Hey ! Who switched the battery ?

Couple of things to talk about before I put the dinner on :

Wow. I was doing fine this week, hyper to the point of having to work hard to bite down on some of the weirder comments that pop into my head. Some of them escaped and there’s a particularly nutty email waiting for someone when she gets in on Monday. (Work related !) But on an afternoon where I took flexi leave to watch the cricket, I just crashed … Going for a little SleepySession upstairs while the cricket’s on type crashed.

Could be a Friday thing, could be a Body-Needs-Minerals thing. It’s probably conditioning but I’ll attack the minerals thing later by grabbing a Fish Supper. The thyroid works by using Iodine, which is an element that it uses to make the hormones that contribute to regulating energy levels.

So where does the fish come in ? Well, there’s a couple of ways to get your Iodine, supplements or natural. By natural, that’s foods that have a decent Iodine content, like seafood. Supplements will do a job too but they can have other effects too, less desirable ones. Things like the multivitamins I had to stop taking because they turned my personality into one most people wouldn’t want to know.

So it’ll be codnchips tonight 🙂 After a bacon sarnie and turkey sandwich from the lovely canteen girls earlier. I eat well at the moment, perhaps too well 😉

What’s number two on things to talk about today ?

Well – the dinosaur that work can be (hey – all organisations can be slow to wake up to a rapidly changing world and slow can be a good thing, it means we haven’t done a Knee Jerk reaction) has woken up to all the Social Engineering stuff we can do nowadays. That’d be Facebook, Blogging, Twittering and all the rest.

Spotted the reaction on the work internal news pages today and to be fair to them, it’s actually a good one. They’ve split it into two, Sponsored and Personal. Sponsored is where you actively declare what you’re working on and effectively become a mouthpiece of the organisation. Personal is like what this blog will remain, a non work use of a way to say Hello World. And for me, another way to sort out thoughts and get them out of my head before my head explodes.

I read the info on it today and to be even more fair, they’ve called it Guidelines instead of Rules. Sponsored is a little heavy (too much editorial control, seems too much like a job) but I reckon they’ve done a decent job with the Personal guidelines. They’re actually looser than the ones I operate already, which boil down to :

Talk about the Good, rant elsewhere about the Bad.
Keep the anonymity going,
Look for fun Codenames, only talk about people if you think they won’t mind.
Don’t let slip any personal information – always sensible.
(like – “hey ! I’m away with work for a week, come steal stuff from my house!” would be bad)

There’s a lot of great people where I work but I only mention a limited selection cos my imagination has failed to come up with decent codenames for some of the others. Quite a few people at work know about my blog now (including my boss) and I think my boss’s boss had his eyes opened by how much information can be picked up when you go to a website due to me using Sitemeter as an example. Your IP address can be a goldmine and if you run a website or a domain, your true name and home address could well be publicly available.

Looks like with the new guidance I can happily keep on going the same way I have so far 🙂 But I won’t be starting up a Sponsored one. The rules there have way too much editorial control taken out of the hands of the author, which is fairy nuff but it’s not something I’m interested in getting involved with. Oh there’s also a “no endorsements” rule in there, which I’ve broken a heap of times already cos I like to say when I see good stuff and me saying I use HP laptops or Ford cars is technically an endorsement.

Right – getting hungry now, so it’s time to chuck the fish in the oven (maybe a little garlic bread too 🙂 and pay more attention to the 4 Eleventh Hour episodes I’m watching tonight 🙂

PS The Iodine thing is something I’ve figured out – everyone’s body is unique and we all react to stuff in different ways. I’ve figured a link between crashing and Iodine from fish and it could well be psychosomatic. If you know yourself, then you’ll be able to fix the various imbalances we suffer from. Like my current upset tummy – it’s not something it’s eaten, it’s more like it’s shouting “EAT SOMETHING!”, time to put the oven on so I can do just that 🙂

Yep – it was downpour for a fair bit of yesterday …

Yep – it was downpour for a fair bit of yesterday but the Yellow Face came out to play later.

And we had enough clear sky overnight to inspire a Facebook comment of :

"has just spotted a Big Round White Thing in the sky. Must … resist … urge … to … howl … at … it …"

Geek frustration

Hmm

This time a few days ago, I was looking forward to having a first look at Windows 7 before giving it a good n thorough going over …

I’m a bit frustrated though, my Inner Geek is looking for wayz n meanz to keep itself amused. The Windows 7, short as it is, has gone on to my techie blog but to save technophobes deciphering what’s on there it took one look at my desktop PC and burst out laughing :-). Probably a good thing too cos you could sum up the Windows 7 flirtation as :

Objective of trying Windows 7 – to answer the question “is it worth buying this software ?”

To which the answer is a comprehensive “NOOO!”. Lol. Nothing to do with Windows 7, more to do with the hardware that I have available. It’s actually been one of the better Testing Things I’ve done because :

The objective has been answered (muahahaha – I’m carefully avoiding the words “success” and “achieved”).
There’s been zero disruption to my PCs.
I’ve got my answer with the minimum of time, effort & hair loss.
I’ve saved £80 that I can spend on pizza, movies and popcorn.

Result !

But my Inner Geek is now a little put out at being frustrated out of an opportunity to look at something new, which is probably why I spent a fair bit of the Cricket-Watching-On-Sofa time yesterday reading the Ubuntu installation manual. Ubuntu is a piece of absolutely free software that runs your computer but it’s a little different to the Windows stuff everyone else uses. I’ve seen what it’s based on before but that was over 10 years ago.

Shame about no result in the cricket today, although it does put us one game closer to regaining the Ashes. 1-0 up with 2 games to play. If England win either of the next two, then we win the series. If the weather beats the teams, then England win too. Fingers crossed for England winning it the right way, which will have us giving the Aussies a thumping in the next two games.

No pen & paper gaming tonight sadly, so I’m now chilling out to Paramore on iTunes (Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygene is queued up for later) and if I have enough time later, it’s Queen’s A Kind Of Magic.

Aye – very curious about the Prius … but it woul…

Aye – very curious about the Prius … but it would definitely take a test drive to see what I thought of its rather different powertrain. Only driven an auto box car/truck once so far and the Prius is a step beyond that (CVT instead of fixed ratios)

PS The autobox fortnight was followed by me stalling my Puma at the very first set of traffic lights I reached after returning to GB … Somebody forgot that it had a clutch !

The Prius is an amazing piece of engineering, but …

The Prius is an amazing piece of engineering, but from everything I've read, it's not at all a driver's car. It gets phenomenal fuel economy, of course, but cornering is something you watch other people do.

I miss the MR2 ("Mister Two"…always loved that moniker). What a pure expression of driving that car was. I wish Toyota would bring it back. Perhaps now that Honda's moving ahead with its CR-Z, Toyota will get with the program, too.