Meaningless musings

6 Years Old Today

2009-11-04T13:29:17Z

Today is my Livejournal's 6th Birthday. It's certainly not used as much as it used to be (only a few posts so far this year), partly because of newer, shinier sites like Facebook and Twitter but also because most people that I used to follow have stopped using it. Anyway, enough of that, here's something more interesting.

Yesterday I went to benefit gig for Bletchley Park (the WWII code-breaking station) which was really rather excellent. It opened with a talk by Simon Singh on the Engima machine and code breaking in general. The rest of the show featured stand up sets from Dave Gorman, Punt & Dennis, Robin Ince and Richard Herring. All of these guys were excellent, although Dave Gorman did wobble in the middle of his set. The show also featured a rather ramshakle comedy panel show with Robert Llewellyn as chair, Robin Ince and Richard Herring as guests as well Johnny Ball. If you were a child of the 80s you'll know how exciting it was to see Johnny Ball. He was great.

The show finished was a sketch based on Radio 4's show that's set in Bletchley Park, Hut 33 featuring Punt & Dennis, Robert Llewellyn, the voice of Stephen Fry and others.

All in all a excellent way to spend £25, and it was all for charity anyway!

Writer's Block: Top of the Charts

2009-09-07T13:19:18Z

What's the most-played song in your music library?

View 2051 Answers

According to Last.fm, it's Munich by Editors.

Banning Richard Dawkins

2009-03-06T13:14:26Z

Richard Dawkins is supposed to be giving a speech at the University of Oklahoma. A legislator has tried to stop him by banning him from the whole state!

Read the text of the proposal here.

Nice to know that free speech is alive and well in America...

Missing The Point

2009-02-10T13:04:46Z

I don't think Amazon have quite got the point of Valentine's day. On their frontpage at the moment they're showing...

Either Amazon wrongly assumes I'm single (although given the geeky nature of some of the things on my wishlist it's a reasonable guess) or they're really missing the point.

Snow

2009-02-02T09:32:41Z

~~Unlike the southern softy~~ Like scaryjeff I have battled my way into work and am one of only five people in my office. I hope I can get home!

See below the cut for a couple of snowy railway scenes.

Comedy Nightmare

2009-01-14T13:48:07Z

Last night I went to a benefit show for the Free Fringe starring Sean Lock, Robin Ince, Dave Gorman, Lucy Porter and several others. The show was a mixed bag, as you'd expect with so many performers. All the big names were great though.

The show was compèred by Daniel Kitson who, as compères tend to do, chatted with members of the audience. We were almost in the middle, on the front row. Guess who he picked on first? Me! Argh! I can't say I engaged in witty banter which had the audience in stitches, but compared to the other three people on the front I probably came out of it the best. Bizarrely there was another Andrew who was a computer programmer on the front row, and we ended up have an argument over which was best, Java or C++, with Kitson acting as the intermediary. Fortunately my "Java is slow" argument beat his "It's used by hundreds of people". One nil to me!

Being picked on has always been a concern of mine, but it wasn't as bad as I had anticipated. I'm not sure how I would cope if I were ever asked on stage though...

Brokenness

2008-12-29T11:21:20Z

I brought my laptop to my parents house so I could be guarenteed a decent computer to use. Unfortunately my desire to make sure it had all the latest software on it coupled with the fact it hadn't been updated for ages means that I've broken it several interesting ways over the past few days. Consequently I'm writing this blog post on my iPhone while lots of writing scrolls up my screen. I really need to get off Gentoo... At least the Wii is working. Mario Kart won't race itself you know!

Early Christmas

2008-12-22T13:00:16Z

Today is my last day at work. Tomorrow I pack my bags and make the 90 minute trip up the East Coast Mainline to my parents house. Unfortunately Ellen won't be with me, she'll be making the considerably longer trip from Stanstead to Dublin. As we're not spending the actual day together we decided to have an early Christmas yesterday. We tried to make it as much like the real day as possible, although with less Doctor Who.

For my present Ellen brought me a subscription to New Scientist magazine. For the last five years I've had a subscription to the NME but I found it less and less interesting and cared less and less about the bands in it so I canceled. It's nice to have a high-brow replacement so I'll look cool^* reading it on the train home from work.

Our flat looks a little bare and we have looked at, and discussed buying, some art to go on our walls. Unfortunately real art is far to expensive so for her present I got two photos from our holidays blown up onto 14"x18" canvas by The Digital Room. I think they've come out really well, and Ellen seemed very happy with them. I haven't taken a photo of them hanging in our flat, but the photos I used were of Geraniums and Dun Laoghaire Harbour Lighthouses.

I think it's nice to spread the presents out, now I get to get excited again on Thursday :-)

* Is it even possible to look cool while reading a science magazine? I hope so!

iPhone gripes

2008-11-24T13:28:34Z

I've been using my iPhone for two weeks now, and overall it's great. Easily the best phone I've ever used. It really has changed the way I live my life because there is so much I can now do from anywhere that before I'd need to be at my computer for.

Despite this though, there are a few things that Apple should fix.

1. There's no character count when typing a text message.

This might be a small issue and given I get 500 free texts a month (which is way more than I use) it doesn't matter that I might sometimes send people two messages. However, it would be nice to be able tailor my messages to the limit of 160 characters.

2. The new over-the-air download of podcasts is complete broken.

Rather than listen to my music on a loop while I travel I listen to a number of podcasts, and Steve Lamacq's 6music show. MythTV on my PC records his show every afternoon. A script then converts the recording into a 300MB MP3 file and updates the xml document that describes it as a podcast. This is served by Apache on my local machine.

Specifying http://192.168.0.8/podcasts/feed.rss works fine for iTunes on my PC. When I sync my iPhone new episodes of Lamacq's show get copied automatically across.

It was well known that an update last week would add over the air downloads for podcasts. This would be brilliant I thought, because then I wouldn't need to turn my girlfriends laptop on unless I want to back my phone up.

Disappointingly there are two big flaws with the implementation of podcasts on the phone when compared to podcasts on iTunes. Firstly there is no automatic checking for new episodes - you must press a button for each feed to see if it has been updated. Secondly only podcasts that are delivered through the iTunes store can be downloaded straight to your phone. When attempting to sync my custom podcast on my phone no attempt is made to download the feed and I get sent to the store's podcast homepage.

Is there any need for this limitation? I can't think of a good reason for it :-(

Google is useless to see if anyone else has come across this issue or resolved it because it's full of speculation and screenshots from before the update was released.

Leaving Orange

2008-11-07T18:21:21Z

I'm currently on hold trying to leave Orange so I can switch to O2 to get an iPhone. It seems like I've been listening to their hold music forever. Do you think that those who press the "I want to leave Orange option" get put to the back of the queue? Maybe I'm being cynical, but if you can't talk to an operator you can't leave!

Humm, just after writing this I got through and it was a very speedy and friendly Geordie who dealt with me. I hope O2 are as friendly...

Wearing red dress gets women a more expensive date

2008-10-28T15:20:36Z

From the BBC: Women who don a little red dress before going out with a man may find their date more attentive and generous, according to scientists.

The article then goes on to talk about the colour red. I think they've made a rather basic error. Let me correct it for them...

Women who don a little dress before going out with a man may find their date more attentive and generous, according to scientists.

There, one less word and just as realistic.

No Time For Gentoo

2008-10-28T13:20:34Z

I've run Gentoo as my primary desktop OS for the last six years, and I really like it. Its extreme flexibility does have one major draw back though - it requires a significant amount of time to keep updated. I used to have the time to do that, now though, I have better things to do.

At work I run Kubuntu on my desktop, which I'm very happy with. Work don't pay me to maintain my own desktop, and I've spent very little time setting it up.

The big question now is how to replace Gentoo with Ubuntu without losing all my data. I'll probably buy a new harddrive, I could do with a new one anyway. That seems like the safest, if slightly expensive route.

Now all I need to find is a few hours to make the switch...

Pan and Scan

2008-10-16T12:30:23Z

Recently I brought Ellen the West Wing box set, and we've been working our way through the series. Last night we started watching series 3, which is the series where they switched to widescreen. No problem you think, widescreen is common on DVDs and with a nice big widescreen tv I should get a great picture. Rather than make the picture widescreen, the DVD has a 4:3 image with black bars on the top and bottom. Not only that, but the image isn't even in the center of the 4:3 image so the TV's zoom function chops off the top of the picture!

Grr.

Piggybacking

2008-10-06T12:06:45Z

Yesterday I went for another appointment at my opticians. Fortunately the blood vessel that caused me to stop wearing my last lens has now disappeared enough for me to be able to try a new type.

I'm going to be piggybacking lenses in my left eye, which as you can probably guess involves me wearing two lenses in the same eye. Has anyone out there in LJ-land heard of this before? I certainly haven't. It did give me really great vision and the oxygen permeability should be much better than the combined lens I was using, which will avoid the blood vessel growth.

I will hopefully pick the lens up next weekend and we'll see how it goes...

Mark Watson repeated live

2008-09-26T12:22:01Z

Last night I went to see Mark Watson record for a dvd at the Bloomsbury Theatre in UCL. The show are great - we were in the center on the second row and he was really funny. We had been listening to and enjoying his show "Mark Watson Makes The World Substantially Better" on Radio 4. When we saw in Metro that he was playing near us we thought it'd be nice to see him live. Unfortunately, his live show consisted of about 15% jokes about it being recorded, 70% material from the radio show and 15% new material.

How much do you consider to be reasonable for joke reuse? If it was marketed as the same show that would be fine. If there were a few of the best jokes reused that'd be fine too - where would Bill Bailey be without the song about the snow flake melting on the eyelash of a startled deer? I think hearing that many of the same jokes is a bit much, given we paid £17.50 to get in. The differences in the jokes were really highlighted to me. The percentage of water that we are made up of increased from 70% (the correct value) in the radio show to 95% last night!

Maybe I shouldn't be annoyed at this, but I do feel a bit short changed.

WiiFit

2008-09-24T12:06:17Z

Yesterday Ellen managed to find a shop that actually had WiiFit in stock - this was after two months of looking! We spent a reasonable amount of time playing last night, and my first impressions are that it is both fun and useful.

I'll probably spend most of my time playing the balance games like Ski Jump and Hula Hoop as those are the most fun, but jogging and the other aerobic exercises are enjoyable too. They are quite hard work though! WiiFit is not a game which you can spend all day playing!

It allows you to specify a weight target and will nag you to play the game until you reach it. How annoying this nagging will become remains to be seen...

More On My Eyes

2008-09-15T12:12:14Z

So the saga of my eyes is continuing, and I'm currently on my fourth contact lens for my left eye, but there is a good chance I'll need another. My last lens fitted well and I could see really well. However, it was not letting enough oxygen get through to my cornea, which responded by growing a blood vessel. As the cornea is transparent having a blood vessel in it is not only unpleasant to look at but it could cause vision problems as well. To counteract this I've got a new lens which has more holes in it and is slightly flatter to let more tears underneath it.

Will the change in lens cause this blood vessel to disappear, or will I need a fifth lens? I have a check up next Monday to find out...

Contacts and Trains

2008-08-04T21:33:12Z

I've been a full on contact lense user for the past week now, and it's definitely getting easier as time goes on. I can now put them in first time and wearing them for extended periods of time is not too uncomfortable, however the feeling of having something in my eye does not go away however many hours I wear them for.

The longest I have managed is 8 hours wear on Saturday, and 6 hours today. Unfortunately on both occasions my left eye has given me considerable discomfort starting a few hours after I took the lens out. My left eye is the bad one and I have a special lens which is has a rigid center with a soft outer part. The optician did say that this lens is prone to rubbing at the join, so I can only hope my eyes get used to it and it doesn't cause any further problems.

The improvement in my vision with wearing the lenses is so great that it really shows how bad my left eye is even with glasses, and I really want to wear them for ~14 hours a day. Hopefully my optician will have some suggestions in my checkup next week.

In other news, the DLR is really cool. For those who don't know it's a light railway system serving the East side of London. Not only is it overground so you get excellent views of Canary Wharf, the O2 and London City airport but the trains are computer controlled so they have big windows at the front instead of a driver's cab.

It takes a little while to get used to, but once you realise that it is going to stop at the station and you're not going to die it is quite fun, and an excellent piece of technology. If you have the option, stay on to Bank because the track dives into a tunnel and changes from the worlds worst rollercoster into a twisting, turning, ghost-train-like experience!

I used it because I'd just arrived at the aforementioned London City airport so Sunday combined my plane geekery with my train geekery and my computer geekery! I needed to have a bit of a lie down when I got home...

Flickr Activity

2008-06-12T09:03:44Z

I've gradually been copying all my old photos onto Flickr, and now I'm up to over 1000 photos I'm starting to get some activity.

Yesterday some of my photos of sheep were used on a NowPublic news story - it's a news site a bit like Digg but more user generated than just a collection of links.

My photo of LOLcat from Darren's party at the weekend has been added to Purina's Pet Chart. Please go to the site and vote for my photo - you don't even need to sign up, just click a button!

Fire Alarm

2008-06-05T15:45:07Z

So the fire alarm is currently broken in my office, and we're working through intermittent loud ringing.

It's a bit like being back at school - time for the next class!

Contact Lenses

2008-05-28T21:01:20Z

Today I had a contact lens fitting. It wasn't as unpleasant as I had expected, and while the lenses were uncomfortable after ten minutes or so it was ok. The biggest problem was that my eyes were watering bucket loads of tears which made it very hard to tell if the lenses were having an effect. I do think they will improve my vision considerably as they push the cornea of my left eye back into a more normal shape.

I need a hard lens of my left eye, and a soft one for my right which means that each requires a different technique for getting the lenses in and out of my eyes, but that's something to worry about when I have my training session on their use in a week or so I guess.

Phoning 999

2008-04-16T21:02:32Z

Tonight I phoned 999 for the first time ever. Around 6:30pm a bunch of 10 or so youths appeared and were hanging around outside our flats. They were being a bit noisy, shouting and chasing each other but nothing too bad. Around 8:30 however they began to beat someone up. It was someone in their group, but they were holding him down and punching him for a fairly long period of time - so we phoned 999. Apparently someone else had also called about them.

About five minutes later a police car turned up with one woman police officer who had a little chat with them, told them to keep the noise down and then drove off. Unfortunately it's not private property so until they start damaging things there isn't much the police can do...

Hopefully they won't come back - we do live in a fairly dull area!

Social Profile Insults

2008-03-07T19:34:26Z

Like many people I have the Compare People application added on Facebook. Over the past few weeks they've been sending me emails ranking my friends across various categories, which is quite interesting. Today however they sent me an email I really wasn't quite so keen on...

In total, you were reviewed for dating 19 times and no people expressed interest in you.

Well gee, thanks for that! They continue...

You are more desirable than less than 20% of 23,340,004 people.

So less than 20% of people are less attractive than me? Is it a good business strategy to send insulting emails to users? Perhaps people know I'm happily in a relationship, or perhaps I'm just highly unattractive. Whatever the reason I don't really need to be told about it!

Dr Brian Cox

2008-01-31T13:11:45Z

Every school child in the country should watch this Tuesday's Horizon program on gravity, presented by Dr Brian Cox. It's a really exciting, inspirational and informative science program. If all school children saw this program, there would be a surplus not a shortage of scientists.

Spamalot

2008-01-13T21:39:39Z

Last night I went to see the Monty Python musical, Spamalot. It's mostly based on the "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", though there are elements of several of their films and aspects are changed to fit with it being on stage. It much more musical than any of their films, with most of the songs being brand new. As you would expect most of the key Python skits from the films are present and correct (including a sing-a-long version "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life"). Strangely though I found the new jokes to be funnier the ones I already knew, but I guess that's because it wasn't the Python crew performing them.

The stage production is excellent and the cartoony look of the Python graphics is spot on. The pyrotechnics were much more spectacular than expected which was a nice surprise. At one point God's (voiced by John Cleese) feet come down and lift off a bit later with rockets in the heels. The giant wooden Rabbit also looks superb.

All in all a good fun show that doesn't disappoint, but doesn't surprise much either.