Segway Rally

Many thanks to Buyagift for this Segway Rally for Two Experience

Mark and I have ridden a Segway before when we were in Paris last year.  We had booked a group Segway Tour and it turned out only the two of us had booked it so we effectively had a private tour, it was brilliant and we flew round Paris in record time on those speedy little electric machines.

We had seen the off road Segways at Cannock Chase and fancied a go on them, so jumped at the opportunity thanks to BuyaGift :).  

There are 12 locations available across the UK so chances are there is somewhere fairly local to you.  Our local group was at West Midlands Water Park near Tamworth.  Booking was easily done and I ensured we had an evening visit so we could get there after work.

Upon booking in we were kitted out with knee pads, elbow pads and a helmet. There were 8 of us in a group and a couple of instructors, we were quickly introduced one by one to the Segway and the instructor made sure he was close by for those a little weary of the machine.

The Segway is controlled by distributing your weight, if you have ever played on a Wii Balance Board it is probably a similar sort of skill!!  To go faster you put your weight on your toes and to slow down/go backwards you distribute your weight into your heels.  Steering is carried out by simply turning the handle bars left and right.  They are quite easy to control once you get the hang of them and are great fun.

The instructors let us have a play about to get used to them on a big flat area, they then called us in for a couple of games.  We were split into two teams of four and started off by a simple sprint relay back and forth, it got a little bit more tricky as we then had a slalom race and finally we had to do the slalom race backwards!!  Great fun and a really good way to get us used to controlling the Segway.

We then moved on to maneuvering the Segway up a bit of a slope, a lot trickier than it looks, you had to keep the Segway steering up the slope and lean into it.  Gradually the slopes got steeper and steeper, trickier and trickier!  Our instructor then took us to the top of the hill and told us to go down it!  Then onto a bigger and steeper hill which we went down and I sort of might have fallen off just as I hit the bottom!  Oops.

All in all it was good fun, I was a little disappointed at how slow the Segways were as the ones in Paris were a lot quicker so I expected these to be faster for some reason.  I also thought we might go somewhere, ie round a forest tour or something similar but all we did was a couple of slopes in the same area.  I would recommend it to someone who hasn't tried Segway before.

Visit Buyagift for this Segway Rally for Two Experience

Marco Pierre White Steakhouse Bar & Grill Birmingham

Have a look at my review: Food Fascination - Marco Pierre White

What is she?

I sent off a DNA test for Dizzy 3 weeks ago and have just had the results - so what breeds do you think she is crossed with?

Turns out she is german shepherd cross border collie - as we thought, we did think possibly rough collie.  It is a fabulous cross, she is so intelligent and easy to train.  She can be a little dominant at times but otherwise is such an easy going laid back dog.  I would love another of the same cross. 

Social ‘Petworking’ on the rise

Social ‘Petworking’ on the rise
- Hounds are ‘top dog’ on social media compared to cats -

Andy Murray’s dog Maggie May has posed with his Olympic medal on Twitter and Karl Lagerfeld’s cat Choupette gives fashion advice to her followers. It’s 2012 and pets on the net are bigger, better and fluffier than ever; the nation’s obsession with their pets means we are increasingly likely to give pets their own social media status from sharing photos to tweeting their thoughts.

Research from Petplan, the UK’s largest pet insurer, and host to one of the most engaged Facebook pages in the UK,[1]  reveals a 36% annual increase of pets with their own social media profile, as well as a 25% rise of pet owners sharing photos of their pets online.

Cats have traditionally dominated the World Wide Web but now it’s the socially savvy hounds who are the true social ‘petworkers’ as 7% of pooches have their own Facebook page, compared to only 4% of felines. Boo, nicknamed ‘the world’s cutest dog’ started and still leads the online trend. Currently Facebook’s most popular pet, this adorable Pomeranian has more fans than the Dalai Lama.[2] Along with Boo, four out of the top five most popular pets on Facebook are dogs including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s pooch Beast. Since the explosion in popularity of Britain’s Got Talent winner Pudsey, dogs are now 12 times more talked about on Twitter than cats.[3] Dogs also dominate YouTube with ‘the ultimate dog tease’ being the most popular pet video with over 100 million views.[4]

Despite dogs’ dominance online, cats are still strongly represented. 83% of cat owners who put their pets online also regularly share photos of their felines compared to 69% of dog owners.  Although it seems that pup parents demonstrate a greater sense of humour with 42% posting status updates on behalf of their dog.

Francesca Keefe, Petplan Social Media Executive comments: “We’ve long known that animals are the stars of the internet, but in the last year since we started tracking pets’ presence online there has been an explosion in ‘pet pride.’ Increasingly pet owners are giving their pets a more active role in their life and spreading the joy that having a pet can bring. As well as the fun side of social media, we’re also seeing more and more pet owners take to Twitter as an effective way to look for lost pets.”

Jan Rezab CEO at Social Bakers comments: “As a global social media and digital analytics company we track online engagement levels across Facebook and Twitter and over the last year we have seen a significant rise in the interaction with pets on social media. There are many social media profiles dedicated to pets, but at the top of our Facebook pages, in the animals category, are dogs with cats coming in fifth.”

Case Study

Denver the dog, owned by Morgan Taylor

Someone who has experienced the phenomenon of social petworking first hand is Morgan Taylor, owner of Denver, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever. Morgan started taking photos of Denver because he was his first puppy, and he wanted to capture those moments before they disappeared into memories.  He added the photos to his Flickr account under his "Littlest Duder" set.

There was an instant interest in Denver and a picture of him in the park made it to number 11 on Flickr’s Explore page. As page views of Denver went up, new people added him to their contacts, and Denver's fame train was solidly in motion. After that a number of people contacted Morgan asking if they could post his photos on their blogs, requests he always granted. Brekend.nl was one of these blogs, and he regularly sees traffic coming through from that post. Another surge in popularity occurred when a friend posted one of Denver's photos to reddit.com, resulting in 73,000 views to that photo in a single day and 147,000 total views to his Flickr stream.

The most recent surge came from the UK’s Daily Mail posting an article on its website. Following this publication, The Huffington Post ran a similar piece, with further information about Denver; as a result Morgan received 248,000 page views of his Flickr page in a 24 hour period.

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-ENDS-

Notes to editors:

Pick of the best social media pets

http://textfromdog.tumblr.com/

http://maddieonthings.com/

http://dogswaiting.tumblr.com/

http://foodonmydog.com/

Facebook*

Pet	Number of likes	Celebrity comparison	Number of likes
Boo	5,014,674	Dalai Lama	4,179,463
Beast	880,336	Gisele Bundchen	846, 086
Joe	310, 767	Stewie Griffin	306, 483
Mishka the talking husky	286, 450	Richard Branson	249, 964
Professor Meowingtons pHd	101, 870	Al Gore	81, 194

Twitter*

Name	Number of followers
Maggie May	12,505
Choupette Lagerfeld	13,187

YouTube**

Name	Number of views
The Ultimate Dog Tease	109,375,464

Statistics from a survey conducted by Vision Critical July 2012 and the Petplan Pet Census March 2011 both surveying over 1,000 respondents

*Facebook and Twitter statistics taken from August 2012

**YouTube statistics taken from June 2012

---

[1] According to Social Bakers http://www.socialbakers.com/blog/708-june-2012-social-media-report-facebook-pages-in-the-united-kingdom/

[2] Social Bakers figures taken August 2012 

[3] Radian6 figures taken between 1^st April – 20^th June 2012

[4] YouTube figures taken June 2012

Snowboarding!

Well after having tried out the wakeboarding in Spain I decided I wanted to give snowboarding a go as I didn’t feel that strapping a plank of wood to your feet was actually that scary!!  Mark snowboards and he has tried to get me to give it a go for ages, I only learnt to ski three years ago and haven’t really done much of that.

A little while afterwards Tamworth snowdome emailed some voucher codes and I managed to book two 3 hour lessons (required to get you up to standard) for £29 each instead of the normal £86 – bargain!!

Lesson one I was very nervous and was in a group of 6, 3 children and two other adults.  The instructor was really good and basically kept hold of us until we were confident in going down the slope heelside and toeside.  Lessons take place from half way up the slope.  Unfortunately one lady hurt her wrist and had to leave the lesson.  The instructor started to teach those of us that were a bit more confident to turn so we attempted that a couple of times.  I came away thinking that the toe and heelside wasn’t too bad however the turns were DIFFICULT!!

Lesson two was about learning to turn and being able to run from the top of the slope without falling over a lot.  This time I did fall over a lot trying to turn, we were in a smaller group which was great (just 4 of us) and the slope really went quiet for the last hour so we got in a lot of practice.  Luke (our instructor) was very patient and would try and explain how to do it differently so something clicked.  For example, I was struggling going toeside to heelside, and on about my 4^th attempt he said lift your toes and it clicked and I got it, before he had said weight on heels but I wasn’t doing it very well, as soon as he said lift your toes I could do it.  Ironically (typical me) he said I was struggling with the turn that most people find easy yet I had mastered the more difficult turn fairly easily!

After that there was no stopping me and we were allowed to go from the top, I had one really bad fall coming from the top which was very painful!!  However other than that I did really well and we’re going to book a recreational session again in a couple of weeks.

I loved it and am keen to go again, it looks so much cooler than skiing and the boards look cooler lol!  Though my ideal board size is 141 and there aren’t many about so I don’t know whether I will get one of my own.  I really could do with my own boots though as the newer boots I had for lesson one fit perfectly but the boots I had in lesson two were the older style and felt a bit big.  You need to be comfortable so I think I might pay a visit to decathlon when the winter stock is in.  Would like some nice white ones!!

Double Chocolate Cake with White Choc Buttercream

This is a lovely cake I made last night. The sponge is lovely and light and moist.

Ingredients
For the cake:
150g unsalted butter, at room temperature
150g light muscovado sugar
40g cocoa, sifted
150g self raising flour
1tsp baking powder
½tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 medium free range eggs
1tsp vanilla extract
142ml soured cream
2tbsp golden syrup

For the buttercream:

200g white chocolate
280g unsalted butter
280g icing sugar
1tsp vanilla extract

METHOD
1. Heat the oven to 180C/mark 4/ Fan 160C. Grease and base-line 2 x 18cm sandwich tins. Beat together the butter and sugar until pale. In a separate bowl sift the cocoa, flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and a pinch of salt, mix well. Add to the creamed butter and sugar.
2. In a measuring jug whisk together the eggs, vanilla extract, soured cream and syrup. Pour over the dry ingredients and beat altogether.
3. Divide the mixture equally between the tins. Bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes until springy. Leave to cool for a few minutes in the tins, then transfer to cooling racks to cool completely.
4. For the buttercream, melt the chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Leave to cool slightly. In a large bowl, beat the butter and icing sugar together until creamy. Beat in the chocolate and vanilla extract.
5. When you’re ready to serve, transfer one of the cakes to a serving platter, spread ¼ of the buttercream on top, then top with the other cake. Then use the remaining buttercream to ice the top and sides of the cake. Top with the chocolate curls.