Paul Leigh

Something's going on...

Introduction

I'm a freelance IT Consultant living just outside of London. As a developer I specialise in collaborative software, in particular, Microsoft SharePoint. I also work with most of the Microsoft software stack; Exchange, SQL, Windows Server, .NET and more.

I'm married to Sarah and we're expecting our first child at the end of March 2011.

Microlight Flying

In any spare time I get, I can be found flying my Microlight, a Flexwing QuikR. In a nod to my web development work, the private registration is G-HTML.

I also do some volunteer work on the council for the British Microlight Aircraft Association (BMAA)

Family Fly Day

After a week of tidying up the dashboard and cleaning the QuikR, I took my mum and brother Simon up for a 1 hour flight each. As they were visiting and the weather seems reasonable, it seemed rude not too.


http://public.fotki.com/paulleigh/flying/family-fly-day/

QuikR Spring Clean

As the new flying season approaches, I decided to bring the trike home and give it a strip down and spring clean. The exhausts got collected today and they're being professionally polished up. Time to get my hands dirty now though!





This is what the dash now looks like after a re-fit and re-wire.














HTML5

I've been busy creating a new site for the BMAA, to sell vouchers for Trial Flights. I decided it would be a good time to build my first HTML5 compliant site and also used ASP.NET MVC3 with the Razor View engine.

It's much slicker to use than I had hoped for and I'll be making sure all my future websites are developed using HTML5. I added some jquery too for some picture and video effects. The site isn't live yet as it'll need a few text revisions before sign off but I'm hopefully this can be done by mid April 2011.



Verbier

I've just got back from a week in Verbier. The annual boys ski holiday was in Switzerland this year, Kev, Pete, Richie and Mark made it out this time around.

No new snow, so limited for powder runs but the pistes were in good condition and I managed to learn to ski (I normally snowboard), even getting to do the black mogel run at the top of Mont Fort (if a little clumsily). I also had my first paragliding experience. I'll post the videos on YouTube when I get a chance to edit them as I had a helmet camera on for most of the time.



















Paragliding Vid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBvqCxhy0Ns

BMAA Forums & YouTube

I finally got around to updating the BMAA forums software. Its a relic of the early .NET adopter days written in VB.NET called DotNetBB. It's fairly awful to debug and the code is extremely hard to follow.

However, I've added the ability to add inline embedded YouTube videos to it today.



Nissan Juke

Sarahs new toy has arrived... but she's at work, so I get to play with it first.



Custom T-Shirt

I need to get some more thermal gear for an up and coming Ski trip. Thermal gear now also doubles up for use in the Microlight. So instead of paying over the odds for branded gear, I'm having some branded gear of my own created. First off is a couple of T-Shirts to test the process out.



Actually the costs  worked out about the same as stock shop bought T-Shirts but at least this is my work and there won't be any copies anywhere - It took me about four hours to trace the logo as a vector image using Xara Designer Pro

Update: The first T-Shirts arrived today (Jan 25th, 2011). They look as good as any other shop bought ones but these ones are unique to me. Update #2: Long sleeved T-Shirts arrived today, look great too.

Big Printer

I've recently purchased a Large Format Inkjet printer, a HP Designjet 610T. I've created a few posters but the aim is to get some proper use out of it during 2011. I think first up will be some pictures on canvas for the nursery but if any of my friends want a picture printing, just let me know. It prints on an A1 width roll and is very high resolution photographic quality.

I've also started to work on a 3D design software package from Google, called SketchUp, so I'll be printing some of my designs for aircraft parts as well.

Alphabet Challenge

I'm taking part in the Alphabet Challenge this year. The idea is to fly to 23 locations starting with each letter of the alphabet (Q,X,Z are not used). So I'm using this opportunity to try to visit 23 new locations, that I've never been to before.

I'm going to try to record all the landings for this challenge : Alphabet Challenge Playlist on YouTube

First Post

Hello, I thought I'd start the New Year off with a new blog. I tried it before when I went on a Greenland trip and it was fun to keep and look back on, so I'll try to keep this up to date with what I'm up to. It'll take me a few weeks to get the content properly filled out, so be patient if you see some blank spaces.