Archive for July, 2005
Senseo
I bought a Philips Senseo coffee maker yesterday, after getting a good recommendations about one, and checking out other reviews online. I’ve been drinking a lot more of the stuff recently, so I thought one might be kinda fun.
There were too many instructions when I took it out of the box. The enclosed leaflet is huge, detailing each step in far too many words, resulting in it looking harder to use than it actually is (which is very simple). There was also a seperate set of starting instructions stuck to the drip tray, written using different words than those on the bigger leaflet, adding to the confusion.
I’m still learning the subtleties, but it does create a good cup of coffee, which I guess is the main thing. It’s single cup mode is really stingy, filling just half of the rather standard sized coffee mugs I have, but telling it you want two cups while still only using a single pod seems to solve that.
Snapped
As I was coming back into the building this morning after walking the dog, she pulled me forward on the lead so hard that I snapped the key in the lock.
Which is just what you want on a Saturday morning.
Thankfully I was able to get the broken part out of the lock without any problems, and I’d also already opened the door, so I wasn’t locked outside. But since that’s the only key I have, I couldn’t go out again without being stuck.
I phoned the estate agent and was told that the letting department was closed until Monday, and that they therefore couldn’t help me. When I asked for any kind of advice for what I should do, the reply came "I don’t know, it’s just sales here." Which was astonishing.
So I waited for the girl upstairs to come back, so I could get a copy of her key. But she’d gone out just before I’d come back and was nowhere to be seen after a couple of hours. Finally I had the idea that my dad could come and get the key and take it to the key cutting place to see if they could still copy it, even in it’s broken state. That way I wouldn’t have to go out and be stuck if they couldn’t.
It turned out to be no problem at all for them, and I’m now furnished with a new key, as well as a copy. Which means once again I can go outside.
Horrible, stinky, scary, people filled, outside.
Grass
I’ve managed to get up early every day this week and be down the park with the dog at 7:20am. The place is understandably empty at that time, but a woman from the local dog walking service can be found getting dragged around by five of them.
Fury enjoys the chance to run around like an idiot, and I often find her sniffing the grass before rolling around on her back and kicking her legs in the air as if she’s having a fit. Even if I’m half asleep when I get there, I get enough of a laugh from seeing her do this to wake me up properly.
Stars
I discovered the Mario 64 speed runs today. There’s one which completes the game in 19 minutes, thanks to exploits that allow you to do it with just 16 stars. The second one I watched does 70 stars in just over an hour, but both runs have the same thing in common, insanity.
Some of the moves they manage to pull off are incredible, and you have to realise that the 70 star one manages an average of a star every 52 seconds. Even Tick Tock Clock, a world that I remember cursing repeatedly when I played it, is made to look simple.
Considering I wasn’t even aware you could do a long jump (and I have completed the game with 120 stars) it was no surprise that when I hooked up my N64 and gave it a shot myself that I was entirely useless. Most of the time I couldn’t even keep Mario going in the right direction.
I’m starting to think I’m slightly retarded.
Kitty
Here’s quite a nice shot I took of the cat belonging to my brothers neighbour a few weeks ago.
It took about 20 photos before I got that one, every time I thought I had her lined up correctly she would move again. But persistence paid off.
Polish
Today I was installing Ubuntu at work for a certification process I have to go through on Wednesday. I had the pleasure of doing it on a 42″ screen.
I can’t help but be impressed by Ubuntu and just how far the Linux desktop has come since I first installed Redhat 5 all those years ago. It’s easy to see why Microsoft might be quite worried, the speed at which development is occuring means that every six months there’s a noticable difference in spit and polish.
And it’s spit and polish that seems to be missing at the moment, there’s something still more usable about the Windows or OS X environments, and I’m sure that’s simply born out of more people having been polishing it for longer.
Hippo
The remarkably good weather has continued unabated over the past few days, allowing me further time to walk around the local park with the dog, soaking it all in. She’s starting to get a bit of a name for herself, with people saying hello to her by name. This is because when you meet other dog owners they don’t ask for your name, they ask for the name of the dog.
The funniest question I’ve been asked has been "is it a dog?" to which I had to take a beat before replying "no, it’s a bitch". That’s because to me, a dog is a dog whether it’s male or female, and I’ve never really got in the habit of calling them bitches. So when somebody asks a question like that my initial reaction is to reply with something like "no, it’s a hippo."
Remarkable
I got my new laptop this morning, an HP nx6110, which I paid just £411 for, brand new. In fact, if it wasn’t that price, I wouldn’t have been getting a new laptop. But at last I can once again lie on the couch or the bed instead of being constantly confined to the desk and chair.
It’s a remarkable piece of kit considering the price. It certainly hasn’t appeared slow, the keyboard and screen are great, it’s not too heavy or too big, it’s got a CD burner and DVD reader, enough memory (especially after paying just £30 for a further 512MB to bring it up to 768MB) and a great little touch pad. If you’re in the market for a cheap laptop, I heartily recommend it.
Needles
Forever reducing the number of glasses I have to wash, I broke another one tonight. While trying to wash it. Fingers, it turns out, contain a lot of blood.
Tomorrow I have to go to the dentist, my favourite of all places, and get two fillings. At the same time I will point out that one of my teeth broke in half about a month ago, to which he will surely reply that I have to make another appointment so that he can inflict further pain and discomfort upon me.
I would love to take comfort in the fact that I get a little bit of time away from work, but I’d much rather be hitting keys than having large needles inserted into my gums. Call me a traditionalist if you will.
Adulation
I got my mobile phone upgrade today, a Sony Ericsson k750i. It has a 2 megapixel camera (complete with a panorama mode which beats my proper camera), an FM radio (what I really wanted), an MP3 player, records video with sound, and most importantly of all, can flash SOS in morse code with it’s light (which can also be used as a torch and photography aid). Graham wondered if it was also possible to attach an egg whisk to the bottom.
The person who posts in the comments the most realistic situation where you would find the SOS morse code flashing useful wins a prize. Or at least, wins the adulation of their peers.
Maybe.
Scrobble
You may have already noticed, but I added an Audioscrobbler link and list of my last 10 played songs on the right column. I’d actually installed a plugin for this before when I was using the Mac to play music, but I could never get it to work. Now that all the music is back on the PC again I thought I’d give it another shot, and even though I’m still using iTunes things went great.
Well at least once Audioscrobbler had caught up with my updates.
So now at last you can see my slightly suspect musical taste. And future Blogbear users can look forward to this being one more possible component to put on their pages.
Gardening
Before I goto bed every night I take the dog out for one last walk. It’s usually quite late, usually around midnight, and tonight just after. While I was waiting for her to do her business, a woman was outside her house on the other side of the road.
Now this wouldn’t have been abnormal other than the fact that she had black bin bags and appeared to be doing some gardening, pruning the plants just outside her front door. Who makes sure the flowers look nice at a quarter past midnight, in the pitch black? She didn’t even have a porch light on or anything like that to help her along the way, it was just a woman, in the dark, a black bin bag and some sort of cutting implement.
Which of course is more than enough to make your imagination walk another line.
Deer
Colour me impressed by the latest Firefox Alpha, Deer Park 2. Finally I’ve seen a reason to switch away from IE. It’s insanely fast, being able to reorder tabs is finally available (although I still think the close button should be on the tab itself), and the newly released Google toolbar gives me the same environment as I’m used to.
Being able to click the back button and have the previous page come up instantly is the kind of thing browsers should have been doing years ago.
Ramp
Blogbear development started up again today, slowly, and still finding my place, but I’m hoping to ramp it up and really get into it again. Lost my place a bit over the past few weeks, and totally underestimated the scale of what still had to be done, but I’m sure I can still get it out there soon.
But I also played God of War for the first time today (article on What Interest soon), so my attentions might end up being directed elsewhere.
Recreated
Apart from the A-Z filter on the start page, I’ve now completely recreated the VB version of my WOPR media box software in Perl/Tk. It can now properly handle multiple source folders/drives, unlike before when I had to have two copies running pointing at different places. It also combines folders together, so the Star Wars folder on one drive and the Star Wars folder on another drive get combined into one virtual entry which shows the contents of both.
All this, and 1/5th the size of the VB version. I’ll whack in the A-Z tomorrow, along with the features I really want; splitting the TV and films and a play random option.
I’ll probably open source it eventually, if only so you can all laugh at my code.
Trainers
I got new trainers today.
I wrote a post telling the story behind that, but it was bullshit.
GUI
I have a PC plugged into my TV called WOPR, which runs a full screen Visual Basic application which takes input from a remote control and displays the available video content and lets you play it (it launches ZoomPlayer for the playback part). It’s a video version of the Musicbox audio player that I released many years ago.
Dealing with Visual Basic is never fun, I spend the whole time wanting to use features that I’m used to having in Perl and get annoyed at all the workarounds necessary instead. So, with the need to replace the WOPR software on the horizon, and the need to do something which isn’t web-coding, I spent last night and tonight looking at Perl GUI systems.
Win32::GUI is where I concentrated my efforts yesterday, but the API is unable to handle keyboard events without jumping through a whole bunch of hoops, and since it’s not very well documented, finding those hoops is a bit of a nightmare. It is however, very simple.
Tonight I had a quick look at wxPerl, but the OO-nature of it was enough to put me off. There seemed to be an innordinate amount of fluff required to actually do something, and none of it seemed particularly intuitive. So then I turned to Perl/tk, the classic Perl GUI toolkit for which O’Reilly even have a book. And you know what, I like it a lot.
It’s setup much like Win32::GUI is, which means no OO-madness, and very few lines of code required to do anything. It also handles keyboard events with ease, and has a nice canvas widget that, so far at least, has made displaying the text and images I need a breeze.
The WOPR software is a very simple application, so it shouldn’t take long to get it up to scratch now that I’ve found something usable. Mostly it’s nice to get a break from HTML generation.
Weather
I think there must have been some sort of the mix up with the people who control the weather, because Scotland isn’t meant to get this hot. It’s certainly not meant to get this hot when I’m stuck in an office full of electronic equipment which likes nothing more than to pump even more hot air into the surrounding area.
It’s meant to get cooler as the week goes on, let’s hope so, I’d like to get some sleep.
Parks
I spent a fair amount of time this weekend down the park with the dog in the glorious sunshine, and very nice it was too. Sitting out on the grass watching the joggers and other canine owners was an enjoyable diversion, especially when the weather is so nice.
I was a little surprised to see a family had pitched a sun shade, placed down some deckchairs and rugs and were having a picnic. Although I call it a park, it’s really just an area of grass with a small area for cars and a path that doesn’t really go anywhere. We’re also surrounded by large proper country parks, so to decide that you’re going to spend the afternoon with the kids here just baffles me (if you’re wondering, I choose it because it takes 3 minutes to walk there and the dog gets car sick).
Maybe they’ve been barred from entering all the other parks in the area. Criminals.
Trousers
There was a car accident outside my window today. A car with nothing except two kids inside rolled backwards down the hill, scraping along the parked cars before eventually coming to an abrupt halt thanks to a lamp post, which threw it’s lamp out onto the ground in disgust. The screaming kids were removed from the back by their parents as a crowd gathered to inspect the damage, including someone whom I assume was the owner of the Mercedes with the now scratched back bumper. I also assume the hand brake failed, but since I didn’t go outside to join the people who repeated the incident to each that came along, I’ll never actually know for sure. But it did bring a moment of excitement to an otherwise dull day.
My trousers have also started falling down. Which either means I’ve lost weight, or my trousers have gained it.
