Month: August 2012

LOL – so that's it : Multi layer decoys :

1st – draw their eye with big sporting events
2nd – jam their sensors with ridiculous amounts of coverage
3rd – that skycrane

I think the aliens were caught watching the Olympics. A great bit of deceptive timing!

There’s only one news story today …

Ok. There’s another couple for big sporting events but I’ve talked way too much about that last week already !

The Martian Space Defences have been doing pretty well lately. Apart from the two mini rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, they’ve shot down pretty much everything we’ve sent their way over the past few years including our poor homegrown Beagle II.

I think the success this time is through using decoy tactics. This landing was setting down something rather bigger than what they’ve tried before (Team America Science Crew “NASA Lands Car Sized Rover on Martian Surface”), so instead of using parachutes or big bouncy balls the technique this time was :

Aerobrake with a heat shield like usual (friction like in your car brakes is an excellent way of dumping kinetic speed energy)
Slow down more with a parachute
And then come in for a soft landing via skycrane

Before, objects we’ve fired at Mars have looked at parachuting all the way or using big inflatable balls to absorb the energy of the landing. This time, with a skycrane to slow the rover to zero vertical speed, it’s apparently led to a perfect landing. That skycrane also appears to have been the perfect decoy for those Martian Space Defences …

I didn’t get up in time to see the live coverage this morning :-(, I’d got myself caught in Borderlands, where the difficulty in the mission I was attempting ramped up to a ridiculous amount. I succeeded … but at about 1.00 am on the night before first time back at work for a while. Didn’t want to sleep in. Also wanted to be fairly fresh, so doing a 4 hour sleep wasn’t an option.

I’ve been eagerly reading the summaries on The Register today – they’re amusing. They love it that the team has achieved the landing 🙂 But they’re wondering what the Martians think of us landing a nuclear powered, laser armed tank on their soil.

More info from the boys & girls at NASA : http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html

Wanted to include a picture but copyright regs seem to be getting more and more nasty. I’d have loved to borrow one from a website I won’t name (or link) but after reading their terms ? Hell no. I’m not going to dignify them with any mention at all. Even though their Yankee Go Home (they probably nicked it off Reddit) sign was funny.

That’s a good aside to end on actually. Copyright is going nuts. As well as me shying away from borrowing pictures in return for linkbacks, I’ve been seeing people say that their Youtube videos have been threatened with takedowns because they’ve included other people’s trailers (with credit) in their videos. Trailers are adverts. It serves the copyright owner to have the trailer displayed as much as possible. Yet people repeating those trailers are being hit by copyright breach nastiness.

It’s a silly world out there folks when we can’t tell people about good stuff. I don’t think NASA will mind the link above though !

Awesome to see this latest space mission get through its second most dangerous (after launch) phase intact, hopefully there will be some good information coming from it that will increase the weight behind “We Must Go To MARS”. Can’t stay on this planet forever, someone will blow it up sooner or later …

PS There will be no such luck with penetrating the Venus Space Defences – they’ve made their’s incredibly hostile …

It’s going to be weird tomorrow – first day back at work after the week off.

I’ve got so used to keeping an eye on X different channels of Olympics, it’s going to be a wrench to cut myself off from it while at my desk. Or maybe not, I expect I’ll be busy enough to disappear into my tunnel and only come out for updates when I take a break.

Next break will be in a couple of months time when another project milestone approaches. Similar for this one, we’ve just had a massive milestone which this time passed smoother than ever before. The next milestone will be somewhat different, it’ll be for a project just starting instead of a project hitting its deliveries.

That’s a weird feeling too. The past 12 years have all been about Deliver, Deliver, Deliver. Now the deliver phase is finishing, that project is transitioning to its support phase. We’re still buying stuff for it, like you’ll keep buying stuff for your car. Or maybe not normal people buying stuff for their car, more the nutters I see on the CT forums who modify their car into something … strange. However, we’re also learning a hell of a lot at the moment about what we have Delivered, with all those lessons about to get ploughed into the next project.

(I’m having to be deliberately vague about precisely what I work on, although I have left a clue in one or two of the 714 posts published here)

I needed the break – my batteries were getting severely depleted from piling the hours in at work. I’ve not been physically tired (outside of cricket), it’s more a mental tiredness from putting in the Deep Thought to think through the problems we see. It just happened to coincide with week 1 of the Olympics :-).

I’ve not done much over the break, apart from watch an obscene amount of sport 🙂

That laziness was mostly enforced, due to the back injury I picked up in the cricket on the Wednesday before the break. It took until Tuesday until I could move reasonably well again, with me not really being ready for a cricket match I’d have played in on Thursday (if required), if that game hadn’t been rained off.

How am I physically ? The back feels good now 🙂 Slightly stiff but that’s fairly normal. I’m not 20 any more. The thumb I damaged is still … damaged … but that’s ignorable. I can drive and I should be able to write.

My legs – are still not all fixed yet. They’re hugely improved from where they were last year when the skin would break at the slightest excuse and they ulcerated out to a significant portion of both calfs. They basically just wouldn’t scab up to repair themselves. Now, the hair is coming back on my left calf and I suspect they’d be completely healed by now if it weren’t for an obsessive compulsion to scratch …

Must exert more discipline.

The leg problem has had a significant net benefit though. The discipline needed by the “diet” pills (actually antibiotics) convinced me I could alter my eating pattern to something significantly healthier. Before, I’d graze at all times of the day. My metabolism therefore thought it could stay fairly slow, as the energy intake was fairly constant. Shifting to include deliberate fasting periods during the day seems to have kickstarted it into being as hyperactive as I can remember. I think that hyperactivity has let me burn off the fat.

But … while I appreciate having much better definition on my leg muscles now, I think I’d prefer losing a bit of the belly first 😉 I’m down 1.5 stone now on when I started the diet. There’s more to come but – slow & steady so it doesn’t immediately come back on. I’ve maintained the 12.5stone weight over this week, which is a good sign. My energy output hasn’t been high, so it shows that I’ve matched the intake to avoid gaining the weight back.

I have managed to achieve something over this holiday. I coulda done with dealing with the weeds before they become unmanageable again and I seriously need to blitz the other housework. That effectively got put on hold due to my back making it very difficult to move.

What have I done ?

Killed the vacuum ! Or rather the dust bunnies have. Been having issues sleeping, mostly due to slight breathing problems. I’ve been worse with the wheezing but even slight breathing problems freak me out when I’m trying to get to sleep. Or it could be due to not being physically or mentally tired, thanks to the break.

I managed to vacuum half my bedroom tonight, before the vacuum decided it had had enough … Think I’ll be avoiding Hoover next time around.

Right – it’s just about time to watch those Fastest Men On The Planet, so it’s time for me to sign off – g’nite all 🙂

Here’s the view on my desktop :

One of the little Facebook exchanges yesterday was around “only 3 events ????” – muahaha.

And there we go. My desktop’s answering all questions I’ve given it so far and has taken over from the laptop for first choice machine for watching internet video on. The laptop could handle one of those video streams (but in lower quality) but would struggle for space and capacity with more. And that’s with its 17″ monsta screen. My laptop is an AMD machine, which means it’s pushed to the limit of what it can do and doesn’t like to stay at that limit for long. However, the desktop is a much higher performance Intel machine and can stay at its limit all day.

What’s on the screen there ? Firstly, it’s a 23″ Samsung running at 1920×1080 pixels, so the picture size of each video is still pretty good.

Top left is the BBC1 stream, showing the cycling. Team GB is breaking all records in the cycling at the moment, with the last 5 rides all beating world record times. Latest was in the Women’s Team Pursuit.

Bottom left is the Hockey stream, showing GB Women vs China. On screen there is Kate Walsh, back in the starting lineup just 6 days after breaking her jaw. In that picture, she’s sporting the bits n pieces holding her head together.

Wow. That’s true grit. Nearly scored a couple of times too. It’s 0-0 at half time.

Right hand side is the sailing, with Team GB sailors continuing to do well today. The sailing competition isn’t won in a day, it’s won through consistent results over the entire regatta. And Team GB is doing pretty well. I’ll be watching Ben Ainslie hopefully overcome his Danish nemesis tomorrow.

What else is there ? Steam is just poking through in the background there, with me downloading Rage (£6.50 in another sale). I’d actually stopped when I took the screenie, otherwise the network meter would have been a straight line showing 10Mbits/s download. If I let Rage download, it’ll blow through my download cap which puts me into traffic management 🙁 And that means less quality on the video streaming.

There’s 2 performance meters in the top right, network and cpu. Network is curious – I think I reset it this time last week, which means my desktop has downloaded 72GB since then. And most of that is Olympics or youtube … Crikey. The CPU meter is showing that my desktop is somewhat overpowered for all this, it’s barely turning itself on. It does help having plenty of memory – the meter is showing 2.7GB used, which is more memory than my laptop has available to it (3GB installed, some of that is taken by graphics).

Any desktop from the last few years should be able to handle the BBC streaming – noting that the BBC streaming is some of the best on the web at the moment. ITV streaming is far more greedy in terms of cpu cycles.

I’ve since switched the hockey over to Tennis, with Laura Robson and Andy Murray playing again today in the mixed doubles. I watched them have a hard fought win earlier, this time it’s the semi finals with medals beckoning … Fingers crossed, hope they win. Andy Murray would expect to do well in the Tennis but Laura Robson has been a revelation. They’re a set up at the moment.

What does get confusing is which commentary refers to which video stream …

PS I also have the cricket coverage on the main telly, with new kid on the block James Taylor currently going through a trial by fire courtesy of the South African bowlers.
PS2 Sailing commentators definitely win the Shoutcraft stakes, their clarity cuts straight through the other streams.

Yey ! More golds and medals for Team GB today 🙂

It’s been great to watch them being won and it’s still not getting old to stand for the national anthem when the medal ceremonies come on.

But … and this is linked to a question someone asked on Steam – how much does it cost ?

The Steam question was wondering how much pain my credit card was feeling after the Steam Summer Sales 🙂 Actually not that much. It currently stands at £45, with the major part of that being Civ V and its expansion. I think I resisted fairly well and it let me avoid disappointments seen by people falling foul of Ubisoft’s dubious DRM service. (More people need to boycott software with that DRM)

If you stick to the sales and avoid purchases that you’ll get little or no benefit from (Battlefield 3 vs factory overclocked graphics cards ???) then things don’t have to be unaffordable. I apply similar logic to munchies, if they aren’t on offer, that makes the jaffa cakes and the Wispa Bites easier to resist. That £45 is the equivalent of 1.5 A List big budget games and I’ve picked up 8 separate games for that including 2 A List (Civ V & Borderlands) games.

However … Compare that to in real life sport …

Real sport equipment can cost a serious amount of money. My own experience extends only really to cricket, which can get quite expensive. Over the past couple of years, I’ve spent cash on :

Helmet – cricket only, £15 in a sale
Spikes – think these were £25 (sale again) but you could waste £100 on them
Knee supports – £28 each. EACH !
Kit bag – think this was around £20 ish last year and I got one of the smaller cricket bags
New bat – I didn’t buy one but if I had ? £150 minimum for an English willow bat

What else ? I haven’t bought batting gear since the nose job incident (I think!) but refreshed the gear after that. I think something psychological made me change all my gear after breaking my nose but – my pads disappeared into a team’s kit bag and I’d been thinking about changing them anyway. If I remember right, pads and batting gloves cost about £15 each back then. Sales again 🙂

I’ve also picked up sundry other bits and pieces this year – the Pink Cap cost a tenner, as did the pink bat grip from Lords.

You’re probably asking – is all this kit absolutely essential ? Yes and no. Most cricket and other sports clubs will have a shared kit bag which people can dip into for games. I’ve lent out my bat and pads a few times this season. When I did archery (long time ago!), the bow and arrows I used came from the club.

However …

Spikes or studs – utterly essential. These give an incredible amount of grip, it transforms the amount of power you can put into the ground with your legs. If you try to run on greasy ground in trainers, it’s difficult. It’s actually dangerous for me to try using full leg power on dewy grass, as any slip is usually followed by leg muscles complaining. It’s near impossible for me to sprint on damp grass in trainers, as there simply isn’t enough grip to allow that much leg power to be transmitted to the ground.

So we wear spikes or studs as appropriate to avoid injury and let us use the power in our muscles. And it’s similar for the knee pads too : My leg muscles developed before my knees had the structural strength to contain their power. When I sprinted, it felt like my knees wanted to explode. So I took to wearing the knee pads in order to hold my knees together. It just so happens that they also allow me to take knocks involving cricket ball on knee.

Specialist gear – yes, I could borrow pads or bat but I prefer to get accustomed to my own. With archery, the olympic standard bows have all sorts of extra bits to make them balanced and more consistent. Sail boats, you gotta practice somehow.

Even the basics of shoes cost more than they really should.

But – the point I really want to make is – sport at a highly competitive level costs a hell of a lot :

Time – so many of the athletes have to make it their life, to the point where they cannot have a paying job.
Basics – shoes, outfits
Gear – racquets, bats, gloves
Special gear – how much does a boat cost ? A top level racing bike ?
Gym time – facilities cost money, training costs time

Top level sport costs so much in terms of money, sacrifice and sheer bloody minded dedication. Every athlete who’s made it to the Olympics has paid so much in all 3 to get there. They’ve earned both their place and our support.

All of ’em.

But especially Team GB 🙂 (I’m biased)

(Quick note – I started this post talking about Olympics but … read on – something else took over and I’ve saved the Olympics one for another day)

With my own cricket, I think I may have jinxed out the rest of the season after buying another helmet on Tuesday.

One thing I wanted to talk about actually, which I may leave for another post (nah – tears won) so I can do her justice – I’ve found the strange sensation of tears coming during games … I’m quite an emotional chap but keep the emotions behind walls that are tough to break down. Yet, on a couple of occasions, I’ve felt a tear coming down my face during a game.

It’s for a lady called Katherine (aka The Rose), who we lost to breast cancer in Spring. I didn’t actually know her that well but I’m still remembering that smile that answered the big grin that usually accompanied me doing the Meerkat thing as people walked past my desk.

In the games, the tear would follow me explaining why I’ve been wearing the Pink Hat for as much of this summer as possible. In the last game, it was me telling one of the umpires (borrowed from the other team) what the Pink Hat was about. And good lad – he wore it. I’d switched to the helmet and had to hand over the hat because it was slipping down my trousers and protecting the back of my right knee.

In a sense, it’s not just Remembering Katherine, it’s remembering everyone else that we’ve lost whether that be due to illness, accident or in service. (I’ve seen what losing friends in service can do to people – help the survivors where you can, part of them died with those they lost)

I’m glad I had the idea to don the Pink Hat this summer. I’m also … relieved that I didn’t make a big thing out of collecting as :

The wetness has caused more than half the games to be cancelled
My own fitness stood up but my body rebelled with injuries
I’d have felt very uncomfortable pressurising people to contribute when they cannot afford to live for themselves
(Money’s tight these days)

But I am very glad that I decided to don the Pink Hat for tribute. I hope it’s raised awareness. Or at least that enough people know about Pink + Sport = Awareness to realise why I’ve been wearing it.

Despite how hard we try to, we cannot remember everyone we’ve lost over the years. I have a stunning memory (mostly for pictures, i.e. beautiful smiles) but cannot remember everyone I’ve lost.

So I started with just one. I remember Katherine.

And I’ll close with that cos I can feel those tears coming again.

PS Just cos I didn’t collect doesn’t mean others won’t appreciate it – click here if you’d like to make a contribution.

Hurrah !

Gold medals for the Brits at last 🙂 Awesome to see too. The Brit Girl pair of Helen Glover and Heather Stanning started us off with gold in the women’s pair (rowing 2000m), followed by Bradley Wiggins in the men’s cycling time trial.

I have mixed feelings about the Wiggins medals (he now has the most medals of any British Olympian), after watching the two he got in Beijing. (Controversial opinion coming!) He didn’t seem to be helping out his team mates at all in Beijing, in fact I got the impression that he held them back and nearly cost them the medals. But … you can’t deny him this one, time trial is all about one cyclist against the clock. It’s all his medal this time.

I’m back to two sports today – Cricket is on the telly (it gets priority there cos I can’t stream it), with the Olympic sport medley on the desktop. At the moment, I’m leaving it with the BBC1 choice, although as they’ve focused on the rowing this morning it’s aligned with what I’d have watched anyway.

Hoping for more golds later 🙂 I want to see a few more before I head back to work next week.

Anyway – cricket on the telly at the moment and it’s already bringing in the controversy. England have juggled their side a bit, going for a more aggressive fast bowling pack. To be honest, the bowler who’s been dropped was ineffectual in the first Test and the ground they’re playing at (Headingley) is historically a fast bowler’s paradise.

At least, that’s how it used to be – pitches change over time. It’s been looking fairly playable so far this morning, with England putting the South Africans in to bat and not having any success yet.

Crazies went to see Dark Knight Rises on Tuesday. Good film. Unusually for an action based movie, it covers quite a decent amount of time. But also unusually, there’s enough clues (ok, they are big Hit Over Head With It clues) to let the audience keep up. I’ll be buying it when it comes out on offer. I might even pay a higher price on blu-ray for it.

That’s a curious one. Blu-ray has a definite price premium to it, harking back to the early days of DVD. I think it is worth it, just from the improved sound. Visually however, there’s not much to tell between upscaled dvd and bluray, as modern dvd players get stuff out of the signal that might not have been there to start with.

Distracted again. I went into Sports Direct hoping to get a headband to a) absorb the sweat (ugh) and b) get my helmet tight again. What did I walk out of there with ? A new helmet. Ooops. Especially as I’m not sure I can use it in a game, as the “helmet completely on head” position has the lid obscuring my view almost to nose level.

So – still need a headband to push the front out enough so the back doesn’t tip the angle down. (It makes sense but you’d need to see the design and I’m not advertising which type !)

There’s my kit buying jinx striking again, at least I didn’t spend £150+ ish on a new bat that I won’t get any value out of. The helmet was only £15 on offer (and it is shiny and my old one is technically broken).