I had managed to go without a dose of man flu for a while, but just when I have a number of travel trips coming up, it strikes.

So I've battened down the hatches and have been taking hot drinks, vitimin C, etc and at night, I've been helping myself to a couple of drams of a favourite little tipple of mine, The Isle of Jura.

Now, being that we're all social mongerals these days, I tweeted exactly that: http://twitter.com/fymd/status/8599984501

Well, after a few exchanges with the official @jura_whisky twitter account, I tweeted that they should send me another bottle to help me fight it further.

30 minutes later (about 35 mins ago) I had a chap at my door and was presented with a bottle of Superstition, one of the distillery's many fine single malts.

(I'm a registered member on the Isle of Jura website, so they had my address).

I'm still in shock by this. Completely in awe. It's rare to find such an act of ... kindness, yes, kindness.

I don't know what else to say really, other than a huge thank you to them and to Contently Managed, who delivered it.

Seriously. Thank You!

Update: here's a photo of my bottle of Superstition and my get well card

...a life in Hollywood.

My agent seems to think I could be the next John Travolta, and we've been "trying out" how I would look in some of his previous roles. Here's me with Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction.

The headshot was originally taken from my stag do back in Edinburgh, back in October.

For those at ColdFusionCamp last week, and anyone following Twitter, they all saw/heard about the issues I was experiencing with my MacBookPro. The end result was a flashing folder during boot rather than the Apple icon, and ultimately me having to borrow Mark Drew's MBP instead.

My presentation at ColdFusionCamp was on "ColdFusion and PDF: Improving Your Workflow". Part of my demo involved showing off LiveCycle Designer, which unfortunately only runs in Windows. This meant I had to put together a VM instance using VM Fusion to run XP. Big deal. I do this all the time.

Well after getting home from Munich I managed to get my MBP up and running again and took advantage of this to get all my MP3s onto a portable hard drive as well as some Work in Progress reports. All code, database scripts, documents etc are kept in Subversion on one of our servers or on one of our file servers (which gets backup up). Ultimately, if I couldn't retrieve anything from the MBP it wouldn't have mattered.

In the process of getting my MP3s etc I decided to physically remove the VM instances. Click and Delete.

Well, since I did that I've not had a single freeze or crash on my MBP. Hopefully I'm not tempting fate here, but it looks like a corrupted VM Image was causing all my issues. Saying that, I may take advantage of the situation and get the MBP checked out anyway (even if it is only 7 months old).

I just snaffled a box of Roses chocolates from my wife to be - the wedding is this Saturday woo hoo - in the hope that I would get all the strawberry sweeties for myself.

However, I'm appalled to find that once again I've got a box of Roses with absolutely no strawberries. 

I think I'm going to have words with Cadbury!

Apparently a few folks have been left with a void in their life after my last blog post. The reason? I never confirmed whether Pandas are in fact giant badgers.

Let's look at the evidence. I've linked to these photos found via http://images.google.com and any copyright etc is of course that of the photographers, and indeed badger/panda perverts. Too much? Think I could still get in trouble? Ack, who cares, after all badgers rock!!!

copyright Badger Watch and Rescue Dyfed, 2005


Photo is from National Geographic and photographer is Michael Nichols.

Looking at the two of these can there be any doubts that they aren't the result of ridiculous cross breeding of Zebras and Dalmations?

Especially this nasty looking one.....

I thought I better blog something seeing as how I'd hit the dreaded "There are no blog entries available" message.

To be honest, I've been too busy with things to even contemplate blogging. The primary things being moving house and the fact I get married two weeks today.

From a technie perspective, I've moved hosting company, and will in fact be targeting to have all our clients live at Hostway (www.hostway.co.uk).

Moving also allowed me the chance to upgrade CF from 8.0 to 8.01 though this particular server is still 32 bit. Internally we're running everything on 64 bit, and we'll be looking to deploy everything at Hostway on 64 bit.

And that's about it ... oh, there is news coming about Scotch on the Rocks, but not quite yet ... on, and I may be in Munich at the end of November. Stay tuned.

p.s. and if you're wondering about the title of this blog posting, it's just a random thing.

My long term trek into the world of old age continues as today, I turn the grand old age of 31...

...and the old age is having an effect already, as I can't think of anything else to write.

I can't quite remember why I ended up reading the official rules to the "Suite Life Sweepstake" competition on Adobe.com, but I'm still trying to make sense of something.

You can find a link to the sweepstake on the Adobe.com homepage (bottom left box on right hand side).

In typical Adobe fashion, the sweepstake is open only to the US and Canada - we don't get competitions or offers in the UK, because the UK office can't be bothered.

Anyway, for some reason I decided to read all the rules of the sweepstake... I really must have been bored, but when I arrived at the end of point (4)... well. I'm amused, confused, bewildered and totally dumbfounded.

I would like to quote the part of rule (4) that ... well, read the full thing yourself at http://www.adobe.com/special/sweepstakes/terms/

If the selected winner is from Canada, the winner will be required to correctly answer a math problem prior to receiving the prize.

Why????

Seriously, why? Is there a reason that a winner from the US is simply given a prize, but one from Canada has to answer a maths problem?

I'm in London this week giving training (a customised version of our CF Admin courses), and I flew down from Edinburgh.

I left the house at 11.30am, arrived at Edinburgh airport around 12.30pm, for a flight at 2.50pm. I eventually got booked into my hotel at 7.15pm.

So it took me around 8 hours to get from my house to my hotel. It's about 400 miles.

If I had travelled by train (assuming no incidents) I would have been here a lot earlier. I'm seriously reconsidering how I travel between Edinburgh and London. Plus I could have worked on the train down!

Being a metalhead at heart, my top 10 records of 2007 is ... well, all metal. That being said, if you saw my record collection, you'd all be somewhat surprised :)

• Machine Head - The Blackening
• Dream Theater - Systematic Chaos
• Megadeth - United Abominations
• Rotting Christ - Theogonia
• Paradise Lost - In Requiem
• Soilwork - Sworn to a Great Divide
• Dark Tranquility - Fiction
• Nile - Ithyphallic
• Gamma Ray - Land of the Free Pt 2
• Job for a Cowboy - Genesis