Sleepypete's Pillow

Nah – no air filter machine. May have to scout them for when I next blitz clean the house. Last time I really did that, I was coughing for days due to the dust going up into the air for me to breathe in.

it took me years to learn not to buy it just cause it's on sale
well done kid

do you have an air filtering machine, or several, they really do help with dust
also Swiffer products are great for dusting off, they hold the dust rather than spread it around

hugs

Not actually bought anything yet on the Steam sale …

A few things have caught the eye but not enough to actually get the credit card for :

Anno 2070 – it’s a city builder game but I’m not altogether sure what I’d do with it. Still curious about it though. However … it has Ubisoft’s overbearing Digital Rights Management software attached to it which requires an always on internet connection. That’s not actually a problem for me, although it is for Ubisoft. My internet connection is 99.9999% available, which is much more than can be said for Ubisoft’s DRM servers.

Might & Magic Heroes VI – missed the boat on this one, although it’s another one that’s subject to Ubisoft’s DRM. It’s another example where rampant piracy is costing honest customers. The DRM would not be there without piracy.

Warlock – Master Of the Arcane – another one I avoided but it’s one that I was interested in. I’ve always been a fan of Civilisation type games. They have huge depth available in terms of strategy and this one looks to bring in fantasy elements which seriously open up the scope past Spearman vs Tank. But … it’s another which was released before it was ready, with elements like diplomacy being sacrificed in the rush.

Bloodbowl – I used to be a big Games Workshop fan. I’d get White Dwarf every month and keep up with their games. I even got a few of their PC games. They were strong games too – tabletop and computer. GW went very mercenary though and it showed in the attitude they had towards selling complete games. Actually, on tabletop that’s probably not completely fair as they maintained game balance while adding new bits through White Dwarf. But on computer, they effectively pioneered the “sell something incomplete now, sell DLC later” ethic that’s infecting the PC gaming market more now.

So I’ve avoided getting what the independent reviewers think of as a broken game. Wonder if I could find a copy of the earlier Chaos League somewhere.

Lesson – just because it’s on sale doesn’t mean you Have To Buy It.

That’s kinda distant from the title isn’t it …

My eyes have been particularly bad lately. People are noticing and asking about it … Hayfever seems incredibly bad this summer and my eyes have been watering excessively. However … always ask if you’ve found the right cause. I suffer from dust allergies as well and my house is in severe need of Attack By Vacuum Cleaner. I also wear glasses and while I keep the lenses clean that’s not always enough. So I attacked them with something short n pointy to clean the bits that a hanky doesn’t reach.

Eyes improving. Handy 🙂 But still a way to go. They’re still sore but not as much as a couple of days ago. I’ve also changed my pillowcases. Where do we put our eyes when we sleep ? Usually next door to a pillowcase. Lesson – don’t neglect the obvious 😉

Chilling out today. I can keep myself going for ages if I need to. And when I start to struggle, I know stuff I can consume to kick in the hyperactivity again. Things like going for the coffee, crunchies, Mini Egg stash. I need a certain amount of fish in my diet (iodine for thyroid) so had a bit of fish last night for dinner.

Needed the chill out this weekend. I can push myself when I need to but at some point I need to stop and catch up. My body’s telling me I need to catch up after last weekend plus the Scotland trip by letting me know about all sorts of soreness. It’s mostly in the achilles area of my legs.

They’re just whinging at me though. There’s nothing actually broken. Now I’ve had a little break, if I needed to I’d switch right back into up and at ’em 🙂

Milkshake later while the cricket’s on – milk’s good for the bones.

Uhoh.

Steam Summer Sale time …

Every summer and winter, the most popular (cos they got in first) online software distributor does a massive sale. Huge discounts, daily deals and all that. I’ll keep my eye on it for a while in case any good deals appear. So far I have my eye on Beyond Good & Evil, although I’ve not bought that yet. I’m also interested in Sins of a Solar Empire (not discounted) and a couple of others.

I’ll occasionally have a mad moment or two when the sales come around. I’ll see something and think “ooo – shiny, always wanted that” and then when I’ve got it, I’ll leave it in the games library unplayed like :

SWTOR – got boring very quickly
Battlefield 3 – criminally unstable
TitanQuest – bought it when my last machine broke its Windows
Moo3 – very, very poor

And there’s a bunch more like that. I’ve improved my record lately with games, just by buying less of them. I ignore the magazine reviews which don’t tell you about unfinished code and believe the online reviews more. It’s trusting where the money is coming from. Online reviewers tend to be unaffected by commercial interest. They get their cash from you watching their videos and they’ll make enough ad revenue to let them buy their own copies of the games. A magazine has far higher production cost and is dependent on the publishers feeding them early stuff so they meet their deadlines.

I’d far rather trust an independent than magazines which time and time again prove themselves to be in the pocket of publishers who persist in peddling stuff that’s unfit for sale.

I guess I’m getting a bit cynical about the gaming, although I’m not actually gaming that much at the moment anyway. Doesn’t seem enough time in the evenings to bury myself in a game.

I have had time tonight though to indulge in a bluray (Three Musketeers – silly but fun film). Not done that for months. I needed the popcorn. (Getting tired – leave is booked for a fortnight’s time, just spookily coinciding with Olympics!)

Still raining. I was thinking about saying “Hey! Not busy, I can play tonight” for cricket after missing potential games on Tuesday and Wednesday due to the Glasgow trip. However, I’d have had to fight my way through traffic to go home to fetch my kit before heading to SW Bristol to the game. Bristol roads are bad news at that time of evening. The decision became academic at about 3pm when the heavens opened … and I think there’s still stuff up there because it’s still raining.

Wanted to say something about a work colleague.

He hurt his hand quite badly on Monday evening, bad enough that he needed to go in for an operation on Tuesday morning. We hadn’t got much information coming through to the team so we didn’t quite know what the implications would be. I figured he’d be demanding his work laptop as soon as he was coherent enough to remember the password. Back on Communicator by 11.30am after the op. That’s commitment.

Some people will take the mickey for doing things like that. There’s a few who are a bit too much into “I’ve been signed off work – yippee! Free time”. We’re not like that though. We feel an obligation to get things done. Last time I had off sick (I don’t notice bugs) was bugs but the time before that was my 2 nose jobs 9 years ago. And I only had about 4 days off total for that. We”d get horribly bored anyway if we had that kind of time away from getting stuff done.

We’ll miss our guy’s actual presence for a little while but with the way we’ve shifted how we work over the past few years, he’ll still be able to make his mark through remote log in and teleconferencing.

It used to be that we’d have people visiting the outstations far more regularly. That expended a lot in terms of time and air tickets. We’re hopefully more efficient now with us reaching for the spiderphones at the slightest excuse. We probably get more meetings in and more stuff done that way, although I have to say it was great yesterday to say hello personally again to people I’ve only talked to over the phone over the last couple of years.

That’s enough about work though. Friday tomorrow. Bacon day. And I’m hoping to get away early enough to not lose any of the flexi credit I’ve built up 🙂

PS I think my fingers have come out in sympathy. I’ve cracked the bones in most of my fingers through cricket and they occasionally like to remind me … The latest are two fingers on my left hand which feel cracked again. They still support typing pressure and holding stuff but are still … distracting. I’m either getting old or they’re rain sensitive !

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