Month: July 2012

Haha – this post was awesome this morning when my mind went into blog posting mode again in the airport …

Been travelling today, which for this particular trip involves a lot of waiting. Portsmouth and London trips are ok, I can handle my own arrangements completely independently. Scotland trips are a bit different because they involve air travel …

There’s a lot of waiting involved with air travel. Today’s trip started with getting on the road at 5.10am for a flight at 7.10. The airport’s not actually that far away, just 20 miles. You have to go through the centre of Bristol though (according to the satnav! and that’s no chore at 5am) so it takes a little longer. But yeah – for air travel, you have to plan to arrive well over an hour before your flight because of all the waiting time :

Time to get through security checks
Time to get to the gates
Time for the queues to move through the gates
Time to get to the aircraft

It’s a lot of time where you’re effectively doing nothing – nothing you do can decrease the time sunk into the travel activity. It doesn’t end there though – you’re dependent on the people on the other side to get you where you need to be.

I have to say though – the Scotland end of the project is really well sorted for that. We have Taxi Andy and his shuttle (got me through the Glasgow traffic in record time!) and the two Go To Girls in the office. I should get up there more often.

Some people handle waiting far better than others.

I think I’m ok at waiting now. I just accept the inevitability of it and figure out something to keep my mind active. That’s the real key – the phrase “a watched pot never boils” is very apt. If you’re watching the pot, the seconds draw by slower. If you’re getting on with stuff, suddenly it’s 6pm and you’ve got a mountain of flexi credit to burn.

The daft thing is that when I was in blog creation mode this morning (with nothing handy for noting it down), my supposedly encyclopaedic memory neglected to remember it. Perhaps that’s tiredness creeping up on me – it’s 10pm now and I was active at 5am. Long day.

Oh ! It can be highly amusing sitting at the back of a plane. The passengers weren’t particularly interesting but there were two cabin girls happily chattering away about all & sundry.

She really didn’t need a nose job, or liposuction. She was perfect, with a lovely smile when she spotted me grinning up at her while she was doing the drinks trolley thing. But she was talking about having stuff like the lipo and nose done anyway. And why the hell didn’t I leave a phone number ? Lol 🙂 Too shy.

Other observations while waiting – glad I wasn’t wearing my jeans today. Coulda been embarassing if they’d fallen down after I needed to take my belt off for security. Will bear that in mind if I do casual flying.

Aaaaand … I think my brain is quietly frying due to being awake too long, time to hit Publish Post and hope for more coherency tomorrow.

Cheers Sadie 🙂

I'm not sure if it's advertising the driving laws that's needed – just more enforcement of them. I think if we had compulsory retests every 5 years or so, it would sort out a lot of the bad behaviour we see on the roads.

It's a bit bad that the speed limit for urban roads is seen as a minimum instead of a limit …

Ok, that was seriously the perfect description of texting drivers. There isn't a turn lane onto my street to I just have to pray that the person behind me is paying attention. The other day the teenage girl behind me was so obviously texting and was for sure going to ram into me. I think they need to advertise the texting/driving laws more, like they do drunk driving. Anyway, you have a nice blog 🙂 I came upon it randomly!

Just nabbed from the Facebook feed :

Made me chuckle when I spotted it.

Phones do everything for us these days … cameras, texts, communications, internet radio, speed camera warning, emails. What else … satnav, authenticators for games, calculator, music player … I hear you can use them to talk to people as well. Imagine that. I can even tell my phone to print stuff on my dad’s printer.

It’s a bit of a modern curse though.

I was heading into work this morning when I was coming up behind someone going slower than the traffic. They were driving erratically as well, going from one side of their lane to the other. They possibly covered more sideways distance than forwards distance. I figured they were either drunk or on drugs, they were that bad.

Did I overtake ? Hell no. If you overtake someone like that, you can’t rely on them stopping. I’d rather not have a drug addict ram me up the backside. (That’s bad any way you read it). If you’re the one behind, you can rely on your own ability to stop in time.

Anyway. She went straight on at one of the roundabouts while I was turning left. I had a chance to look over and … guess what. There was a mobile phone being held between idiot and steering wheel, with girlie attempting to punch letters into texts.

That’s insanely dangerous. I won’t reply or even read texts in the car unless I have a buddy there to press the keys. Answering a call is not so bad – chuck it on speaker or have it coming over Bluetooth handsfree. All I need to do to answer a call in my car is move one finger across to a steering wheel button and then it’s on handsfree. But texting ? Punching the correct key takes way too much attention. And it showed in how erratically she was driving.

That’s not an anti-women drivers thing by the way – she definitely had the lumpy jumper thing going, just happened to be reinforcing a stereotype – it’s not like she was a male Merc driver doing 80mph+ on the motorway outside lane with his newspaper open over his steering wheel. There’s dangerous and then there’s criminally insane.

There we go – modern problems from modern toys. Hold on … the old tech newspaper thing was actually more dangerous. Lol 🙂

And I’m listening to the wrong album ! Currently chilling out to Alisha Rules The World by Alisha’s Attic. Cracking debut album but the track that matches this post better is Barbarella off Illumina. Mind you, the current track (just finishing) is Indestructible which matches the mindset of Girlie Texter.

Still kinda catching up after the weekend.

The recorded stuff on the box is getting under control now by virtue of me not recording much. While Stargate was repeating, I’d have 3-4 pages due to record over a week (1 page = 7 programmes). Now it’s 1 and a bit. Not watched a blu-ray for a while either, lots of cricket has been watched.

Watching the usual round of videos – Totalbiscuit, Jesse Cox, Dodger and the Yogscast. I’m still thinking of looking at Minecraft, with one idea there being Sleepypete Minecraft creations. I need inspiration for that though. Maybe if there was a car equivalent for Minecraft where you build computerised racing cars instead of structures.

And perhaps if a Minecrafty type coder reads that ? It might just have planted an idea seed … I’ll leave it there 🙂

PS I was thinking on Friday’s drive that it might be fun to have a Facebook dictation app. Like – you’re driving, you’re observing people in their cars around you. You make comments … and the app snags ’em for Facebook. That could be highly amusing … Although driving does make me swear too much.

Just come back from a weekend away … in the middle of a couple of hours chillout before bedtime (Everything But The Girl’s excellent Amplified Heart is on right now).

Let’s see :

Almost turned around inside 20 miles of driving because conditions were pretty bad. The inside lane of the M5 was flooded in quite a few places and it was almost bad enough to avoid the lane entirely. I didn’t, pushed through it and the sun came out around Worcester. I still needed to divert off my first choice route (there’s fun roads near Grantham) because part of it had a major road (A52) closed.

Cue a bit of magical mystery tour … One of the things I’m a huge fan of with my car is the satnav.

It gets criticism from some numpties cos it is a bit crude compared to some. However … it works 100%, unlike the attempt at using my Android phone for satnav which was abandoned before it even figured out where it was. It also does traffic avoidance via FM Radio, so while I was seeing “Long delays M42 J6-J9” (another part of my route) on the overhead signs the satnav was figuring out how to let me avoid that traffic without losing too much time. It works too – taking me around Birmingham to the North instead of the South only cost me about 10 minutes.

That’s enough about the car though, except that I quite like that it cost £46 in petrol for all the driving this weekend (+maybe £2 for the last 25 miles) at 53mpg. The Focus would have done 32mpg over the weekend costing £77. The Lexus is a far better drive too.

Arrived on Friday to find a new toy … And commenced fiddling with it to set it up as desired.

Cue some hours of being incredibly frustrated with Google’s software. You should be able to “Cloud Print” via Google Chrome. Get this :

Grab a bit of software for your printer.
Install the Google Chrome web browser.
Tell Google Chrome that you want your printer hooked up for Cloud Printing.
Keep the Chrome browser open (WTF!)
Attempt to print to it from an Android device.
And commence the hair tearing frustration.

I may try it again with the Kodak printer I’ve inherited. It’s fairly new, it just doesn’t understand Cloud Printing the way the new ones do. Oh – the new toy is an Asus Transformer Pad. It’s quite Shiny. Not sure about its shininess compared to an iPad but it’s still quite Shiny. It comes with a detachable keyboard that lets it pretend to be a laptop. It’s a little … different but it redeemed itself from early frustration which was more to do with Google software being crap. They promise the world but miss crucial things out. I’d expect the Tablet Pad to have a help system reasonably visible with a “This Is How To Print” in big letters somewhere.

Currys & PC World lie through their teeth. Currys refused to take the Transformer Pad back or let us switch it for a Windows laptop. That would have sorted out a lot of issues (but I think the Transformer Pad will do them ok). The result is that Currys are blacklisted by my mum & dad for a while – and I’ll be avoiding them to.

What’s this about lying ?

The Staples guy was honest. He said he didn’t know whether the printers in his shop supported Cloud Printing. The Currys guy pointed us towards HP printers “They’re the only ones that support this”. The PC World girl (charming she was and apparently holding the store’s brain cell) admitted that HP and Epson printers could do what we wanted.

I wonder what printers they are desperate to sell ? Duh. Here’s the gen from Google for what supports Cloud Printing. You’ll notice Kodak on there too. We avoid the Canon, HP, Epson, Lexmark cartel because they rip you off for cartridges and we avoid HP in particular because their build quality nosedived when Carly Fiorina got hold of them. They went from making industrial bombproof strength bits to epic fail.

We came out of Staples with a shiny new Kodak Hero 5.1. Me Like. I can print to it from half a world away just by emailing it. That’s Shiny. Or I could print to it from my phone. I’ve inherited their not-so-old Kodak ESP5250 all in one scanner to replace my Piece Of Shit HP (broken page feeder and it would have been £40+ to get the cartridges to reactivate it).

Yeah – talking techie, weekend started with the hair being torn out and ended very happily. Everything works, Shinies were acquired and the Shinies do what we want them to. If the printer is new enough to support Cloud print properly without needing A-Chrom-ination active, then Google Cloud Print (and Kodak print by email) is quite Shiny.

Happy days.

It’s good to see the mob up there too and catch up. Also means I get fed properly 🙂 I should really do that myself as it really wouldn’t be that much extra effort or attention to add veg to the “chuck it in oven & forget about it” cooking strategy. Yep – I’m a bit lazy there … but it’s part of preferring stuff that isn’t messy, bearing in mind it’s me that’s going to be clearing up the mess.

In terms of weight – hopping on the scales before my shower saw me at 12st 8-9lbs, which is down another few lbs over the weekend. Healthy eating = good for you. Then again, I’d not eaten that much today, just a big dinner at the pub plus a Twix and assorted Minstrels left over from Friday.

Bit sad at missing out on a potential RCA hug though !

And after attempting for over an hour to persuade an Android tablet/laptop abomination to print … Microsoft are probably quite happy that other people do operating systems that are FAR WORSE than their's.

AWFUL SOFTWARE

Spotting news stories again …

Apple are doing rather well it seems … That’s a Register link to a story where they are looking at stats which say that Apple PCs are not quite in the same minority as Microsoft PCs. A good thing too. Personally, I think it’s because Microsoft apparently being bent on destroying the credibility of their own software.

When a bit of software is released, it’s tough to answer “Where do we go from here ?”. And honestly, Microsoft had hit a pinnacle with Windows XP. In it’s early days, it combined everything you need out of an Operating System.

Reliability – I’d got some seriously big uptimes out of my desktops, only rebooting them for updates or if I’d turned it off over a weekend away. When things went bad, System Restore was robust enough to fix it.
Performance – Any current user of a M$ OS would scoff at this but it was different in the early days. XP was a very smooth OS and would run very happily in 256-384MB. My first laptop ran fine in 512MB. Nowadays, Windows is so bloated that I doubt it would boot up in 512MB and would be unusable if it did.
Enabling – this is key. An Operating System should let you do things on a machine (do not buy a Chromebook as they seriously fail in this) and it should enable that to happen transparently. Vista failed because it was incredibly annoying.
Compatibility – apart from some DOS stuff, XP would allow you to run your software. Try running old 16 bit software on 64 bit Windows 7. You would be able to on Linux … Same with old hardware.

However … around the time that Vista came out, an essential update (Service Pack) struck Windows XP. It effectively killed the disc caching, crippling the performance of the machine. We see it at work, where we are too often waiting for our XP machines to chatter away with their hard discs. The whole idea of disc caching is that you don’t have to wait for the disc. All the disc activity is looked after in system memory, with the changes being recorded to disc some time later. However, that update set “some time later” to “do now, make user wait”.

And so we wait for our Windows machines to do stuff while we watch the hard disc light flash away. I get the same problem on this Windows 7 laptop, it’s a fault in all current versions of Windows. My desktop is immune but only because it has a FLASHy hard disc.

Don’t get me started on drivers and software support … Ok, I touched on it above. Backwards compatibility is one of the most essential things in the computer world. (Apple fail hard here too.) Lack of compatibility comes from design decisions being made which change the driver model, with the intention of making machines more stable. What should happen is that the old driver model is retained and supported … but anything that uses it MUST be locked away in its own little sandbox. That’s how I got those 16 bit card games running – by having a WinXP sandbox virtual machine running. That sandbox emulation should be part of the underlying OS.

I’m ranting again aren’t I ?

I think my Windows 7 desktop will be the last Microsoft software I buy (although I may not get a choice). Coupled with an SSD boot drive and 8GB of system memory, it’s nice and smooth. It should last me for quite a few years before Microsoft swing their Compatibility Bat at it. From what I hear of Windows 8, it’s yet another step into horrid interfaces.

Whatever happened to the OS taking a back seat and just enabling you to do stuff with a machine ? Fancy shells do not make fancy machines. Gis the Explorer shell and we’ll put the fancy applications on top of the shell.

That’s the key error – trying to do too much with the shell. (The bit that is the base user interface).

Ok. Some shininess is good (like being able to wave over a taskbar thing and get a preview) but a lot of shininess is just a bad excuse for the horrific levels of bloating we are seeing in today’s software. And it should be achievable just by updating the shell, not the underlying OS. See Linux for an example of keeping the same basic underlying kernel and giving the user a more advanced shell.

And I think I’ve ranted quite enough for now 🙂

What is it that really makes Apples grow ? Water !

And it’s water, water everywhere at the moment. Although yesterday’s cricket did get called off due to the sun being out. (Nah – waterlogged pitch from there being so much rain). Hope people aren’t affected too much by this weather this weekend. It could definitely make the Silverstone GP interesting …

Feeling a bit :

Again right now … That’s the System Crash Pocket Dragon by the way. Poor fella’s wings will have given out on him sending him in for the crash landing.

With me it’s just tiredness. I wasn’t tired until someone asked when I had my summer leave booked … Then I got tired in anticipation. It’s only been a month since my last dose of a week off work, so I’m waiting a little longer before my next break.

Nah – the tiredness will be leftovers from the bugs from last week. Plus inactivity. Plus me running at hyperactive speed for I dunno how long. I have a problem building with doing too many hours, with not many chances to knock down the flexi credit on a Friday. Not really a problem but I don’t want to lose earned flexi credit if I can help it.

Especially if the earned flexi credit is coming at a cost to my health, which has improved enough for me to be quite possibly playing cricket tomorrow …

Possibly a little early because my right leg isn’t back to a level I’d be satisfied with yet but it’ll survive one game. Lungs have improved 🙂 I’ll play tomorrow night cos the team’s desperate for an extra body, so I’ll do the impersonation of a cricketer thing.

Yeah – it was one of those days today at work where for most of it, we’re in Necessary Evil type meetings Accepting something as big as we’re accepting doesn’t come without some really tedious meetings. But you still have to pay attention and be professional, despite your brain screaming at you to let it do something different for a while. And they’re only “tedious” because they’re dealing with minutiae which sounds boring now but which trips you up later if you don’t deal with it now.

What you don’t want in those meetings is for them to suddenly become “interesting” … because “interesting” would take on the same meaning as the old Arab curse : “May you live in interesting times”. A tedious meeting with no surprises is better than hearing about stuff that means all plans are up in the air and need revising. Excitement like that sounds great but you really don’t need it in a professional environment. I’d rather be excited about what we’re delivering than excited about clearing up big messes.

But that’s not going to happen in my project – we’re very good at spotting the problems early, anticipating which cans have the worms in and keeping things on track.

Yey for us 🙂

And this is usually the point where less anonymous type people would point to a news story and say “We Wos Ere” or “That’s Us”. I refrain from that here, although it is great to see what you’ve been working on hit the national news for good reasons. And there’s precious little of that around at the moment because the newsies have been out for blood lately.

Chill out mode at the moment :
I’ve run out of gaming videos to watch off youtube;
England cricket got called off due to rain;
I’m wondering about heading into a game;
My brain is too frazzled to pick the book up (Firefox by Craig Thomas);
“I Can’t See New York” is about to start on iTunes;
(and I will be singing along)
And I’ve had enough of watching recorded stuff.

Not watched a dvd or blu-ray for way too long now. Just had way too much recorded stuff to watch, combined with there being a huge amount of cricket on the telly (despite the weather).

OMG my singing voice is dire at the moment. Almost as bad as Emma Bunton attempting to sing What I Am and butchering it.

What else ? I must be feeling ill still. I’ve been eyeing up something called Minecraft. It’s a sandbox game where you mine stuff and build stuff. It’s best in multiplayer where you’d make your own stuff but also scout around what other people are putting together.

I’m Engineer enough to appreciate putting together an elegant building or machine or other stuff you could do in Minecraft but I’m a little too much Engineer to think of something to build … Ok. I’d see about making a replica of Lords cricket ground for one. And spaceships too.

Minecraft can wait – I’ll watch the Yogscast videos for now. I think that shows how frazzled my brain appears to me when I’d rather watch videos of people playing games than actually play the game.

Time for more Tori Amos – her Scarlet’s Walk album has been playing for the duration of me writing this post 🙂 Wonder if iTunes has any Tori Amos going cheap …

As oars.

I have my first choice bat, which is actually the second last one I bought. The new one got chewed up so quickly it almost became firewood (cheap n nasty – nothing to do with me clobberin’ edges) and I have an older bat that dates back to school that’s too tired to be of any use on the field now.

They’re not seeing much service out on the cricket field at the moment – I’d pass myself as fit to play now (legs are just good enough, lungs are almost clear of bugs) but we’ve had So Much rain lately. Standing water and puddles on the road kind of rain.

Gotta wonder how much more rain our roads can take before we get a repeat of the floods from a few years ago. Bristol, or at least the northern part where I live, tends to get away without being too badly hit by flooding or snow.

Looking at ’em, yeah – you could probably use them as short oars 🙂

By the way – the CT in my car’s name doesn’t mean Canoe Transport. How is that car going ? I’ve had a “6 months on review” type post in reserve as something to write when I get really stuck for ideas. I’m not going to do that one tonight cos I think it’ll need a fair bit of rational thought, which is something I’m struggling for at the moment. (Tired and using most of my energy up in work time)

While I’ll leave the Lexus CT thing for a while, what I will say is : If you can afford to get a New, Nearly New or up to 3 year old car, you should. It’s worth it in terms of the amount of trouble free motoring you should get. My car experience so far has been :

Fiesta – 10 year old. Tired and broke a major component (master brake cylinder = no brakes)
Astra – 10 year old. Bits kept dropping off it
Belmont – 5 year old (I think!). When we bought it, it was just going through the failures … It was sorted by the time I bought it from my mum but it still had things breaking on it.
Rover – 5-6 year old. DISASTER
Puma – bought at 2 years old, ultra reliable until it was mebbe 6-7 years old, then things started breaking.
Focus – 6 years old. And hitting the bits starting to drop off phase. One major failure (inlet manifold)
My dad’s company cars – were pretty rock solid (we looked after them)

I’ve not had the CT long enough to give any reliability info, outside of there being no failures, no rattlies, no niggles (outside of iPod software) to report over 9 months and 6000 miles. Fingers crossed that it stays reliable … There’s not many complaints of mechanical failure appearing on the Lexus forums, which is good news.

You can hopefully see the pattern there … New to 4-5 years old : car’s fine. Older than that and bits start dropping off it, on modern cars as well as the old bangers. This is despite full service histories too.

There’s 2 arguments going though :
Depreciation – a car loses a lot of its value over the first 3 years. For normal cars, the retained value after 3 years can be anything between 25% and 50% of the original purchase price.
Reliability – the early years of a car really are the best.

My advice – Figure out what car you want to get. Buy as young as you can afford. And then keep it until it starts to break. That worked well with the Puma – at £9,000 for 2 years old it was just inside my price range. And it gave many years of trouble free motoring. It didn’t owe me anything … but I did leave it a bit too long before I changed car, mainly because I didn’t have a clue what the next car would be – there just wasn’t anything on the market that stood out. I got bored with the Focus quite quickly but I’m hoping to hold on to the “I wanted it” choice of the Lexus for a good few years after I finish paying for it.

I’ll leave it there I think, except to close on marvelling that the rain outside is louder than the fan inside this laptop … Commencing to drown out both sounds with music 🙂 Current track : Misguided Ghosts by Paramore.

Beware – techie stuff below !!! 🙂

When I come in from work, I’ll usually do a round trip through various news sites. I can’t really do that at work (in lunchtime of course) because our archaic browser (IE6) either goes BANG or flat refuses to open the site. That’s even sites like BBC, which will crash at random, or Metoffice, which flat refuses to load at all.

Ok – random news stuff :

Facebook phone app attempts to seize your mail.
I’m on Facebook a fair bit. It’s possibly the best way to get a message to me with a chance of me responding wherever I am (phone supports it). But the Facebook people have been getting more and more obnoxious with what they do with other people’s data. This one is the latest from them and they do it without asking for consent or even informing you what they’re doing. Which just increases the NerdRage. And as we all know, NerdRage goes viral incredibly quickly.

My phone seems untouched by the latest stuff from the app but I don’t use my phone for email anyway. I can receive my normal email and Googlemail from it but can’t send due to ISP restrictions.

Microsoft – Overclocking causes BSODs
Well – duh ! But that’s only the title of a rather confused article. Parts of it suggest that if you get a machine from a good name, it’ll last longer. Not necessarily … My last laptop (an HP) died within a year of cooler failure and the extremely bad design meant it was easier to get a new one than it would have been to fix. (Think entire laptop rebuild). But they do have a point – I build my own custom PCs because it allows me to build in the reliability that gets lost in OEM cost cutting. And I would always tell people to avoid PCWorld / Currys / Dixons etc own brand machines.

On overclocking – this is where you take a standard machine and persuade it to go faster. My current desktop runs at 3.5 Wibblies. I could probably make it go at 5.0 Wibblies (1 Wibblie = 1 GHz). But it’s not worth me doing that because :
I can’t trust the overclocked machine is getting all of its sums right
It shortens the life of the machine

The article agrees with the shortened life thing. I like my custom build PCs to just sit there on the floor doing their thing. I REALLY don’t want to have to replace a £160 cpu inside 6 months because I cooked it through overclocking.

Steam … (not an actual news story)
What’s with Steam lately ? Stability seems pretty poor right now – it just blipped me offline yet again. Good thing I’m not gaming at the moment.

BBC – I’m ignoring most of what’s on BBC.

Most of what we see there is people with hyperinflated wages misbehaving themselves. Like seeing bankers yet again making news for all the wrong reasons. This time it’s Barclays, who I will do ZERO business with because a good few years ago they called me an idiot in a letter that was begging me for business. Big mistake. There’s plenty more competition out there from banks that have respect for their customers and value them. Barclays, however, have an attitude problem.

June – UK’s wettest on record
Hell yeah. I think we’ve had more cricket called off this year due to weather than we’ve actually had chance to play. How many games have we actually played ? I can’t actually remember. Anyway. We’ve have continuous rain today, next game is supposed to be Thursday and I think I’d be physically ready for it (after bugs + leg) but I don’t think there’s much chance of it happening.

Gamespy has … nothing of interest.
I’ll keep an eye on Gamespy because they occasionally notify you of big things happening in the gaming world. Trouble is though, they are part of IGN so if you do read something on there, have major doubts as to its accuracy. Think of them as the Sunday Sport of games journalism. But poorly written articles that you then peer review against other sites is better than missing out on news totally.

Ooo eck – it’s Tomshardware time …
Mouse introduced with finger cooling fan
This really should have been announced 3 months ago. Like – April fool’s time. I can see their idea but … very, very silly.

Aside – what have I done to my left shoulder ? OW. It’s felt like I’ve jarred it from since like 5.30pm at work. It’s still functional and I don’t have a clue what I’ve done to it but it’s … distracting. The shoulder joint is complaining, as is the elbow. Urg.

Particles that Oxygenate Your Blood
Very interesting. Said the crazy person who can see all sorts of Mad Scientist applications for this one besides the medical ones. An emergency injection of these might see divers with broken respirators have enough time to get to air.

That’s it for now. I need FOOD. And none of that nutritional pizza. Cos that’s just plain Wrong.