Year: 2009

Been up at my mum’s and dad’s this weekend for a bit of a delayed Easter, plus a Happy Birthday for my mum & nan.

Bit more tinkering with various things – I’m pretty confident I know why my network and internet performance hasn’t been particularly great lately. And that’s when my internet’s been happy. Looks like the Belkin wifi card I bought for my desktop isn’t up to the job so I’ll be buying some more bits :

1 – a new router to replace my old one
2 – A Big Long Wire
3 – another multigang plug
(I have various bits plugging into an extension lead, which isn’t particularly ideal)

There’s more about the various testing on my Techie blog, which can be found via a link in the Blogroll.

My nan now has a copy of The Sound Of Music, which I’m sure will end up annoying mum & dad at some point. At least I’ve spared them the Sing A Long copy 🙂

Swanholme has a new waitress. Very lush 🙂 Efficient with lots of politeness and a ready laugh. Yep, good meal at the pub today 🙂

Still getting good signs from the latest car. Usually on the road trip, I’ll take one or two breaks to stretch my legs. But I’ve been quite happily doing the 3 hour trip in one block, with no stops. My back tends to tell me that’s a little silly but not enough to force a stop. Plus the traffic’s been good – one reason for stopping is to extract myself from groups of morons who are otherwise going at roughly the same speed.

I think my sister and I may be getting more converts to some new music. Dinner time on Saturday was enhanced by a bit of music playing :

My Laptop + iTunes library + Airport + Denon hifi = Great sounds

I think I may be buying the Airfoil utility soon too, which will allow not just iTunes sounds but things like Youtube videos to be piped across to decent speakers. I get the feeling my sister would wear out my Bat For Lashes Fur & Gold cd if she got her hands on it, although she’s more interested in this video of What’s A Girl To Do.

More Bat For Lashes on Later … With Jools Holland – gotta admit I’ve only watched 1 track from that so far, looking forward to watching the rest.

(Addon – link for Carmi – car adaptor for Wii. Crazy !)

Pamela – one of the things I always watched out for in badminton was lefthanders … lot more chance of having an imprint of racquet on you if the partner used the other hand !

Carmi – could be a weather thing … Need lots of sun and warm weather to get the pitches right for games … But there has been a Canadian team in various World Cups 🙂

Still refining that recipe for napalm. Need the mix just right before I embark on clearing the back yard.

Bobkat; the words ‘science project’ and ‘sleepypete’ in the same sentence fill me with fear… 🙂

Especially when he includes words like ‘petrol’ and ‘matches’….

cq

These are GREAT pics, and I agree with the others: kudos to you for posting the self-portraits.

I’ve always wondered why cricket isn’t more popular here in Canada. We’ve got enough of a British heritage that it should be second nature to us. Thankfully, at least, rugby seems to have a solid footing in uni circles.

Funny — I mentioned that I thought about posing for my “round” entrance,
but – I wouldn’t DARE post it. We women just take ourselves too seriously.

I played racquetball for years – and I had huge bruises from being hit by the ball. Occasionally I’d get hit with a raquet — and that was bad!

Think I need to buy more wires …

I’ve run out of different setups I can play with !

And I reckon I’ve been sold a lemon with the wifi card that went into my desktop 🙁

The science project should keep you out of trouble? LoL 🙂

There is nothing more frustrating than a dodgy internet connection.

… which means a distraction is needed. Cos while I’ll natter about the people, I’m not too fond on talking about work.

I have a new Science Project 🙂

And those words usually have people who know me diving for cover or grabbing a gas mask. Previous Sleepy Science Projects have involved things being left in fridges long enough that they grow tentacles and fur. This one is a little different and it’ll be highly techie, so it’ll appear on the techie zone blog as it evolves.

Been having the annoyance of a dodgy internet … I went a long period where I just wasn’t interested in playing online games but now the interest is rising again, it gets highly frustrating when your enjoyment of the online game gets blocked by you getting knocked offline every few minutes … One of the things I’ve tried is to try out different ways of connecting up my PCs to see if that makes an improvement. Which brings me to the Science Project 🙂

I back up my iTunes library reasonably often – and now it’s gotten rather big (11GB, almost 3000 songs !) it takes a while to copy it from laptop to desktop. Especially when the wifi card on the desktop apparently isn’t too good :

Copy using wifi – I gave up after over 2 hours
Copy using a wire link – About an hour 🙂

So that’s my Science Project – checking out how fast I can wing the Bits around. Lot more boring than growing Alien Life Forms in the fridge. Dinner’s about to come out of the oven and it’s gaming tonight, so this one will take a little while to implement. Curious about the results …

Oh – highlights of the new additions to the library are :

Bat For Lashes (aka Natasha Khan) – well worth a listen this girl
Goldfrapp – I’d recommend Supernature if you’re into something loud or Seventh Dream for more relaxed and ethereal
KT Tunstall – curious 🙂

Addon – Having Goldfrapp’s Supernature on in the car makes you drive 10mph faster. Fact.

Heh heh heh – I’m cheating with the stats – they’re what iTunes tells me 🙂 But I’m a stats junkie, so that’s another thing that keeps me happy.

I kinda like iTunes but what’s really improved my listening quality lately is the Airport Express that lets me stream music to remote speakers over my wifi network. There is a bad though – iTunes 8.1 changed something that broke the wifi network for an hour or two. (See techie blog)

I don’t use archive cds as a backup – I’d lose ’em or they’d suffer cd fading … But what I do occasionally do is copy (there’s that word again 😉 the whole iTunes library between laptop and desktop so I have a backup on another hard disc.

And then I twiddle my thumbs while waiting for it to copy over wifi at about 5Mbit/s (Airport Express is unspectacular in its reliability) before giving up and using an Ethernet patch cable instead 🙂