Firetop

The more regular Firetop blog visitor may already have discovered the gallery of photographs I added last week. Having come back from my honeymoon with over 500 photographs I picked out the best ones for hosting in Flickr. I then found a useful wordpress plugin ‘FAlbum‘ to enable me to have the Flickr photographs displayed on this website - building the template was fairly straight-forward. I’m not planning on loading snaps of ‘nights out in the pub’ or ‘my Gran on a skateboard’, it’ll be more for things I consider to be a bit more artistic and well compositioned. You never know, I may even win the countryfile competition sooner or later… bring it on.

Technorati Tags: photography, flickr, falbum, gallery, wordpress

I removed the Snap preview window functionality from this blog yesterday. It was responsible for generating the preview shots of websites when you moused over links to external websites. The poll I ran on the right hand menu clearly came out that it was ‘very annoying’ so not being one to ignore customer research… down it came. With hindsight I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised - clicking to a page to find it’s not what you wanted and having to click back isn’t that much of an inconvenience - in fact it’s half the fun of browsing. At least we all know now though - don’t go for Snap preview functionality.

Technorati Tags: snap preview, web usability

Tonight we received a welcome-home present from our youngest cat ‘Bella’. Whilst watching Panorama’s rather unsurprising investigation into the dodgy GSK drug trials, the cat flap slowly creaked open and in clambered our fluffy cat with a mouse in her mouth. I don’t know if she was trying to be ironic given the topic of our television viewing, but this was certainly no pharmaceutical knockout-mouse. I wasn’t about to let her start experimenting with it in the house so had to mount a mouse rescue operation. (more…)

This final entry for our Honeymoon covers our last two days in Scotland spent at Culcreuch Castle. This castle was the oldest (and most expensive) of our romantic destinations, situated in a very small ‘oops I blinked and missed it’ village - named ‘Fintry’ not too far from Stirling. We arrived late on Sunday evening, having driven a long way from Inverness and, towards the end of our journey, through far too many small and difficult to navigate roads (it didn’t help that one of the main roads was shut due to bad weather). We learned on arrival that we had just missed them having one foot of snow outside. (more…)

Sunday was all set for the final leg of our Scotland tour - this time from Inverness to Fintry (near Stirling). Instead of taking the more direct A9 past the Cairngorms (which we’d seen enough of on previous drives) we opted for the longer West Coast route past Loch Ness, Ben Nevis and through Glencoe. It was a wet day (our first in Scotland believe it or not) so taking snaps of Loch Ness was a quick and wet affair. As we drove the twenty or so miles along the edge of Loch Ness we stopped at Castle Urquhart to stretch our legs and take a few more photos of the perfectly still Loch Ness - no sign of a monster anywhere though. (more…)

On Saturday I was very much looking forward to our drive up to Tain, North of Inverness, where we would find the Glenmorangie Malt Whisky distillery. Our Lonely Planet Guide to Scotland told us to arrive on Saturday between 10am and 4pm so we got there just after lunch. However, rather annoyingly the Lonely Planet Guide had it wrong; Glenmorangie’s distillery is closed completely on weekends - which ruled out visiting at all whilst in Northern Scotland. I was most annoyed, not least because that was one of the reasons I’d made Suzie_Q a named driver on the hire car (more…)

Following our scenic drive across the Cairngorms on Friday, we arrived at Tulloch Castle, North of Inverness, just after dark. Walking into reception past a large door marked ‘Dungeon’ I tried to find somebody to check us in - their computer was up and running but the desk was vacant - and no bell to ring. After a few minutes I wandered into the restaurant and found somebody to help us (an odd welcome really). Having completed the necessary paperwork we were shown to the honeymoon suite (room 12) up on the 4th floor (could have been 3rd but carrying a 29kg suitcase up the stairs it sure felt like 4th!). Once in and collapsed on the bed (can’t put your back out on a honeymoon) I realised that we’d missed Deal or No Deal… yet again (more…)

Fraser Castle was our first destination on Friday morning after checking out from Norwood Hall. It was yet another beautiful sunny day as we drove West towards Alford on the A944. We reached Fraser Castle at about 11:45am and discovered a virtually empty car park and closed castle. However, most castles are closed in January, and we went primarily to see the external scenery rather than any internal historical materials. (more…)

Until a week before our wedding I wasn’t sure if Suzie_Q and I would be able to stay at Norwood Hall. Unlike the other three Scottish honeymoon destinations I’d made online reservations with, Norwood’s staff hadn’t responded to my email chasers so I had to phone them to get confirmation. We arrived on Wednesday evening after a drive up from Edinburgh via the Cairngorms and received our key to the honeymoon suite. No porter to help with the heavy suitcase (still carrying BA’s ‘heavy’ sticker), and no lift – the Norwood needs an ‘Angus’ like Melville Castle, instead I struggled to take the case up two flights of stairs myself. (more…)

On Thursday morning we had breakfast and went back to bed because we’d had such a bad night’s sleep the night before (we slept on the sofa bed instead of the main bed for reasons described in the forthcoming Norwood Hall posting). By 1pm we’d switched rooms and were free to go out and enjoy Aberdeen. ‘Enjoy Aberdeen’ is probably a contradiction in terms, I’ve never seen somewhere so grey with tiny little tenements lined up row after row. We headed North out of Aberdeen for Forvie Nature Reserve – a place allegedly full of migrating winter birds and sand dunes which sounded like something a bit different from castles and snow. I was still keen to test the Digimax on something different, so a contrasting environment seemed a good idea. (more…)