Alan Jeeves Blog

Cape Town & Garden Route – Nov 2009

This was my best holiday of my life, me and avi went to Cape Town – her home town and travelled along the Garden Route to Plettenberg bay.

Below is our experiences at each location.

Cape Town – Village Lodge

Our first stop was at Village Lodge in Cape Town central. Nice area but due to it raining all the time while we stayed here we didnt venture out much. Finding the place was a bit of a challenge – just look out for the restaurant’s name: Soho.

The hosts there were very nice, including Rickardo which spent a couple of drinks with and had a funny evening. Peter was good fun too!

The hotel was nice, they had a roof garden thing with a nice looking pool and garden chairs etc, would had been lovely in the sun

The room was basic – sadly two beds put together, but this time it wasn’t that uncomfortable, and we had no hand wash But the bar and restaurant area was very nice and the food was great!

Talking about food – for our first evening we went to Cattle Barren for dinner for Avril’s sister Cheryl’s birthday, the steak was amazing, our waitress: Natalie was entertaining even though Mr B called her Vanessa, and some of the waiters sang happy birthday which rounded the night off very well.

We also ate at the V&A Waterfront at Cape Town Fish Market, average food really, i had yellow tail.

On our treks out, we ended up at Mariners Wharf at Hout bay, and the restaurant: Wharfside Grill. It was wonderful here, I had Kabeljou and chips and Avi had a great lobster. We got a free glass when i had a cocktail drink, Andreas was our sailor waiter

We also went Bowling at Grand West Casino – awesome place!

Oudtshoorn – Lavendar House

Our next stop was far east: Oudtshoorn. We stayed in a lovely peaceful guest house ran by Rita. We had a Braai here at night next to the pool, very romantic. Too ws the room – where the bat and toilet was altogether with the bedroom, lucky we were comfortable with each other!

We stayed here for one thing: Cango Caves. This was great fun even though we did the normal non-adventures tour, where our guide Eric sang to us in the dark.

We went to the Cango Wildlife Ranch on the way back, where I fell in love with turtles and we saw meerkats in real life – amazing creatures! Our guide here was also good fun.

We ate at Jemimas on the main road, nice food as usual where Avi ate Ostrich meat for the first time.

Plettenberg Bay – Halcyon house

Next stop: Plettenberg Bay, where Charles and Judy welcomed us to their tranquil guest house. These were probably our best ‘hands-on’ hosts, cooking us breakfast, pouring evening drinks and chatting to us while Avi was kicking my butt at pool.

There was one high street which had restaurants, we ate at Ghillies Grill where Miriam was cheerful and liked Avril’s ‘rack’ Food was okay here, Avril had to send her steak back for more cooking

Upstairs at Fu.shi was a mixed bag – our waiter was probably the worst in SA! But the food was yummy.

We went to the Plettenberg Bay game reserve and went on a Safari on the back of a special land rover, i was at the back being bounced around like i was on a roller coaster!  But the experience was amazing, seeing so many animals in their natural habitat, probably my best excursion of the whole holiday.

The beach here is nice and quite, we had KFC there and the mash and gravy was yuk!

Mossel Bay – 1 Point Village Guest House

I realy liked this guest house at mossel bay. We went for the attic room, which was airy and also had the bath and toilet with the bed – open plan style along with an amazing balcony looking out to the sea.

The sea front was lovely with the waves crashing in, the restaurants were very touristy, but we found a Spur tucked away which wasn’t, and was the usual Spur greatness.

We found a wicked Braai spot, on the river bank where i created a great fire, so great while we were packing up to go someone came asking if we could use our fire for their Braai

Hermanus – Aloe House

This town was nice, Rosemary the host, the huge room, private pool and the free bottle of sparking wine!  The room was self catering on two levels – up stairs was he bedroom, with a ’shower under the stars’

We walked Fernkloof Nature Reserve, where along with the proteas and other plants was a little turtle!

We again ate at a Cattle Barron – and again had a lovely steak!

Avril was amazed at the whales in the bay, we saw more when we ate at the Ocean basket where avi ate a huge platter of prawns, king, prince and queen! I had a lovely fried fish.

On the way to cape town we stopped off at Cape Lagulhas – the most southern point of Africa (it was very windy), and then we had a braai at Kleinmond (cheese and ham toasties)

Fish Hoek – A whale of a time!

This place was self catering, and had a balcony over looking the sea – amazing views!

The room was airy but the carpet near the bed was rough on your feet, the bath room was small and dark and they didn’t supply much ‘extras’, like cooking oil, ketchup, drinks etc would had been helpful also we had no salt and pepper until we left a note for the cleaner

The pool was great – although again there was no ‘extras’ like towels.

There was not much in Fish Hoek but theres plenty around it, like penguins at Boulders beach, the scratch patch at Simons town to name a few.

We also found a resturant which had Potjiekos – i had lamb Avi chicken curry – well nice!

We travelled to Cape town lots from here and visited Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, went up table mountain and cape point and shopped at the huge Canal Walk.

The End

It was a great trip – where I found out why Avi kept on going on about Marcel’s frozen yoghurt – it was as good as she said!

Rapid PHP

I was looking for a better editor for php files than notepad++, and came across Rapid PHP (blumentals.net), which is very good.

One nice thing is, it is very configurable and settings are easily backed up and / or transferred to another install (just copy a folder, do options -> export settings).

But this caused a problem as the laptop i was copying the settings from had multiple screens but the other install didnt and the app opened on the ‘other’ monitor and i couldnt move it back to the only screen i had.

Solution was to edit the registry, go to here:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Karlis Blumentals\Rapid PHP\7.0\General

And set the Left ket to zero

Easy fix once you know what to do

Cape Town Big Walk 8th November 2009

We’re planning to enter the annual Cape Town Big Walk  this year which is on Sunday 8th November 2009 – i had to email the orgainser to confirm this date as the website hasn’t been updated with any details of this years event. They replied ultra quick howvere – so thanks!

Post a comment if you are planning on participating!

New Forest 2009

Another road trip took us to New Forest – Lymington. Along with the ride was Ruth and Avril – my girlfriend!

Lymington was lovely, we went to the Otter and Owl Sanctuary.

And stayed at a nice Bed & breakfast named Fernbrake, the host made us feel comfortable and happy and would recommend it highly, it was located on a side track so was very quiet. See: http://www.fernbrake.co.uk/

We ate sunday lunch at the Hobler Inn pub, all our dinners was yummy and i ate two deserts! See: http://www.alcatraz.co.uk/indexSite.html

View photos here

Synamtec Backup Exec – USB Hard disk – Backup-to-Disk Folders going offline – resolved

There is a known problem with using Backup-to-Disk Folders (on a USB external hard disk) in Synamtec Backup Exec where the drive / folder goes offline just before a backup is started which means the bacup pauses until the folder is back online – you can make it come online by right clicking it and selecting Online. But I think i have found the solution to the problem!

Randomly i kept the application open and the backup worked without going offline and i have done this for over a week now and the nightly backups has worked ever since!

 I think leaving the app open means it keeps the connection to the external disk open and live and the problem before was when the backup starts it needs the drive to be ready but it can take a few seconds for this external drive to wake up and be ready and backup exec just timeouts and marks the drive offline for ever – until user action puts it online.

If you find this helpful – please please leave a comment! Its great to know people read this and i have helped.

adium and unknown error 205

Hi,

I think i started to get this error when i updated to the latest version of  adium (on mac osx)

Every time i connect to msn i get a error message popup saying unknown error 205, unkown user.

I’ve just found out how to stop this, the problem is that i somehow got the user: messenger@microsoft.com on my buddy list. Just using Adium this user never shows up so i installed Microsoft Messenger for the Mac, connected and went to preferences then privacy and removed that user from the lists (either the allow or block list) – to do this right/Ctrl click the contact in the list and select delete (thanks Camille for highlighting this weird UI)

Quit messenger and loaded Adium without the annoying message popping up

If you find this helpful – please leave a comment  – use the link below – thanks!

Direct link to the English messenger 7.01 or Click here to go to the page to download Microsoft messenger for the mac. Its a confusing page, scroll the details frame – bottom right and the download links are at the bottom.

Weekend in Bath with Avril

Had a lovely weekend with my girlfriend in Bath.

Fudge Factory sell nice fudge

3 page photo album – nav buttons top left

Las Vegas & New York Holiday Aug 2008

Went to Las Vegas and New York with my brother for two weeks ending with Sacha’s stag weekend in New York.

Had lots of fun, and bumped into a couple of people from Mitcham! Can’t believe it, certainly made the evening.

Stayed at ~Circus Circus in Las Vegas – nic e and large room (with two double beds!) but the place was unsurprisingly full of families which was annoying.

Vegas is sureal – see photos here

New York was cool, similar to london but much bigger – in many ways! See photos here.

Flash is random

If you’re not a Flash programmer this may not entertain you – so move onto something funny, if you are please read on…

If you have a two movie clips – one laid over the other, flash is ‘clever’ and knows the user can’t see the one underneath and therefore deactivates mouse handlers – onPress, onRollover etc when the mouse moves over the MC overlaying it.

Another test (s3 inside s2) shows all handlers of a MC within another MC will never be called if the containing MC has any handlers set.

Check out this movie showing what i mean

British Museum – China’s Terracotta Army

Went to the British Museum the other day with mum to see China’s Terracotta Army.

The exhibition was pretty crowed and small was wasn’t that enjoyable but was good. But the other stuff in the museum made up for it, was there for over 5 hours and was very knackered by the time i got home!

See: British Museum – China’s Terracotta Army