Month: August 2012

Have been – but ages ago …

Came out ok then for the diabetes potential. Might be worth getting checked again though if eating more Green Stuff doesn't sort me out 🙂

Not healing? Have you been tested for diabetes?

I seem to be improving 🙂

A health issue I’ve had for over a year now is that some wounds I’ve picked up have been refusing to heal. That’s not good. The diagnosis last year was ulceration and infection but … I’m hoping now that’s a conclusion based on incomplete data.

What I did was look up and research “diet skin repair” (or something similar) because I suspected that with my horribly bad diet, I was missing out on crucial minerals needed for my body to repair itself. Basically, by neglecting eating my greens and by going away from habitually drinking orange juice, I’d got to a point where my body had run out of the stuff it needs to keep it intact.

After a week of shifting the diet a bit again, things are looking promising again today 🙂 Although I’ll keep an eye on it over a weekend where I can wear shorts all the time. The skin is still weak and shorts mean that trouser material won’t damage it.

Now that’s out the way – techie stuff !!!

Been researching that again today because the desktop PC is still sick. It would boot up fine initially but after “a while”, it would crash hard and wouldn’t work after a reboot. Turn the PC off and on and it’s fine.

Researching “Crucial M4 problems” quite quickly gets you seeing stories about them failing after 5100 running hours. How long is that ? It’s 212.5 days or roughly 7 months. That’s spookily about right for how long my desktop has been active. Looking with that DiskCheckup utility I linked a few days ago, the run time is about 5240 hours (if I’m reading the numbers right).

What’s the known issue ? They’ll go unresponsive after an hour of use, leading to the machine crashing. Powercycling the drive will fix it. (That’s consistent with what I’m seeing)

What’s the fix ? Update the firmware. I’m on that – I’m currently doing disaster prevention by copying all files on the SSD to another drive in the machine. The firmware in my drive is version 0002 and needs to be 000F.

I usually avoid updating firmware like plague – it’s a very risky thing to do and should be unnecessary. One false move (like having the drive die halfway through cos of it’s 1 hour limit) and you’ll end up with something less use than a brick.

It’s been a saga … But it’s good to have it confirmed that Crucial are a responsible and quality bits manufacturer. Other SSDs have been bricked completely by firmware difficulties and one reason I went Crucial is because they didn’t just go sheeplike and clone everyone else’s drive.

One reason Gigabyte and Acer hit my blacklist a good few years ago was that they didn’t have that responsible attitude to making quality bits (now forgiven). The GA5AX motherboard for my K6iii was based on an Acer Labs chipset which had software which was … incomplete. I’m not sure if that firmware was ever fully developed. On motherboards, which form the foundation stone of all PCs, that’s almost unforgiveable.

Crossing my fingers that I’ve got it right on this one. Returning hardware is always a pain, especially if it’s a problem that couldn’t be recreated in store without waiting an hour for the time to tick over. Novatech would be find with returning hardware … it’s just time and hassle to get the drive to them and back on top of annoyance of having to get a new drive up to speed.

It would cut into cricket watching time !

So – crossing my fingers that :

My legs continue to heal themselves
That I can resist the compulsion to scratch them (own worst enemy)
My drive has the known issue with those Crucial SSDs.

And … it’s just crashed again after roughly 1 hour of use. It’s not nice to have a problem. But it is nice to see confirmation of symptoms that lead you to a possible fix for that problem.

Closing out – if you’re putting together or buying a PC and have free choice over what to get, here’s what I think with the knowledge over the past week :

Laptop – use a hybrid drive. Conventional discs are too slow, SSDs are lightning but not big enough. Laptops rarely give you room to fit more than one drive, so Hybrid drives aim to give you the best of both worlds. My laptop isn’t as quick as my desktop now – but it’s smoother than it was before the swap.

Desktop – plenty of room here, use a SSD boot drive and a conventional drive for data. There’s all sorts of advantages to separating out Windows from the data. It’s easier to back up if Windows is separate but that’s insignificant next to the performance gains from separating them out. If Windows is on the same physical drive as data, it has to go back and forwards across the disc to read what it needs. Caching should cut down that time but caching has been broken in Windows for many years now.

Even doing something like switching to my 74GB WD Raptor (conventional but less slow) drive for Windows, combined with the 1.5TB drive for data, would lead to big performance and smoothness gains by eliminating all that seek time.

Had something highly expected happen last night when I was testing the laptop with its new hard disc.

When you make a hardware switch on a PC, you always expect a problem. If there’s no problems, that’s the time to worry. Anyway. This time, laptop boots up just fine with its new hard disc and it feels a little smoother too thanks to that special hybrid hard disc.

Ok. So no problems with the laptop. What I definitely didn’t expect was that in the middle of watching a Yogscast video on the desktop, that the desktop would decide to pop its clogs … Like : full machine crash type oopsie. And when you try a reboot of that Windows 7 machine, a “Starting Windows XP” screen would come up, quickly followed by a Blue Screen Of Death “Windows has stopped to protect the machine” …

What … The … Hell …

Cue a little bit of panic.

Thinking it through a bit more, I go check the BIOS (the bit that first appears when you hit the On switch and figures out what hardware is in the machine). The BIOS aka Basic Input Output System can’t see the boot disc. That’s either extremely bad news or a suggestion of something very easy to fix.

Aside – my desktop has 3 hard discs inside it :
60GB SSD – Windows 7 boots off this but it’s too small to have any data or applications on it
250GB Seagate – my last machine’s game drive, put in there to give the new machine a bit of storage space while I waited until big hard discs came down in price
1.5TB Western Digital drive – where my games, applications and data goes.

What seems to have happened is that a cable went dodgy, so the desktop couldn’t see its SSD boot drive. What happens then is that the Bios tries each drive in turn, looking for something it can hand over to. When it found the Seagate, it would see the Windows XP installation on the games drive. However … that’s an installation that was set up for a very different machine … AMD vs Intel, ATI vs nVidia, wholly different motherboard etc etc ad nauseum. Suffice to say, nothing is shared between last machine and new machine.

Desktop seems fine now after a little poking around inside its innards. I’ve also had the chance to tone down a fan that was getting rather intrusive with the noise, so I’ll be curious to see what temperatures the machine will be running (before, it maxed out at 56 degrees C under load with hot ambient).

Where’s the problem come from ? Miniaturisation.

Cabling for disc drives used to be pretty bombproof. It was solid enough that you had to tug quite hard on the cables to get them out. They had a really good grip.

That’s an old Quantum Fireball EL drive. It’s 3.5 inches wide and I’ve popped a 10p on there as comparison. I think it’s a 7.6GB drive and dates back to when I was running an AMD K6iii powered machine. That ran at 450MHz, which is precisely half the clock rate of my desktop’s graphics card.

Anyway – the white connector is a 4 pin Molex, these had a deathgrip. The 2xlots connector to the right is actually a floppy drive cable but hard disc wires were fairly similar (more pins). Data used to be sent around with lots of wires in parallel, using ribbon cables like in the picture. The problem there is that when you get to really high data rates, the neighbouring wires like to say hello, say “wotcha doing”, “this is what I got”, “can we share ?”. That sharing thing is called “crosstalk”. It’s a big problem and is why instead of doing things in Parallel, electronics has moved to passing around 1 bit at a time. I.e. Serial instead of Parallel.

Ok. That’s Dark Age tech, what’s the new stuff ?

That’s the drive that just came out of my laptop. It’s a Western Digital Scorpio Blue drive that holds 320GB. It’s 2.5 inches wide and much thinner than the 3.5″ drives. What’s beside it is the insides of my 2.5″ USB caddy.

The ribbon data cable and the Molex power connector have been replaced by the two sockets with an L shaped connector. You can pull these out quite easily and it’s my huge suspicion that one of them worked its way loose on its own.

When a hard disc goes Bang, the electronics that control it usually still work. That Bios thing can usually still identify that there’s a drive plugged in. Self protection measures keep the control electronics intact if the motors fail in such a way to cause power spikes. So if a Bios can’t see the drive, it’s usually either :

Very Toasty Drive
Loose connector

If the Bios can see the drive but no data can be got from it, that’s when it’s time to chuck the drive in the bin. Thankfully, after unhooking the cables and plugging them back in (plus a swap of a couple), my desktop’s up and running again – but I have just done a backup of its SSD drive again. Just to be safe …

Addon – meh. It’s not a loose connector. It’s a toasty drive. Another failure after about an hour’s running this time …

PS Yes. That is the bottom half of a penguin and definitely the whole of a Biscuit puppy. You are not seeing things.
PS2 I deny all knowledge of dust.

Ok, ok, so early today I was saying :

“I’ll leave the laptop hard disc swap until Friday so I can do it while the cricket’s on” – with the idea being that I’d be able to work on the laptop without wanting music in the background to listen to. (The music lives on the laptop).

But. The idea of “why the hell wait ?” took over. Lol. Been catching up on more recorded telly tonight, Falling Skies plus the last few A Town Called Eureka. What’s that give ? An opportunity to work on the laptop without wanting music in the background to listen to. (No I did not copy/paste that – lol)

It starts with a little disaster planning. In 2.5 years of owning my laptop, I’d not made the factory restore discs. So in those pop and about an hour later I have 4 dvds full of Acer factory restore gubbins. So if this transfer messes up completely, I’ll be able to reinstall fresh. Or if it doesn’t quite do what I want (there’s potential of the transfer losing recovery stuff that’s in a special partition) then I don’t lose anything.

The software I’ve gone for to do the transfer is called Acronis Backup & Recovery. It costs about $75 … but … there’s a free trial version. That only lasts 15 days but … I’m hoping to only have to do this once. Sold !

Oh and of the backup software I looked at, this was the only one which appeared to do what I wanted (despite blurb on websites), which is to totally transfer the software from one hard disc to another.

One thing it’s doing though is take copious amounts of time.

The transfer is called “clone hard disc” and involves a bit for bit, partition for partition copy of the old drive to the new one which is connected up via USB. It’s doing this by rebooting into a copy only mode. But it’s taking ages … It’s just hit 100% (and I’m rebooting it) so it’s hopefully got a full copy on the new drive.

Let’s see … Next step – swap the hard discs over, after I boot up the laptop to :

Take a little look at the new drive
Assure myself I can go back to the old one

Hmm. The reboot is taking a while … I’ll be ignoring a video from Totalbiscuit (Sleeping Dogs game) while I do the switchover. More later ! I’m hoping to have a fully operational and upgraded laptop by sleep time.

Ok – Update 1 – testing the new drive hooked up to the laptop with the old drive active is curious … Drive Manager can see it but won’t let you interact to it if you’d copied over what’s called “NT Signatures”. Curious !

Time to take a plunge into the gubbins …

Update 2 – back’s off the laptop and the old hard disc is … scorching. I suspect it may have been having more trouble than I thought. Hard discs should not be 70 degrees + (too hot to hold).

Update 3 – One hard disc swap later and I have a Starting Windows screen ! I’m not used to stuff like this working so easily – something’s gonna go wrong 😉

Last update – this one is being tapped in from a laptop that is exactly as it was left when I started the backup (even down to the random desktop wallpaper). Is it quicker ? Let’s see. It’s too early to really tell yet, any comparisons will be buried in potential “I’ve upgraded so it must be better” placebo effect.

Verdict on Acronis – bloody brilliant. If I needed this software more, like if I was making machines for a living and wanting to cut down on software time, it’s perfect. If I was a sysadmin and looking for enterprise grade software, again, brilliant.

Hugely recommended !

My body’s not the only thing that’s struggling to maintain itself at the moment … (Danger – Techie Post !)

Just spent a bit of cash on the laptop. I’ve not installed what I got yet (that’s to come and I’m anticipating HHAASSSSLLEE) but I’m reasonably sure my laptop has a terminal problem.

Symptom :

Occasionally (about once or twice per boot up) the laptop will freeze with no mouse pointer response for about 10-15 seconds (unsure due to Watched Pot time dilation). Music or video keeps playing for a few seconds, which suggests the cpu is still happily sending stuff out of buffers. Everything else freezes. Hard disc light will be on solidly. After the freeze finishes, laptop is all happy.

But … Sunday, it gets scarier. It’s early in the Olympics closing ceremony and I’ve put a Facebook post in decrying the BBC for getting Prince Henry’s name wrong. Email replies come in and I think the laptop shows its own disgust at me by crashing hard and Loud. As in, crashing halfway through the “new email” sound leaving that sound running at Max Volume. Think 12 on the dial.

That one actually needed a full reboot because the laptop didn’t recover.

However … it wasn’t actually that easy. Laptop comes back up sure. But only part of the way. When I start up my laptop, it’ll fire up its Windows 7 gadgets plus I’ll load Firefox, Outlook, Messenger, iTunes, Steam and Digiguide. (Yep – that’s a lot of work for laptop). This time, Firefox and Outlook opened quickly with Firefox being usable. Outlook was not. It took half an hour (literally!) before the laptop was happy again with all applications open.

Translation – bad news. And a GeekyPete remembering back a bit and thinking it might be a good idea to replace the hard disc in this machine.

Hard disc theory – they’re built from discs with magnetic Stuff on which spins at a few thousand rpm. They have a motor to spin up the discs. There’s an arm that reaches across the disc to read the data. It’s literally floating across the disc.

If stuff goes wrong with those motors, it takes more effort than it should to spin up the discs. When that effort is more than the motors can give, the drive breaks. I’ve had that happen before, on my first PC (this is Dark Age stuff, my graphics card has more memory than that PC). It’s totally terminal, there’s no way domestically you can get the data off a drive that’s died that way.

How can you check ?

If you catch it early, when the PC stalls there will be a faint clicking sound as the motors try and spin up. Newer discs are much quieter though. You can use software like PassMark’s Diskcheckup. I’ve just tried that and it’s let me look at the health monitoring information that’s buried in the drive. There’s a few anomalies there, including a few “JEEZ THAT’S SILLY HIGH !!!” scary numbers.

If you see the line :
Raw Read Error Rate – Value 200, Worst 200, Threshold 51
What’s your reaction ?

Mine was OH SHIT MY DRIVE IS NEARLY TOAST. And then you look in the help file and find the High = Happy. (where have I heard that before). Lesson – read the help files and they’ll decipher what you’re looking at.

I think I’m on to something though – Spin Up Time (how good those motors are) is 199 to a threshold of 21.

So – what am I doing about it ?

I’m making a change while it’ll be easy before a hard disc failure makes it huge grief. A like for like cheapest switch would be a 320GB little drive (link is an example) for £48 from Novatech. What I’ve done is spend more cash on something just a tad better.

Windows biggest failing is having to wait for the hard disc. What’s the best way to fight that ? Get a quicker hard disc. It used to be that you’d pay Western Digital silly money for a hard disc that was slightly less slow. But there are now alternatives :

Solid State Device drive – memory discs. My main desktop PC runs off one of these and it’s Fast. Truly fast. But … 60GB of Crucial M4 SSD costs £56 and that’s barely big enough for Windows. And my laptop has to have enough room for applications plus a 32GB iTunes library. So now we’re looking at 128GB at a push (£60 for cheap, £84 for a Crucial M4) and 256GB to be happy (£140+).

Hybrid drive – these are normal discy discs with a tiny Solid State bit to speed them up. This is what I’ve bought – 500GB for £84. Not as fast as an SSD but has the size to keep a laptop happy.

I’ve not taken it out of the bag yet so I’ve not started the changeover – fingers crossed that it’ll be an easy one !

PS At some point I’ll compare the process we have to go through at work for stuff like this and the process we can go through at home. It’ll be a whinge. And I’ll enjoy every character of it 🙂

(addon – I’ve spotted all the hits come in looking for info on Martin Wolfram – I don’t know much, just what I saw on the telly. Will keep looking and add a link if I find anything. Hope he’ll be ok when that shoulder fixes !)

… Please turn off the torch.

That’s from one of the pen & paper role play gamers in a little group that’s been going for years (on hiatus at the moment – ill health).

This Olympics (and this will be the last Olympics post for a while – honest) has been pretty awesome. It’s had everything :

On at a good time, so you don’t have that “stay up longer or go bed at reasonable time ?” timezone competition thing. Beijing was ahead of the UK, so the time zone was quite hostile.

Information – the London2012 website has been outstanding for getting results, updates, scheduling and just generally getting information out there. With the diving, I was occasionally seeing results and updates come through before the commentators and crowd saw them. (That’s partly due to the delay on the feeds).

Coverage – this has been unrivalled. Huge number of channels with great camera work on them all. It heralds the digital age coming again. For Beijing, the multi channel streaming architecture wasn’t as mature and the hardware we have to show it nowhere near as ready. I didn’t but I suspect I could have watched some of the coverage on my phone, like I listen to internet radio on it.

I suspect the coverage may have plateaued there though. I’m not sure it can be taken that much further, apart from maybe Picture In Picture selections like what was promised with TV decades ago.

Stories – There’s been stories all the way. Good ones, Bad ones, Embarassing ones, Heartwarming ones, Inspiring ones.

Good ones – the way it’s all come together, with the conduct of the games being such that it’s allowed the athletes to come to the fore. One thing I can remember from Beijing are the stories about the smog, no such worries about London although the rain made things interesting at times.

Bad ones – the non-trying badminton players and the occasional bad referee. Yep. These stole the headlines but it was dealt with appropriately.

Embarassing ones – remember those Arabian signs ? Oops ! (Paul McCartney counts too)

Heartwarming ones – that clip of Victoria Pendleton showing the heart symbol will be shown for a very long time. As will those of our boys and girls being in tears on the medal podiums.

Inspiring ones – all of the athletes. All of ’em. But especially Martin Wolfram who injured his shoulder badly during the diving and then proceeded to complete the competition with a useless right arm. Did well too.

But – what’s next ?

Back to life, back to reality. I’ll be looking forward to the Paralympics in a couple of weeks, followed by the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia. I’ll give sport watching a rest for a few days (cricket’s on but will ignore until Thursday’s Test Match).

I didn’t get to go along to any events (feeling I missed out) but Olympic spirit was flowing well, even with those who I’d never believe it would catch. What is next ?

Catching up on the telly … Got lots of recorded stuff, lots of recorded films and 7 blu-rays have arrived that I haven’t watched yet. Lots to watch.

Cricket season is done – there’s another game but I’m going to be avoiding that. My back is sound but isn’t fixed yet. I’m being careful because it could go bang again easily if I twist wrong. Nah – my legs aren’t fixed yet.

Actually that’s another thing I’m going to have to change and that’s diet … I’ve done a little more analysing and come to the conclusion that neglecting certain things in my diet is why I’m having problems with legs, lungs and eyes.

Whenever you hit a problem with your body, try and analyse it. Don’t instantly go for the patch it over solution, as the underlying problem will still be there. The creams helped my legs repair some of the damage but it didn’t fix the underlying cause. I think it’s diet – I need to get the greens back in and the orange juice. I used to drink a reasonable amount of that, enough to keep me healthy. I think what’s happened is that my body’s run out of the essential minerals it needs to keep it healthy and I need to make the switch to get them back in.

We’ll see how that goes. Sainsburys tomorrow and I’ll break a habit by visiting the aisle with Green Stuff in it.

But yeah – I’m not repairing as quickly and as efficiently as I used to. Playing cricket one week needed to be followed by a week away in order to recover. There’s a lot of consistency between symptoms observed and things missing (Vitamin C, K and zinc) from my diet. And now I’ve identified that, it’s time to test the conclusion and see if it’s right 🙂

Besides – I’ve got bored of biscuits, munching raw crunchy cabbage will be suitable biscuit replacement :-).

I had a chance to leg it early enough today, using hard earned flexi credit, to head into the middle of Bristol for a wander around.

The eyes were fully open as usual, what did they see ?

Summer outfits are definitely still In. But then again – we’ve switched back to Heat Lamp conditions.

Trouble is, “summer outfit” tends to mean really tight outfits which can look great on some people, on others it tends to bring out all the wrong things … Excess person tends to escape the overly tight outfit in all the wrong places. (I sadly have to watch for that with my t-shirts!) Or … instead of the tight outfit accentuating and emphasising healthy curveyness, it shows where the ribs are sticking out from half starved fashion victims.

I’ve still been using my summer jacket lately, which is a light blue denim one I got in Orlando a few years ago. It’s light, it has huge inside pockets. Good for carrying my various bits around. I don’t trust my wallet in my trouser pockets, there’s too much tendency for it to try and work its way out of there. I haven’t lost my wallet yet, so that theory must be working.

Book sales …

Waterstones are doing a “Buy One Get One Half Price” at the moment (stickered items only – grr). But … with the Michael Cobley books I looked at, the third was in the offer, the first two were not. If I’m going to speculatively buy a new author, I want to start at Book 1 not Book 3. So they stay on the shelf. I think that’s a bit sad myself, it’s a lost opportunity for a shop that will be struggling enough already due to the competition from online sellers.

More book …

Spotted all 3 Hunger Games books in HMV in a set for £6. That’s cheaper for 3 books than we tend to see books sold on their own. Remarkable deal, if you’re thinking of getting the Hunger Games books, that’s the deal you want. I almost went for it myself as I was picking up more Stuff there. But … The Hunger Games was a very well made film. They did a cracking job of it. I may well even buy it when it hits an acceptable price. But … the backstory behind the action was GOPPING. It was awful !!! The entire last kid standing concept was ripped off from Battle Royale and inserted into a Future Earth society that was utterly nonsensical. So if the only good thing about the film was how they translated the action parts to the screen, I consider the books with the backstory to be a waste of time. Although I may actually buy them at some point to make up my mind properly.

You can only really form a true opinion about something if you’re working off relevant facts. If I tell you that Intel cpus are better than AMD, it’s coming from valid objective technical factual information that comes from endless articles. If I tell you that Florence & The Machine are awful noisemakers, that’s my subjective opinion and you should only take it as your’s if you’ve attempted to listen to them without your ears bleeding.

(I’m not a fan and think they’re horrendously overhyped)

People who get in the way

There’s lots of these. They’ll thoughtlessly spread themselves across a whole pavement, blocking the path for everyone. (This goes for people who have meetings on stairs too). The ultra wide mob aren’t so bad if they’re going your way (answer = chill pill) but if they’re approaching, it’s time to get the elbows out.

Yes – I’ve been known to send rude people flying rather than step off pavements into traffic. Didn’t have to go that far today, the rude people decided not to argue … although I did have to stop myself from running over a child that was taking the lead from a rude parent.

I bought stuff !!!!

Yep. Check outside to see if the sky is falling (hazy but sun’s still up). Blu-rays were going 5 for £30 so I picked up Paul, Armageddon, Das Boot, Sunshine and Stealth. Yep. There’s some bad films in there but I enjoyed them. Not so sure about Sunshine, need to make my mind up about that one again. Music wise, I’ve picked up the Ting Tings (Sounds from Nowhereville), Tori Amos (Abnormally Addicted to Sin), Smash Mouth (All Star Smash Hits) and Gabriella Cilmi’s Ten.

Greatest hits albums …

Most bands put these out at some point. Either if their careers are going down the pan, or if the record companies want to exploit the back catalogue. Was surprised to find greatest hits albums by Smash Mouth (music from Shrek) and Voice of the Beehive. The Voice of the Beehive greatest hits was basically a compilation from their first 2 albums, cutting off the really bad tracks. I saw a few more All About Eve collection cd’s while browsing. They must have really upset someone at EMI, there’s been more collection cd’s than actual All About Eve original albums.

Mind you, that could also mean they had a fan in the label who wanted as much of their material out there as possible.

Last bit – I miss my hot chocolate. I used to have a hot chocolate and something munchable when I’d exhausted the potential of wandering around the shops. Trouble is, I started reacting (lactose issues) to the hot chocolate. So I had to switch to something different for the coffee shop visit. I definitely miss the hot chocolate but … I’m a coffee fiend 🙂

And with the mention of munchables … the athletics looks like it’s kicking off and I’ve not had any popcorn for a while …

PS I today spotted the most awesome pair of platform soles I have EVER seen. (Even beating Snow Queen platforms!). They must have been at least 6 inches and were made of rubber with a big hole in the middle. Result – they worked like springs and she went Boing Boing Boing wherever she walked.

It’s not through some long winded sciency process involving sand into silicon and copper and gold into wires …

My money’s on the 680 ohm.

Wonder if any of those have been subject to doping ?

PS Daft picture courtesy of Intel’s Facebook page …

I did pretty well on Monday at work with the withdrawal symptoms …

My actual boss and I are both sport nuts, so we tend to swap latest score info between us and natter on analysis too. She’s got a keen analytical mind that’s very into cricket, so you can probably imagine how in depth we can go on that.

(As a lunchtime conversation of course!)

Anyway – those swapping of Stuff Has Happened, plus the typical First Day Back From Leave hecticness let me avoid thinking too much of Olympics. That didn’t really hit until Tuesday, when I was really missing the Olympic TV combined with watching several streams via the desktop.

What’s been the salvation ? The London2012 Android app is pretty darn good. I can’t remember what the info feeds were like from Beijing in 2008 but for this Olympics, the dissemination of information has been incredible. Top notch. And I don’t think that’s from improvement in technology (cricinfo has been doing ball by ball commentary at a similar level for many years), it’s just been done in a simple, seamless way.

Check it out while it’s there : www.london2012.com

It’s simple, yet efficient and remembers what web pages should be – lean & clean. I wonder if the rise of the smartphone has something to do with that ? Are they making web designers go away from cluttered pages and back to simpler ones ? Not a bad thing. It’s backed up by the Android app, which has up to the minute live score info for all events plus there’s a Voice Of The Games which gives short paragraph updates for events that have just completed.

What they seem to have got cracked now is the process of pulling the information in and distributing it to the web, in near real time.

So some of the sting of that withdrawal has been taken away by Just Enough info being available via the Android app. Plus with the explosion of social media, more and more updates are coming across that way.

I do get another type of withdrawal symptom though from a leave period. I thrive on interaction with other people. I get horribly bored when I’m on my own. Things like games are too predictable, stuff on telly is often a repeat, memory means I’m struggling to keep the music library fresh.

Being around people is completely different. The interactions around an office defy prediction. Especially in larger offices like the floorplates at our work. (The buildings are Big). We keep a good sense of humour going too. Offices that keep a sense of humour get more done, even if that humour is sometimes very dark …

Oh and if someone smiles at me in the office, I know that it’s because of something I’ve done rather than some scripted thing that would happen anyway. Even better if someone chuckles at something I say. Oh and games don’t randomly award you with real cake for no good reason.

Cake is life.

Oh and it’s a huge bonus when the Cake attracts more smiles. We had a visitation from the BM mob from the old team. Talking of interactions that defy prediction – lol 🙂 That mob was always just one half comment away from breaking into something : Silly, Scary, Outrageously Amusing. I only tended to pick up on it halfway through and it tended to be way past my understanding (think caveman!), which is where the scariness comes in.

Oh was I talking about withdrawal symptoms ?

Olympics – I’ll definitely miss the games when they’re over
Cake – diets are evil but cake brings smiles
Old team people – scary ! And awesome to see them come up for the cake

PS I devoured my donut so fast this morning that it appeared to have been inhaled.
PS2 Scary can be wonderful too. Especially when it is that special brand of female scary where you have no clue whatsoever as to what they’re going to be getting up to next.