An Exercise in Irrelevance

I’m travelling today; got to Birmingham airport rather too early. Had the traditional bucket of coffee and slightly stale croissant from Costa coffee (forgot to ask for a small coffee; where do you get a stale croissant from at 6 in the morning?). As soon as I got through security, they decided to evacuate us from the depature lounge, and then let us back in again before we were out of the door.

Still, I managed to add to my Silly Ideas wiki for the first time in ages, so all is not lost.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Trying to help my dad out with his computer. I’ve come to the conclusion that Vista is a pig. It’s slow as treacle, unless you turn off all the 3D nonsense which frankly doesn’t do much anyway. It’s not very stable. Norton anti-virus refused to identify itself to uninstall; when I finally worked it out, the uninstall took for ever. Eventually I had to reboot; it turned out to be because it was waiting for input from me from a dialog underneath the "uninstalling" progress bar. And I could not get it sharing files despite my best attempts. The only nice thing — it knew the name of my router and opened up a browser to http://192.168.1.0 automatically.

Picasa is also a pig. The UI is slow, the scrolling uncontrollable. I want to add captions and place into an export folder but, unaccountablly, this takes about 20 clicks. Urrgh.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Been a long time since I have written anything here. I have been out since October, but I guess I’ve just been busy.

Pan’s Labyrinth is a remarkable film, with the only negative point that I suspect the rest of the Christmas fayre will be downhill from here.

The story manages to mix a fairytale with the real world story of life under fascism. The two stories intertwine in a way which is a benefit to both. The imagery of the fantasy part are deft and visually stunning. The violence, pain and bravery of the real-world wonderfully acted and moving. Topped of with a beautiful score, the film couldn’t have been bettered.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Just got a new Plantronics Discovery 510 — this is a bluetooth earpiece that I thought would be good for travelling; no wires to get broken and tangled up in my bag. This is the third device I recieved from Plantronics. The first two, Discovery 340 I think, were both broken. I think it was a systemic fault in the manufacture as they both failed in exactly the same way, during pairing. The 510 is a nicer device (sold at three times the price so that’s not surprising). The main advantage, however, is that it actually works which is a relief. The sound quality is not that great though. I guess most people are using this over a mobile where you wouldn’t notice, while the drop from normal skype quality is clear. Still, it will be useful, so long as it doesn’t break.

Meanwhile, my new Virgin Broadband sufffered it’s first outage. Around 18 hours, no connection, no DHCP, no DNS. Pathetic. Their authomated phone support service said "Some people may be having issues, and our engineers are working on it. Turn your modem off and on may fix it". Gods, talk about lack of specifics.

Originally published on my old blog site.

Amasingly I have nearly got to Christmas with no parties. I’ve missed everyone, two to being away at the FuGE workshop, or in Nancy. The last I missed because I have spent the last few days culturing bacteria in my throat, a traditional occupation at this time of year.

Originally published on my old blog site.

In Manchester for a FuGE workshop. It’s a bit surprising actually, but half of Newcastle seems to have decamped down here. So far the discussions have been deep and intense; we established early on that it’s pronounced "fugue". Everyone has ignored this and carried on pronouncing it how they started off. Personally I am fond of "fug-ee".

The University is a building site; I did see a patch of grass on the way from the station, but a guy with a theodolite was eyeing it up. The hideous maths tower is now a distant memory to be replaced by the scan building. This has been lovingly architected to evoke images of a gasometer. It’s hideous.

Manchester seems much the same as before with a few shops gone, a few more appeared. Next to the stationary shop in the precinct, they have a Brazillian eyebrow plucking emporium; I think I may pop in tomorrow.

For food, we went to "No 4 Dine and Wine" in Didsbury; despite the silly name, it’s nice. Quite homey and comfortable, the food was well-prepared and straight-forward enough, except for a tendency to balance the meat on top of the vegetables. The veggie options were okay; the roast vegetable soup was particularly good, although too hot; I ended up flushing burnt bits of the roof of my mouth down the sink at half time.

Surely the roof of your mouth should really be called the ceiling of your mouth?

Travel there and back was a pain. On the way, we couldn’t get a taxi for love nor money (actually, we only tried money). In the end, we took the bus. On the way back, the taxi arrived okay, but he bought us back via Liverpool. "This is Oxford Road" he announced just north of Rusholme. Yes, I know. That would be the road we started off on. Eventually we got back to the Business School which has a 101 integrated hotel and sauna rooms.

My laptop fan is starting to make pained noises as the machine overheats. Time to sleep.

Originally published on my old blog site.