Last Tuesday was my wife’s aunties 85 birthday so we went to a local pub for a celebratory meal. A good time was had by all. It is not everyday you are 85 years young-congratulations Aunt Doreen (AD to those close by)!

Other news:

My wife and children are away on half term holiday in Rhodes.

I am left on my own at home as my employer would not give me holiday at this time. I have been looking at computer graphics in C & C++ and finding it a little tricky as these languages do not seem to have inbuilt graphic functions and need additional libraries to add better graphic features ( ie Allegro/CGUI/FLTK/Win32/MFC etc). This is a bit of a contrast to Java that has better in built graphics features (Java Awt and Sing).

This is all with a view to me making a Chess GUI! Well why not! Sure will be a good challenge for my coding skills. This looks like it will be a long ongoing project though.

Meanwhile here are a couple of random recent photos:

1. Flowering Chives:

2. Evening view from my front door:

 This weekend I also started to consider coding my own CMS in php for some of my older websites. Again this would be an interesting coding challenge for me, but I have lots of other things to do first so I doubt I will find time to do this soon.

Lastly I saw this video on YouTube this weekend and it struck a chord! Enjoy 🙂

 [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us-TVg40ExM[/youtube]

(NB do not forget to visit www.chessat.richard-dickinson.com for my weekend chess news and games!)