insignificant ramblings of a 50-something woman
-
First day of spring
I’ve never seen so much snow outside our front door before. Aberdeen is looking gorgeous this morning for the first day of spring. I flew back to Aberdeen from Nice yesterday afternoon and I’m very lucky to be here. All other airports in Scotland were closed and all BA and Flybe flights in and out…
-
Antibes, France
I’ve been quiet for a little while because the past week I’ve been in Antibes for a team meeting. Here’s my team (photo courtesy of CK): We are nine Happiness Engineers working from six different countries. I met three of my team members for the first time last week which was great. I love working…
-
VPud – vegan black pudding
I tried the world’s first vegan black pudding this week. It’s made by a firm in Lancashire called The Real Lancashire Black Pudding Company. It was delicious! It’s made mostly with oats and pearl barley, two of my favourite foods. They use beetroot to give it a deep red colour. It’s very easy to make:…
-
Minecraft and pubic hair
I’ve never paid much attention to where my site’s traffic comes from until recently and now I’m intrigued by the amount of search engine traffic I get for an old Minecraft post I published in 2014. Google Webmaster tools shows me all the search terms people use to find my site. The top 30 search…
-
Don’t eat my muffin!
Daniel left this note before going to school this morning: It says: Dear Dad and Mum and Elizabeth, make sure you save a muffin for Daniel. I have not had mine yet. That’s not entirely true. I made a batch of twelve muffins yesterday and he’s already eaten two of them. This will be his…
-
Enabling debug in WordPress
In my post about troubleshooting WordPress plugin problems I expalined how to disable plugins and themes when you don’t have access to the wp-admin dashboard. But what if that doesn’t fix the problem? Suppose it’s not a plugin or theme breaking the site but something else. The next step in this scenario is to turn…
-
Vegan banana choc chip muffins
Is there anything more delicious than banana and chocolate mixed together? This has always been my favourite combination for a muffin. These are very quick and easy to make and they’re also a great way to use up elderly bananas. Ingredients 2 ripe bananas 2 tablespoons ground flaxseed 6 tablespoons water 1/4 cup vegetable oil…
-
Troubleshooting plugin problems in WordPress
You’ve just installed a new and exciting plugin on your WordPress site which you can’t wait to use but it breaks the site. You can no longer access the wp-admin dashboard and all your visitors are seeing a white screen of death when they try to load the page. Fortunately there’s an easy way to…
-
Shared spaces
I want to write about shared spaces. These are road spaces that everyone shares – pedestrians, cyclists, motorists, buses, and taxis. Rather than segregating users into their own space, all signalling and road markings are removed and everyone is thrown in together. The theory is that if you remove all the road markings, traffic lights,…
-
Creating Minecraft mods: setting up the environment
Note: I’ve created a two YouTube videos showing how to do this – part 1 & part 2. Yesterday I posted a guide for installing Minecraft mods on a Mac. The logical next step to this is is creating your own mods. This is not quite as easy as installing them – you will need…
-
How to install Minecraft mods on a Mac
My most popular post of all time by far is a documentation page about how to install Minecraft mods on a Mac. Nothing else I’ve ever written has come anywhere close to the popularity of that post. I guess no one really cares how I spent my weekend but clearly a lot of people want…
-
A winter person
I didn’t want to leave Ballater today. It started snowing heavily this morning and it was the kind of snow that settles for a few days; the best kind of snow. The flakes were huge and dry and it wasn’t windy or particularly cold. The snow followed us all the way back home, turning to…
-
Ballochie Suspension Bridge, Braemar, Glenshee, and snow
I took these photos today of the magnificent Ballochie Suspension Bridge which is just outside Braemar. It was built in 1924 and spans the River Dee. I always admire it when we drive past, not just for the bridge itself which is beautiful in its own right but also for the setting – the forests,…
-
Craigendarroch, Ballater, Scotland
Today we walked up Craigendarroch which means hill of oak (craig = hill or crag/rock, and darroch = oak). It’s a steep, rocky hill overlooking the village of Ballater. From the ground it doesn’t look very inviting because of the rocky cliffs and indeed the women behind the reception desk in our hotel tried to…
-
My 10 minutes of radio fame and Ballater
Yesterday I had the very great pleasure of being on BBC Radio Scotland’s Out For The Weekend programme, which is on Friday afternoons. They called me earlier in the week to see whether I’d be interested to come in and talk about my petition and I said unequivocally, yes! It was just a short 10-minute segment…
-
Australianisms
A couple of months ago Elizabeth started watching Zumbo’s Just Desserts which is an Australian reality TV cooking show. She loved it. I was amused by all the questions I got after she’d watched an episode, “What’s a bickie?”, “What’s an iced vo-vo?”, “Is Arnotts a real company “, and even (gasp), “What does Aussie…
-
Bike path for Union Street
Which of the following two photos do you think looks better? Union Street without a bike path: Union Street with a bike path: The second photo is an artist’s impression produced by Cycling UK. It was a year ago last month that I discovered the city council had no plans for a bike path through…
-
Is this our “Stop the Child Murder” campaign?
I organised my first ever protest yesterday and it went really well. The protest was to call on the Aberdeen City Council for a protected, segregated bike path on Union St. I don’t want to say it was a success just yet because there is still no commitment from the City Council for a protected bike…
-
Internet Shopping Fail
In wishful anticipation that a lot of people will turn up on Saturday wanting to sign the petition for a bike path on Union Street, I bought some clipboards on Amazon yesterday. The only problem is that I accidentally ordered A5 clipboards instead of A4. Now I’ve got 6 of the damn things and they’re…
rachel.blog 