Monkeez.org

Joe

Our party was good. It was my best party ever. David and Ali
My best bit was the scavenger hunt; we had to found out how old a tree was so we counted the rings. We also got points for finding bugs and flowers and strange things. I had a centipede on my hand. So did my cousin, Eden. My team won the medals because we got so many points!
We had a Spongebob Squarepants cake, my mum forgot the candles. It was a really fun time.

Isaac

Today it was my birthday party! First we played a game, then we got sorted out into two teams. My team was the Red Team, with Callum, Lucas, Aaron, Tom and Alfie. The best bits were when we found the sweets because I liked the sherbet. We found a very strange leaf. Aaron F was the first to found the treasure, both times! It was my best birthday party ever!

See all the pics at our gallery. (password required).

Tonight Joe and Isaac were finally invested as Beavers, after going for 7 months.

Today we went to the Tolpuddle Martyr festival in Tolpuddle. We saw Chumbawumba, some of The Men They Couldn’t Hang and Billy Bragg.

We liked the stalls that were selling crystals, chess sets and wooden toys for us, books for Dad, clothes for Mum and ice cream for us all!

Chumbawumba are all folk now, and sounded very good. Billy Bragg was excellent at the end singing with a group of pupils from St. Mary’s school, Puddletown.

First of all, we got off the coach and then saw cows, calves, pigs, piglets, sheep and lambs. Next we saw two horses and a pony. I liked stroking the calves.

A bit later we went to the old church. There was a tomb in there. Next we went to see where they make horseshoes. It is called the blacksmiths.

Isaac came second in a chess tournament last weekend. He played well during his four games, and enjoyed the day. Isaac even had to play Joe, but I won’t say who won to keep the peace.

Luckily for me, I could sit and work during the tournament, but it was a very long day. Well done Isaac.

kingswood_tower

Originally uploaded by kabads

I’ve just returned from Kingswood, an activity centre on the Isle of Wight. It was pretty exhausting, with activities starting around 9:30 am (with an early rise for breakfast) and then finishing at 9pm.

The children thoroughly enjoyed the activities, including Quad-biking, archery, climbing, zip-wire, abseiling (both from the tower in the photo) and Night-line (following a length of rope whilst blindfolded).

Wave those flags

Originally uploaded by kabads.

Happy birthday Pete – sorry it’s taken us a whole week to sort this pic, but it’s worth it. Hope you got some sleep in the end. Trugs, Ads, Treasure and Zakster.

Tiny tickly tumbly Timmy,
Didn’t have time to talk until half past 2.
So he didn’t talk. He ate some pork
and that was really true.

is a free music site of particularly good quality (well, they have stuff I like).

We’ve uploaded it for you to hear. Please, whatever you do, don’t use it as a ringtone as it is likely to induce insanity.

[audio:http://www.monkeez.org/sounds/phone_is_ringing.mp3]

The mozilla foundation are starting to impose controls on their logos and trademark.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=354622 and  http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=265646

I think this is a dangerous route for the Mozilla foundation to go. Whilst I understand that they need to protect their trademark, they may hamper the popularity of their products by imposing control procedures on 3rd party distributors, with talks of a boycott already.

Why not let this go? After all, they are succeeding off the back of Netscape, and Netscape were happy to hand over complete control to Mozilla?

The boys had a good time at football training session today. Joe was out tackling hard and Isaac made some very good saves in goal. Joe scored a goal which rebounded off Tom and Isaac and Isaac won the player of the week trophy!

(and why Microsoft will fail to succeed in the mp3 market).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5371182.stm

Installed Ubuntu on our machine at home a couple of days ago and it’s good stuff. If you’re thinking of trying Linux, but have used Windows all the time, then this is for you. It installs easily, has a nice looking interface and has lots of software that works out of the box (without the typical config process).

Loads of more ubuntu screenshots (not ours though) can be seen here.

We’ve finally planted our geocache nearby. It’s currently stuck somewhere in the editorial process, but it should be out soon. We’ve also placed some nice stuff in there, which should interest people to go there.

Happy hunting.

writes interesting stuff. I like his take on life, especially his ideas on self-sufficiency.

We all went on a cruise because we are the funniest grandchildren and we are twins. On the cruise we went to Malaga and Gibralter and Cadiz and Portugal. On the boat we had a swimming pool and a posh restaurant called Nautiness bar. At Malaga we went to the Aqua Parc.

We went camping once in Hastings and a week ago we went camping again in Weymouth. On Isaac and Joseph’s birthday we had an England birthday cake and a Spiderman birthday cake. On Daddy’s birthday we went to the Aquadrome and pizza hut. His birthday cake was an ordinary cake with cream and plastic soldiers on them.

We went on a long bike ride to the pub on our old bikes. On our birthday we got new bikes with gears which meant we could go faster downhill and uphill. So we took the bikes camping and to a forest. We did 3 Geocaches in the forest on our bikes. Some of the tracks were hilly and fun. Isaac didn’t use his brakes on any of the hills even though mummy and daddy said “use your brakes”. Luckily Isaac didn’t have any falls. Joseph went down the big hills without any gears and brakes.

All through the summer we went geocaching. You go around with a GPS unit and normally it costs £99, but we got ours cheaper. You go all around the forest looking for little ammo cans or lunch boxes or black round tiny cylinders. The small ones are called micros. You find the geocaches in holes of trees, under logs and rocks. Inside the geocache you can find a little packet with toys in and another little packet with a piece of paper where you have to write which day you found it. And we like swapping all the toys inside.

We seem to have caught the geocaching bug. Basically, you get a GPS receiver like this one and you can key in waypoints which then send you to secret locations where there are geocache boxes with stuff inside and a log to sign. More pics will follow of our success (and failure).