Tony Ruscoe’s Blog

Daddy Ruscoe

2011-04-11T09:13:00.002+01:00

I’m pleased to say that I’m now a very proud father following the birth of my beautiful daughter a couple of weeks ago. That doesn’t mean this blog will turn into a baby blog filled with cute baby pictures though. But here’s one, just this once:

However, I thought it would be worth mentioning the books and apps that I found useful during the pregnancy and birth.

Books

Many books written for fathers-to-be often assume that all men love watching football, drinking beer, playing football, going to the pub, and watching more football, and then break it to them gently about how they won’t have either the time or money to enjoy beer or football once the baby is born. Other than enjoying the occasional beer, that’s far from an accurate representation of me.

Fortunately, The Expectant Father: Facts, Tips, and Advice for Dads-to-be is perfect for new fathers that don’t match that “typical bloke” stereotype. It’s written by an American author, so a few sections aren’t relevant for readers in the U.K. – although when you read about how much it costs to give birth to a baby in an American hospital, it will make you incredibly grateful for the NHS – but the rest of the book is really useful and informative for fathers anywhere.

Broken down into sensible monthly chapters that cover what’s happening to the baby as it grows, what the mother might be going through both physically and emotionally, and how the father might also be feeling, I found it to be educational and reassuring and would definitely recommend it for any expectant father. I’m now looking forward to starting the New Father Boxed Set by the same author which covers the next couple of years. (The author also created MrDad.com but I’ve not had chance to check that out yet.)

Apps

Of course, there are loads of baby-related apps now available. I downloaded a number of free baby names ones which varied in quality quite a bit. I guess the usefulness of these largely depends on whether you actually find a name that you like, although simple sorting, filtering and the ability to mark names as favourites are good features to have for lists consisting of thousands of names. In the end, I think my favourite one was Baby Names.

Contraction Calculator was essential during the early stages of labour to help gauge when it was time to call the midwife and go to the labour ward. It’s basically a simple timer that records when contractions start and stop, provides the average for the last five, notes when the waters break, and lets you export all the data.

Pro tip: Don’t get lazy and change your phone settings to keep the screen on at all times while using this Contraction Calculator app though, as labour can last for days but screen burn can last forever. Fortunately, what I thought was screen burn disappeared after a few hours of normal use.

Ancestry Family Search Chrome Extension

2010-12-21T08:31:00.000+00:00

Over the last few months, I’ve been getting into writing Chrome extensions for the team at work to help automate some of the tasks that we regularly need to perform in the browser. I was amazed how easy it was to write Chrome extensions and I’d encourage anyone with HTML and Javascript knowledge to read the Google Chrome Extensions documentation and give it a go too.

Until a few weeks ago, I’d still not written any publicly available extensions, but then I saw this tweet from EricaJoy:

Half asleep thought, must write down before passing out. Chrome extension for searching familysearch.org for Ancestry.com relatives. SLEEEP.

That sounded like a pretty good idea to me and something that would be easy to write too. A quick search of the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery suggested nothing like it already existed either. After a few hours of coding, I gave Erica a copy of the extension to install and test. Feedback was good, so I uploaded it to the gallery for other genealogy enthusiasts to enjoy:

Ancestry Family Search Extension (Chrome Web Store)

I’m pleasantly surprised to see that it’s already got 156 users, 93 weekly installs and an average of 4 stars from 8 ratings. If you install the extension and discover a bug or have an idea for a feature request, you can send me your comments using the feedback form.

Note: I had a couple of issues with the extension when FamilySearch.org moved their search from beta.familysearch.org to www.familysearch.org which meant I needed to update the permissions but those should be fixed now. I’m also aware that the search criteria is no longer displayed on the results page but I hope to fix that in the next version.

Baby Ruscoe

2010-10-06T10:56:00.001+01:00

I’m pleased to announce that we’ll be having a baby in March 2011. And here’s the proof…

10 weeks 2 days

11 weeks 6 days

Update: 3 November 2010

18 weeks 6 days

Back to the Future: Back in the Cinema

2010-10-02T10:03:00.000+01:00

I first watched Back to the Future when it aired on TV, complete with terrible dubbing over the “bad” language, which I recorded to VHS and watched practically daily. I had the pleasure of seeing Part II and Part III at the cinema. My mother then bought me a VHS rental copy of Part II from a friend that owned a video rental store – ssshh! – and I watched that until the tape was nearly worn out. When the VHS trilogy box set was eventually released, I asked for it one Christmas and watched that regularly, having a strict rule that I would always watch each film all the way through so that the tape wouldn’t unevenly worn in places.

When the DVD box set came out, I got that for another Christmas and was disappointed to see that it suffered from being framed incorrectly (known as the BTTF DVD Framing Fiasco) and got two replacements discs delivered from Universal. When the “Ultimate Edition” DVD box set was released a few years later, I couldn’t resist getting that one as it included even more bonus material and previously unseen footage.

I also made my own plywood Hoverboards and other replica props from the trilogy when I was younger, filmed some scenes out of the film with friends when I was in my school’s Film Club, bought the soundtrack and original score on cassette and CD, own several model DeLoreans, and more recently dressed up as Doc Brown for a friend’s 80s party.

I guess you could say that I’m a fan; a fan that had never seen the original movie at the cinema. So imagine how excited I was to hear that Universal was re-releasing Back to the Future in UK cinemas to show the original movie in all its digital glory following the remastering they’d done for the 25th Anniversary Blu-ray release.

Last night, I joined a queue of other fans waiting to watch the movie on the big screen, most of them probably for the first time like myself. You could sense the excitement in the air and hear people arguing about which film in the trilogy was the best or worst while others quoted their favourite lines. When we eventually got seated and the film started, there was a spontaneous round of applause and cheering followed by complete silence as everyone watched the opening scene. (Kudos goes to the guy taking a photo of the opening logo with the iPhone and not getting thrown out!)

After watching the film on TV, VHS and DVD dozens and dozens of times over the years, was it any better on the big screen after its digital remastering? Of course it was!

I’m not sure whether it was due to the remastering or simply the size of the screen, but the level of detail was amazing, for better or worse. A great example being the DeLorean, which actually looked like it had been built by a crazy scientist, with all the welding, rivets, screws and imperfections clearly visible. On the other hand, you could really see the effort the make-up department had gone to in order to age the actors playing Doc Brown, Biff Tannen, Lorraine and George McFly by thirty years for the 1985 scenes, but it unfortunately looked a bit too much like latex at times.

But what I enjoyed most about watching the movie at the cinema was the audience reactions to all the classic lines, which made me hear some of them with a new perspective, like when the Doc says, “There’s a rhythmic ceremonial ritual coming up.” I hadn’t really appreciated how funny that actually sounded before. I also only really realised for the first time quite how sinister Biff is being when he’s trying to force himself on Lorraine in the car outside the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance before George comes to save her. I generally just felt more emotionally attached to the characters and totally immersed in the action. When the credits started to roll and the audience was clapping and cheering again, I honestly felt a bit overwhelmed. And I can now finally say that I’ve enjoyed watching Back to the Future at the cinema.

As a final thought, I hope that this re-release proves to the film production companies that they don’t need to remake old films in order to bring them to a new audience and rake in the money from the theatrical release. If it’s a truly great film, all they need to do is re-release the original. There’s even no need for any extra effects to be added either. It should also reinforce the theory that film-lovers will still pay (what seem to be extortionate amounts these days) to visit the cinema and watch a great film despite having already watched it many times in their homes, sometimes even from poor quality copies. In fact, it might even persuade people that they need to see the film on the big screen to fully appreciate and enjoy it. Things have changed a lot over the last twenty-five years with the widespread adoption of the Internet and the movie industry needs to change too.

Food, Glorious Food… in Sheffield and Whitby

2010-09-05T22:38:00.000+01:00

I’ve had comments that all we ever seem to do – based on my blog posts – is eat, eat and eat some more. Perhaps I should just turn this into a food blog so that I’ve got an excuse to keep stuffing my face. Anyway, this is going to be another post about eating as Suzy and I decided to take a few days off work and enjoy a week of indulgence to celebrate one year of marriage.

“Confusion” Food?

We started the celebrations on Saturday night with a meal at Spice Market Cafe (371-373 Ecclesall Road, S11 8PF) which we’d recently discovered was part of the ever-growing Relax, Eat & Drink family of restaurants owned and run by award-winning Sheffield restauranteur Richard Smith. (Artisan is another one of theirs which we enjoyed a couple of years ago.)

We’d read some reviews describing the “East-meets-West” menu as being a “mish-mash” and “confused” but even Richard Smith says himself, “There’s no authenticity to this restaurant whatsoever – it’s Brit spice.” I guess some call it fusion food but my mum called it confusion food when I described the menu to her. Whatever you want to call it, Spice Market Cafe is probably a love-it-or-hate-it type of place.

Personally, I loved the Black pudding wontons served with sweet and sour cabbage and apple chutney and thought the Fisherman’s appetiser board (consisting of curried smoked haddock, crab spring roll, crispy king prawns, salt and pepper squid, salmon fish cake and SMC dips) was a great variety of fishy goodies for two to share. Our mains of Slow braised belly pork, crackling, noodles asian vegetables and miso gravy and Teriyaki cod, sesame long beans, noodles and crispy king prawns were a bit disappointing though. They weren’t terrible, but just seemed to lack something by comparison to our excellent starters. However, the desserts certainly made up for it. We were a bit spoilt for choice but decided to share Toffeed bananas with sesame seeds and banana sorbet and Chocolate samosas with orange dipping sauce. It was lucky we shared as both were so rich and sweet that I don’t think I could have eaten a full portion of either one. Mmmm!

Sunday Lunch

The day afterwards, we met up with my sister and brother-in-law and coincidentally went to yet another Relax, Eat & Drink establishment. (And no… this post isn’t sponsored by them!) This time, it was The Cricket Inn (Penny Lane, Totley, S17 3AZ) which we’d been to a few times before. Not only do they have top quality ales by the award-winning Thornbridge Brewery but they also have an excellent Sunday lunch menu. I had their huge Steak and Thornbridge Ale pot pie made with cheddar, thyme and grain mustard pastry, dripping roast potatoes, buttered vegetables and pie gravy and it was absolutely delicious but left no room whatsoever for dessert. As always, their specials boards and Sunday roasts looked great too. I can’t believe they still don’t take reservations at weekends though, so be prepared to wait for a table on Sundays (although we were lucky and only had to wait five minutes).

Whitby

We also escaped Sheffield for a couple of days and ended up in Whitby where we’d heard they had good seafood, fish and chips, and a nice clean beach.

When asking people where to eat in Whitby, you’ll almost certainly be told to visit The Magpie Cafe. With long queues outside the cafe (as forewarned) we decided to join the slightly shorter queue next door for their takeaway, where we got some lovely cod and chips.

After spending the afternoon walking along the beach, we had planned to go back to The Magpie Cafe for an evening meal as their restaurant menu looked great but the queues were still ridiculous and we were hungry. Faced with a number of seafood restaurants, we perused all their menus, read a couple of online reviews, and decided to try The Marine Hotel (caution: Flash website).

I enjoyed their Marine crab cakes made from lightly spiced cod and crab, served with a pleasantly hot and spicy sweet chilli jam, and Suzy had an equally enjoyable Lobster salad with a mango salad and dressing.

For main course, Suzy chose the Pan fried fillet of Sea Bass and chive mash with a prawn, parsley & lemon butter. With mussels being unavailable, I opted for their platter, which I didn’t realise at the time of ordering would include half a lobster, a fillet of sea bass, a fillet of sea trout, a whole mackerel, pieces of battered cod, king prawns and squid all served on samphire.

Needless to say, I didn’t actually manage to eat all that even after sharing some with Suzy. With both of us unable to face any of their desserts, we decided to walk along to the amusement arcades and let all the fish go down before grabbing a sugar donut and waffle with chocolate sauce and cream.

We stayed overnight at the excellent Heathfield Bed and Breakfast Guest House where Linda served up some Whitby kippers and poached eggs for breakfast the following morning that I think might have been the best kippers I’ve ever eaten. If you’ve only had the pleasure of boil-in-the-bag kippers, it’s worth visiting Whitby just to taste these!

With our bellies full once again, we started our journey home, visiting the historical Whitby Abbey and the picturesque Robin Hood’s Bay along the way.

You can find more photos of Whitby on Picasa Web Albums.

My Own URL Shortener

2010-07-21T22:32:00.000+01:00

I’m a big fan of the domai.nr service which helps with the discovery of domain name variations creatively using ccTLDs. If you’re into wasting money on random domains, you can spend hours trying different words and phrases to see which crazy variants are still available for purchase. Ignoring the standard .com, .net and .org TLDs that are already taken, here’s what the service suggests as possible valid domains for my surname:

rus.co/e
ru.sc/oe
r.sc/e

Since .sc domains cost a whopping US$125 per year, I’d ruled those out a long time ago. But when I heard .co domains were being opened up to global registrations, I happily handed over $29.99 to Go Daddy to reserve the domain, hoping nobody else would claim it during the sunrise and landrush periods.

After over four months of waiting, I finally got confirmation yesterday that the rus.co domain was mine, joining the likes of t.co (Twitter), fb.me (Facebook) and goo.gl (Google, obviously).

My first shortened URL is rus.co/e which is currently serving a 302 temporary redirect to ruscoe.net since I’ve not yet decided how to structure my shortened URLs. For example, should I always include the trailing /e after the domain so that it looks more like my surname? Should I use a namespace for different URLs – e.g. something like rus.co/e/b/ or rus.co/eB/ for blog posts and rus.co/e/x/ or rus.co/eX/ for external links?

While I’m making my mind up about those details, I also need to decide which technology I want to use to power the URL shortener. I’ve considered services like bitly.Pro and awe.sm but think I’d prefer to have tighter control over things, so it looks like I’m going to be getting my hands dirty writing a custom solution...

Any tips or suggestions?

San Francisco, California

2010-07-18T22:00:00.004+01:00

I can’t believe it’s July already. Time literally seems to have flown by since I started at Google in January. They say that happens when you’re having fun. And fun I am having. In March I visited our Zürich office. If you’ve never seen photos, you need to take a look. The BBC has a story and video from when it opened in 2008 too. A couple of weeks ago, I visited our Amsterdam office for a day and back in May I had the pleasure of visiting our headquarters in Mountain View. No matter how many photos I’d seen and stories I’d heard, nothing really prepared me for the scale of the place. Cycling between buildings to attend meetings and having to choose between a dozen or so different places for lunch takes some getting used to. Not that I’m complaining, of course!

Since the trip was also my first time in the United States, I decided to make the most of it and spend another week in San Francisco with Suzy. We stayed at the Hotel Triton, a boutique hotel themed around pop culture, where we had a corner room on the fifth floor overlooking the Dragon Gate entrance to Chinatown.

As seems to be the tradition for these types of blog posts, here’s a run down of what we got up to, which is more for the benefit of my memory than anything else… so feel free to skip the words and just look at the pictures.

Saturday 15th May 2010

After meeting Suzy at the airport and checking in at the hotel, we wandered around the local area looking for a place to eat, going full circle and ending up at Mikaku across the road from where we were staying. Their bento boxes were excellent and their choice of saki looked equally impressive.

Sunday 16th May 2010

We got up early and grabbed a quick breakfast at Starbucks before heading down to Howard Street so that we could join the Bay to Breakers crowds. I only found out about this crazy phenomenon a couple of days prior when a colleague warned me about it, suggesting that it was the type of event that tourists generally want to either avoid or embrace. After reading that it basically involves a 12km run, followed by pretty much the entire city in fancy dress, with music, drinking, dancing and nudity, we decided to go and take a look. If you’re ever in San Francisco at this time of year, I’d definitely recommend checking it out. This was the 99th year it’s taken place, so I suspect 2011 is going to be absolutely huge.

We walked about 5 miles of the route and saw a bit of Golden Gate Park before turning back to get some lunch. Then we went to Jacks Cannery Bar to rest our legs. I sampled a couple of local ales and Suzy had the best Bloody Mary I’ve ever tasted.

For dinner, we decided to try one of the many restaurants in Chinatown. With so many to choose from, we read tons of online reviews before settling for Chef Jia’s Restaurant (925 Kearny Street, San Francisco, CA 94133) as recommended by the SFGate Chinatown page:

Chef Jia’s: Every guidebook ever written on SF has probably mentioned the House of Nanking, but few seem to shower its neighbor, Chef Jia’s, with equal praise. We don’t see why. Huge lines form for Nanking, but Chef Jia’s food is just as good (if not better) and cheap – and the restaurant is less crowded. One warning: Order “hot” only if you really mean it.

They were right about the queues for the House of Nanking, that’s for sure. We’ve no idea what the food’s like in there, but Chef Jia cooks nice big portions of Chinese food that tastes great. Chef Jia’s place is a bit worn in places and was empty apart from one other couple when we got there, but its tables soon started to fill up with locals and people wanting to avoid the Queue of Nanking.

Monday 17th May 2010

We skipped breakfast and ventured out into the torrential rain to take a tour of Chinatown and its tacky tourist shops, elegant rooftop temples, and a back alley that was used in Karate Kid Part II.

We ended up in Little Italy and went to Caffe Delucchi for lunch and picked a couple of nice hearty dishes from their breakfast menu that were really tasty; Polenta with Pulled Pork for me, and Italian Frittata for Suzy, which she washed down with an Italian strawberry cream soda.

The weather didn’t improve much after lunch, so we got even more wet walking to Lombard Street, taking a trip hanging from the side of one of the famous cable cars up and down Russian Hill and Nob Hill, then strolling along The Tenderloin to the Civic Center before heading back to the hotel for a rest before dinner.

I’d been told that we had to try Lulu’s whilst we were in San Francisco, so I’d already booked a table via their website a couple of days earlier, and I’m pleased to say that the food lived up to the high expectations. They were mega busy, so the service was a little slower than you’d usually expect from a good restaurant, but we didn’t really mind as we were enjoying the atmosphere of the place and the food was delicious, so we were surprised when the waiter brought us two complimentary dessert wines after our main course as an apology for the poor service. They clearly have high standards and know how to treat their customers, which certainly makes a pleasant change!

Tuesday 18th May 2010

For breakfast, we made a quick stop at the Brioche Bakery (210 Columbus Ave, San Francisco, CA 94133) to pick up a croissant or two, walked up to see Coit Tower and then walked down to Pier 33 so that we could hop on the 09:30 ferry that we’d booked online with Alcatraz Cruises so that we could spend the morning on Alcatraz Island.

About.com says that Alcatraz is “only an abandoned prison, the weather can be unpleasant, it stinks during seagull nesting season, and it takes up almost half a day to go there and back.” To which I say, “So what!? It’s unique and has a fascinating story.”

Even though we got the first boat of the morning, there were still things we hadn’t seen on the island four hours later. The main reason we left was that there are no places to eat or drink on the island unless you take your own picnic, which we’d recommend doing so that there’s no need to rush back to the mainland.

After successfully breaking free from Alcatraz, we made our way to Pier 39 for some lunch. We’d been wondering what San Fransisco’s local speciality dish was before we arrived since there was nothing that really came to mind. Once you’re there, it’s quite obvious that clam chowder served in a bowl made out of sour-dough is a favourite though. Prices and quality seem to vary a bit but we opted to eat ours at Chowders which was fine.

Pier 39 appeared to be the most touristy part of San Francisco. For a city that must attract so much tourism, San Francisco has mostly managed to keep its identity, but Pier 39 makes up for this a bit.

We spent the remainder of the afternoon watching the seals at Pier 39 and exploring the rest of Fisherman’s Wharf, including a visit to the Musee Mecanique where they’ve got an impressive collection of antique arcade machines and video games, mostly for 25¢ per play, and quick potter around Ghirardelli Square.

Being down near the water, we figured we’d try to hunt down some good seafood for tea. Having read reviews online, it seemed SFGate had hit the nail on the head when it said, “Look in any San Francisco guidebook and you won’t see much on dining at Fisherman’s Wharf. No one takes the time to really check things out. Instead, writers dismiss it with a casual wave of the pen, saying there’s nothing good.” Regardless, we opted for Nick’s Lighthouse (5 Fisherman’s Wharf) since they seemed to have some decent crabs and other seafood available from the takeaway counter outside and SFGate didn’t say anything too bad about them. Despite being overpriced because of the location, the crab would probably have been the most sensible thing to order. Our seafood platter was disappointing, the wine was expensive and the service wasn’t great. It was the only place during our trip where we felt we didn’t want to leave the 18% tip that’s expected at most restaurants in San Francisco.

Wednesday 19th May 2010

Following a quick breakfast from Boudin Bakery & Sidewalk Cafe, we hit Macy’s, Bloomingdales and the Westfield San Francisco Centre for a touch of window shopping to work up an appetite. Ever since arriving in San Francisco, I’d been determined to enjoy a stereotypical American meal, consisting of huge portions of buffalo chicken wings and ribs or a massive burger. Although San Francisco’s numerous and varied restaurants are fantastic, unless we were just looking in the wrong places, this is one cuisine that it seems to be lacking.

Thankfully, The Cheesecake Factory on the top floor of Macy’s seemed to have the menu I’d been looking for. Their starter of buffalo wings the size of chicken drumsticks was plenty for two to share and was really enough for a lunchtime meal, but I’d already ordered a portion of beef ribs for my main course and Suzy had chosen a burger. But for a moment, we thought we might never get to taste them.

Whilst waiting for our main courses, our waitress told us that there was a bomb scare in Union Square – right outside Macy’s – and that she was going to leave, along with about half of the staff. Although there was no official evacuation plan, she gave us the option to leave too. I had no idea whether this was a regular occurrence or something more serious but the waitress seemed pretty panicked and the rest of the staff clearly didn’t know what to do. Suzy joked that we should just stay put and enjoy our “last” meal together. Fortunately, one of the waiters announced they’d been given the all-clear about five minutes later, just as our main courses arrived. Perfect timing!

Despite the bomb scare, we both thoroughly enjoyed our meals. I’m not sure I’ve ever had beef ribs before but these were melt-in-the-mouth-good with so much meat on them that I had to leave two to take home for a snack later, along with a generous slice of Key Lime Cheesecake to share.

After wandering around Union Square and Downtown a bit more, we went back to the hotel and got the ribs and cheesecake chilling in the minibar fridge before nipping out for a quick drink with a mate who had just moved to San Francisco. It wasn’t until we got back to the hotel that we found out — thanks to Twitter users — that the whole of Union Square had been evacuated and they’d even sent in a bomb disposal robot while we were waiting for my ribs!

Thursday 20th May 2010

We grabbed another quick breakfast from Starbucks on our way to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market where we found several really good specialist food and cookware shops in The Ferry Building Marketplace.

We bought two massive wrap sandwiches from Golden Gate Meat Company (caution: terrible website jingle) to eat later and then hired two bikes from Blazing Saddles so that we could cycle across the Golden Gate Bridge and see it up close. Once we’d reached the other side, we enjoyed an ice-cream in the tiny Mediterranean-like city of Sausalito before catching the ferry back.

For our last evening in San Francisco, we grabbed a couple of huge and delicious slices of pizza from Escape from New York Pizza down the street from our hotel and then jumped on a streetcar to join a fellow Googler for drinks down The Castro.

Friday 21st May 2010

On our last day in San Francisco we’d planned to sample some burritos but decided not to bother dragging our suitcases around for a few hours and just had a lazy morning in the hotel, getting our money’s worth by staying right until check-out time, and then made our way to the airport thoroughly exhausted and ready for another holiday…

Not quite as stereotypically American as I was expecting it to be, I thoroughly enjoyed San Francisco and I can’t wait to visit again!

One Year Ago

2010-07-11T12:00:00.001+01:00

One year ago today, I was in a pub alongside the Norfolk Broads with a few of my friends, not fully appreciating the world of pain and humiliation I would be facing later in the day as I had to run back and forth in front of a large group of people firing paintball guns at me. It was my Stag Do Weekend. Whilst enjoying a pint of Guinness in the beer garden, I got one of those phone calls that nobody really wants to make or receive. It was my mum letting me know that my grandad had passed away.

We knew his death was imminent, so I’d told her that I wanted to know if anything happened even though I was on my stag do. He’d been ill for some time, almost certainly longer than he would have had us believe, and I’d been reminiscing and making mental notes about the good times I’d spent with him for a while so that I’d be well-prepared for speaking at his funeral. My sister wanted to write a poem and she used the Internet to research the type of thing that people said at funerals. What I said is posted below, with some minor edits, in the hope that it might help anyone looking for inspiration for what sort of thing to say at a funeral, and also so that my fond memories of him will be digitally archived forever.

Grandad John

One of my earliest memories of Grandad was him buying me my first He-Man figure because I’d been brave enough to have my injections. I guess he thought that if I was going to play with dolls or action figures, I should play with the manliest ones available. Having two daughters and a granddaughter, I think he wanted to make sure I didn’t grow up to be a big girl.

I remember that he once saw Nan teaching me how to play patience with a pack of cards and decided that I should learn how to play a real man’s card game, so he started to teach me how to play pontoon. For money. On one side of me, he was telling me how to bet £1 or £10 at a time, and on the other side Nan was whispering in my ear that he really meant 1 pence or 10 pence. I was only about eight years old, so either one would have wiped out my piggy bank anyway.

I must have been about nine or ten years old when he decided to buy me a second-hand chest expander. I think he must have looked at my scrawny body and decided that I needed to get a bit more muscle on my bones so that I could be as strong as He-Man. I tried to use it a few times but quickly came to conclusion that I could never be the weightlifter or wrestler that he once was.

Another sport he continuously tried to get me interested in was football. Quite often he’d ask if I’d seen the match, to which I’d reply that I hadn’t because I wasn’t really interested in it. This probably went on for the last 20 years or more, with him more recently shouting down the phone when I was speaking to Nan, asking if I was watching the match. On a few occasions, when he said there was a good match on, I’d try my best to humour him and ask who was playing. He didn’t always know, he just loved to watch it regardless. Even with his eyes closed! Whenever his eyesight got a bit worse and he struggled to see the players, he’d just go out and buy a bigger TV.

Something else he liked to watch on his big screen was boxing. Knowing how much some of the boxing matches cost to watch, he was extremely proud to tell us all that he’d found a Sky channel where he could watch the match without paying. Little did he know that he’d found the pay-per-view channel and it actually cost him £15 when he clicked the “View” button! (And he wasn’t very pleased when my auntie had to basically tell Sky customer services that he was an old man who didn’t know what he was doing in order to get his money back!)

New technology wasn’t always one of his strong points. Having a TV, video recorder, DVD player, Sky box and CD radio – all of which being clearly labelled on each plug, just like he always did – he bought himself a remote that could control all of them, only to find that when he changed channel on the Sky box, it switched on the CD player. And when he turned down the TV, it turned up the radio. In hindsight, that worked out pretty well for him as he liked to listen to the football or rugby whilst watching the snooker or cricket.

You’re probably aware of modern digital cameras that don’t require films. Well, Grandad was definitely ahead of his time as he’d been taking pictures without any film for years using his many cameras that he’d picked up at car boot sales. Of course, those cameras still needed film.

Everyone knows how he loved scouring flea markets, car boot sales and charity shops for bargains. He was even generous enough to offer his bargains around. Over the years, I’ve gratefully taken away gadgets, torches, tools, etc. To be fair, I’ve also had to turn down shirts, pairs of socks and caps that, well, only a grandad would wear! In fact, before my sister took her boyfriend to meet Nan and Grandad for the first time, she warned him in advance that he might get offered a pair of trainers. Sure enough, my future brother-in-law had barely sat down when Grandad was checking the size of his feet and pulling out a pair of trainers he’d picked up at a bargain price a few weeks earlier.

One thing I definitely have in common with Grandad is my love for food. If his plate was piled high, he was happy. If you gave him a choice of desserts, he’d want both of them in one bowl. If you took him out for some posh pub food, he’d tell you that Morrisons have bigger portions. If you told him the buffet was open, he’d be the first in the queue. Just a few weeks ago, Suzy and I went round to see him at home while he was having his tea. (It was 3 o’clock, so only an hour earlier than usual!) With his plate piled high he gestured to Nan in the kitchen and said, “She keeps giving me these skinny meals!” Even though he was ill, he hadn’t lost his appetite or his sense of humour.

Finally, I’ll leave you with one of his many profound statements:

“I never forget anything... because I never remember it in the first place.”

Well, Grandad, I’ll never need to remember you, because I’ll never forget you.

Migrating from Blogger FTP to Custom Domains

2010-03-05T10:10:00.001+00:00

When I started my first weblog back in 2002, I was using a homegrown blogging platform. It was powered by ASP and a Microsoft Access database, which I later rewrote to use the FileSystemObject to create static files after I learnt that Access didn't scale well even with just a handful of visitors.

Around three years later, I eventually decided to migrate to Blogger because it had some excellent features which I couldn't be bothered to implement myself. The killer feature for me was FTP publishing, which allowed Blogger to upload ASP files to my server so that I could continue to host the blog on my own domain whilst still being able to benefit from its other features, like archive pages, comments and an XML feed.

I was therefore disappointed – but not surprised – to see the announcement that Blogger would no longer support FTP publishing after 26 March 2010 (which was later extended to 1 May 2010). Although the team added a bunch of new features when they launched Blogger Beta in August 2006, FTP publishers couldn't migrate to Blogger Beta until a couple of months later, and even then they couldn't benefit from the full range of new features. It was pretty clear to me then that FTP support was going to be phased out one day, especially when custom domains were announced in January 2007. To be honest, I'm surprised it's not been switched off sooner!

Migrating to custom domains actually offered me the best of both worlds; the ability to host the blog on my own domain without needing to worry about hosting whilst benefiting from all the latest features. Regardless, I decided against it for no good reason other than the fact that it would require some effort on my part.

One advantage of working at Google is that I was able to reach out to the Blogger team and ask what they had planned for the FTP migration tool before it was launched. I was really impressed and relieved to hear that they'd been working hard to design and develop a tool to make the migration from an FTP blog to a custom domain as quick, easy, pain-free and seamless as possible for blog owners, site visitors and search engines alike.

The migration tool is now available on Blogger in Draft, the special version of Blogger where new features are tried out before being released to everyone, and it should be available on www.blogger.com soon. There's an excellent step-by-step screencast of the FTP Migration Tool, which I've embedded later in this post, so I won't go through what that process entails here. However, having now followed the migration process myself, I thought it would be good to mention a few extra things that I did to help make the move as smooth as possible.

Feeds

Before the announcement that FTP support was being deprecated, I had already moved my feed to FeedBurner and was redirecting any requests for the old feed using a custom ASP error page which I configured on my host. Furthermore, rather than provide FeedBurner with the location of the static XML feed on my server, I pointed it at the one hosted by Blogger since I figured that would be faster to update and more reliable.

Note: You don't need to do this, and not everyone with an FTP blog will be able to redirect requests for their old feed to their FeedBurner feed, which is why the Blogger FTP Migration Tool automatically posts to your blog explaining that the blog has moved, giving your readers the new feed address.

Tracking

Since I use Google Analytics to track visitors to my website, I wanted to make sure this would still work. Although my existing profile would have continued to track visits to the blog, the site structure would be different and could have potentially made my reports confusing, so I decided to create a new profile. All I needed to do then was update the tracking code in my blog template to include my new profile identifier.

Note: Updating the tracking code in the template before the migration process would result in the FTP blog being updated to use the new tracking code too, so I did it after the blog has been fully migrated. If you're thinking about doing the same, make sure you read my note about updating templates below.

Template

I had always used a custom template with my FTP blog, so I had to update any absolute references to my CSS, JavaScript and image files. Although Blogger's missing files host could have taken care of this, I prefer to have things like this explicitly defined so it's clear how things are working at a later date.

My blog had also been using Active Server Pages (ASP) for server-side scripting, so my blog template included things like server-side includes and ASP code blocks. Since those obviously wouldn't work on Blogger, I had to make a few changes to remove any server-side scripting. This basically involved moving the content of the includes to directly inside the template and rewriting any of my server-side logic to use jQuery on the client-side instead.

Note: One small gotcha about updating your template after your blog has been moved to a custom domains is that the "Off" option for the NavBar is no longer available. If you had this switched off previously, any changes you make to your template now will add the NavBar code back into your blog. If you're using your own custom template, you may find it doesn't play nicely with your CSS. It should be possible to fix this by updating your CSS though.

DNS

To make the migration process even quicker, I created my CNAME entry in my DNS records in advance, following the instructions in the Blogger Help article for using Custom Domains.

Migration

Once I'd completed the things above, I was ready to use the migration tool:

Links

Since I often link to my own blog posts from within my blog posts, I need to go back through my old posts and update these links to point to my new blog address. The same applies to any links pointing to my blog from other places, like profile pages on other services or social networks. Although the redirects would direct visitors to the right place, it's always best to remove any unnecessary redirects where you have control over the links.

Tip: If you're using Google Webmaster Tools, it's quite easy to get an idea of where is linking to your blog. Just go to the dashboard for your old FTP blog domain and click the More link under the Links to your site section to see all external links and then select Internal links in the menu to see where you're linking to your blog posts from inside your website. (This will probably return hundreds of URLs, but it should give you a good idea of what you need to update.)

Conclusion

Using the migration tool was really straightforward and I'm pleased it's encouraged me to finally make the switch. I'm going to have to spend some time checking out all the new features that are available to me now I'm finally using Custom Domains.

Since I like to keep my website directory clean, I'll probably give it a few months to see how things go before I delete my old blog posts from the server. I may then create server-side 301 redirects to make sure any visitors, proxies or search engines that have been slow to pick up the changes will still manage to find my posts. If you're planning on migrating and think you're comfortable setting up server-side redirects and getting your hands dirty with Blogger's advanced setup options, you could always just skip using the migration tool and follow the Advanced Setup Checklist.

(Finally, apologies to anyone who briefly saw messages posted to my feed over the last couple of days saying this blog had moved; I was too eager to try out the migration tool and my unusual configuration caused a couple of bugs to surface in the process. These bugs have now been fixed and everything is working!)

Recipe Binder for iPhone

2010-01-23T16:33:00.002+00:00

Recipe Binder for iPhone uses Facebook Connect to work with the Recipe Binder for Facebook application, which currently has 5,315 monthly active users and over 20,000 user-submitted recipes for Facebook users to browse, search, favourite, rate and comment on.

What I like best about using Recipe Binder over other recipe websites is that all the recipes have been “tried and tasted” by other friends and Facebook users. I’ve found some pretty good original recipes on there and I will honestly be adding more of my recipes now I know I can easily access them on my iPhone.

Recipe Binder for iPhone (iTunes App Store link) is available now and costs just $1.99 / £1.19.

Well done Chris and Dave!

Non-Disclaimer: This is just a quick plug for an iPhone app which a couple of mates have been working on. They haven't asked me to write this and I'm certainly not being paid to do so. In fact, I even had to buy my own copy...

New Year, New Website, New Job

2010-01-03T15:30:00.004+00:00

Firstly, apologies to anyone who saw this post earlier when the title was incomplete and it didn't have any content. I am currently on a train trying to use Blogger on my iPhone. Although I didn't have any signal to save the post as a draft, it seems I did have enough signal for it to publish when my fat thumbs pressed the wrong button. Then FeedBurner picked up the post and published it to Twitter. And I've just had a Google Alert email telling me it's now indexed by Google Blog Search. It's times like this when I have to question whether the real-time web is a good idea. Anyway...

The reason I'm on a train is because I'm heading down to London in preparation for the first day of my new job at Google. Even though it's been two weeks since I finished work, I still feel like I've been rushing around trying to get everything sorted. One thing I wanted to do before starting was update my website. It's about four or five years since I last made any significant changes to the design or underlying structure of the site, so it's long overdue. And given I'm joining the Webmaster Team at Google, I figured I might get a few more visitors.

Of course, I left it until the last minute and didn't really get chance to do everything I wanted to. So what you're seeing at the moment is definitely a work-in-progress version which I expect to change lots over the next few weeks, months or years. It could really do with an Under Construction animated GIF. If you get any errors or experience any issues with any area of the site, please get in touch.

And if you do find any problems with my site, please don't worry... I can assure you that the quality of my work at Google will be much, much better than this!

2009

2009-12-31T12:21:00.001+00:00

Some of our friends got married.
Some of our friends became parents.
Suzy and I became godparents for the fourth time.
My grandfather sadly passed away.
I turned 30.
Suzy and I finally got married.
We went to Scotland for our honeymoon.
We went to Jersey for my belated birthday celebrations.
I decided to leave SDL.
I decided to join Google.
And I finally stopped biting my nails.

2009 has been an eventful year. Best wishes to everyone for 2010.

Tony Ruscoe: Going Google

2009-12-08T00:00:00.002+00:00

I’ve been using Google for about nine years. I made the switch from AltaVista because it was faster to load and had better results. Ever since then, I’ve been constantly amazed at the number of new services being released and acquisitions being made by Google.

When I stumbled across Google Blogoscoped in 2004, I immediately got hooked on the idea of trying to second-guess Google’s next move. Searching for secret services and subdomains, digging through source code, monitoring experimental sites for subtle changes, and looking out for security exploits are all things I’ve done and written articles about. It’s always fascinated me to see how quickly news about Google spreads across the Internet, newspapers, radio and television. And it shows that I’m not the only one interested in Google!

People have often suggested that I should work for Google, given my obvious enthusiasm and keen interest in everything they do. I’ve always dismissed that suggestion, partially because I’ve never seen a position advertised which I felt would suit my skills and experience, but also because of all the stories I’ve read about how difficult their interview process can be!

So when I heard Google was looking to hire Webmasters in the UK, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the job specification described my ideal job and I decided to apply. What happened next came as quite a shock...

I’m extremely excited to confirm that I will be taking on a role within Google’s Webmaster Team from January 2010, working from the London office. Although I don’t know exactly what I’ll be working on yet, I’ll be part of the team that looks after Google’s many websites, which doesn’t include products such as Gmail, Google Calendar or Google Reader, but might mean I get to work on Google’s home page from time to time!

Unfortunately, this obviously means I am no longer able to be co-editor of Google Blogoscoped. But that doesn’t mean I’m leaving for good and closing the door behind me. After five years of contributing to the forum, I don’t intend on stopping now. I’ve always been impressed by the discussions and observations made by the Blogoscoped community, so I hope it will continue to be a part of my daily routine for many years to come. I’ll probably avoid commenting on any speculation about what Google might be planning next though... ;-)

I’d like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank Philipp for giving me the chance to write for Google Blogoscoped, which has clearly played a large part in developing my interest in everything Google-related and has given me some great exposure and opportunities. Being able to attend Google Press Day 2007 in Paris was a particular highlight for me!

I’d also like the thank everyone else who reads the blog or contributes to the forum. It’s people like you who help to keep Google honest. It’s really important that you continue to question what Google is doing and raise any concerns that you may have about how Google operates as a company. After all, I want to work for an awesome company rather than an evil one!

[Enormous thanks also to Google Blogoscoped members, and Googlers, John Mueller and Reto Meier!]

Ocean Restaurant at The Atlantic Hotel, Jersey

2009-11-16T13:18:00.002+00:00

In my last post about my surprise trip to Jersey, I left a bit of a cliffhanger, which was mainly to give me more time to write this post. But I can now reveal that my final surprise of the weekend was an evening meal at one of Jersey’s Michelin-starred restaurants!

After a drink and some bar snacks in our hotel bar, Suzy booked a taxi to take us to Ocean Restaurant at The Atlantic Hotel. On arrival, I could tell why she didn’t book a room at this hotel for the weekend; wooden floors, stone walls, chandeliers, expensive art-work... the place was like a palace!

Since we were a little early, we had another drink and some more bar snacks, being careful not to ruin our appetite, and then perused the menus. Given our previous experience and Christian’s more recent comments about the price of the wine at The Old Vicarage, which is the only other Michelin-starred restaurant we’ve visited, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the wine at Ocean Restaurant started at around £18 per bottle.

Despite being tempted by their tasting menu, we both decided to choose from the à la carte menu. And here’s what we ordered:

Abuse-bouche

Sole Goujon with Lemon Foam

Starter

Suzy: Ham – Pressing of ham knuckle, maple baked foie gras, roasted langoustines, artichoke purée

Tony: Scallops – Pan roast hand dived Jersey scallops, honey baked pork belly, creamed cabbage

Main Course

Suzy: Beef – Tasting of Jersey beef miniatures, dauphinoise purée, onion rings, beef marmite

Tony: Venison – Roast loin of Scottish venison, autumn vegetable dauphinoise, d’Agen prune jus

Pre-dessert

“Something like lemon meringue pie served in a shot glass but without the pastry”

[Sorry, once again this wasn’t on the printed menu we brought away, so that’s my lame description!]

Dessert

Suzy: Chocolate – Hot chocolate soufflé, white chocolate ice cream

Tony: Coffee – Coffee panna cotta, espresso jelly, white chocolate quenelle, whisky foam

We would have loved to have tried the cheese board too, especially after seeing the huge selection of cheeses get rolled out on a trolley for the table next to us, but we honestly couldn’t have squeezed in another mouthful!

I generally don’t like coffee-flavoured desserts, but the coffee panna cotta tasted great. In fact, everything we had was cooked to perfection. The flavour combinations were all spot on, the presentation was outstanding, the service from the staff was of the highest standards, and the atmosphere was perfect too.

Sounds pretty good, eh? That’s because it was! Seriously, it’s easy to forget what amazingly good food tastes like. When we were on our honeymoon, we did have some really good food, but it’s clear why Ocean Restaurant has a Michelin star – as well as three Rosettes in the AA Restaurant Guide 2009 – and all those other places we’ve visited don’t.

Ocean Restaurant definitely gets our recommendation!

Jersey

2009-11-04T21:18:00.003+00:00

As a belated 30th birthday present, my lovely wife booked a surprise weekend away for us both. I only found out where we were going when the airline made the final call for the flight. All I knew until that point was that we were flying, didn’t need any foreign currency and I needed to pack some smart clothes! So I was very pleasantly surprised, in the dash for the plane, to discover that the destination was Jersey. It was somewhere we’d never been and I’d heard it’s a beautiful place to visit. As always, food played quite an important part in the trip, so keep reading for mouth-watering menus...

The Hotel

After our short flight, we decided to walk from the airport to our hotel in order to see a bit more of Jersey. After 20-30 minutes of walking, we reached St Brelade on the south coast and walked a little bit further along the beach to the luxurious L’Horizon Hotel & Spa. We were told at the desk that we were lucky to have been given a corner room which had a balcony and sea-view. And very nice it was too!

The view from our room at L’Horizon Hotel & Spa

Lunch at the Oyster Box

After dropping off our bags and hanging up our clothes, we wandered back along the beach to get some lunch and ended up at the Oyster Box. Since we knew where we were going for dinner, and suspected it could end up being quite a big feast, we decided to have something light. Which is a shame, because their menu looked excellent and we could have benefited from the annual Tennerfest offers, which basically promotes fixed price menus at hundreds of eating establishments across the Channel Islands.

Anyway, we ordered three Special No. 3 Royal Bay Oysters, Grilled with Garlic Butter and Chorizo to share, Suzy ordered Chancre Crab Risotto with Chives, Rocket and Parmesan and I had Tuna Sashimi and Salt & Pepper Squid with Wasabi Mayo and Soy. The restaurant was really fresh and modern, everything was beautifully cooked and tasted great (although Suzy thinks there was too much “salad crap” on top of her risotto which she pushed to one side). I am now also a fan of wasabi mayonnaise and reckon it would go brilliantly with chips!

Deep Tissue Massage

My next surprise was a deep tissue back massage. After getting changed into our robes and slippers, we made our way down to the spa facilities at the hotel, which felt very odd to be honest! I’d been having some problems with my shoulder and, according to the masseuse, I have bad posture too, which is good to know. After she straightened up my shoulders, I actually felt much better. I’ve now got to learn how to sit up straight. After spending some time in the sauna, steam room and salt-water swimming pool, we went down to the bar for a quick drink before going out for dinner.

Dinner at the Crab Shack

Next to the Oyster Box where we went for lunch is the Crab Shack. Although part of the same group, the Crab Shack is a lot more relaxed and casual than the Oyster Box but the food is definitely just as good. For her starter, Suzy had the Crab, Scallop and Clam Soup and, since we were in the Crab Shack, I obviously had to have 2 Chancre Crab Claws with Mayo. Both were delicious. For main course, Suzy had a huge portion of Tempura-battered Local Fish and Chips with Peas and I thoroughly enjoyed a massive pot of Thai Moules and Chips.

Thai Moules and Chips at the Crab Shack, St Brelade’s Bay

The main courses were good but we would both have appreciated better chips; Suzy would have liked fewer fresh-cooked chips and I would have preferred long fries. It was clear they were very busy as they had to borrow staff from the Oyster Box, which was apparently uncommon for a Friday night, according to the waitress who kindly apologised for the slow service, so we were lucky to have got a table since they don’t let you make reservations unless there are at least six people.

Bicycles

For my next surprise, Suzy had arranged for us to hire a couple of bikes from Jersey Cycle Tours. Most people seem to think this isn’t much of a surprise since it sounds more like hard work than fun, but I’d wanted to hire some bikes when we were back in Lismore so I thought this was exciting! First we had to quickly remind ourselves how to ride a bike and then we set off along Jersey’s fantastic cycle routes...

Jersey War Tunnels

Our first destination on the bikes was Jersey War Tunnels, the site of Hohlgangsanlage 8, the German Underground Hospital built by German occupying forces during the occupation of Jersey during World War II. (Thanks Wikipedia!)

Jersey War Tunnels: Entrance tunnel

The tunnel complex hosts a fascinating and heart-wrenching exhibition about Jersey’s history and its German occupation during World War II. The educational exhibits really make you empathise with the people of Jersey. If you visit the island and don’t know much about its history, I would definitely recommend a visit.

St Helier

After some lunch in the café at the Jersey War Tunnels, we got back on our bikes and headed to St Helier, where we had a quick mooch about the shops and market before pedalling back to St Aubin to drop off our bikes before getting ready for my last surprise of the weekend, which I’ll save for my next post...

Honeymoon Part 4: Cedar Manor and Windermere

2009-10-08T22:28:00.004+01:00

Saturday

In order to break up the long drive home from Scotland, we decided to stop over in the Lake District for the final night of our honeymoon. After searching online for somewhere that served good food, I fortunately came across The Cedar Manor Hotel & Restaurant in Windermere which had excellent restaurant and hotel reviews. Although their website says they only allow stays of two nights or more at weekends, I gave them a call anyway and was lucky enough to find that their ‘Coniston’ room was available for just one night. This room has a view of Lake Windermere, which we were just about able to see through the trees.

The view from our room at Cedar Manor Hotel

After exploring the area and grabbing a sandwich from Lazy Daisy’s in Windermere village, we headed back to the hotel for a relaxing game of Mastermind (borrowed from the hotel lounge) and then got ready for the final evening meal of our honeymoon...

Dinner Menu

Starter

Suzy: Terrine of Wild Boar with Home Made Pear and Raisin Chutney and Cardamom Rye Bread

Tony: Potted Shrimps – Morecambe Bay Shrimps with a Sweet Cucumber, Dill & Rocket Salad

Main Course

Suzy: Lamb Rump with Black Olive & Basil Crust, Couscous and Mediterranean Vegetables with a Red Wine Jus

Tony: Medallions of Pork Fillet with Grilled Polenta, Buttered Spinach, Wild Mushrooms and a Smoked Paprika Cream Sauce

Dessert

Suzy: Dark Chocolate and Hazelnut Truffle Cake with Honeycomb Cream

Tony: Glazed Lemon Tart with Poached Seasonal Fruit

Complemented by their freshly baked homemade bread, this meal was the perfect end to our honeymoon. Once again, we found local ingredients cooked to perfection in really healthy sized portions... and by ‘healthy’ I guess I really mean ‘unhealthy’ since they were pretty big! The staff were really friendly and the lounge and restaurant both had a sophisticated yet relaxed atmosphere. If you want to sample the food at Cedar Manor, I would definitely recommend booking as they were mega busy!

Sunday

Cedar Manor Hotel

After enjoying our wonderful honeymoon and filling ourselves with course after course of great food, everything finally caught up with me and I had a bit of man-flu on the last day. Even the Grilled Grapefruit followed by a Cumbrian Grill (Gold Medal Winning “Pinks” Cumberland Sausage and Dry Cured Bacon, Lancashire Black Pudding, Mushrooms, Tomatoes and a Hash Brown) which I had for breakfast didn’t make me feel any better. So after Suzy finished her Fruit Compote and Yoghurt followed by American-style Pancakes with Dry Cured Bacon & Maple Syrup, we decided not to bother going on any crazy long walks and just settled for a quick visit to Lakeland to check out the useless yet essential kitchen gadgets before heading home and settling back into reality...

Honeymoon Part 3: An Lochan and Dunoon

2009-10-01T22:20:00.002+01:00

Thursday

After filling out stomachs once again, we made our way to our next hotel which was An Lochan, Tighnabruaich on the Kyles of Bute. Previously known as The Royal Hotel at Tighnabruaich, An Lochan is a grand old Victorian building some modern touches.

Upon arrival we were greeted by John, the very friendly hotel manager who seemed to work every waking hour and yet was still always cheerful. He seemed to be so excited that he had a couple on their honeymoon that he couldn’t wait to tell us that they’d be giving us “a wee bit of complimentary fizz” to help us celebrate!

The view from our window at An Lochan Hotel

When we arrived, there was a small wedding about to take place. Everyone was waiting for the bride to make her entrance down the stairs and looked a little disappointed to see Suzy and I make an appearance instead! To avoid getting in their way, we went for a little walk down towards Tighnabruaich and then went back to the hotel to check whether anyone had uploaded any of our wedding photos to Facebook! They had, but the Internet connection was practically non-existent, so we viewed a couple of them and then got ready for yet another slap-up meal...

Dinner Menu

Starter

Suzy: Langoustine Ravioli with Carrot & Courgette Salad, Tomato & Dill Vinaigrette and Shellfish Foam

Tony: Pan Seared Scallops with Black Pudding, Apple Puree and Curry Oil

Main Course

Suzy: Loin of Gloucester Old Spot Pork with Caramelised Apple Sauce, Wilted Curly Kale, Roasted Black Pudding and Saffron Mash

Tony: Taste & Texture of Aberdeen Angus Cross with Fondant Potato, Fine Beans and Truffle Sauce

Dessert

Suzy: Glazed Lemon Tart with Vanilla Poached Strawberries and Mascarpone Ice Cream

Tony: Summer Berry Pudding with Elderflower & Champagne Sorbet, Berry Coulis and Crisp Mint

My starter was absolutely perfect. The hand-dived local scallops were juicy and went really well with the classic combination of black pudding and apple puree. The curry oil was a nice touch for a bit of spice too! Suzy was a bit disappointed with her langoustine ravioli as the other items on the plate were a little over-powering for the delicate flavours of the langoustine.

Again, my main course was out of this world. I love dishes which include beef done two ways. The differences in taste and texture really complement each other. I first enjoyed this style of dish at The Supper Club (now closed and known as Moran’s) and this was even better than I remembered it. I think the truffle sauce was the winning factor. Suzy was a bit disappointed with her pork though. It was good but nothing special. (And I think she was just a bit jealous of my meal!)

After desserts (both of which were great) we had a quiet drink in the cosy Shinty Bar at the back of the hotel.

Tony having a Bloody Mary in The Shinty Bar at An Lochan

Friday

For breakfast, Suzy had fruit and yoghurt followed by kedgeree and I had cereal and a full Scottish breakfast, complete with black pudding and haggis!

We then spent the day in the small town of Dunoon. One of the few places to visit in Dunoon is Castle House Museum, which is right next to a viewpoint which offers some great views of Dunoon and across the Firth of Clyde towards Gourock.

Looking over Dunoon from the viewpoint near Castle House Museum

The museum is contained in a few rooms of the house and offers all sorts of information on the surrounding areas and exhibitions about local history. (Some of the exhibitions do look like school projects but that just adds to the authenticity!)

On the way back to the hotel, we took a few more photos of the views of the Kyles of Bute and then had a very quick visit to the tiny Tighnabruaich Village and Port before going for a walk down the stony beach before dinner.

Dinner Menu

Starter

Suzy: Carpaccio of Venison with Caramelised Shallots and Rocket & Parmesan Salad

Tony: Platter of Garlic Roasted Langoustine caught by Arthur in the Kyles

Main Course

Suzy: Spicy Beer Battered Fillet of Halibut with Salt & Vinegar Chips and Tomato & Shallot Salad

Tony: Pan Seared Fillet of Seabass with Fine Ratatouille and New Potatoes

Dessert

Suzy: Summer Berry Pudding with Elderflower & Champagne Sorbet, Berry Coulis and Crisp Mint

Tony: Coffee Crème Brûlée with Milk Ice Cream and Pistachio Biscuit

Once again, I thoroughly enjoyed everything, especially the huge langoustine on my starter, although I was a bit disappointed with the size of the fillet on the main course. And once again, Suzy thought the venison was over-powered by the rest of the flavours on the dish and thought the fish and chips was nice but average. It’s a shame really as the hotel is great and the food was good, but I think we had much higher expectations given the standards at the previous hotels we’d visited and the fact that An Lochan has received several awards and acknowledgements. The desserts were both really tasty again though. After finishing those, we retired to the Shinty Bar again for a “wee dram” before bedtime.

Saturday

For our final breakfast in Scotland, Suzy had fruit and yoghurt again, followed by smoked salmon scrambled eggs on toast and I had cereal and kedgeree. Then we made our way back to Dunoon to catch the ferry across to Gourock so that we could make our way back to our last destination, this time across the border in England...

Honeymoon Interlude: Inverawe Smokery and Loch Fyne

2009-10-01T20:41:00.004+01:00

Thursday

Inverawe Smokehouse

After leaving Port Appin, we stopped off at Inverawe Smokery, where we took ourselves around their small but very informative tour and then bought some smoked salmon pâté and smoked Brie (which our subsequent hotels kindly stored in their fridges for us) from their shop before continuing our journey to Loch Fyne Oyster Bar in Cairndow for lunch.

Having thoroughly enjoyed a few meals at Loch Fyne in Sheffield, we couldn’t resist calling at the original oyster bar. (For what it’s worth, I’ve read quite a few bad reviews of various Loch Fyne restaurants but we’ve always found them to be excellent...)

Lunch Menu

Starter

Suzy: Oyster on ice with Chilli and Coriander Dressing and an Oyster with Garlic Breadcrumbs

Tony: Oyster on ice with Chilli and Coriander Dressing and an Oyster on ice with Shallot Vinegar and Tabasco

Main Course

Suzy: Whole Lemon Sole in Parsley Butter

Tony: Bouillabaisse with Aioli and Crusty Bread

Dessert

No room! It was only lunch time after all!

The first time we had oysters at Loch Fyne, we thought they were a bit salty and gritty. All the oysters we’d eaten while in Scotland had been sweet, succulent and really tasty, and Loch Fyne Oysters were no exception. If you’ve tried oysters and didn’t like them, I’d definitely recommend trying them again if you ever visit Scotland. Once again, the main courses didn’t disappoint either. Suzy’s lemon sole was huge and really tasty (so she tells me) and my bouillabaisse was full of various types of seafood and was absolutely delicious!

After lunch, we got back in the car and drove alongside Loch Fyne on the A815, A886 and B8000, and made a quick stop to stretch our legs at Otter Ferry before reaching our final hotel destination in Scotland...

Honeymoon Part 2: The Pierhouse and Oban Distillery

2009-09-29T23:15:00.004+01:00

Tuesday

After lunch, we drove through some really heavy rain to The Pierhouse Hotel & Seafood Restaurant in Port Appin where we were greeted with “You must be Mr and Mrs Ruscoe!” and the news that we’d been upgraded to a better room because we were on our honeymoon!

The view from our window at The Pierhouse Hotel

After dropping off our bags in the room, we both had a quiet pint of local beer in the residents-only lounge and were pleasantly surprised with a card from the staff congratulating us on our marriage. We then had a chat with the friendly owner, Nick, before getting ready for dinner.

When we went back downstairs, we were given a complimentary glass of champagne and led to the best table in the house, which had been sprinkled with heart-shaped confetti!

The food here was fantastic, using really good locally supplied ingredients which were perfectly prepared.

Dinner Menu

Starter

Suzy: Cajun Chicken & Crab Fritter with Garlic Mayonnaise Dip

Tony: West Coast Scallops – Seared Plump Local Scallops served with a Caponata of Aubergine, Pine Nuts & Pesto

Main Course

Both: Pierhouse Platter – Outstanding Seafood Caught from Lismore, Loch Etive, Loch Linnhe, Mull & Inverawe. Langoustines, Scallop, Oyster, Mussels, Fresh & Smoked Salmon, Rollmop and Fresh Bread.

Dessert

Suzy: [Sorry, can’t remember!]

Tony: Homemade Sorbets – Rosewater, Strawberry and Guava

After dinner, we retreated to the residents’ lounge for a coffee and a Scotch. Since I’m still learning about which whiskies I prefer, Nick recommended one for me based on some others I like, so I now know that I also like Macallan but unfortunately can’t remember which one I had!

Wednesday

For breakfast, we both had porridge made with Scottish oats and then Suzy had poached eggs while I had kippers before catching the small ferry to the Isle of Lismore.

Lismore is a small island with very few signs. After walking down the road for a little while, we gave up trying to find the café and followed a sign to Port Ramsay. After reaching the end of the road there, we turned around and made our way back to the ferry, where we then saw the signs for hiring bikes! (If you ever visit Lismore, I would recommend trying to book some bikes to hire in advance unless you’re seasoned ramblers who don’t mind walking without knowing where you’re going!)

Castle Stalker from Castle Stalker View

For lunch we went to Castle Stalker View to get a closer look at Castle Stalker. Then we visited Oban Distillery and had a taste of some cask-strength Scotch whisky during the tour before buying a bottle of the normal stuff to bring home. To give the alcohol a chance to work through my system, we took a look around Oban and McCaig’s Tower before heading back to the hotel.

The Oban Distillery

Although we were within walking distance of a couple more hotels and restaurants, we decided to eat at The Pierhouse again since we’d already spotted a few more things on the menu that we wanted to try.

Dinner Menu

Starter

Suzy: Smoked Halibut and Swordfish with Caper Berries and Salad

Tony: Pierhouse Oysters – Chilled and served with Spicy Chorizo, Raspberry & Shallot Vinaigrette

Main Course

Suzy: Soy, Sesame, Garlic & Chilli Stir Fried Tiger Prawns served with Rice Noodles

Tony: Seaweed, Lemon & Pepper Crusted Fillet of Cod served with Sugar Snap Peas

Dessert

Shared: Whisky Ice-Cream followed by a Selection of Cheeses

Thursday

For breakfast, we both had cereal followed by a full Scottish breakfast, then left the friendly staff at the wonderful Pierhouse and jumped in the car to drive to our next destination...

Honeymoon Part 1: Edinburgh Castle and Mhor

2009-09-29T22:14:00.004+01:00

Monday

Since it was pretty much on our way to our destination, we stopped off in Edinburgh for a few hours to grab a sandwich and have a look around Edinburgh Castle.

Suzy and Tony at Edinburgh Castle

Then we battled with the city centre one-way system, with most of the roads still closed from the Edinburgh Festival and tram works, before finally getting out of Edinburgh, ditching the sat-nav, and taking a more relaxed scenic drive through the woodlands of The Trossachs heading for Balquhidder.

After driving for six miles down a single track road heading for nowhere, we eventually arrived at Monachyle Mhor Hotel and were shown to our exquisite room, complete with spa bath, with just enough time to relax for a moment before getting ready for dinner in their restaurant.

Canapés at Monachyle Mhor

Chef Tom Lewis – who you may have seen in the Great British Menu series shown on BBC2 in 2006 – produces some really special food. Here’s what we had:

Dinner Menu

Canapés

Both: Mackerel on toast, tomato and basil gaspacho and breaded balls of haggis

[Sorry, these weren’t on the printed menu we brought away, so those are my lame descriptions which don’t really do them justice!]

Amuse Bouche

Both: A Ballotine of Truffled Confit Chicken with Red Wine Shallots

Starter

Suzy: Hand Dived Orkney Scallops with Brown Crab Risotto, Buttered Spinach and a Shellfish Velouté

Tony: Perthshire Lamb Fillet and Ratatouille Tart, Aubergine Purée, Fine Beans with Tomato and Olive Emulsion

Soup

Both: A Demitasse of Broccoli Soup with a Crispy Goat’s Cheese Topping

Main Course

Suzy: Highland Beef Fillet and Cheek with Sautéed Spinach, Celeriac Purée, Ginger Carrots and Tarragon Jus

Tony: Scrabster Halibut Bourguignon Roasted Shallot and Garlic Purée, Samphire, Celery and Broad Beans

Homemade Puddings

Suzy: Double Roasted Peach Cobbler with Pecan Biscotti and Spiced Peach Sorbet

Tony: Dark Chocolate and Tonka Bean Pavé with Salpicon of Pineapple, Glengoyne Whisky Ice Cream

The conservatory restaurant at the front of the building offers some relaxing views of The Trossachs looking out over Loch Voil. Our table was in one of the alcoves, so felt even more special and romantic. The good service and excellent food here got our honeymoon off to a great start. It was definitely worth that six-mile drive into the middle of nowhere!

Monachyle Mhor Hotel

Tuesday

Despite being pretty full from the previous night’s meal, we still managed to enjoy the wonderful breakfast. Suzy had yoghurt and fruit compote followed by scrambled egg with smoked salmon and I had homemade muesli followed by smoked haddock with poached egg.

After a mooch about their garden and shop, we had a quick chat with Tom, the owner, before continuing our drive through The Trossachs, stopping at several viewpoints to take some photos along the way before having lunch at The Bluebell Café.

Honeymoon

2009-09-29T21:37:00.000+01:00

As you would probably expect, we went on honeymoon after we got married.

We decided on Scotland since we’d never been before and had heard great things about the food there, particularly the seafood, which we both love to eat. I guess it’s also the type of place where you wouldn’t usually want to spend a lot of money to live in luxury for the week, so it seemed like a good time to treat ourselves to something we might not get chance to do again.

Since it was one of the few things I had to organise for the wedding, I decided to put my feet up and delegate the responsibility to a company called McKinlay Kidd who specialise in planning short breaks in Scotland.

Given a brief of “a romantic break / seafood trail combination” McKinlay Kidd sent me a free, tailor-made proposal which described all the hotels, restaurants and routes we’d be taking. The proposal sounded ideal, so I booked it after doing a bit of research to find out which hotels we’d actually be staying at. (The proposal doesn’t actually name the hotels, presumably to try and discourage people from booking directly with the hotels after receiving the proposal, but it didn’t take much effort to work it out.)

McKinlay Kidd say they include a £7 per person per night service charge in their fees which they guarantee to refund if you believe that arranging your holiday through McKinlay Kidd hasn’t met your expectations. I found that booking through them was only around £15-20 more expensive in total than it would have been had I booked with the hotels directly, so I’d definitely recommend booking through McKinlay Kidd if you’re planning a trip around Scotland to save yourself all the extra hassle of dealing with several different companies.

A week or two before the honeymoon, they sent me a pack containing a touring map of Scotland, some brochures, directions and our hotel accommodation vouchers, so we were all set for Scotland!

Since I’ve been trying to write this post for the past three weeks, I’ve decided to break it up into more manageable chunks. As each one becomes available, I’ll also link to it here:

And if you’d rather just look at the photos, they’re available in my Honeymoon set on Flickr.

Wedding

2009-09-09T13:51:00.002+01:00

After proposing to Suzy last year, we finally got married last month. Here’s a photo that Chris took:

You can view some more photos taken by our guests here, here and here.

We both had a fantastic day. I won’t bore you with all the details, but we wanted to give credit to the companies that helped to make our wedding day so special. In no particular order, thanks to:

And, of course, thanks to everyone who sent us congratulations and good luck messages via Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, email, post and in person!

I Googled My Dad (Pic)

2009-06-21T00:00:00.004+01:00

... and LEGEND came up a million times!

I got this Father’s Day card for my dad. He’s definitely one in a million!

How Facebook Uses Your "Skipped" Webmail Contacts

2009-06-12T00:00:00.003+01:00

Yesterday, Facebook suggested two people to me through its “Suggestions” feature which usually includes friends of friends, co-workers and people I used to go to school with. The odd thing about these two suggestions was that although I knew both of them – I had made contact with them years ago because they are my third or fourth cousins – we had no friends in common, we had never worked at the same place, we even lived in different parts of the world. So how did Facebook know that we knew each other?

I’m sure all you Facebook users are already aware that you can enter your Gmail (or other webmail) username and password to import a list of your contacts into Facebook to see if any of them are already registered based on their email address. This is something I have never done as I don’t like to enter my Google Account password on third-party websites. Even if I had done this, I knew for a fact that I had never used my Gmail account to email these two people.

But what if Facebook had used my friends’ imported contact lists to suggest their profile to me even though they didn’t add me as a friend? I am now pretty sure that’s what happened here. Here’s how I proved it:

My friend added my email address to his Contacts in Gmail.

My friend signed in to his Facebook account and imported his Contacts from his Gmail account using the “Find People You Email” feature.

My friend chose to skip the friend suggestion it was making based on my Gmail address.

I signed in to my Facebook account and saw that my friend’s Facebook account was being suggested to me.

In summary, it seems that even if you choose to skip the contacts you have imported, Facebook will still store your relationship with those contacts. Not only will it continue to include them in your suggestions, but it will also alert them to the fact that you previously imported their email address and that you are registered on Facebook. Facebook clearly states that it will not store your password, but it doesn’t tell you that it will store all your contacts even if you chose to skip them.

Admittedly, your account will only be suggested to others if your privacy settings allow your profile to be returned in search results, so anyone could search for your profile themselves, but is it right for Facebook to suggest you to the people that you have chosen to skip? Also, does this mean it’s possible to force yourself into someone else’s suggestions list by simply adding their email address to your contacts?

Update: Canna points out in the forum that you can now remove this information from Facebook using the Remove Contacts Imported using the Friend Finder page, usually accessible via: Friends > Find Friends > Learn More. (Perhaps this is a new page as I don’t remember seeing that link before...) [Thanks Canna!]

Google Translator Toolkit

2009-06-09T00:00:00.002+01:00

Google Translator Toolkit is a new tool being launched today to help translators organize their work and benefit from shared translations, glossaries and translation memories, the Google China Blog reports (English translation by Google).

Evidence that Google was working on a service like this originally surfaced in August 2008 when references to Google Translation Center appeared in Google’s robots.txt file. At the time, the service was only available to Trusted Testers and most of the pages and screenshots were quickly taken offline. Since those screenshots were produced, it’s clear that a lot of changes have been made to the tool.

The Translation Process

The Google Translator Toolkit Workbench, showing side-by-side editing of Wikipedia’s Google article.

For those not familiar with standard translation processes, a professional translator is likely to use a Computer-aided translation (CAT) tool to help identify and extract snippets of text for translation from various file types.

Google Translator Toolkit currently only allows users to upload HTML, Microsoft Word, OpenDocument Text, Rich Text and Plain Text documents up to 1MB for translation. Alternatively, it’s possible to enter the URL of a file on the web, select a Wikipedia article or a Knol for translation.

Once uploaded or selected, files can be translated using the Workbench interface which shows the source text and the target language translations either side-by-side or above and below each other.

Previously translated segments from the translation memory are suggested and can be rated by yourself and others.

One good reason to share translations with others is so that they can be reviewed for consistency and style. Google allows users to rate translated segments, presumably for style and accuracy. Comments can also be added to the target document, which is especially useful when collaborating with other users.

Translation Memories

In addition to the global translation memory, users can also create and share their own TMs.

Many CAT tools allow the translator to store their human translations in a database called a translation memory. The memory can then be used to help with future translation projects by checking to see whether a certain word, phrase, sentence or segment has been translated before. Even if it’s not exactly the same phrase, the translation memory can be used to suggest what’s called a fuzzy match, often indicated by a percentage to reflect how similar the text is.

When translating Wikipedia articles and Knols, the translations are stored in a global, shared translation memory that’s available to everyone by default. That means previously translated phrases from these articles are stored and available for use by other translators using the service, so if they ever find themselves translating the same piece of text, Google will automatically populate the interface with the previous translations to help save time.

Google’s support article explains the process:

Pretranslating your documents

When you upload a document into Google Translator Toolkit, we automatically ‘pretranslate’ your document as follows:

We divide your document into segments, usually sentences, headers, or bullets.

We search all available translation databases for previous human translations of each segment.

If any previous human translations of the segment exist, we pick the highest-ranked search result and ‘pretranslate’ the segment with that translation.

If no previous human translation of the segment exists, we use machine translation to produce an ‘automatic translation’ for the segment, without intervention from human translators.

We realize for some translators, pre-filling with machine translation may actually slow, not speed up, the translation process. In such cases, you can change your settings to pre-fill the segment with the source text, so you can type over the source text instead of making corrections to automatic translation.

Uploaded documents can benefit from using this global TM too, but if users don’t want to share their translations with everyone, they can create their own translation memories and control exactly which users can make additions and rate translations.

Translators already using CAT tools may have translation memories stored in the Translation Memory eXchange (.tmx) open standard XML format. Google allows translations contained in those TMs to be uploaded and added to existing Google Translator Toolkit TMs, providing they’re no larger than 50MB and confirm to TMX 1.0 or higher.

TMs other than the global TM can also be searched for previously translated segments which can then be rated without opening a translation document.

Glossaries

Glossaries are collections of words and phrases with definitions and notes associate with them. They are often used in the translation process to help choose which phrase is most appropriate and to maintain consistency between translations of technical or specialty subjects. Google Translator Toolkit requires CSV format glossaries to be uploaded (it’s not possible to create one from scratch) which will then be automatically searched for terminology in the segments that are currently being translated.

Learn More

For a really quick overview of some of these features in action, you can watch this YouTube video:

How could this be useful to Google?

A machine translation of the Google China Blog explains, “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Translation of information, in our view is the key to access to information.”

Google has been working on a statistical machine translation system for a few years now, which it started to use for Google Translate instead of Systran in October 2007. Since then it’s been slowly integrating translation into many of its services, including Google Toolbar, Google Talk, Google Reader, Gmail, and YouTube. There’s even an AJAX Language API which anyone can use to build upon.

In my opinion, this latest tool has clearly been designed to help improve Google’s translation offerings. One thing on which statistical machine translation relies is aligned translations. In very simple terms, to help train a statistical machine translation system, text in one language is fed into the system alongside the same text in another language. Will enough text, the system can start to learn how certain phrases should be translated. Without aligned translations, there’s no easy way to know exactly which sentence in the source document relates to the translated version. That’s where translation memories are very useful; they contain aligned translations.

There are literally thousands of Wikipedia articles being translated all the time, but the translations aren’t usually maintained in a translation memory. Through using Google Translator Toolkit, translators could benefit from seeing previously translated text from the global translation memory and, in return, Google could clearly benefit from translators using its interface to translate any content that’s then stored as aligned translations in their global TM, which it can ultimately use to enhance its statistical machine translation system and improve the translations that are provided to end-users of any service using Google Translate.

And as the global TM grows, it might even be possible for end-users to get near-to-human-quality for translations of their documents, websites, blog posts, emails and tweets instantly.

[Thanks TOMHTML!]

Disclaimer: I am an employee of SDL, a translation company that provides translation services and software.