After a quick trip to Aldi and some fun in the kitchen, I managed to make 10 large lasagne portions and 10 large spaghetti bolognese portions for around £17, here’s how it stacks up:

I’ve tried to be realistic about every aspect of what I put in there, including prices for the amount of seasoning, oil, herbs and gas used.  Most people already own things like saucepans, cookers and old takeaway containers for storage, so that’s not included because it’s impossible to quantify.

There you have it, a filling tasty 20 meals for 86p each, stuck in the freezer and ready to go!  I’ve got one sitting on my desk for lunch today, and I’m quite looking forward to it

Sad and Useless – Stuff on my Rabbit

Stuff on my Rabbit

The office where I’m currently working on BT’s super high definition panorama.  You’d be able to see my desk if it weren’t for the mirrored windows!  Thanks to Gareth for the link.

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Took me a while to pluck up the courage to lean far enough to take this one on my phone!

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Another shot of the paralympic tennis match we watched. Amazing to see how skilled and agile these guys were when I can barely hit a tennis ball in a straight line!

The problem occurred when trying to setup Postgres 9.1 for an application, but to have the cluster in UTF-8 rather than the standard LATIN1 that is used by the locale en_US.  When trying to setup the cluster, I was getting this error message:

The encoding you selected (UTF8) and the encoding that the selected locale uses (LATIN1) do not match

So, here is my solution to getting a UTF-8 cluster up without mucking about with system locales, etc:

* PLEASE NOTE, IF YOU HAVE DATA IN THE DATABASE, BACK IT UP FIRST AND RESTORE IT, THIS PROCEDURE WILL DROP EVERYTHING *

sudo bash
apt-get install postgresql
su postgres
pg_dropcluster --stop 9.1 main
pg_createcluster --start -e UTF-8 --locale en_US.utf8 9.1 main
psql -U postgres
ALTER USER postgres WITH PASSWORD 'password';
\q
exit

I hope this helps someone and good luck!

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On a trip to Warwick castle at the weekend, we watched a bird show including this barn owl. Rather majestic as it flew above our heads and despite it’s agility, we couldn’t help but duck as it zoomed past.

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Japanese tennis player just about to take a shot at London 2012.

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Go run! Inspirational structure in the Olympic park.

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Sitting at the front of the boat and looking down to a long drop. Frightening, but quite a new experience!