As bright and happy as London is during winter, I went down to Tony & Gudrun’s place (My Uncle & Aunty) at Gosport (across from Portsmouth Harbour) for a more cheerful xmas. I think it’s the most of my relatives I’ve seen at the same place and time! Shows you how spread out our family is, spread out over countries such as Australia, Ireland, UK, Switzerland, Holland, Chile, China & USA, just to name a few!
Following German Tradition, we had a big dinner on xmas eve, and followed with the presents. (My cousins Peta and Noah have no arguments with this tradition as you could guess, giving them a 12hour advantage!)
Xmas Day continued with a big Lunch, and if you’re wondering what a vegan eats on Xmas day? Nut roast, baked potatoes, salad, garlic bread, biscuits, custard etc!
Unlike Oz. the UK actually puts some of their Biggest shows on Xmas day. Special episodes of Eastenders to Dr Who. But Boxing day is all about Football.
I met my cousin Marc and his family on boxing day for the first time, and they are all vegetarian! I think we actually out-numbered the non-vegetarians. Just.
We took their dog Tilly for a walk, and noted the not-so-secret Mi5 Spy Training centre (seriously, thats it, right next to the golf course, where real James Bonds are born! Maybe I should inquire about a position?) and a decommissioned fort on top of the hill.
I’m not exactly the grinch, but i hate xmas carols. And Woolworths has been playing them since the start of November. But Trafalgar Square has officially started xmas 2weeks and 4days too early by turning on the lights tonight. Apparently its some big tradition, with the tree coming in from Norway each year. But I have to say it was quite unimpressive… It was barely even the hallmark-triangle-shape we have been sold to love. All 500 lights simply wrap around neatly.. Just sitting there… Constantly on.. No flashing.. No colours.. And of course it was raining! If its cold and wet it should at least come with snow!
There are some much nicer light displays around Soho and Angel which I might take photos of soon.
£ No, not a rant about how ridiculous the price of EVERYTHING is here when you convert to AUD (thats X14 for those wondering). Just a little FYI on something thats been bugging me.
If you are using a US keyboard and trying to enter the Pound Symbol (£), you’ll notice you don’t have one.
If you have a full keyboard its easy to use the ALT+No. combos for ANY character (ALT+156 for pound), but most laptops don’t have
the required numeric keypad. I usually use the windows charmap, or copy paste from elsewhere but this is annoying!!
The easiest solution seems to be to switch your keyboard from “US” to “US International” (if you switch to UK you can use SHIFT+3 but too many other keys are different like @, ‘, etc). So to change it, do the following
START | SETTINGS | CONTROL PANEL | REGIONAL AND LANGUAGE OPTIONS
LANGUAGES TAB, Click DETAILS (window pops up)
Click ADD and select new keyboard of US INTERNATIONAL
Select US INTERNATIONAL as the default language, then Click the US layout and click REMOVE
Close the window and click OK saying it will remove it later as currently in use.
Next time you log in your layout will now be US INTERNATIONAL and your RIGHT-ALT key is now like AltGr (from euro keyboards) And allows you to enter all funky symbols. äåé®þþüúíóö«»áßðøø¶¶´çµñ欿¿¿¿¿¿ç«ö»¥×¡²¤¤€¼½¾¾¹££££££.. you get the idea…
(Note, you will have to ‘confirm’ the apostrophe key by pressing SPACE so it doesn’t insert something like the characters above. )
£ = RIGHT-ALT+SHIFT+4
On a mac its ALT+3 but who gives a shit.
Got a better way? Post it in the comments!
