The trip itself was to a camp site in the Scottish highlands called Glen Nevis, which sits at the bottom of a few of the mountains in the area, and just at the right angle to fool you into thinking that Ben Nevis isn’t as tall as you think it is. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Ben Nevis, but it is an incredible effort to get there. From Middlesbrough, which is considered to be in the North of England, the journey is still six hours in the car, not including bathroom breaks and food stops. Adding to this the 2.5 hours between where they were, and where I was, it totalled over eight hours journey time in three very heavily laden cars (I was absolutely convinced that 10 people and their camping gear could not fit into three cars… I was wrong).

There is quite literally no easy way of getting to the area by car, or anything else for that matter. For the first half of the journey, it is mostly travelling on the highways, and abusing the walkie-talkies to play I-Spy and make assorted childish noises, but once you have driven through Glasgow, and out the other side, you’re well on your way to no-mans-land. Some of the roads travelled were barely wide enough for two cars, and sat at the base of cliffs, with nice plunges into local loches if you aren’t careful. There were plenty of clues on the way to where drivers’ spacial awareness had failed them, and subsequently lost wing mirrors by hitting bits of cliff face. Believe me when I say that squeezing between a wall of rock and a luxury holiday coach on a winding mountain road is enough to put hairs on your chest, and I wasn’t even driving!

Once you’re off the scary cliff road though, you’re well into the Highlands, and I never realised how right people were when they told me how incredible the Highlands were, even while driving…

If you’re interested, you can find the route taken below.

(View Larger Map).

Upon completing our epic journey into what can only be described as the middle of nowhere, we finally arrived at the campsite. The camp site was actually quite well equipped, and had full shower facilities, laundry facilities and even a burger van where you could get some fairly decent fish and chips. Something we ate like starving dogs when we got there. There was even a classy (and expensive) pub nearby! That first night though, we pitched up our four tents (2 x four man, 1 x two man, and a festival tent), in a corner of the site, and settled in by drinking our beer supply, and falling asleep.

Most of the week our diet consisted of fried things, and I developed a very unhealthy taste for fried Spam with bacon. We had some small camping stoves and the like which we used to cook food for ten. This was usually stuff that could either be fried, boiled or simmered, so baked beans, pasta and bacon made up the majority of the food.

On the days when we weren’t hiking, we had a football and a mini american football to entertain ourselves with, and plenty of beer and literature to entertain those who didn’t want to play (or in my case, couldn’t play because of the marble-sized blister I picked up climbing the mountain.

The second full day we were there was definitely the most difficult. From waking up in the morning to almost 11pm, it rained non-stop. After cramming 10 men into a single four man tent for most of the morning and lunch time, we opted for the pub, where we sat down with a game of Family Guy Monopoly. Until we’d almost drank the pub out of Thistly Cross ginger cider.

On the first day of the holiday, it was reasonable weather, and given the dreadful forecast, we opted to climb Ben Nevis. Setting off at 11am, we aimed for the top with bags packed with jackets, gloves and sweets for sugar boosts.

Progress at first was quick and entertaining. Plenty of laughing and running occurred. Granted, this was mostly on level ground, but it was still easy, and we (foolishly) thought that the climb was going to be easier than initially thought. We quickly (within a couple of hours) managed to make it to a fork in the road, where the tourist route and the pro route separated off.

The mountain has two main routes to the top. The first is what we dubbed the “tourist route”, which consisted of mainly manufactured paths that zig-zagged all the way to the peak. The second route was the “pro-climbers route”, which consisted of the same initial walk, followed by a climb up a snowy ridge, finally followed by a scramble to the adjacent peak that was Ben Nevis.

Being ambitious fools, we chose to take the hard route, and after about thirty minutes of wandering across wet rocks and loose mud, another party of boys our age came up to us walking the other way, imploring us to turn back because they’d been stuck for three hours climbing back down after realising that the ridge was impassable due to the snow. We heeded this advice, since we wanted to get back to the camp site the same day, and turned back and ascended the tourist route.

The tourist route was probably the best route in hindsight (even if the other route had been passable), since even climbing the tourist route proved to be difficult. Especially when we got about 2/3 of the way up, and the ground became almost entirely shale, causing the required effort to double since for every step we took forward, we’d slip on the shale and go half a step backwards. The whole climb became a heck of a challenge for me. Besides the fact that I am probably in the worst shape I’ve been in years, I rarely even have to climb stairs, let alone mountains! This wasn’t helped by the fact that we forgot to pack any substantial lunch, and had to survive on our small breakfast and our Mars bars and Kendal Mint Cake.

We finally made the peak at around 4pm, in the middle of a hail storm and about 4 inches of snow (we were very glad to have packed gloves and scarves, since it was sunny and warm at the bottom). It had taken us 5 hours, which included a 1 hour detour from the turn-back. Celebration was made with a large bottle of wine and celebratory photographs and phone calls. Of all the people to contact, my boss at work received a text message asking him nicely to turn on my Outlook out-of-office autoreply message!

In conclusion, climbing Ben Nevis has definitely been one of the most physically challenging things I’ve ever done, but it’s also ticked off one of the things I wanted to do before I died!

Enjoy, and as always, Peace.

I have always made an effort to avoid making this resolution for two reasons. Firstly, it’s completely unimaginative, and secondly, I never needed to (no ego intended). Since I was a teenager, I have been a regular gym attendee, and my fitness levels were good. In 2010 however, I reached a weight of 90KG (~200lb), and it was at that point where I couldn’t live in denial any more (my excuse has been that it was muscle, not fat), I need to diet. So I’m making it my aim to lose at least 10KG (~10lb) over the course of the year.

For a long time now, I have been having some sleep issues, generally involving going to bed at unsociable times long after my girlfriend has given up and gone to bed. According to at least one study of programmers, I’m far from the only one that suffers these problems, but that doesn’t mean that I hate myself any less for writing this blog post at 1am on a Tuesday morning. My aim this year is to get this under control, so that I can start being sociable in mornings again. Some of the tips mentioned in this StackOverflow wiki will hopefully help.

This year, as always, I went back to my home town of Lincoln (UK) to celebrate new years with some of my closest friends, and in my hung over state while attempting to fix my parents computer, managed to break it beyond all redemption. A crime that cost my parents £400 in new computer hardware, and almost cost me a severe disowning (thankfully my parents are the forgiving sort, so it’s a suspended sentence).

However, I digress. The key task I was given from my parents was to salvage the data from the old hard disk in their now defunct computer, and while doing so I discovered that the disk is actually in very good condition, and while my parents will in the near future be receiving a DVD containing their precious files, I have profited with a 150GB hard disk!

I have been using a Virtualised copy of Ubuntu Linux for quite some time now, and I have therefore decided that now is the time to start Dual booting a copy of Ubuntu alongside my Windows 7 installation. The fact that a large proportion of my software is now multi-platform (GIMP, Eclipse, etc), combined with the fact that WINE support has never been better, and that I’ve recently purchased The Humble Indie Bundle #2 which fully supports many Linux, means that (hopefully) the transition could be very smooth.

Therefore my final target is to finally stop dipping my toe in and out of Linux and giving up, and finally take the plunge and embrace my entitled freedom. Hopefully the Ubuntu Forums will be prepared for the onslaught of newbie questions!

Oh, and happy new year!

Peace.

I thought I’d get right to the point. WordPress. Is. Awesome. When I wrote my original portfolio in 2009, I opted to use WordPress, but I only used it to create the blog area of the site, the rest was done in plain XHTML using the odd Dreamweaver HTML template system.

When it came to rewriting, I decided that it would be wise to see what tools would make life easier. While I was holidaying in Centre Parcs in February with my girlfriend, I bought a copy of .net magazine, which featured a big article on using WordPress. I must admit that it was quite the eye-opener. On the back of that Magazine article (which I’d recommend trying to get a copy of if you can find/order it, Issue 199) I decided to write this whole site using WordPress templates, and I never looked back.

Admittedly, WordPress isn’t a full-blown CMS compared to other alternatives, but for small sites, it can’t be beaten. Almost everything you’ll ever need to do is already set up for you and running. All that you need to do to get a basic site up and running is to just install WordPress, and then modify a set of specially crafted PHP files to create your theme (or do nothing if you just want the default WordPress theme). Even writing search queries is as simple as calling a function and running through The loop.

When I was deciding on a design for my website, HTML5 discussion was all over the place. The promise of a final draft in 2012, its implementation in (almost) all major browsers, and so on, has put HTML5 very much to the front of almost all web developer’s minds, mine included. So when it came around to choosing the markup for this site, I made HTML5 an option.

This proved to be somewhat controversial, since when I asked around about using HTML5, some people were cautiously for using it, and others were almost aggressively against using it because it wasn’t yet mature. In the end though, I opted to use HTML5 as an experiment, in an effort to see whether or not it can be used.

Obviously there were some limits as to what could be done using HTML5, specific functionalities such as video and audio are a no-go, since browsers like Internet Explorer have no implementation for them. But what I did opt to use were the new Semantic tags, which HTML5 introduces, such as the tag for holding content articles and the tag for holding “tangentially relevant” information (i.e. content that isn’t core to anything, but can provide further explanation to things in the content).

One of the main things I noticed with HTML5 is how good support actually is. Even in Internet Explorer, certain things such as the DOCTYPE and the new Charset meta tag are supported without hacks or workarounds. But a few minor bugs in Firefox aside, support is already quite mature.

However…

The only warning I’ll give for people considering using HTML5 semantic tags is that Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and below requires a JavaScript shim to support the semantic tags (which can be found at: http://code.google.com/p/html5shim/), and if your visitors have JavaScript disabled, then your CSS has to either compensate for this, or provide an error message.

One of the most pain-free decisions I made when writing my new portfolio site was the choice to drop Internet Explorer 6 support. Internet Explorer CSS hacks are a fact of life, even in IE8. However hacks for IE7 and IE8 hacks were quite minimal in this site. Internet Explorer 6 however tripled the required hacks, and required that I not use things such as the “child” selector, which complicated the CSS immensely. In the end, things got so bad that IE6 support got dropped (except for a message at the top of the page telling IE6 users that they aren’t supported) and I never looked back.

Well, that’s my bi-annual random rambling done for now. I am aiming to increase my post rate as my new years resolution, so hopefully there will be more random rambles in the near future!

Peace,

– Karl Nicoll