Jason's Blog Site

Everyone in the UK will know that the past 5 days have brought mayhem to the county, it seems that we are just not set/prepared for snow. Schools closed, roads closed and not a gritter insight!

Since the weather extended the kids holiday by a week, it seemed ashame to not get out and enjoy the white stuff.

Here's some photo's/video of what we've been doing.

You will have noticed that I've been drawing my car, and messing about with graphics etc. So it's said that redheads have more fun, which I doubt, but I believe that they might just look a tad better than silver (but only as a drawing). To prove my point I changed the colour of my drawing, and the results speak for themselves.

For sometime now I've wanted to update my company website, but time constrants and family have meant that I've put it off for a few years now, but now that has al changed. With a slow year for work, I took the time to re-vamp and hopefully generate more business.

Below is a screen grab of the homepage, this site is built from scratch, with a few flash elements thrown in.

DesignWise Website

Photo's of your pride and joy are great, BUT sometimes nothing beats a really good illustrated image.

Below is an example of a Mitsubishi GTO Twin Turbo, drawn in CorelDraw X4.  It took to good part of 24hrs to complete, and if I'm honest, still needs some work doing to it.

Click the image to view larger view! 

Just recently, I've noticed that due to the lack of use my car has been getting, that the battery is not quite charged as it should be. There's nothing wrong with the battery, just that the alarm draws power from the battery and it drains over a few weeks of none use. So armed with 'google search' I set about looking for a solution to my problem, and the first thing I found I liked it alot.

My first link was to the Maplins website, here Maplin.co.uk and found this 

It's a solar panel trickle charger. It comes with connectors to plug into your cigerette lighter socket, or clips to connect direct to battery. (The cigerette lighter option is the easiest, but only if your car's socket is not switchable live, mines switchable, so I'm going to have to run a new wire that's perminant live to it.)

The charger draws power from the sun or artifical light, and since England is cloudy (alot) it still works. So just plug it in when I get home, unplug when I won't to use the car and no more dead battery woes, and its meant to prolong the life of your battery.

From time to time I just get bored at work, guess it helps being the boss!! Anyway I was surfing the net this morning and saw a really nice illustration of a Porsche GT, so I thought I can do that, so armed with a photo of my car, I set about creating an illustration based on my GTO.

Here is the result:

For those that don't know, the illustration is a vector graphic, these are scalable without loss of image/resolution, where as a bitmap can not. I was going to do it in Adobe Illustrator, but plumbed for CorelDraw instead. Now the image above is not finished, but gives a good idea of how the car looks.

1 day later a small update to the rear end....


Pimp my ride....

The summer has now come and gone, well almost, refreshing morning bike rides just before the day warms up have been on the cards these past few weeks.

My new training partner, Mark, has proved to be a worthy adversary. At the beginning of the summer Mark approached me and asked if I won't mind letting him join me when I went out on the bike, truth be known I'd been struggling to get the enthusiasm to get out, so this was what I needed to get back into the saddle. Mark is a 'Personal Trainer' and has his own gym, so I was somewhat nervous about how I would fair.

To start with we had to convert his bike from a full suspension lead weight to a hardtail ridged fork feather weight beasty! This no longer gave me the edge on my lightend bike. Lifting weights and cycling are completely different, so for the first month he struggled, but soon his own fitness caught up and our 12mile route soon turned into a mad speed fest, with us both having strong sections, and no real advantage over the other. Part of the course was a 3 mile sprint from Elmstead to Colchester along a duel carriage way, this was not an ideal stretch to be on, and I was always waiting for some truck not to see us and turn us into 'brown bread'!

Then a few weeks ago Mark asked if it was possible to lengthen the course, this was good news as I had an alternate route that I had used a few times, and was happy to get off the main road, as the new course cut the road out completely, and so the new 14.6mile course was born.

Below is a googlemap of the course:
(not sure why the route sometimes does not always show)

View It's only 14miles in a larger map

The new route adds another 2 miles of off road cycling, this is good, with some up and downhill sections to get the heart pumping. This also has increased our ride time by 15mins, which although does not sound like much, when your continually pushing on over rough terrain it really saps your strength.

First time out, I forgot the route and had to cut it short, second time out I remembered the route but got a puncture, which Mark took great advantage of. I never realized how much more effort it takes to ride on flat tyres!!! But the third time out was a charm, and I enjoyed every minute, bump, hill and speed sections.

Hopefully we will keep getting out as the weather turns colder and wetter. I know I certainly need to just to keep my body in shape. Did I mention Marks about 18years younger than me, which makes me feel a little better about myself.

See old people can still hang with the youngsters!!!!