straining to see any strays… I just hope he doesn't pick up the scent of my keys. Actually, I can't seem to find my spare garage key… Noooooooo!

My friend Ade and I were meeting his colleague Chris in a place called Saxton the other night to take some landscape photos. Ade had written down Chris's mobile phone number earlier that day and as we were getting near he texted him to say we were running a little late. After a couple of minutes he got a reply of: "I think you've sent that to the wrong number mate".

Ade replied saying that he was trying to get a hold of Chris and was meeting up with him. He then got the message: "this is Chris, but I think you're looking for a different Chris". Ade must have copied Chris's number down incorrectly but managed to write down the number of another guy who just happened to also be called Chris! What are the chances?!

Luckily we got there and there were plenty nice photos to be had, like this one:

What you can't see is the swarm of midges that were biting me! Grrrrr!