The actual pursuit is a challening one. Happiness, and particularly enduring happiness, is dificult to find and viciously tough to hang on to. All of which makes the last few day all the more, well, happy. My wife and I have been to a wedding.

We’re not new to it. We’ve been to a few and I don’t want to give the impression for a moment that we didn’t enjoy them all. Some can be less inviting, perhaps because you don’t know anyone or they’re simply so vast that opportunities to congratulate and celebrate with the couple are a little too scarce. Ultimately, however, they’re most enjoyable occassions.

Even against that background. This one’s a corker. It’s as though the happiness which permeates the event has become a tangible thing. A mood that can be almost seen. Perceived, rather than simply felt. We’ve had a fantastic time and suspect that everyone else has too. Especially the newlywed, Victoria and Daniel, who positively radiated joy all day.

Enough of words. Pictures.

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You can now find a number of galleries of your favourite little persons under the gallery menu button. Just hover over the button and you will be able to see the different albums available. The resoloution is reasonable but if there’s an image you partiularly like and you would like a HD copy of it so that you can print and frame it just let me know and I can email you the full size image. Just in case you don’t want to use the menu button I thought I could be extra helpful and give you some links here. The first is to the album of Ninette’s first six months, the second will take you to the album covering Persephone’s first two weeks.

Enjoy!

My own travel was almost as easy as being flown. At least it was after I discovered that my mobile phone, a Sony Ericsson C903, includes an efficient route finding programme called, easily enough, Navigator. It was that discovery that brings me to my topic for today. Satellite Navigation systems or Sat Nav’s.

We’ve all heard the horror stories about roads which lead across farmers’ fields, through buildings, off cliffs and across impassable gorges but the more common problems are always the most unsavoury, not least because the common problems are the ones you are probably going to have to experience yourself. After all, no one worries too much about the person who drives off a cliff following a merry yet authoritative voice’s instructions. We can console ourselves with the sheer remoteness of the possibility that this might ever happen to us. It is horrible of course, yet most people have untold capacity for ignoring those horrid things which happen to others as long as their personal occurence remains most improbable.

When the probability of something untoward occuring personally increases, man’s ability to defer his concern reduces in directly inverse proportion. Terror becoming certain when the terrible thing itself become certain. So it is with satellite navigation. The notions that your battery might give out on you, that you may lose that precious signal or that you may pay too much attention to the screen and not enough the world in which you are driving are not only unpleasant but pretty likely too.

What surprises me really is that we render so little attention to the fact that a pocket portable device which can retain a charge for over a hundred and twenty hours can tell me where I am and show me where to go so that I might arrive at where I am going. Most of us are less concerned with the how than we are with what it sounds like when it rings or the colour of the case it comes in. For example, did you know that sat nav systems have to account for relativistic differences in time, produced by the distance and relative speed of the satellites, when calculating your location from the signals they receive? Thank you Einstein. Thank you Sony Ericsson.

Now, if only my C903 had come in glossy red.

Word of the Day: Insatiate
- Adjective

1 – Insatiable: insatiate greed
2 – not satiable;  incapable of being satisfied or appeased

Not too shabby eh? There’s more but I don’t want to bore you. What’s that? You’re not bored? Righty o!

Ooh, you can see the Big Hungry Giant in the background of this one. How cute! The baby, I meant the baby!

After a visit to our preferred Indian restaurant last night I thought it only right that I make a recommendation. After all, why should I keep this valuable information to myself?

A mistake often made by restaurants, especially given the emphasis the web receives today, is the failure to maintain an informative and interesting website. The Spice Island in Plumstead is no exception. It emerges very quickly that there is an appropriately named website listed. Unfotunately this is registered to a venue in another part of the country so I wouldn’t use their menu too much if you are going to be visiting their, completely unrelated, counterpart in south east London. On second thoughts I’m not sure I should mention it as using those place names will only cause confusion for googlers. (Edit).

So about the restaurant. You can find them here:

196-212 Plumstead Common Road
Woolwich
LONDON
SE18 2RS

There’s a small car park behind the building so if there’s no space available on the street to the front of the premsises you can try and park there.

The real appeal of the place is in the take away menu. If you place an order of more than ten pounds then you can choose a vegetable dish as a free extra. What this means practically is that you can have a delicious Indian for two hungry giants or three more normal appetites for a little over a tenner. Our usual arrangement is to place an order and put some rice on at the same time. Food is normally ready for collection after 20-25 minutes and the range and quality of the dishes is excellent. Like most small restaurants, if what you want isn’t listed then they will do all they can to accommodate your tastes.

I would go on to recommend some specific dishes at this point but before I do I want to point out that I am yet to be disappointed by anything I have order from this place. We often eat this food with friends and the inevitable mixing and matching that goes on with Indian food means that I have now tried a very large number of their dishes. They are all, even if I happen not to like ‘em, very good. The chicken tikka masala, a mainstay of British Indian orders, is excellent and very creamy and mild. Their Madras dishes are excellent and the Dansak dishes. A type of sauce which is hot and slightly sour and based on lentils is wonderful. Try it with the lamb!

I do enjoy my food photography and next time we order I’ll take some photos for you all to salivate over. In the mean time, why not give them a call yourself. Spice Island is open from 6pm. You can call them on 0208 316 5207. Do it now. Well, if you’re hungry and it’s after six!

On thinking about that last sentence I realised that I still, loosely, of course, include myself amongst the youngsters. I suppose this is because there remain so many important decision which affect my life and the life of my family which are made by individuals or groups far away from my influence and in many cases awareness. Not that control is necessary, quite the opposite. To be involved with all of the important decisions in one’s life is definitively impossible. No single person can maintain that number of sufficiently intimate acquaintances. Even if you were to organise a company of persons to undertake the work it would be so vastly expensive an undertaking that I am confident that perhaps only the very wealthiest alive could even consider attempting it. Besides, this is moot, the effort simply isn’t efficient. It is far better to accept that much of life is determined by chance or by others; attention should be focused on dealing with those elements which are within the scope of our control and influence as well as dealing with those that aren’t in a positive manner.

Why positive? Because negative or positive approaches are irrelevant to the decision maker. If you choose to be unhappy about your tax bill, well, the only person who will suffer from that is you. Better by far to be happy and lighthearted, even if you choose to fight such a thing in the most grave manner, do so lightly and without worrying about it too much.

These are some of the thoughts I have had watching my daughter passing the five seconds mark in independent standing. What am I going to do when she can talk?

Click here to view the embedded video.

To my mind, that’s pretty funny. When she finds out this is on-line she may not agree; enjoy it while it lasts.

Not.

I was frantic. There was music to listen to, a daughter to hang out with and a great deal of my own work to be getting on with. Now that it’s over I can tell you that working for me is a nightmare!

Installing WordPress for them, yes they’re noobs, helped me realise just how powerful and user friendly the software is. With minimal effort you can produce a clean and professional looking website to showcase your thoughts. Ultimately content is king, but well presented and easy to read content is always better than content which isn’t. With this in mind I thought I could post my first ever list as an essential part of a blog entry. 

1 – WordPress is free.

Yep, it’s first and foremost! Contrary to that most popular advice many things in life are free. At many retail outlets for instance you can buy one product and get another free. Why today at my local food store you can buy one bottle of Coke and get another free. Even Burger King have a buy one get one free offer. They don’t like it if you ask for 50% off one though. And they really don’t like it if you try to take the free burger or the free coke and leave them with the one you have to pay for. In these instances, buy one get one free is a clever man’s 50% off. The retailer gets the full price of one product where if they had offered you 50% off the price they would probably have taken half the money as most people would only buy one. I.E. the one they actually needed/wanted.

The other poor, miserable, and reprobate type of free is best evinced by considering free gifts. Almost invariably the result of hidden cost or items of minimal worth. Take a look at any of the free templates from Template Monster. You’ll see what I mean pretty quickly.

WordPress isn’t just free. It’s brilliant and free. That’s outright remarkable. The only question you should have now, as you wander away from this post, is whether a legitimate list can really only have one item in it?

Word of the day: Ocelot
-noun
1 – A spotted leopardlike cat ranging from Texas through South America

Season one was something else. Within our circle of friends it was remarkable. We got together and watched the episodes in small groups of three or four. I can’t remember if we split the cost of the boxed set or if one of us had already purchased it. Without the regular advertisements episodes are about 43 to 45 minutes long and they are awesome. Pure awesomeness.

24 is now done with seven seasons. That’s about 125 hours of my life gone forever. Do I mind? No.

Well, perhaps a little. Season four wasn’t any good. While writing this post I’m watching episode nine of season seven. You know what. I think we’re done here.

Word of the day: Isthmus
- noun
1 – a narrow strip of land, bordered on both sides by water, connecting two larger bodies of land.
2 – Anatomy, Zoology. a connecting, usually narrow, part, organ, or passage, esp. when joining structures or cavities larger than itself.
3 – Ichthyology. the narrow fleshy area between the sides of the lower jaw of a fish.