Andrew Goodricke

Three Peaks

On Friday 9th October 2009, I will be attempting the Three Peaks Challenge with three friends.  The aim is to climb the highest peaks in Scotland, England and Wales (Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike & Snowdon) over a three day period.  We’ll be climbing Ben Nevis on the Friday, Scafell on the Saturday and Snowdon on the Sunday.  I have decided to do this to raise money for a charity called The Friends of Michael Sobell House.

Michael Sobell House is the hospice and specialist palliative care centre based at Mount Vernon Hospital, enhancing without discrimination, the care of patients with life limiting illnesses and providing support for their families and carers. Funding from charitable donations must reach an annual target of £1,200,000 to maintain patient care at its current level from the In-patient unit, Day Therapies Centre, Outreach Team and Education Program. Many services at Michael Sobell House would not exist without Fundraising and Voluntary contributions from individuals, community groups, companies, charitable trusts and legacies. It is thanks to a dedicated team of staff, generous and skilled volunteers and with the boundless energy and enthusiasm of all its supporters that Michael Sobell House can keep ‘Sharing the Caring’.

Please visit my JustGiving page: http://www.justgiving.com/andrewgoodricke/ if you’d like to sponsor me.  Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving – they’ll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they’ll send your money directly to the charity and make sure Gift Aid is reclaimed on every eligible donation by a UK taxpayer. So it’s the most efficient way to donate - I raise more, whilst saving time and cutting costs for the charity.

So please dig deep and donate now.

Here’s a few facts and figures about the Three Peaks:

Ben Nevis

1344m high

Expected time to reach summit and return - 7 hours

Scafell Pike

978m high

Expected time to reach summit and return - 5.5 hours

Snowdon

1085m high

Expected time to reach summit and return - 4.5 hours

You can also track our progress at: http://purplefundraising.co.uk/

I’ve been working with Ajax recently, I’ve been particularly impressed with how potentially powerful Ajax is.  Having a good knowledge of PHP and HTML myself has helped when it came to learning this amalgamation of technologies.  If you’re not aware what Ajax is, It stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML (eXtensible Markup Language).

A good introduction to it can be found on Harry Maugans in tutorial AJAX Made Easy, in addition to that the SAMS Teach Yourself in 10 Minutes have got a great little book on Ajax which explains it all really well from beginner to intermediate.

Back to the point in hand, I wanted an animated gif to display while I was collecting data from the server. That is precisely what I got when I came upon the Ajax Loading gif Generator. You can customise the gifs produced from the type of animation to the fore and background colours - A great little tool!

Woohoo!  My first post at andrewgoodricke.com.  The purpose of the blog is for me to keep track of any useful sites, information and what I’ve been up to.  A bit more about me can be found on my about page.

I’ve not had an amazing amount of experience with WordPress to date so I just downloaded a pre-created theme that I liked the look of, I will try and get my own design done at some point but I feel this will be here for the forseable future.