Friday, puncture again. Luckily I'm now carrying spares tubes.

That's three in a month. So I just got 3 tubes for £10 at halfords, (the Raleigh branded ones didn't seem to be working out so I'm buying even cheaper)

How often is this going to happen?

We had monsoon weather on Friday. Proper end of the world rain.

I was cycling home in it when the left crank started to come loose. I stopped and inspected it. decided there was nothing I could do and struck out for the top of the Minley road expecting to be able to coast down the other side. 20 meters later my rear tyre punctured. Unperturbed and as a (reluctant) ex-runner I thought "never mind I can run pushing the bike". 50 meters later the inner tube came out and wrapped endlessly around the rear gear set. After some brief dalliances with running while holding the rear wheel in the air and running carrying the (old, full suspension, steel) bike I gave up and called for support.

Props to Arkade for helping me out.

Keith.

Last night I took my other half out for a meal in Reading. We decided on Italian food and ended up in a nice looking place near the Oracle called Prezzo.

 For Starters I had "Mussels Marinara" (which was okay) and S had... well I can't remember the name but it was essentially a lifeless looking, thin slab of mozzarella which had been breadcrumbed and flash fried. A few of the typical spiky green leaves and a ramekin of sauce accompanied this. While it would not have been my choice S. obviously fancied it. However the "sauce" was raw passata or tomato juice. It was so tangy it overwhelmed everything else on the plate. The staff asked if everything was OK and we pointed out that the raw tomato juice was horrible as politely as possible but nothing ever came of it.

Having put that down to experience we set about our mains. Pizza tres gusto (thin pizza -  tomato, mozerella, chicken, bacon and pepperoni) and S. had chicken Ravioli. So how many things can go wrong with a pizza?

1. I ate one third of this vast wasteland of mozzarella without running into any topping.
2. The one third with no topping was tasteless. It had no hint of flavour.
3. The 3 toppings intersected in no more than three mouthfuls. An intervention was required to manually redistribute them all.
   
4. There was a doughy uncooked mouthful dripping with that uncooked tomato sauce from the starter.
5. ALL the flavour was in the chicken, which was overpoweringly salty.
   

 The ravioli was going down nicely until S. started complaining about some of them being very salty. In the end she determined that one half of the plate was blighted in this manner. Either there were two batches on this plate or someone had slipped with the salt mill.

Sure they were all small misdemeanors but all together they made for a pretty dreadful dining experience.

Perhaps they would have made a better fist of the deserts, we didn't stay to find out.

You are right, I shouldn't be offloading about this in my blog but hey, I just couldn't be bothered to make a scene last night. I feel the need to put something positive in here so I will recommend somewhere excellent nearby.

k.

A story of a forbidden (and ultimately tragic) love between a man and a gadget.[Read More]

While surfing around looking for iphone related stuff over the weekend I found this...

Prepare yourself ...  "First, there was nothing, but the hope of a dream"

If you want to sing along check out these lyrics.

Ah the Eighties, I'm fired up. 

My kids decided to join the YouTube generation and as a relatively geeky dad I was pleased with their choice...

 
 

So I feel a little dirty.. this is technical and work related. Up to now I've only used my blog for the pointless musings of a broken mind.

But here we are....

The story is that due to a bit of a crunch over the Christmas period this year I couldn't get any vacation. The problem with this was that I needed to spend the time with my aging Mum who would otherwise have been on her own. So I needed to work from a location where there would be no broadband.

 I had a look at a couple of possibilites and in the end I ended up (in desperation) looking to see if we had any USB modem support in Solaris yet..... Bingo,

    http://www.sun.com/io_technologies/usb/USB-Faq.html

So I borrowed a Nokia e61i hooked it up and found two new devices under /dev/cua/[0-1]. I tip to one of those and type "AT" <return> I was surprised when I got an "OK" response. I never did look up what the other one was for because after checking out how to set the APN for my Vodafone connection
(AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet") next a tiny (hours and hours) bit of fiddling with pppd (haven't touched that in years!) and hey presto I got a 3g connection. I VPN'd into Sun across my new sppp0 interface and it was fast and stable all week!

 The good part of the story ends there because, despite the fantastic hot spot of 3g coverage centred around my Mum's house when I tried to use it I found the network unusable from there despite being able to get a connection reliably. Still I eventually managed to disable 3g and get the e61i to run in GPRS only mode (network->settings: disable UMTS, enable GSM only) It was a bit slow but it got the job done. 3g is great, much faster a totally usable. But that's the limit of my equipment, if anyone want's to send me an HSDPA capable handset then get in touch!

 So if you want to try then here are the ppp config files I used:

        /etc/ppp/3g-chat

ECHO ON
ABORT BUSY ABORT 'NO CARRIER' '' ATZ OK AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet" OK ATDT*99***1# CONNECT

        /etc/ppp/peers/3g 

show-password
asyncmap 0xa0000
debug
/dev/cua/0
connect "/usr/bin/chat -f /etc/ppp/3g-chat"     # dial into ISP
user web
remotename 3g           # name of the ISP; for pap-secrets
#noauth                 # do not authenticate the ISP's identity (client)
noipdefault             # assume no IP address; get it from ISP
noident
defaultroute            # install default route; ISP is Internet gateway
updetach                # log errors and CONNECT string to invoker
noccp                   # ISP doesn't support free compression
usepeerdns

     /etc/ppp/pap-secrets

web 3g web

To make it go I issued "pppd call 3g".

If you want name resolution then you can hack up a script to stuff the returned DNS server addresses into /etc/resolv.conf yourself, personally as my VPN solution has IP address based configuration, I didn't bother. So just to reiterate if you want to send me a super fast data handset....  I may post some comparative test results!

Should usability be a priority?

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke.

"yep" - Me.

I went out for a bit of a birthday drink this weekend.

This part of the world is a bit sparse when it comes to finding nicely chilled out places to eat and drink.  Which is why The Pour House in Hartley Wintney is such a great treasure. It's also unusual to find cocktail bars outside of the city.

Among the things I drunk were:

    Manhattan - OK
    Eastwood Old Fashioned - Awesome, far and away the winner.
    Misty Kiss - Very nice.
    Sazerac - Complex, still not sure about that one.
    Sidecar - Very nice, I was looking forward to trying this and it did not disappoint.

The staff were enthusiastic and happy to explain the origins of the drinks and the ingredients.

As a side note the food was excellent as well.

It's not all roses, It goes without saying that it was quite expensive, but it was hard to begrudge them of the money when the whole experience was so good.

Despite a very odd hangover the next day (hence the title) I'm actively looking for an excuse to go back there and I expect I will during the summer. So if you know me and you're going, don't forget to invite me!

The Christmas blog entry... I promised myself I wouldn't do this, how predictable. The number of posts must sky rocket at this time of year.

We, that is my two children and I, travelled down to Devon and met up with my mum and my sister's family, a brief chat with my brother (who has been in Vancouver for the last 13 years) and that's it, reunited again. We had plenty of food, lots of gifts and a lot of games to play. My ex and I agreed (did I mention I'm divorced yet?) to try a new approach to dividing the children's time between ourselves this year. In previous years we have split the time on a "couple of nights with you.... couple of nights with me" basis. This year I was asked if I would be prepared to split the time more or less into two large blocks. I was sceptical because I really love to spend time with the girls as often as possible and I was also worried that they might feel sorry for the parent who was elsewhere.

The kids had the best time ever, with time to play with their gifts and I actually had time to relax during the holiday.

Due to the incredible generosity of a complete stranger (thank you Jo! :-x ) we got a Nintendo Wii and its very cool. Both of the girls enjoyed boxing... which was a surprise! Will exposure to tennis, golf etc. in these diluted forms work out as a positive or a negative influence on their sporting aspirations overall? I wonder how much of a shock it will be when they feel the weight of a racquet or the effect of the ball hitting the racquet? I hope they don't actually try contact boxing though. (I try to keep away from the console wars arguments but I can't help myself.... It's really FUN, go and buy one NOW.)

Also.... have a look at "wall and piece" about "Banksy", awesome, inspiring stuff.  What a great gift, thanks you two!

Now we move towards new year & probably a new year party to embarrass myself at. I have a week to catch up with my friends while still on holiday. I'm nervous that I'll end up tidying or DIYing, but we'll see. After that I guess it's back to the gym with my pathetic trainee who absolutely must work harder (more about them later) ((and I have to work off all this turkey)) , then back to the computing and the working and the crash dumps boo-hey they taunt me. {frink}

Oh no I feel the obligatory cheesy end of post.... I can't help myself.....

Merry Christmas and I hope you all have a happy new year.

Ohhh god that felt good. 

Well that was a surprise. I got everything ready for a nice relaxing bath before bed and as I am a bit of a restless soul I couldn't quite make up my mind whether to listen to a podcast, read a book or watch a DVD. One thing was for sure, this bath was going to be relaxing and far too long. So I line up my Solaris lappy 486 and a copy of Backroom Boys and dig out a bottle of schnapps left over from the party. Thanks for offloading those weird bottles that other people brought to your parties guys. I think the next challenge is a bottle of cheap premixed Pina Colada, sheesh.

Bath full, check, shot glass full, check, Solaris up and running check... hang on I'll just check the wireless is connected... tap on my sun.com bookmark and I'm presented with some 2.0 related speil entitled "the big mash up". The name's got me interested because mashing things up migrated from being strictly DJ lingo into general vernacular here about a year ago, by my reckoning. My friends and I often talk long into the evening about the way media is crossing, converging, tangling, how companies are unleashing services powerful enough to destabilise the traditional media and as addictive as crack for the consumer. £kerching£. In short it's an interesting time.  That's not my point. My point is that Snapp radio actually turned out to be cool. From the point of view of someone in the bath it's been a while since we did something cool, ok ok, don't jump down my neck, we do a whole lot of cool things. However I do not really need a scalable standards based operating system in the bath I'm using it becuase I love it. For now one or two cores in my CPU is enough as well. As soon as I'm running a trading floor from my bathroom I'll let you know. No, Snapp radio is actually cool for me in the aesthetic sense, I was completely hypnotised by it. Not so long ago you would have to visit a pretentious art installation to see anything like this. The music would be garbage and the small number of images would match seamlessly!

There is a killer element to this, the fact that the images and music are thrust together. I can't really find the words to do it justice, it just has a hook because an image of you at a concert is as likely to show up as anything else. You can watch it struggle with abstract music and then suddenly you start to believe that it's really matching moonlit beaches to ambient tracks. All sorts of believable emergent behaviour. The music and pictures form the two strands of the double helix man. Whoa, that schnapps is kicking in. heh heh.

My advice.... get the beers in, full screen your browser window and let the tunes and images roll over you.

Ah Marvin Gaye is coming on...  do you plan to let me go, for that other guy you loved before.........

 When I was at UMIST my ex got me into pinball. At the time I had no idea about it. I had eschewed pinball as a teen in favour of sprites or vector based entertainment. I once dabbled with fruit machines, but after blowing 90% of a weeks wages in two hours on the way home, I never went back to them. I had just started work so a weeks wages was not much but it was still everything I had earned.  Anyway, I digress, this is supposed to be about pinball. Mentally I had pigeon-holed pinball alongside pong! Thanks to my ex I learned that pinball had a lot more to offer than simply knocking a ball about the place.

This brings me to the problem. I wanted to play pinball the other day and nobody could tell me where to find a table. So far I have found one pub 10 miles away which has a pinball table and that is the William Cobbett in Farnham. The Simpsons table provided a couple of hours of good entertainment. It looks to me like pinball is dying. Perhaps I was just lucky playing pinball in Manchester. The pubs round here are really dull because of the lack of a student population.

If you know of others within a 20 mile radius of GU17 9QG then please let me know!

So, on Saturday we had a party.

It was great, everybody just about fitted into the house with a bit of spillover into the garden. There was plenty of food and drink. Almost everybody was able to come along so we soon reached the essential critical mass required for the thing to become self sustaining.

There was of course the small matter of the fireworks......

When me and a pal decided to have a fireworks party we put up a web invitation with had three choices: "I'll come and bring a firework", "I'll come and pledge towards the cost of fireworks" or "I won't be coming". The icing on the cake was the trailing "prize for the best (UK legal) firework". It seems that this brought out the best in everyone.

The light was failing when we realised that some of the enormous fireworks needed burying a foot deep, or nailing to the fence or in one case staking into the ground. So a rapid sortie into the garden with spade and hammer was required. We got that all done just as guests bearing fireworks arrived. More huge fireworks equals more digging. This continued until it became difficult to find space at the back of the garden for holes. Perversely, holes take up a lot of room. Anyway, more and more fireworks arrived until it looked like we were done. Then I opened the front door to allow another guest inside only to see one of my colleagues venturing up the path manhandling the biggest box of fireworks I've ever seen. Obviously the shop also had a special deal on 'Cheeky grins' because he had one of those as well.
 

At this point there was a lot of well natured swearing and laughing as we tried to work out what on earth we were going to do with the extra fifty or so large insendury devices in the box.

The final hoard was between £400-£500 worth of fireworks, not one of them smaller than your fist and the biggest were the size of grocery boxes.

The party was well underway when the final guests arrived and it was time to start lighting fuses.

It must have been around 7.30pm when we realised that we were pushed for time as it's not really allowed to set off fireworks after 11pm here (unless it's Nov 5th). Apart from that it would be really boring to watch 4 hours of individual fireworks going off. We needed to parallelise, so we got a couple of volunteers....actually I'm not sure had had to "get" them, they seemed to materialise ,very enthusiastic, giggling, foaming at the mouth, hopping back and fourth on the spot and prepared with gas powered lighters despite being non-smokers. Deeply suspicious.

The front room was full of computer games for the smaller guests just in case they didn't like the noise. So we were set.

The four of us started to grab fireworks from the stack of "smaller" ones and with cries of:

"Ready?", "Yes ready!", "Hang on.. Ready", "Mines already lit!", "Cheese it" etc. etc.

We set them all off four at a time working up to the biggest scariest ones. The display was punctuated with twenty or so huge rockets which were absolutely spectacular. I lost track of how long it took. I think it was over an hour and I ended up feeling a bit odd thanks to running up and down the garden breathing in exotic chemical smokes over and over again. It turned out that "Theakston's Old peculiar" was the antidote, convenient.

In amongst the array of explosives there were just a few that deserved special mention:

PROTON BOMB - 16 really loud reports.
RAGNOROCK - This was great to look at and seemed to just keep on going.
Colour Crosettes - Spectacular but I wish I had known the tubes were angled as it was getting perilously close to the shed!
Royal 2000 - Display in a box! Has the endearing quality of stopping half way through to tempting you back across the garden before beginning again with gusto.
Fish - The children's favourite. A sea of sparks with flying fish.
MAMMOTH WHEEL 8 - My personal favourite, not only did this look great but it created an absolutely devastating slow oscillating sound pressure wave which melted everyone's brain.

The star of the show was "three blind mice" this deserves special description simply because it is the most bizarre thing.  After half an hour of slowly building toward Armageddon you light this firework. It sits there for a while doing nothing and then after the pause it 'squeaks' out the tune to three blind mice and just when it's getting repetitive it goes slightly off key for comedy effect. Such an incredible change of pace, it had us roaring with laughter and it won the prize.

Considering I've only described a selection of the fireworks, where was the real damage taking place? In the back garden where alcohol, idiots and explosives were freely mixing? Nope, the front room where the kids managed to pull the door from the hinges.

The small downside to all this festivity was that for every fizz, whizz, pop, squeak and bang there was a corresponding small cardboard wadding disc on my lawn. They took a lot of picking up. This picture shows a wheelie-bin liner full of "smaller" spent fireworks!

I have to thank everyone who helped preparing food, shopping, doing more tidying, bringing extra chairs, you know who you are.

Oh and special thanks to everyone in my street for putting up with it.

Ta ta.

Man I hate tidying.

I was on call today but it was very quiet so I was able to get on with tidying the... (durn dun dun) back room. Now this room has been so untidy since I moved into this house with my two girls 3 years ago that it has been pretty much off limits. Used only to house the Gecko, the stereo and the dreaded homework table. So today in preparation for the firework party next Saturday I set about clearing it. This raised a number of important issues. Firstly, Why does everything come with 3 different data cables these days? I must have two dozen different types of USB cable and precious few of those are standards based! It seems to be the result of digital camera and external drive ownership.

Secondly, spiders, Why is my house the meeting place for Tegenaria gigantea? (Check out the wiki article, 7.5cm span? Pah I'm talking 12cm without them having to stretch out.) When I was a kid I was afraid of spiders but since then I have conquered that fear. I've held tarantulas and even rounded up rogue spiders in pet shops. My preferred method for dealing with a spider is to grab it and throw it outside. However these guys have a habit of waiting until I don't expect to see them and then between 11pm and 1am they calculate the point in my peripheral vision which has been selected by evolution for... "incoming pterodactyl, evacuate colon" then they accelerate to 50mph and do an orbit of the living room leaving me covered with wine after my girlish shriek. Anyway today I found spider central and boxed them all up and shipped them across the road to the neighbours.

The reason for this sudden spurt of energy and enthusiasm is the impending party, People are going to need somewhere to stand, and (ahem) I'd rather they didn't think I was some kind of human hoarding machine. I think I must have inherited the yet to be identified "house proud" gene from my mum. The agony is that I definitely also have the "lazy git" gene which prevents tidying in favour of absolutely any other pastime. I can't blame that one on inheritance, I think I constructed it for myself.

Another thing that makes tidying so difficult is my children's prolific artistic output. I don't understand, it's unfathomable to me because I estimate that during my entire school career I produced at most twenty separate pieces of art. However in the space of Charlotte's four year and Rebecca's two year school career they seem to have produced a volume of work that is best measured in kilograms! Is everything taught through the medium of artwork these days? I am doing my best to store their work but it isn't easy, especially when they bring home 3d pieces.

As I got on the blogging bandwagon I thought I ought to get on the podcast bandwagon. Let me explain... My iBook is so old and creaky that I long since stopped upgrading it on the basis that, often bugfixes bring extra code and when you have a 600MHz G3 every ounce of code hurts. This prevented me from upgrading iTunes for a very long time. Unfortunately one of my close friends played me the Adam and Joe podcast on his 360 the other day and I realised that I was missing out. So as well as tidying I listened to Adam and Joe who were very entertaining. The iBook seems to be fine with this and the service is, as you might expect, excellent. This is all inspite of the fact that the iBook is known among my inner sanctum as "Frankenstien's iBook" becuase I bought it for £100 with a motherboard fault which thanks to judicious use of a scope and soldering iron I managed to work around, thats not including the story about "the hard drive with spit in it". Not the sort of thing I do every day, but nonetheless it's amazing what you can do when you really need a computer!

That concludes todays outing. Oo except for the fact that there were hardly any fieworks this evening. This suggests that the end of the working week is a concept that carries enough emotional enrgy to overcome 401 years of history. Cool eh?

So.... I'm experienceing "Roller" for the first time and it's OK. Seems a little restrictive right now but I'm sure I'll appreciate the benefits *if* I become a regular blogger.
Ok that was my first HTML tag, a hard break. Gosh I hope I can delete this entry once I'm done testing.
An unordered list of things I'm interested in:

• My Family
• My Friends
• Computers
• Fixing things
• Comedy
• History of technology
• Java Basics
• Reptiles and amphibians
• Fitness

Just in case I can't, or don't delete this, In order to fulfil the obligations of the diarist I feel I should at least mention the fact that even though November the 5th is tomorrow, there are a lot of fireworks going off here! I'm planning a fireworks party myself next week. Hmm, perhaps I could write about that.
I hope you enjoyed this pointless outing. Thanks for listening.