Mandarin Language Challenge

Since early 2009 I have been learning Mandarin Chinese off and on. This may seem an odd language to choose so let me explain. In 2007 a good friend of ours told us about a Scouting trip he was organising to Russia, Mongolia & China (further details available here. This seemed like a good idea at the time, and, to cut a long story short, Rosie & I decided to stay on in China for a further 5 weeks. The time we spent in China was absolutely amazing and I gained a real appreciation for the country, the culture and the language and I wanted to learn more.  I decided to learn the language to better understand the culture. Since then, it seems that my language learning has taken a bit of a back seat, with endless excuses rationalising why, so I have resolved to set up a language challenge to try to encourage me to get on with it!

My Epic Quest

I recently read an article on Nerd Fitness where Steve Kamb had set out his goals for ‘levelling up’ his life. He used the metaphor of Role Playing Games to make the concept manageable and put together a list of challenges or quests that could be completed to advance from one level to the next. He then decided that each quest would be worth 20% experience towards the next level, there would also be Master Quests that equated to 100% experience, and this became his ‘Epic Quest of Awesome’. I thought this was a pretty good idea, so using the same concept, I have come up with my own Epic Quest. It’s no different to a bucket list that many people have, but it just sounds cooler

Migrating to Jekyll

At the back end of last year, I started migrating my various coding projects from SVN repositories stored on Google Code to Git repositories. Through a little bit of research, I decided to use two different sites for different reasons, GitHub for public repositories, and Bitbucket for backup and work (private) repositories. Finding GitHub also introduced me to something else that I found quite interesting, GitHub Pages is a hosting service provided by GitHub that allows you to publish websites from your repository. Not only that, but it works with something called Jekyll, a simple, blog-aware, static site generator. This intrigued me and so I looked into it and this series details my reasoning and process for Migrating from WordPress to Jekyll

Travel Memories

After sorting through some of our old photos, a lot of great memories were brought up from the various holidays/travels that Rosie & I have had since we met. This is a series of posts looking back on those holidays and travels. It doesn’t include everything (for various reasons), but it does capture the memories from most of our holidays through the medium of imagery. Each post includes a gallery of some of the most memorable pictures from each holiday, along with a short write-up of the best bits. Hope you like it

Absent Without Leave

After being away from the blog for over 2 years, it is about time to explain what I’ve been up to and why I haven’t been posting. This series is a catch up from my period of being absent without leave