Sleepypete's Pillow

Training - Motivation required

2012-02-13T18:51:00.000Z

Another one from the "Facebook made me lol" collection :

Definite lol from that one.

(Aside - now watching the cricket highlights and thinking "when did bowlers throwing the ball become an accepted part of the game ?")

It's getting close to that time of year when I need to start thinking about getting ready for the season. Previously, I'd rely on a combination of :
Natural Fitness (I'm a fattie but can still pull my weight around with little preparation)
Pre season nets
Running around at lunchtimes at school

These days the running around at lunchtimes and pre season nets don't happen. Plus I'd be challenged to get as much quality training in with nets because of the shoulder issues. I used to be one of the first to turn up and I'd be bowling all through the session (except when it came my turn to bat). I'd get full value out of the nets time, it let me try new things out or groove my bowling action until it was ready for matches. I found my away swinger by accident but nets let me learn how to bowl it properly. I was literally one of the first to turn up and the last one to leave. (Half the team didn't know where the light switches were)

I can't rely on the natural fitness so much now, I used to be in Much Pain for about 2 days after the first game of the season. Much Pain time was closer to a week last year ... even without doing a full allocation of bowling overs.

So what I need to do is to start getting miles into my legs. I have a good training circuit available for that, with a set of roads near my place set into a triangular pattern. I think that it's maybe about a mile and a half. It should serve first as me walking around it, followed by jogging when more conditioning is back in my legs.

That's what it needs really, the power is still there in my legs plus I can really feel the benefit of being a stone lighter. But ... what's cursed me over the years is lack of stamina and being prone to cramp. The diet has caused a bit of an imbalance that's increased that proneness to cramp too. (It's settling and going away)

But most of all - it's motivation.

And the Pink Hat Project for the summer may well be the key to unlocking that motivation. Can't rely on being chased by dinosaurs any more !

Thinking Valentines

2012-02-12T20:04:00.000Z

We're coming up to one of the nastier commercially driven celebrations of the year ...

Yep. I mean Valentines' Day. Kinda weird saying it's a nasty celebration but that's the way I feel about it after seeing what commercialism has done to it.

The idea - that one day in the year, couples do something special. It's a nice idea but as with most Day's, as soon as the market men get their fingers on it, it jumps out of control.

The problem - is that you're made to feel obliged that you should be doing something on that particular day. If you're not then you're made to feel that there's something wrong with you. Even worse if you've been single for what feels like forever, like me. You'd like to go out somewhere to let someone to feel special but there's no willing, interested or interesting partners out there.

The reality - everyone else gets the need to head out somewhere on the Day, leading to the restuarants being totally crammed and tickets for things becoming difficult to come by. If you do get in a restuarant, you're not in for a romantic intimate dinner, you're heading for Sheep Dip dining where the restuarant want you out the door so they can get more people through.

It doesn't lead to it being a good evening. Don't get me wrong, some of the few memories* I retain of the time with Evil Ex are centred around evenings out. We make each other feel better by having a relaxed evening in each other's company. But around Valentines Day, there's too much pressure coming from the surroundings to really enjoy that time away.

*(time has eroded most of them but there's also the lingering after effects of my brains being scrambled by a cricket ball)

Plan A for this year's Valentines Day was to head over to CQ's place for the evening to chill out with pizza and dvd's. We'll be doing that on Thursday instead when all the Crazies are available.

But I will mark it in my own way ... Unless I get the shock of a better offer coming around I'll be stopping in. But I'll put up a music post with the soppiest songs in my library. Here's a taster ...

Grindy, grindy

2012-02-11T17:18:00.000Z

Lately I've been enjoying yet another run through of Deus Ex Human Revolution. It's rare that I'll play through an entire game straight away after completing it the first time (variation is good) and it's even rarer that I'll play through one three times on the bounce.

Yet I'm currently going for the third run, albeit with different objectives. The aim this time around is to harvest as many of the remaining Steam achievements as possible and by the end of this run, I'll hopefully only have just 3 to go.

Big targets this time :
Pacifist - Get through the entire game without killing anyone. This isn't easy ... I've had to do one set piece the bad way because there's a massive chance that exploding a robot will also kill bad guys who you've already knocked out.
Foxiest of the Hounds - Get through the entire game without setting off the alarms.

(To do later : Beat the game on hardest difficulty, peek at all the items in Megan's office at the start, see all the endings)

Going for those two achievements has added more interest to the usual play through and makes you appreciate the stealthy approach. The game rewards you for that, not in equipment (which is plentiful anyway) but in making your character advance quicker. Getting through a level without being seen gives more experience than knocking out all the bad guys. Knocking people out rather than going for the lethal approach gives quicker advancement too.

And by bypassing a lot of the bad guys, it's also been less of a grind. The pacifist approach is a lot quieter than having a sniper rifle boom away across the level, making the bad guys come running.

It's that Grindiness that's key though.

I seem to be migrating to games that are built around dynamic stories. I like the progression as the game goes along. The story has to be fairly tight though, as really open ended ones like the X space games and Bethesda's usual output tend to turn me off. I prefer grand strategy campaign games where the world is persistent, I didn't enjoy real time strategy games where the strong base you built in Mission 1 would be irrelevant in successive missions. And some strategy games hugely resemble the grind through wearing down the game by attrition.

Bit like novels. I've given up on a few novels lately, because they resemble the grind that turns me off certain games. I've quit reading Star Wars books because the Yuuzhan Vong sequence got really unpleasant and definitely a depressing grind.

David Weber's Honorverse books used to be a lot of fun, with fairly tight plotlines built around focused space battle action. They've gone very bloaty now though, with 1000 page books with nary a nuke to explode anywhere. The fun factor went out of them as the politics came in. I've been struggling with reading Game Of Thrones. Something needed to happen within the first 200 pages of sheer grind of character set up to keep me interested. (I'll go back into Game of Thrones at some point). All I can say is that the script writing for the TV series must have been incredible to make it so popular.

Currently reading Stark's War by Jack Campbell (aka John G. Hemry) which I'm enjoying. A trademark of Jack Campbell's books is that they flow well and when the action starts, what you're reading makes sense and keeps focus. A crucial key of science fiction is that it has to remain consistent with itself and the rules that it declares. Departures from that (David Weber is badly guilty here with magic new tech) make the reader doubt the credibility of the series.

Right :

Games - fun when they're tightly focused around a well written storyline. Hopefully Mass Effect 3 will be a fitting conclusion to the series, avoiding some of the grind of the first 2 games.
Books - enjoying Jack Campbell (and sometime I must read one by Thumper), giving up on David Weber and Game of Thrones.
Games & Books - there's more crossover now than people might think. Instead of reading what's on the page, you're writing your own variation of the story with how you approach the situations presented.

England's in trouble in the rugby though, time to turn my attention back to that for the last 30 minutes.

Small is beautiful

2012-02-10T20:06:00.000Z

A little bit of random telly I caught a while ago that now has me hooked is Leverage.

It's not what I usually go for, there's no lasers, jetpacks, teleporters or other bits of sciency-fiction technobabble in here. Just a lot of style and clever smarts in how it sets up the scenarios in each episode.

They also have a lot of fun with how the episodes play through to. The 5 main characters don't necessarily totally like each other but there's a lot of respect for each other's abilities. It's a series where the cast works really well together. But one catches the eye early :

That's Beth Riesgraf who plays Parker. Very definitely a Bad Girl. She's the thief of the bunch and certifiably crazy.

Maybe that's why the twinkle catches the eye. She's actually not that small but that's the way it looks on screen. Perfection (even with the craziness) in a very tiny package (like a few others I could mention !)

Anyway - just really enjoyed watching the pilot episode again and I'm now looking forward to watching the rest of the series. Hell, I even bought season 2 unseen and I very rarely do that.

Here's another character who joins in with making this a cool series to watch :

Very true. The Geek Shall Inherit The Earth.

PS Boy does surround sound make you jump out of your skin if gunfire goes off on the soundtrack taking you by surprise. Jeez !
PS2 Feeling a bit better today for some reason I can't fathom. Must be the bacon sarnie in the morning and the prospect of the weekend to come.

In need of a Hobbes

2012-02-09T20:24:00.000Z

I'm feeling like that somewhat at the moment. Depression is a curse suffered by many (CQ calls it the Ugly Monster) and I'm definitely no exception. In my case, it's probably a case of manic-depression. I enjoy riding the wave of being hyperactive manic but I know there's usually a downside to come later.

At the moment, my Ugly Monster is raising its head from :
The cold. It's getting into my bones and muscles, feeling like someone's poured concrete down my spine. It's actually not that much worse than normal, except that I'm feeling it more due to not having that hyperactivity to let me blast through it.
Feeling lonely.

It's that loneliness that is really biting at the moment. I have great friends, like the Snow Queen, Craziequeen, BK, half the people on my Facebook, CK, BD & RCA. Trouble is, when I'm needing to reach out to them, I'm usually picking the wrong time. It's hard to have a heart to heart in work time. People are busy. (Including me !)

What I need is the chance to talk with someone until we're literally falling asleep. Bit like the original intention for 03.45am No Sleep, talking with friends until it's so late you can't stop your eyes closing. There's stuff I'd need to talk about that are too private to be put here. However, there's also me finding it difficult to talk to people about what I feel. I'd need absolute trust and confidence in secrets to talk about some of it. I must look a rather different person outside the happy smiling armour I habitually keep up.

I've not let that armour down to allow those emotions to be released for a Very Long Time now (even in my last serious relationship I was walling off). I guess I've just been single too long now and in need of more hugs.

There's also a touch of being frustrated in helping people. I know there's a few of my friends who could do with similarly opening their armour and unburdening those pent up emotions or just being able to talk through their situation to someone who can offer a soft shoulder and a willing ear ... but the frustration is in not being let in to offer the help. I'm wanting to help - I just don't know how.

Going back to the cold, here's another Calvin & Hobbes scene :

We're threatened with snow tonight, which could make it interesting to get into work tomorrow. When it snowed a few years ago, I was one of the few who made it in. It was seriously tempting to do a snow scene like the one above, except instead of salutes there would have been branches like the rifles of a firing squad. On the other side, there would have been a single snowman with a blindfold.

Woulda been hilarious. Like the rest of the Calvin & Hobbes strips done by Bill Watterson who is an absolute genius. Sadly there's no more Calvin & Hobbes being made.

By the Power Of Crunchie !

2012-02-08T19:49:00.002Z

Tired again. Not a great day for me this one - the cold temperatures are getting into my back and making it feel as if concrete has been poured down my spine. I have been able to ignore that (plus the bounciness keeps the stiffness away) but there is a limit.

It wasn't all bad, I was able to make the Snow Queen and Mrs Sunshine smile at seeing one or two of the comments headed their way after the Cricket Charity related postings. Mrs Sunshine got that codename cos that smile brightens up the room and it always warms the heart to see the Snow Queen smile. Although I am seriously scared by a comment by Dawnie on Facebook :

Me : it seems to be my lot in life. To be a slavish minion to the whims of Queens
Dawnie : At least she doesn't demand you being a Eunuch! :p

Yep. Scared.

I did manage to get some focus and energy going today though, thanks to the Power Of The Crunchie. (I didn't wave the Crunchie above my head with a cutscene of an old magical castle while transforming into He-Sleepy ... honest). Strange colourings can be good things ... in moderation :-) (The moderation comes from skipping the morning teacake)

Crunchie Power has mostly worn off now though. I'm not giving up (chillout+book later) but I'll go with the kitten's answer :-)

PS Almost forgot - attribution for the picture goes to : http://www.cathouseonthekings.com/ which I found via Facebook.

Where's all the Pink Hats ?

2012-02-07T20:54:00.000Z

Ok, so Friday I mentioned a potential project for this summer ...

The idea was born from a conversation with a very dear friend, with me remembering a colleague from a couple of years ago. Combine that with the controversy surrounding Karen Handel, formerly of the Susan G. Komen group and you get me thinking I could do a little more than just contributing to charities. I could be the focus for a bit of money raising.

There's a bit more to it as well. I probably have just one or two seasons of cricket left in me. Actually, with the state of my shoulder and a couple of other long term injury issues, I probably should have called it quits on cricket already.

But ... I like running around at daft speeds chasing and pouncing on balls. Maybe I'm part kitten ?

Hey ! I'm strange and am not afraid to admit it.

It's a curious feeling, this project. On Friday, it was just an embryonic idea that had the barest possibility of happening (me playing cricket this summer depends on my legs supporting it). But ... that seed of an idea has taken root and it's growing into a case of :

"So it depends on my leg getting better and the rest of my injuries cooperating ? Sod that, I'll play anyway.". If I tear stuff up again, there's plenty of time after the season for it to heal.

And it's similar for those other long term injuries. With the weight loss, I'm getting back my agility from a number of years ago. I have the same power available in my legs, it just has less weight to shift. That's awesome all round. As well as being more nimble, there's less stress on my legs.

In 3 months I've lost enough off my middle to do the belt up 2 notches tighter. Although one of my Facebook updates today is : "And just because you can put the belt one notch tighter, doesn't mean you should." I.e. Sleepypete becomes SqueakyPete.

I have a feeling there's a bit of Positive Mental Attitude coming in there though. Bit like having a cause to fight for. Or maybe a few causes as I'm looking out for a couple of people right now. Or maybe I'm just pleased at the prospect of having some of the old bounce back.

So - that potential embryo idea of "I could do this" is turning more into a "I want to do this". There's a few details to look into though :

Which charity - think I'll ask for advice from the girls at work for this one and go with what they say
(always follow the advice of women - it's much safer that way and it makes them happy)
Getting Pink Stuff
(no suitable pink hats in the Mall shops or online)
Getting ready for the season
(I really need to stop relying on natural fitness)
And sorting out the donation thing
(Probably via www.justgiving.com)

And there's that aspect of time running out. If I do something like this, I need to do it either this year or next. I'm getting too old now for running around cricket fields at daft speeds. The old injuries are making their presence felt more and the new ones are taking longer to go away.

As to the why ... I like helping people out. I live for it. And this attaches "helping people out" to me having fun. Plus there's the biggest reason why I like helping people out : Because I can :-).

PS Actually, now I think more about it, I think I'd do it 50:50. 50 for breast cancer for the colleague from a few years ago and 50 for Help For Heroes.

Picture Monday - Armour Amour

2012-02-06T19:09:00.001Z

Spotted this one on Facebook over the weekend :

Lol'd ... And thought of my neighbour, Cyberkitten. Who will love it.

Fantasy armour is always a good subject for getting the artists going. I think the artists and fans of artists are actually the ones who go for the more revealing drawings. The D&D gamers get trained out of putting their women into daft outfits by the GM :

Player : That's right - chainmail bra and panties for my character
GM : Ok, you're about to go through a thorn infested bramble patch ...

Here's another one from an older game and book I read many many years ago ... Curse of the Azure Bonds had two main characters, Dragonbait and Alias. It's a pretty decent book (I brought it with me to Bristol and will read it again sometime) and quite early it explains away the abomination of a breastplate the female lead wears. 'Magical thing causing resistance against pointy-stabby' (I paraphrased)

Yep - we got trained early by our GMs to think Full Plate = Good (even for female characters). Trouble is, evil GMs also have a tendency to make Full Plate wearing characters have to cross rivers. Usually under threat of imminent attack. There's rules in there that say that Full Plate takes 15 minutes or so to put on and rushing that causes all sorts of "I can't move!!" penalties.

Unless you use magic ...

I can't find it right now (it's in Defenders of the Faith) but you could add a property to that shiny Full Plate armour where your character said a command word and within 1 action, that Full Plate would fly on to the character Iron Man style. So your girlie cleric (it opened up lots of banter with the rest of the party and I had a lot of fun with it) could go :

Keela : "If I were you, I'd remove that hand from where you just put it"
Octopus Guy : "Why would I want to do that ?"
Keela : "Armour up"
Octopus Guy : "OWW!"
(from the hand trapped in naughty place)

I was always more about having fun with the role playing type aspect (while being a strong Power Gamer too) and the Armour of Calling just opened up more possibilities.

And - how have I managed to turn a simple picture post into yet another Wall of Text ? Lol :-)

PS CK - if you can find one, check out the level 50 ish green Jade Breastplate. Looks better on trolls than it would on a Worgen though ...

Sporty Sunday (and Saturday)

2012-02-05T15:28:00.000Z

It's been a good weekend for sport this one ...

Yes - it's still the football season but I for one don't count league football as a sport. It's a con game played by namby-pambys with no integrity or respect whatsoever. But that's enough about so-called "professional" footballers. Their conduct gives the term "sportsman" a bad name.

What's made this a good sporting weekend is :

England cricket on the telly
Start of the Six Nations rugby
Superbowl tonight

England have been playing Pakistan in the neutral venues of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. (They can't play at home because the situation is too unstable). It's been a torture exercise for the fans to be honest, as they've crumbled against the spin. But they're our team, we love 'em and we'll support them through thick and thin.

Especially if they celebrate like Monty Panesar. It's just sheer, unconfined joy when he takes a wicket and he puts my old Aeroplane wing celebrations to shame.

I'll confess though that I've fast forwarded through much of the cricket this weekend as this series has been a bit of an unspectacular grind amidst the clusters of wickets.

Six Nations started this weekend and is always one for the sports fans to look forward to. Rugby's a hard, uncompromising sport played by true hard nut athletes. Like the cricketers, they'll play on with broken bones (if they can) and a little bit of blood is taken as an honour badge (until the ref spots it and tells them to get it sorted). Compare that to footballers who feign injury to get opposition players in trouble.

I'll not watch all the Six Nations games, it'll follow the rules :

Watch all England games - get tortured by knowing they can play better.
Watch all Ireland games - because of the affinity from living there for most of my first 10 years.
Watch games where there's a chance of a good game.
Ignore Scotland and Italy - because both sides are pretty poor (Italy are improving, Scotland are just poor)
Shout for the other team when France are playing - even if it's the Welsh.

Is there anyone I haven't upset yet with the above ? Lol :-) I don't mean any of it outside of match banter.

Mixed feelings about England rugby this year. A new coach has swept a very wide broom through the team. He's been brave, taken his own approach to things and some of it looked ok. There's still some massive holes at key positions though where the players just aren't international class (10 is a lynchpin and Hodgson has never been up to it at international level).

Yesterday's England game lived to those expectations - England were lucky to win a game where they flattered to deceive people into believing they had any real ideas for how to get points. It was one of the least impressive (outside of improved discipline) displays by an England side for quite a while. And Scotland were worse ...

Compare that to the Welsh who have just punched a half chance through the Irish defence to score a try.

Superbowl's tonight - I don't watch much American Football but I usually enjoy it when I do. American sport tends to be much more regimented in its play than European football and NFL is no exception. Short doses work well for NFL and Baseball, so you don't get jaded from seeing season long the same thing over and over again. The Superbowl is usually worth watching though.

The trouble with the Superbowl is that it's on really, really late. I will probably last as long as the half time show before going "zzzzzzz".

Saturday 9

2012-02-04T15:50:00.000Z

Spotted this one a while ago on TBB's blog and thought - I must do that.

It's a Saturday 9 meme :

1. Do you live close to where you grew up ? Why ?

No. Not any more - I've followed the work. The first years I can properly remember had me in Northern Ireland, which is a beautiful country to live in. We had a house out in the sticks, which is still there albeit with a new access road, new barn and it looks like a landscape gardener has done stuff to the land around it. But the recognisable features are still there, including the wall where we used to shoot cans off it with an air rifle. My parents still live in Lincolnshire where I went to secondary school but I now live in Bristol where the work is.

2. Have you ever been so angry that you almost lost control ?

With other people - very rarely. I walk away before snapping with others.
With myself ? Hell yeah. One reason for the ongoing damage to my shoulder is that while I rein myself in with throwing normally, those reins aren't in place when I've made an error. So if I've fumbled or dropped a catch, a 110% power throw will be coming in from the boundary. I'm in an instinct frame of mind at that point, won't be able to stop it and will go OW in a big way when the throw is away. At other times, I'll channel anger into tighter focus. Like Friday 27th when the self-anger got turned into tighter focus for getting things done.

I don't think people realise that I put the tight control on to myself. It actually hinders my interactions with normal people, although a touch of natural empathy can have me picking up on how other people are feeling.

3. Are you a fan of a musical act that slightly embarasses you ?

Let's see ... Paul McCartney's The Frog Song will always be a favourite. As well Manamana. I will always sing along to Abba. But I'll go for Alisha's Attic. Not for their music, which is consistently outstanding but for the nickname I grabbed while I was a fan of them above everyone else : Alisha's Addict. People who know me at work will recognise why that might have triggered the embarassment flag over the past year or so ;-)

4. Is there a movie that always makes you cry ?

Yes - it's called Bolt. It's an animated film about a super dog. The bit that really gets me is towards the end - the burning building sequence.

(Men do cry sometimes, we just hate to admit it - except footballers who have something wrong in the head)

Hey ! I'm a dog person and not afraid to admit it :-)

5. Who is the most famous person that you've met ?

Bumble, aka David Lloyd. He's one of the Sky cricket commentators and is certified bat-shit crazy. He's a great guy, brings a lot of colour, fun and genuine enthusiasm for the game into the commentary box. We met him at Trent Bridge 2 years ago when we watched Yorkshire blow it yet again. We were walking around the ground to find seats before the game and coming the other way is Bumble. I got a handshake, although it was a fleeting meeting as I suspect he was late for duty and needing to rush off.

Great guy - made my day that did, the result didn't matter after that :-)

6. Before you leave your home, what must you have ?

Keys, wallet, mobile phone, shades (sensitive eyes). Brain (no kidding, sometimes it gets left behind). If for longer than a day : laptop.

7. What do you miss the most about being a kid ?

No cares. Sure, they probably worked us for longer hours at school with the homework but I wasn't subject to chores etc. Also space, I had the space to practice the cricket in the back garden (there's still a bare patch in the grass where I stood). I haven't the space to do that here :

The back yard has a big step so I couldn't bat in it
Not enough depth for the batting practice
And I'd be throwing a ball at the windows ... (Throw ball, whack it when it returns on the bounce)

After school, I'd be nipping out the back with me kit to do 30-60 minutes batting practice with that occasionally broken up by having to fetch the ball from in front of the house if I'd hit it over the top.

8. Tell us about a passion of your's that your readers would not expect.

Ok, that cuts out anything to do with chocolate, pizza or sweeties ... My passion is elegance in all of its forms. That can be a device that just Works, it performs its function with the finesse of something that's Just Right.

But that's just the half of it. I watch people. The human body is a machine as well, albeit made of bone & muscle & skin instead of metal & wires & motors. It come in all shapes and forms. And some of them move with such a subtle flow that it's like watching water flow down a stream. It's partly economy of movement, part just enough extra movement.

It's watching the difference between the gawky walk of a starved fashion victim and the "I know what I'm doing ... and I KNOW you're watching it" walk of someone who is utterly comfortable with who she is. Mind you, it's not always the confident ones who have that elegance, one colleague was desperate to lose weight but still moved with the flow of a dancer.

Doh - getting distracted again. How smoothly I get around depends on how my body is behaving. I've trained myself to move with total economy of movement, partly because it protects my knees. But it also unlocked Extreme Speed for me.

Just remembered from a few years ago - there was a person working in the team next door who would walk past the desks normally. Until she reached the desks of Sleepypete and Diablo. At that point, a sway would be introduced into the walk. We think it was unconscious but it had the effect of both Sleepy & Diablo being utterly unable to do any work until she was out of sight.

9. At what age do you think you'd be to think, "I've had a great run" ?

I dunno. And I don't think that time is for a long time to come. Still too much to do. I've learned stuff but not passed it on. I'll not be satisfied until I've passed on a decent proportion of what I know. And while there's still at least one person out there who needs help only I can give, there's still a place for me.

PS We appear to have snow. Maybe there will be enough for another Snow Thing later ...

Potential Summer Project ...

2012-02-03T19:00:00.000Z

One of the best and most interesting bloggers out there got me thinking yesterday ...

(Yes - that was the grinding gears sound you may have heard)

Thumper's wondering at the moment about what to do in the future for walking to help out breast cancer charities. The trigger is an American politician who has infected a charity over there with some daft ideas. There's plenty more info on that (said far better than I ever could) over on Thumper's blog (link on the side and Escaping Kitty link here).

Anyway. That got me thinking, along with remembering back to the more recent past :
A colleague who did something similar to what I'm thinking of last year
(or year before last - blurry time syndrome strikes again)
A colleague who is still Very Ill

The ill colleague is someone who definitely counts as Good People and it's tragic that someone so nice and so young (21 + a little more than me) has been struck down with the cancer curse. So there's a fairly close reason for thinking of getting involved.

What's the project ?

We've had a few people do running for charity but that's not really something I can do. I can sprint fast but not for that long a distance. I won't be running any half marathons any time soon. Cricket suits me quite well because it's bursts of being explosive interspersed between lounging around. Although I don't do much lounging around in the field usually due to being hyperactive.

Middlesex County Cricket Club have had an association for a few years with the Breakthrough Breast Cancer charity, with one aspect being that Pink dominates their coloured one day game kit. I can't go that far, because :

3 day games + cricket I play = red ball, needs white clothing
1 day games for counties = white ball, needs coloured clothing

So wearing pink stuff when playing with a red ball would not be appreciated by the opposition. I'd do it if there was charity money involved though :-)

Instead, picture the Sleepy One in a Pink floppy hat, batting with a pink cover over the helmet and wrapping the fingers around something round and pink and rubbery while batting. However, I'd need the pink helmet cover (or pink helmet), pink hat and pink grip for the bat. Can I find them ? Not on the web ...

I can't bowl any more, so if it was a Performance charity thing I'd need to do it on Runs, Catches and Run-outs. I'm not even sure if I'll play this year, that's all dependent on the legs which went a little backwards today. I don't think my skin appreciates the cold weather we have at the moment or the dessicated atmosphere in our office building.

I don't know if I'll actually pull this off this summer but the seed is there in my mind. Next time I wander around Bristol centre or the Mall, I'll be on the lookout for Pink Stuff. In the meantime, I'll keep on contributing to charity as I usually do. Spam through the letterbox gets ignored (there's too much of it) but I'll happily contribute for the personal touch.

PS Hoping for another charity cake donation thing in the office soon. Cakes made by our office people (the Snow Queen bewitches us with baking) are always 'Blink n Miss it' cos they are That Good.

Thinking about - Other people

2012-02-02T20:32:00.000Z

Saw something on FB today that I think I identify with :

I hope that's true for me. Your past defines who you are through how you have assimilated your life experiences but it doesn't mean you have to be locked in to it. I hope I've managed to assimilate the various major stuff that's happened to me, while not going down the Dark Side and have it forever dominate my destiny. The most recent major test of that was being able to play in the same cricket team as the fella who took up with my last partner ... and be civil.

I think being civil actually may have weirded him out. Lol :-)

Stuff over the last few weeks/months has made me revisit the past though. There's things there that none of the Bristol people know. Reason ? It would make them treat me different. Or would it ? I dunno.

Truth is, while I'm addicted to knowing Stuff, I recognise that the Secrets I know aren't all my own. I'll decide when I let my own secrets out, I don't have that right with the secrets of others. Hence all the codenames and the dropping of the codenames when I need to rationalise my own thoughts.

It is difficult though when events around you remind you of the past which you have left behind. And because those events are mostly about relationships, it's the relationships that dominate my mind at the moment. January seems to be a bad time for relationships, or is it the impending Valentines day ...

My sister has a new bloke in her life, who came to visit this last weekend. He's a good bloke, he can stay. But it made the family revisit quite a few things that we don't really talk about any more. There is some deep personal tragedy with our family from 20 years ago. We don't talk about it much but we very definitely Remember. And if/when the time comes that I get kids, there will be a special request to do with that Remembering. That's a decent time away, although it does crop up in my thoughts.

Relationships are the other major thing in my thoughts - although it's now about looking out for other people. I'm finding it strange that I've been getting used for advice and that I'm in a position to give that advice. You can see the pain in them, hidden behind the public face they want to put. There's also a reluctance to confront or accept what's happening.

I'm thinking there of a couple from the gamer world - I like to think I'm good friends of both. One of them managed to get me to sing on Mumble (not an insignificant feat) and the other has me swapping pooter stories. But ... as part of them breaking up, both are quieter. More subdued. And others are more subdued around them. It gets even more complicated on Facebook where Ex A and Ex B are now ex friends with each other, they're both more reluctant to talk to common friends. My reaction to both was along the lines "omg - say it ain't so", with that sent to both as I respect both equally.

I do it too - I'll have second thoughts about commenting in certain places because I know unfriendly eyes might be looking. But at the same time, I remember back to my own break up and my reluctance to spill the beans on what precisely the terms of the breakup were. I think that to expose the totality of it would have been rather spiteful. We don't have the right to say who another person should call Friend and I'd have been prejudicing those friendships.

I'm rambling again aren't I ...

I know a few people who are in pain at the moment. It's the pain of cracked or broken dreams and the strain of having to lock that away from the world in order to remain functioning. I've had that kind of pain three times in my past :

First - I made up a fantasy that let me keep going. It took me a long, long time to accept the truth there.
Second - I ran. And in the running, I cost myself the chance of the First Hons degree I should have got.
Third - I locked down. Which was as damaging as the fantasy and the running.

One thing common there is Communication. It's better to talk through a problem than to let it fester and bubble away in your head. For the three Dark times above, I didn't know who I could talk to. The issue boiled until the stress of it almost broke me.

It doesn't have to be that way.

Your friends have your back. Lean on them.

Pizza Picture Wednesday

2012-02-01T20:12:00.000Z

Ok,

So I weakened ... Or was it because the intention was to go to Sainsburys. However, traffic into and out of there was hell so I abandoned that for tonight. But ... it got me close to :

Yep. First pizza for a few months :

Pizzahut Pizza > Dominos pizza
Dominos offers > Pizzahut offers

Although it's tough finding out what the offers are for Dominos because their website is appalling and doesn't list them ... Mobile one does but the normal internet one doesn't have a "Click Me For Offers" type button. Meh.

Thinning out

2012-01-31T20:02:00.002Z

Been on my diet for a few months now.

Ok, it's not a real "have a weird formula milkshake instead of sensible meals" diet and it doesn't have any real theory to it except for applying a bit of moderation to what I consume. As in :

Only eat stuff when hungry
Munch in moderation
Avoid grazing
Not over indulging

Thinking of that : time to put tonight's dinner on ... Done ! Completely changing what I eat could quite quickly lead to problems anyway because I seem to be sensitive to things like cheese (and cucumber - makes me throw up)

It's more discipline for continuing with munching what I used to but having less of it. Cookie packets are definitely lasting longer. Not had pizza for ages, although that's partly due to Pizzahut stopping the offer that favours single people. Dominos might be getting another shot (requires a car trip, Pizzahut is in walking distance).

So yeah - cookie moderation instead of cookie monster.

How's it been going ? People have been noticing me being a bit smaller ...

The scales do not lie ! Or maybe they do because I doubt whether they're in any way accurate any more.

I started at a little over 14 stone, which for my current build is probably 2 stone overweight. 12 stone is still heavy ... but I'm allowing myself that because I have quite heavy legs that let me Run Very Fast. Or rather, they would if they didn't have the ballast to tug around.

I've not lost tonnes of weight, that was never the intention. Losing weight too rapidly will cause you problems and it's likely to go right back on again. The last time I had sick time off work (ages ago), I couldn't eat for several days and probably lost a full stone over that time. The next week, that weight was right back on again. Starvation diets will do no long term good whatsoever. The plan has always been to enact a new discipline and lose the weight steadily.

So far the weight loss tally is 7-10 pounds. The variation there is because my weight will go up or down a couple of pounds within half a day. The minimum I've spotted so far is 13st2lbs this morning. Happy days.

What have I noticed with it so far ?

I have more energy ... Dunno if this is the weight loss, the metabolism getting quicker or just Positive Mental Attitude ... but I definitely have more energy. I'm having to watch myself due to hyperactivity. When I go hyper, I have to consciously check myself and what I do because I'll miss stuff I should catch automatically. It's not carelessness, it's just moving on to the next thing before the check bit is done.

Brr. Cold. It's turned colder over the past few days and I'm reaaaaallly feeling it. Must have less insulation, although you'd have thought the hyperactivity manicness would keep me warm.

I can dance ... Not in the strut my stuff in a nightclub kind of way (I have 2 left feet) but the old agility and quickness of feet is returning. At my previous weight, I think I'd have run someone over a couple of times by now but managed to avoid the corridor collisions. And my legs were healthy enough on the walk to the car tonight to let me go Maximum Speed. That's walking with a stride so long you're in danger of splitting your trousers.

People are noticing ... Did I say that already ?

Me being littler is being spotted. Ok, that's the third time I've said that but I'm quite pleased that MiniMizingMe is noticeable.

I do need to figure out a balance though, as my salt/potassium balance is off. That tends to be quite crucial with me as if it's off, I get cramps which tear up my muscles. But I think I'll manage to figure it out before the summer's cricket.

PS I promise not to take it too far and go anorexic. The first time someone says "You're too thin ! Have a PIZZA", I'll come running.

Snow's here ! Or maybe not ...

2012-01-30T21:13:00.000Z

I like Snow.

Although it's a bad idea for my shoulder, I like throwing snowballs at people. I'm usually nimble enough too to have a chance to dodge out the way of Revenge Snowballs. I was the first person a few years ago to have a Snowman - I went out in late evening and built a miniature Snowthing on one of my wheelybins. And I really miss having a SnowSmiley picture on my phone to show random people who I think are in need of seeing a Big Grin.

SnowThing pic : is at this post
(he looks kinda pissed there)
SnowSmiley : is at this other post
(the SnowSmiley pic was from my last phone)

Had the first snow for a while this morning but it was very light and didn't stick around. Think we need to offer prayers to the Snow Gods for more snow. At least for a couple of days because the snow novelty tends to wear thin about 5 seconds after you get stuck for the first time.

My last car had a habit of getting me halfway to work fine. And then the traction control and ABS would cry "NO MORE !" and disable themselves. Usually precisely halfway. Not sure what this one will do - it has less power, more weight, better weight distribution but double the torque. Could be interesting on ice. But it'll be better than the Puma which only had very crude traction control.

Other stuff - I got to meet my sister's bloke over the weekend. He can stay. We gathered together for my dad's birthday (he's 21 + a lot). And it was a pretty chilled out weekend too. And SuperWaitress at the Swanholme thought I'd lost a stone since I was last there too, which made me grin. (Actual tally is 0.5 stone)

More other stuff - my mind is a little muddled at the moment because I'm worried about a couple of people at work ... And my reaction to it. I'm recognising a huge case of deja vu in what's going on there. Both situations. Although the deja vu is more applicable to one than the other :

Depression is nasty - and I can recognise the hopelessness that inspires it from a few incidents in my past. I'm lucky though that my depression cycles have been due to events rather than chemical/biological issues.
Breakups are as bad - except that other people are involved. Depression tends to be a solitary problem, which makes it harder for other people to realise how big the problem is.

I can still remember the long drawn out heartache from when my last major relationship broke up. I wouldn't wish that on anybody. In my case, it was my partner walking out and demanding her cut of the equity we'd gained in the house. I believe she thought that I would have to sell up, however I was confident (with the knowledge I'd been paying about 3/4 of the mortgage anyway and the major bills) that I'd be able to ride it through. It still cost me a 5 figure sum to buy her out though, which worked out to extra money on the mortgage, a reset of the 25 year clock and some lean times for the next few years.

(That's the first time I've exposed that truth outside very few people, like count 'em on one hand)

What made it worse is that Evil Ex* continued on with a theme of upsetting people, to the point where she rapidly alienated herself from my little circle of valued friends. *I only use the name "Evil Ex" because of the alliteration factor :-) Alienation factor gone, alliteration amusement factor - high :-) I'd like to think I'm over it to the point of being able to give a hug if we meet again socially ... but it does take two people to make a hug.

The house equity was only half of it though. For at least six months after, I caused myself untold self inflicted emotional damage by rebounding left and right on people where I was quite frankly, kidding myself. Rejection can do nasty things to a mind already grieving for a relationship. I'm curious as to how other people saw me over those 6-12 months. I know I was a mess inside.

Yep - it hit me hard and still affects me, although not nearly as much as when the wounds were open and bleeding. But because I've been through it, I can recognise the hell that might be about to erupt for a certain person.

I hope it doesn't work out that way - I always have my fingers crossed for Good Things, even if I'm just watching from the outside.

Oh dear - I've Wall Of Texted again. Last word - if you think someone around you has lost Hope, give 'em a helping hand. A little "I believe in you" can go a long way with a person who has lost sight of something to hope for. And if there's one thing I do so much it could be counted as a fault (definitely causes my Real Boss exasperation!), it's help people out where I can. (Although communication skills and confidence gets in the way of people asking)

Stormies

2012-01-28T17:52:00.001Z

Awwwww :

(click for bigger)

PS Managed to not kill anyone on the roads yesterday :-)

SSDD

2012-01-27T15:51:00.000Z

Grr.

As the Facebook status says :

"Think i've operated solely on fumes and self anger and loathing today. No breaks, bacon sarnie or lunch, just starting to get hungry. Home time."

I get really cranky when I'm hungry. And the reason for the self anger and loathing is self inflicted. Plan for today was to get in early for a meeting and then use the flexi credit to head off early to watch live cricket. Didn't happen that way.

Grr.

But - the stuff done today will lay the groundwork for stuff later (need to do something fast on Monday though to cut a bit of time out of how long a different job will take).

Stopping later means I don't watch live cricket but I'll have the highlights on later after an episode of A Town Called Eureka (great series). That's probably a +.

Working at 120% means I got stuff done but I completely forgot to get lunch (missed breakfast bacon as a self-punishment) which I'll pay for later when I travel.

Need to make sure my head's right for the travelling later. If I'm still angry at myself then I could well be a danger to others. Certain checks I have as part of "ME" get bypassed when I drive. I'm sure everyone can relate to that due to how instinctive you need to be while driving because of all the other idiots on the roads.

I'm my own worst enemy and my own worst critic although, unless I go to that instinctive level of operating, no one else will be allowed to see it.

Simple Person's Daybook

2012-01-25T21:42:00.000Z

Welcome back to blogging to Dawnie :-) (link's been added in the sidebar)

Thought I wouldn't put a post in tonight but Dawn's first one caught the eye so much I had to steal it :

Outside My Window :

Is more light. In the daytime at least. Because it's winter, all the leaves have fallen off the overgrowth out the back so the light can get in. Must clear it properly so I get light in the summer ...

I am thinking :

Bzzzzzzzz. I'm flicking between hyperactivity and hypoactivity at the moment. When I'm hyperactive, my thinking is usually going 3 times the speed of normal. Think hamster on coffee. I have to watch myself because I'm more prone to saying or doing something without thinking it through properly. Or I'll just trip up over myself and look like a stammering idiot. But I do like the hyperactivity, it usually comes from me doing something right.

I am thankful for :

Being in a great team (although its days are numbered) and on a great project. Really feel like we've achieved something with the work that's been put in. When times got hard, we pulled together and sorted things out. Despite the disruptive efforts of people outside the team. Our results shine for themselves, their silly questions got answered with "We got it right all along". We've been blessed with a consistent stream of committed professional people who have been awesome to know.

From the kitchen :

Is coming murmuring from the cupboards. It's the lemon minimuffins shouting "Eat me", competing with the Mini Eggs that are whispering "You know you wantit"

I am wearing :

Earlier - suit for work. Now it's white fleecey top over orange t-shirt with an alien type sticker with "Just visiting" on it. Thought that was apt. Finish that off with comfy trousers to let my leg get more healing air.

I am creating :

Same. Not a lot. Apart from mess. I'd like to build a kit car at some point but don't have the facilities to do it. I'll also need to keep my current car for a lot of years so I can afford one.

I am reading :

At home ? Not enough. I'm stalled on Game Of Thrones. When I get home from work, I'm not usually that interested in doing that much outside of websurfing. I guess the last story I went through was in the Deus Ex Human Revolution game. It's not a paper novel, it's probably more. There's as much story in there as some novels (more maybe) and you are at the centre of it instead of looking in from the outside.

At work, today I reviewed a System Requirements Document, which is more intense than reading a book as you need to put mental energy into making sure the document is right. If you don't, you have trouble buying what you want and what you get may not be what you wanted. I think my comments from today will help.

I am hoping :

That the darn car alarm won't go off again. It's gone off twice that I've noticed but not since I disabled the smart entry system. I also have other hopes that I'm going to tease people with by not saying what they are :-)

Around the house :

Is way too much clutter. I have a couple of essential maintenance jobs to do. I need to catch up with housework. And I need to have a massive clearout of all the rubbishy paper junk I have trouble letting go of.

I am looking forward to :

Silencing those minimuffins in the kitchen. And the next cakes that appear at work. Also the next Craziemob gathering. But most of all is seeing if I can persuade a Very Special Guest to join us for that next Craziemob gathering.

If I could change one thing, it would be :

Being so injury prone. I'm getting many reminders now of things broken in the past. I'd like to have a shoulder that's completely working instead of the broken one I do have. Apart from that, I wouldn't change the 2 relationships now gone or other "mistakes" as I've learned a lot from all of those experiences. And I think I've improved as a person through them. But I would like to have less underlying pain from shoulder, wrist, legs, back.

One of my favourite things :

My most favourite thing is making people smile. Hence one habit of writing nice things about people on here. Oh and running full speed such that the wind rustles past my ears. Must get back into cricket this year.

A few plans for the rest of the week :

Travelling this weekend but apart from that, not much. I'll chill out tomorrow, maybe get back in time from work on Friday to watch a little cricket.

Reversed Psychology

2012-01-24T20:38:00.000Z

Sometimes my head behaves so strangely even I can't keep track of it.

Currently on a bit of a downer even though I have no reason whatsoever for it. I've had lots of reasons to be grinning today :

Mrs Sunshine was back after a birthday. Which meant cakes. Which meant lots of chances to say Happy Birthday (while stealing a cake). And you can bet that I found a few excuses to say Happy Birthday to Mrs Sunshine and get that wonderful smile in response.

And I definitely don't believe the claimed age. It's lies. Mrs Sunshine can be no older than 21.

There is always the amazing Snow Queen, who happily seems in good cheer at the moment. Our Snow Queen has been one of the best things about working on my project since almost Day 1 (she joined after 6 months) and it was a really sad day when she left for another project a little while ago. That seemed like a good idea at the time (10 years on a project is a Long Time), even though the inner voice was going "You can't leave - Don't go !" :-)

Was over the moon when I heard our Snow Queen was coming back. She does things her way, which is not always the way we ask her to do stuff. Nope. Things get done the Right Way. Engineer instructions are often well intentioned but quite bad for keeping things straight, we just patch over the gaps with duck tape. People like our Snow Queen, Queen Bee and Superspy (who's retired now) help us maverick engineers in not putting our fingers in the firey stuff.

There's also The Boss, who returned from a baby break last year and got straight back into the swing of things barely missing a beat. Despite engineers asking daft questions.

Where would we be without them ? Probably forever hunting for the information we need to get stuff done.

That's enough about people (for now at least). Work wise I managed to finish something off today which I thought would take longer. Happy about that because it was meeting minutes, which I hate because I start doubting a memory I expect to be perfect (I have a photographic memory that's nowhere near perfect and it works better with stuff I've read than stuff I've heard). Got that done despite a few "Do Immediate" distractions which needed some serious headscratching.

Last week I got to see what I've been working on, which is amazing. Walking in from car park to office, I allowed out a happy "Hello Diamond". We're more visible in the news these days and it's great seeing something go from paper and powerpoint to actual living steel. I bet I'd feel the same way if I joined the kit car world as the car steadily came to life.

So things are actually going ok, there's just something in my head that's blocking the Be Happy message.

I suspect a little of that might be having less interaction with people at home compared to work. Since leaving the WoW world, I've missed having that chance to dip in and out of chat in the evening. I think I needed that as a crutch after my last relationship broke up.

But it'll also be down to lack of sleep. I've been running light on sleep lately with being captured in the Deus Ex world and last night was especially bad. I went to bed at a reasonable time but due to legs being really sore, probably only got maybe 2 hours of sleep.

That's not enough. Will try to make up for that tonight (finished the second DXHR run last night) and hopefully that'll be without needing the Rubber Mallet.

Oh ! Happy Birthday Mrs Sunshine (again) ! :-) And I shall hit "Publish Post" and treat myself to one of the mini-muffins in the cupboard in honour of your "It's definitely 21, it has to be".

Ballet movies are scary

2012-01-23T22:08:00.000Z

Just watched Black Swan. I missed this one in the cinema as the Craziemob didn't really want to see it (can't remember actually, it could have been part of the summer/winter film glut). I like to catch up with the major films I've missed, films like Thelma & Louise where I need to know the background to a couple of new codenames :-)

Thought I'd do a classical music post in honour of Black Swan. How about Black Swan ? This is a seriously brilliant, crazy, beautiful, insane movie showing the descent into madness of a ballerina. It's scary and one reason for that is the doubt on screen. I'm sure everyone reading this will recognise how inner doubt can be crippling and how it can drive you deeper under a cloud of "is what I'm doing right ?".

Black Swan - see it, at least once. The soundtrack is amazing too with it complementing the acting on screen, I'm thinking about buying it just for that. But ... I don't think I will as it's one of those movies I'd only want to watch once.

Anyway - classical music. I have a decent amount of this in the library and I thought I'd pick out 10 of the favourites :

1 - In The Hall Of The Mountain King by Grieg. This is one of the highlights from Peer Gynt and is a favourite of many, being seen in games, movies, ads, you name it. If you've missed it, here it is performed by the Lego Symphonic Orchestra.

2 - In all my years of gaming, only one game has come close to provoking a tear. That game is Homeworld and the opening mission ends with you returning to your home planet to find it in ruins and burning. All you can do is escape with the few colonists you can rescue. Where the emotional impact really kicks is with the soundtrack, it's Adagio for Strings by Barber. In fact, I returned to this game for another go a few years ago. And I felt the tears again at that sequence.

Music can do that to you.

Third on my list is Raindrop by Chopin. I admire elegance over almost everything else and the timing of the piano of this piece is just pure elegance. That's from the raindrop like timing of the individual notes, through the counterpoint of the two piano parts and into the movement between parts of the piece. Here's Raindrop played by "Anonymous passionnée"

4th is for the fourth planet in our solar system, Mars. This opens the Planets suite by Holst. I'd agree with a few of the comments for the YT video "How can you listen to this and not burst into applause immediately?"

5th is for the Doctor and the season where the best modern Doctor came in. Here's his theme from the start of season 6 "I am the Doctor in Utah". Ok, it's not Classical in the purist sense but I'd be inclined to term soundtracks as New Classical. It's just that instead of having ballet as a backdrop, they form the counterpoint to action on screen.

6 - Talking of ballet and remembering what prompted this post showing my occasional love for Classical, here's the American Ballet with the finale to Swan Lake.

7 - Is going to be from Carnival Of The Animals by Saint-Saëns. But which one ! This has many favourites including Aquarium, Fossiles and the cd I have with it also has Dance Macabre. Meh - I'll nominate the whole piece, a collection of fourteen movements that are all classics in their own right.

8 - If I'm including soundtracks, I have to include something from Scifi that had me caught in the Star Trek universe. The original Star Trek Motion Picture came with a Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack, who has been one of the gods of soundtracks for years. Here's the introduction to the refitted Enterprise. Delicate, Grace & Majesty combined. The Star Wars theme is good but this is better. Sorry Mr Williams !

9 - Claire de Lune by Debussy. I doubt many non-classical fans could name this but they will recognise it instantly. It's one you can close your eyes and drift away to.

10 - Lastly, from Last Night of The Proms is the Pomp and Circumstance March from Elgar. If anything sums up the pride and character of Britons, this is it. This is the Land of Hope and Glory, straight from the Royal Albert.

Hope you enjoy those as much as I have digging them out of Youtube :-) I shall have to queue them up on iTunes later as listening to them on laptop speakers with badly compressed sound does them no justice whatsoever.

And there's far too much that's missed this random selection of 10, no Bach, no Tchaikovsky, no Beethoven, no Mozart, no Mussorgsky. I shall have to investigate record shops ...

Taking stock before the season

2012-01-22T20:19:00.000Z

I'm hoping that I'll be in a fit state to play cricket again this year, after the past 2 suffering heavily from injury related setbacks.

2010 - during the first few games, I was slowed down by a groin strain affecting my right hip. I could still Run Real Fast in a straight line but the groin strain affecting turning and accelerating. It also hit my brakes but that's not a problem usually. Just takes longer to get back in position.

I enjoy close fielding more than outfielding, there's more chance to make a difference when you're fielding close in. I aim to scare the batsmen off running by swooping quickly on the ball. I've not made a runout for a while but I keep the score down by discouraging the batsmen from running. The response to the groin strain was to field even closer.

But ... this was also the season of the possibly fractured leg. I never got that diagnosed (intentionally) but this one slowed me down for most of that season. I could run fairly ok on the soft earth of a cricket outfield but had real trouble on roads. And over the top of all that was the poorly shoulder which prevents me from bowling. No diagnosis ? All they'd have done would be to immobilise the leg by putting in a cast, which would have wrecked the muscle and been highly awkward. I could still put weight on the limb, so the pain was a helpful "take care" message. Painkillers would have blocked that message and maybe made me cause more damage.

2011 was a different matter ... I played (badly!) in two games and then had to drop out due to crippling back pain. I'm blaming the chairs in some of the new meeting rooms. And then I developed a skin problem on my legs which is taking ages to go away. The skin thing killed chances of cricket because I couldn't put a knee pad over it.

So 2011 was just two games and had me wondering if my legs would be in shape to allow me to take to the cricket field again.

I'm hoping for better from 2012 cricket but it's a good idea to take stock before the season to know whether it's a good idea. Hell, I don't really care whether it's a good idea, I just miss that feeling of the wind whipping past my ears when I Run Real Fast.

Shoulder - is still there. Hasn't fallen off. Hasn't gotten any better either to the point where it often feels like there's a cluster of strong fingers digging into it. But ... as long as I stay away from the outfield and hold my temper if I drop a catch (I lose it and do hard throws) then I should be ok. Just not a good idea for me to try to bowl.

Weight - mixed news here. I'm consistently down half a stone (my weight goes up or down a couple of lbs each day - tis normal) but I've kinda stalled there. I'm refusing to get downhearted about that, as the weight loss effort is more about being disciplined about what I eat. And I think I'm managing that. I'm comfort eating much less than I used to and I can't remember when I last had pizza.

Less weight will mean Run Very Fast instead of just Real Fast. What I have to watch out for is keeping the right kind of balance in my body, as being out of balance leads to damage from cramps.

Back - been suffering from this over the past week. I think it's more a motivational thing. Minor low level (albeit continuous) pain I can ignore if my head's in the right place. I just have to unlock the right motivation to see me through the pain.

Legs - are improving. Although like the weight, there's Good and Bad days here. It's hugely improved from what it was a few months ago and today, it's happy enough to allow a knee brace to be put on it. Knee pads are essential for me in the field as I make up for lack of skill & practice with enthusiasm. That can involve me stopping cricket balls with my knee so a knee pad gives them a fighting chance to stay usable.

However, this is a good day for the legs as tomorrow they may get angry red on me again. We shall see. At least the skin is fully intact again now.

General fitness - Even though I am at least 1 stone heavier than I should be for my height & build, I'm blessed with what could be called Natural Fitness. Without any preparation work, I'll be able to hit that first game running. Sure, I'll hurt like hell for about 3 days after but recovery time should let me be ready for the next game. And I recover the fitness very quickly. I just need to carry around less weight so there's less strain on the rest of me. Hell, I went up Snowdon without much prep work although my legs were trying to cramp up and explode. That was 26 miles walking added to the up and down the mountain combined with doing all the driving for the weekend. And that's just 20 months ago.

What else ... I got given a weird mouse for work because I got spotted having trouble with an RSI affected wrist. This is more of a cold thing though and is one of those things I can ignore if the motivation is there.

Apart from all that, things seem rosy. The kicker will be if those legs keep recovering to the point where I can put a knee pad on over the bad skin. Fingers crossed I can still remember some technique :-).

Motivation is another make or break. I struggled last week in work, which probably had a lot to do with the early start on Tuesday. The struggle manifests in not noticing having done stuff. I like/need to feel I'm being effective and struggle if I'm not. Trouble is in the "noticing" ... I look back on last week and realise I did get a fair bit of stuff done, I just wasn't noticing at the time. I managed to be one of the last people out every day too so when it comes to sticking in there to finish things off, I was doing ok.

But that's enough about work. Still lots to do there and last Tuesday's trip was well worth it. I got to see what I've helped build, which is awesome. It let me see the people down there too, which always helps for being on the same page with what you want to be doing.

How to close ... At age 37, I don't have that many seasons left for cricket but I hopefully have at least one more in me. The type of cricket I play, evening cricket, works well for that because it's made up of short games and easier competition.

Will I manage to persuade someone into being my motivation (hopefully she has strong fingers and patience!) ? Hopefully :-) Be even better if she's prepared to get some fresh air every once in a while ignoring the muppets on the cricket field :-). I tried to get Evil Ex to come along to a game or two as the fresh air would have done her good. And it would have been perfectly acceptable for the cricket to be ignored in favour of a good book and occasional "yes dear".

Thursday Thirteen - Facebook

2012-01-19T21:23:00.000Z

I haven't done a Thursday Thirteen for ages ... And I figured I'd step back in with a few random thoughts. I'm fairly active on Facebook, more active than I am in looking around the blogging world. FB looks for shorter, sharper posts and most of the time I try and make people grin with what I post.

Here's a selection of the recent FB insanity :

1 - Sharing ICanHazCheezburger's National Popcorn Day. Having to postpone this because I'm too drained right now to demolish a bucket of popcorn.

2 - "Was going to get 'healthy' stuff earlier but now has something infinitely better". I have cookies !

3 - "hmph. You'da thought that with all the hot water I've just had on me from a long and much needed shower (sore back), the heating would have come on to make the t-shirts on the radiator warm ! :-)" That was a really good shower. Back definitely felt better for a while. It's not that bad, I'm just noticing it more than usual at the moment due to being drained.

4 - "think I learned something at Costa earlier ... I might not be as anti-cheese as I thought I was :-) Think it was actually their hot chocolate which was setting me off ..." I have a sensitive belly. It definitely reacts to cheese but what I didn't realise was that it was also reacting to hot chocolate. I guess it's coffee from now on. MUAHAHAHA

5 - "Internet = broke -> sad face". And there was another pointing to Virginmedia's status page. Lost connectivity to the net on Tuesday. It's only when you lose something that you're used to being 100% available that you notice it's gone. And my ISP has been almost 100% reliable since I've been with them with only occasional quibbles.

6 - "That's a quarter of the month's data allocation for the mobile used this morning. Back to the ipod for this pm :-)". That's from listening to cricket commentary on Tuesday morning :-) Great result for Geek Squad Testing, awful result for England's cricket.

7 - "Definitely easier to travel at silly o'clock". I managed to get my butt on the road at 5.30am on Tuesday, half an hour earlier than intended. I suspect that if I'd tried to get 30 more minutes of Head In Pillow, I'd have set off at 6.30 or later. I know what I'm like. Anyway - roads were pretty good and the sun was coming up by the time I was getting close to the destination.

8 - "brainzzzzz". Sent at 05.23 Tuesday morning. I probably looked like a zombie too.

9 - "why am I still chatting to people online when I need to be on the road in 6 hours ? Rubber Mallet time :-)" This was someone on Steamchat who I met at random in a games shop last year. I was still chatting cos I think I was making someone laugh :-).

10 - "I fueled-up my Lexus CT200h, 43.5 UK MPG". This is an automatic thing that pops up when I tell Fuelly that I've filled up the car. It was only half a tank but with 240 miles to go the next day, I wanted fuel in the car because I didn't know where the cheap petrol stations would be on the route.

11 - "Daft question - why would a work machine email browser need to support internet banking ? And who would be prepared to submit their login credentials to something with potential keylogging ..." We had a bulletin come round saying that the IE6 browser which we're forced to use at work would be updated to IE8. And they stated specifically that it would now support internet banking. I would never, EVER, trust my personal login credentials to a work machine. I just don't know how much key logging, data logging, packet monitoring is done. Just that monitoring does take place on the work internet connection. Besides, it's work. Internet banking is for home.

12 - "just spotted - Best Gaming CPUs with comment "only upgrade if there's 3 tiers now and new". My old cpu only just gets on the list ! (Athlon 64 X2-3800+ up to i5-2500k)". I've updated the link there as Tomshardware have updated their chart. Still a big leap from my old PC to the new one and the old one could still do a reasonable job on newer games like SWTOR, Mass Effect 2 and DXHR.

Last one : 13 - "some forum moderators should be shot for being dangerous ..." Oh yes. The public folders at work got shut down partly because some of the moderators allowed things to explode to a point where the Bosses took notice. This comment came up because one of the moderators on CT200hforum was putting on instructions that could lead to irreparable (expensive) damage to people's cars ... He put the "how to break it ?" instruction on and didn't include the "This WILL break the car" warnings.

I managed to resist putting a comment in about certain women being rated on : Number Of Cheezburgers Required To Look Healthy. I like curves ! This was from a Mall trip earlier where there were more than a few fashion victims limping around who had that hollow look and stilted walk that comes from extreme dieting. I wish women wouldn't do that to themselves.

Grid Computing and when the apps don't play fair ...

2012-01-18T21:45:00.000Z

I like to leave my main PC on all day. Or at least, on overnight so I can quickly check my emails on the way out the door to work without having to wait for it to boot up. (see the PS ...)

But ... The "who's paying the electric bill?" part of me thinks that might be a little wasteful. So ... I remembered back a few years to when the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) was popular. That's now evolved into an application called BOINC, which can manage multiple projects that will use your spare cpu time for something better than just keeping the house warm.

So I have a series of projects that use the spare cpu cycles on my desktop PC to do sums for research projects. If you look on Task Manager on a work PC, check the "System Idle Time". After a full day, that System Idle Time could be around 7 hours per cpu core. And that's with you in for 8 hours. Yep, most of the time your work PC is on, it's actually doing nothing but waiting for the disc, network or you to tap the keys.

BOINC puts that spare cpu power to good use.

Think of the number of PCs in the average organisation and then multiply it by that 90% idle time. It's close to Supercomputer power that's just not being used. The Met Office keep asking for new supercomputers, they probably have enough spare cpu cycles in their offices to not need them (they actually use BOINC too).

There's a wide range of applications that BOINC runs :

Medical research
Cosmology
Physics
Alien Hunting
Climate research
Cryptography (I don't support this)
And the list goes on, including apps which I think are a waste like chess analysis and prime number analysis. I'll also not support the Cryptography apps (I don't think it's in my best interest) and a good few years ago I sacked one because it switched from honest medical research to bioweapon research in a misguided response to the Anthrax scare that followed 9/11. I understand what they were thinking but I think it was really bad ethics ...

So what makes me choose one ? And what makes me sack 'em ?

Basically, if I think the app is going to be productive and useful I'll see if can use the machine. I currently run SETI, Rosetta (medical), World Community Grid (medical), Milkyway (cosmology), Spinhenge (dunno!), Einstein (physics/cosmology) and Climate Prediction (gief snow!). Of those, Einstein is being fired but I'll let it go through the work first.

What makes me ditch a project ?

If it doesn't play fair with the rest of them then I'll show what I think of that by not giving it any cpu cycles. There's a few that have fallen foul of that :

Einstein - floods the machine with work to such a degree that other projects weren't being allowed a chance.
World Community Grid - some of the projects inside this have been fired because their deadlines are too short.

The way BOINC works is that it divides up calculations into Work Units, small bites that a home machine can cope with. These can take anything between 5 minutes to 400 hours on my Intel i5-2500k powered machine. Each work unit has a deadline by which the results have to come back, these deadlines are usually sensible. However ...

WCG - some of the individual projects ask for their results to come back inside a few days, instead of the customary 10 days for a 5 hour work unit.
LHC - set deadlines of less than a week.
GRID - 5 days for the only work unit I'll do for them.

BOINC will then choose which project it runs based on deadline and time left. If time is tight, it'll assign a high priority to work that might not be ready in time. GRID's forced its one app to go immediately High Priority and when LHC@home actually had work, it set the deadlines so short that the same thing happened.

There's other meanie apps too. They'll effectively Game the queue system to get priority for their science. I don't think that's on and I respond by giving up the spare cpu time to science that plays fair.

What can run it ? Any PC and I think the Linux & Mac powered ones too. I wouldn't recommend it for laptops because they're not designed to be running calculations 100% of the time all the time. They get hot because the cpu is doing Stuff. Does it affect things like gaming ? Not necessarily and definitely not for me. I have BOINC set to only do calcs if the machine is idle for 3 minutes which gives Full Steam Ahead to Deus Ex HR or whichever game I'm on.

So that's BOINC - how I justify having my machine on all day :-)

PS Time for bootup is no longer an issue ... The SSD boot drive in my desktop makes power on happen faster than some conventional machines will come off standby ...

App-play

2012-01-17T20:42:00.000Z

One of the few flaws of my latest car is that it doesn't pick up Long Wave on the radio. That's not a big flaw but it could have stopped me listening to cricket commentary. And anyone knows me knows that if it were anatomically possible, I'd gnaw my ears off to get to England test match cricket commentary.

But ... an away trip with work provided the ideal excuse to test out a new bit of playing with toys. Test Match starts 0600. Trip was scheduled to start at 0600. Spooky coincidence ? Maybe :-) To be honest, it was pure coincidence because I budget for a 60mph average, which makes the 120 mile trip roughly 2 hours. And then I add an hour of leeway because of traffic and because it's always better to arrive fresh and relaxed for a meeting than flustered due to being late. So a 0900 start (set up time needed before 0930 meeting start) meant getting on the road by 0600. I actually managed to get on the road a bit earlier which allowed a chance for a wake up coffee :-)

Hey - I'm getting away from the purpose of this post :-)

What apps am I using on the Android phone right now ? When I first got my latest phone, I didn't think I'd use the smartphone aspects half as much as I do. What makes it better is that I can send the audio from the phone to the car via Bluetooth.

Bluetooth integration - this comes with the phone and car and allows them to do things like handsfree carphoning. The Lexus kit works really well, it's like having a spiderphone in the car. Impressive.

Tune In Radio -

Lack of LongWave for Radio 4 LW made me go "oops" as I realised it would put a severe cramp into being able to listen to cricket commentary. Enter this app, which allows you to easily get to internet radio stations (that you could get to via their sites anyway!) through its own custom menus. It worked pretty well and its buffering meant that silent moments due to bad signal weren't plentiful enough to get annoying.

I'd heartily recommend this app, although I'd put a warning down that it will munch through your internet data allocation if you use it too much. Bluetooth integration worked well and sound quality matched or bettered that of the car's AM radio.

Radardroid -

This is a speed camera database app that runs on an Android phone. It'll use the phone's GPS to tell it where you are and lets you know if there's danger of speeding fines ... Bluetooth integration didn't seem to work though and the database was either patchy or being quiet due to me not speeding. Still, having a "Speed Camera Soon" voice coming from the centre console is better than no warnings at all :-)

Will have to give it another shot when I'm not using the phone for cricket commentary. I also need to recruit a friend to keep an eye on the speed display while I hit a steady speed like 60 on normal roads or 70 on motorway. Purpose - see exactly how much my speedo overreads, I think it's a +5% overread which I'm ok with. I'll need help for that because I don't want to be holding the phone up to read it while doing 60-70.

Marinetraffic - Lets you see where ships are in the world because there's loads of people out there who collect reports from the AIS (Automatic Identification System) boxes they have on board. I don't use this that much but it's a nice to have if you're interested.

ECBCricket - Essential for the cricket fan. Gives up to date score info where available.

Game authenticators - After having my Eve account info stolen, I take authentication a bit more seriously. I have both the Blizzard authenticator and the SWTOR authenticator. If you're involved in either game, it's worth having the authenticator. It's free. They give you a number with lots of digits that changes every minute, you put the number in with the login. Hackers could get your password but not the authenticator code.

Facebook - Hey. I'm an info junkie :-) Facebook = info. That reminds me ... done. (That was me switching Firefox tabs to poke Craziequeen)

Maps - This one came with the Google phone but is handier than you'd think ... The traffic overlay lets you quickly check how insane it would be to hit particular roads. Now I just need to remember to check it before venturing out the door ...

Notes - Another built in app. I use it to take postcodes to the car for satnav and used it today for logging my journey info. (Miles & Time for expenses and flexi)

TrackID - ever wondered what that great song is that's playing in the shop ? TrackID might tell you. If you get a signal, which I struggle to get in HMV these days.

Finally, IMDB - the mobile version of the Internet Movie Data Base which occasionally gets used.

I could say I use other apps like the calendar but I'm not that organised :-)

We can rebuild him ... we have the technology

2012-01-14T19:43:00.000Z

Just finished a play through of Deus Ex Human Revolution (DXHR)

I got this one last year but after a short look, I decided to shelve it until I did the PC upgrade planned for the Halloween week. My ageing dinosaur wasn't really up to the job of running a game as detailed as this.

Glad I waited, the DXHR experience was well worth the wait. Gamers expect different things nowadays from our A List titles. We look for story, gorgeous graphics and the ability to do exactly what we want in the game. That's pretty rare, even in new games. We also look for voice acting to replace the text only stuff we had before dvd's came along to hold all the data.

In short (okok it's me), we're looking for an immersive experience where we escape into another world. Whether that be fantasy, Earth fiction or other world fiction.

DXHR is what I'd call Earth fiction, based in the near future where augmentation technology is becoming part of everyday life. That's where amputees get their limbs back by technology providing artificial replacements. You are launched into a world with conspiracy, prejudice and urban decay utterly rife. You feel as if the rule of law is being set aside in favour of companies operating above that law ignoring the corrupt governments that get in their way.

And they pull it off very successfully too. I've happily been jumping into the DXHR world over the past few evenings, finishing it off tonight. I'll try and avoid spoilers.

The game engine plays a lot like a normal First Person Shooter with role play aspects built in. You steadily build up your character over the course of the game, adding more and more bionic capabilities to your character. Those include a radar, eyes that see through walls, hacking (big part of the game), limbs, lungs, everything.

Stealth is a massive aspect to the game. The ideal way to play through is to take down one or two bad guys at a time. The game is set up so that if you try to take on 3-4 armed men at the same time by storming in all guns blazing, you die fast. That difficulty just adds to the immersion. The cover system is very well realised. And you have a valid choice between lethal and non-lethal. My 3rd play through will go for the "Pacifist" achievement now I'm practiced in the stealthiness. (Want to play with the big guns in the next run)

It starts to blur the line between Game & Virtual Realm in a way that MMOs can't touch and games like Mass Effect are only just getting close to. It's far in advance of the older FPS's.

I'm kinda in danger of going too geeky here so I'll try and avoid getting too deep into techy nerd-dom. Suffice to say this game is about as close to letting the gamer do precisely what they want when it comes to dynamic combat situations.

However ... there's a catch. For all the stuff it lets you do while in combat, it's still severely limited while in story mode. A criticism of a lot of FPS style games is that they are on rails and this game is no exception. Outside of side quests, you're driven down a specific path with not much chance for straying. That said, it's a very good story. If it were a book, I'd give it a good few reads.

Right - I can no longer ignore the dinner bell coming from the microwave.

DXHR - Pro's : immersive, extensive, excellent story and great stealth combat system. Looks great too.
Con's : it's on rails. And that's about all I can think of.

PS Note I didn't include "free of bugs" in my list of what gamers look for. Sadly, we still buy games from companies that have terrible records with keeping their games bug free. I've just added DICE (Battlefield 3) to my Do Not Buy list, which also includes Bethesda. Too many bugs in their previous games for me to consider buying Skyrim.

Music weekend

2012-01-13T19:45:00.002Z

Just over a year ago, I thought the iTunes library had gotten a little too old. One way I decide what I listen to is what I've listened to least ... And because some stuff had got into the library donkeys year ago, it was getting to be a while between listening to some of the best tracks in there.

I get bored of some stuff really easily ... That's a drawback of having the kind of memory I have. So I vary what I listen to by queueing up albums from the Longest Since Played list and the Least Played list. The next two albums I listen to will be a Simon & Garfunkel collection followed by Whatever by Aimee Mann. Apart from a pair of new Doctor Who soundtrack cd's, I've listened to everything in the library at least twice since resetting all the play counts last year.

What's got the most repeat listens so far ? One rule here - only one track per artist or group. And I'm picking my favourites. Cos I can :-) Youtube links where I can find 'em like usual :

1 - Cardigans with In The Round. Absolutely, totally, utterly love this track. This one is in the lead with 18 plays and a few more of their's are in the Most Played list too. 03.45am No Sleep is particularly special. This is the best though and will always get me joining in, no matter who's around to hear (before the run away screaming part).

2 - All About Eve with Apple Tree Man (strange video...). This one somehow hasn't managed to get in the Most Played (needs 13 and has 12) but it's better than the one that did (Devil Woman cover).

3 - Dire Straits with Expresso Love. It's the guitar intro (Knopfler is a god) combining with the piano that makes this track special. 17 plays for this one.

4 - Bunnies ! The video to What's A Girl To Do by Bat For Lashes has about 800,000 views on YT. At least 1% of those will be from me & my sister, we are firmly under the spell of Natasha Khan.

5 - Goldfrapp's Eat Yourself is in there with 15 plays but I actually prefer the Live Lounge cover of It's Not Over Yet. But I don't think that's written by Goldfrapp so I'll link Utopia instead. That voice is incredible (too good for laptop speakers he says adding it to the iTunes DJ queue) and to show it off so well live is making me want to check if they have any local tour dates coming soon.

6 - Has Edie Brickell for One Last Time but the YT of that doesn't work. I've linked No Dinero far too many times so here's another one off the excellent Stranger Things album : Buffalo Ghost.

7 - Always had a soft spot for Kate Bush, although that's for the early stuff. Not so keen on the new stuff. But when Don't Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake came on iTunesDJ, I just had to follow it with Oh England My Lionheart too. And it's one I can sing along to as well ! (When my voice is happier than it is at the moment)

8 - Oh yes. From one incredible lady singer to an incredible lady artist : KT Tunstall with That live version of Black Horse & The Cherry Tree.

9 - Michelle Shocked is in the library at 9 with Memories Of East Texas but I'm linking something more Bloggy : Anchorage.

And last one for today (gotta leave some !) :

10 - Has Norah Jones with Man Of The Hour but I've linked that a few times too. Don't Know Why it can't be something that's a little ... different ... this time. Magic with added puppets.

10 songs is enough for one post. Saving some for later. Songs like Set The Fire To The Third Bar, The Incidentals but All I Need right now with the weather gone chilly is a little California Dreamin' (Buffy's on).

PS The iTunes library doesn't know about the late night karaoke sessions where I dial up the favourite songs on Youtube for a bit of singing along to. That kind of thing is a "Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid". Muahaha.

Picture Wednesday - what a view

2012-01-11T19:33:00.001Z

The computery thing that has my attention at the moment is Deus Ex Human Revolution. It's a pretty new A List game that came out last year. It looks awesome.

Just look at the view :

I was heading up to Upper Hengsha from Lower Hengsha and caught sight of that out of the window. That's a cheat though as what's outside the window isn't as dynamic (doesn't change) as the environments you play in so not as much computer work is needed. But that doesn't change the fact that pooters have improved considerably from the early days of 3d cards ... Back then that stunning vista would have been blurred out by fog to hide the lack of detail.

I have to admit that I'm getting considerable enjoyment out of this game. Some of my regulars feel like a grind. I enjoy Moo2, MoM and Settlers IV but the Big Fun of those happens just for a fraction of the time you play them for. This one, it maintains an excellent pace keeping the action going along with a decent storyline. I'm glad I waited before playing it though, as the lack of grunt from my last PC would have marred the experience.

The writers have a sense of humour too :

Wasn't me ! Honest guv.

(click piccys for something closer to the original full 1080p goodness)

Greenie Rant

2012-01-09T21:00:00.000Z

One thing I'll do when I get home is dive through a series of websites having a look at what has happened over the day.

(Some people do that at work all day instead of doing work ... but I can't see how they find the time outside lunch or tolerance to suffer the limitations of internet at work)

Anyway. Latest one to cause a twitch is this one from Tomshardware - MIT Scientist Demands Gas Tax to Make Cars More Efficient.

There's not much in the story (Tomshardware is a bit of a lite news site which is ok cos lite = variation). But there's enough in there to tweak me into a rant mode. One thing that regularly hits the news is Green Taxation. Things like charging a congestion charge based on what people drive and where they drive. This usually gets touted as something needing devices to track exactly where you drive and thump you in the wallet if you dare to venture down the wrong alley.

I have a simple line when it comes to position tracking Congestion Charges. It's RUBBISH !!!!

The one in London is relatively ok but that's because it depends on number plate recognition for when you enter or leave the Forbidden Zone. But tracking people's cars is crazy in all sorts of ways. Every car would require a tracking device and that device would need to be monitored with the results translated into charging you for where you've been. Plus there's the Orwellian aspect of nabbing people for speeding based on the info from the tracker.

Device based tracking of cars for congestion charging is an awful way to go. I doubt whether the revenue raised would match the cost of the administration. It's too heavy handed and rather unnecessary.

So - this brings me to the article (which is ok and doesn't deserve a rant). It's looking for a gasoline tax, the idea being that vehicles that use more petrol get hit by the tax more. Petrol tax makes a huge amount of sense :

It's a charge on petrol used
People with gas guzzlers get hit hardest
Which makes Eco people happy
Driving on congested roads makes you burn more fuel
Doing Idiot speed is directly more expensive
It doesn't need any tracking devices

There's a lot of good reasons for it. In Britain, we have 2 main forms of tax associated with our cars : Road Tax and Petrol Tax. Road Fund Tax is a 6 or 12 month fee that gives you a disc that all cars over here need to display. To get one you need valid MoT (annual roadworthiness check) and Insurance. It has a sliding scale based on the car's emissions :

1999 Puma - £210 per year (actually £215 because it's old)
2002 Focus ST (hot one) - £260 per year (or £130 for the same age turbodiesel)
2011 Lexus CT hybrid - no charge
2012 Bentley Mulsanne (example!) - £460 per year with more in the first year

There's more charged in the initial years for the nasty cars. And that's not always the 4x4s ... The sporty cars tend to be nastier on emissions than the SUVs. Nissan's Juke SUV is the same tax as the Mk1 Focus turbodiesel.

Ok - how about petrol tax ... This is where the Greenies should wake up and realise there's already a massive congestion charge. More info here but it boils down to the government taking 80p out of every 133p per litre. (60%)

All those reasons I put above apply to petrol tax as a congestion charge. But that's not the end of the story. The Tomshardware article attacks the overriding trend of modern cars : More solidity leading to more weight, more power included in smaller engines being pushed harder. What cars have I had ?

Astra 1.6 - not too efficient carburettor engine, gave about 36 mpg. Light car, light engine - 90bhp/tonne.
Belmont 1.8 - fuel injected, gave 40-45mpg. Probably 110bhp/tonne. No catalytic convertor.
Puma - saddled with catalytic convertor - 36-40mpg. 110bhp/tonne.
Focus ST - 28-32mpg. 130bhp/tonne (maybe)
Lexus CT - 47-55mpg (expecting more in summer). 95bhp/tonne.
(bhp/tonne isn't the whole story - diesels develop less power but extraordinary torque. BHP = top speed, torque = acceleration. The CT has almost double the torque of the ST170 so acceleration is comparable)

The faster cars have been going Munchies on the fuel. Modern fuel injection gives better economy but it's taken away by the catalytic convertor. The engines have got more powerful but weight added for improved safety has kept them the same speed.

Yeah - cars have been getting more efficient (and consistent!) over the years with better and smaller engines ... but. Without innovative stuff like Toyota's hybrid system or the well intentioned stop/start devices, we'll not get more actual efficiency in our cars. Maybe it's a call for a return to light weight shopping trolley cars like that Mk1 Astra.

Oh my god I've Wall Of Texted again ...

Tax on fuel consumed = good (although I do remember buying fuel for a quarter the price we pay now)
Congestion charge by tracker device = nasty, unworkable, cost more than it could ever bring in.

Something to sing about

2012-01-04T23:02:00.000Z

Not quite sure why I picked that title, except that it's the track playing in iTunes at the moment ...

The library's expanded a fair bit over the past couple of months. Some old, some new, some rediscovered and some given a second chance.

The old are Rita Coolidge, Barbra Streisand and Elkie Brooks where I've acquired a few "greatest tracks" type albums. All 3 of them have amazing voices, they're from a musical era which demanded its stars could sing and not just dance. Autotune hadn't been invented when these ladies were singing their hearts out. Of the 3, my pick has been Barbra Streisand as the choice of tracks is consistently outstanding when it doesn't break through into stunning. The Rita Coolidge album is good but not as brilliant while the Elkie Brooks collection is very patchy. It's a shame, there's the excellent voice and the well written songs but something goes horribly wrong in the middle. Bit like when Kate Bush tried to sing Candle In The Wind and somehow ended up butchering it.

That's the trouble with cover versions, you'd think a great singer would combine with magical lyrics to make something unforgettable but you end up with something horrific instead. I'd pick out an example but I don't think I want to go there in case it sticks in my head and makes me go ~wibble~ at work tomorrow.

Rediscovered :

Just listening to the Once More With Feeling soundtrack from Buffy. It's the actors and actresses singing so it's rather different to commercial manufactured pop. It's a hell of a lot better. There's so much feeling put into the singing that you can't help but sing along.

Ok - maybe behind locked doors where noone can hear you try to sing along (I'm a wuss like that) but you know what I mean :-) Under Your Spell is most definitely the highlight there and I think I'm going to take a little interlude to watch the vid on Youtube ... Oh - forget any disparaging remarks about the singing quality - Amber Benson could easily beat any X Factor wannabe.

Something new :

Evanescence's self titled 3rd album appeared ... This is an ok album. It's not as good as their first two but still hangs together as an album. There's just no stand out tracks like My Immortal or Hello. (And my brain just triggered a memory of a bad cover - Katherine Jenkins should have left Bring Me To Life well alone)

Something old (but not stale) : Meatloaf's Rock N Roll Hero is always good for a listen. This kinda goes in the 2nd chance box but I'm saving that for later ... Everyone will know what follows the words "On a hot summer night ..."

Something given a 2nd chance : I have to thank our Klingon Spirited RCA for this one. I'd written off Snow Patrol's Fallen Empires as a) More of the same and b) Pretty bad. That's what random youtubing can do ... But our RCA had me listening to Fallen Empires in the car ... and guess what appeared in the library not all that long after :-). No stand out tracks on this one again but that doesn't make it a bad album.

Past & Present :

I'd been missing a Cardigans album ... To be honest, half the tracks on Emmerdale I'd already got with their Life album. So I'd been missing 7 tracks that were easily worth the price of a cheap album. That's Past, as the Cardigans split up a few years ago. Lead singer, Nina Persson, went to a new band called A Camp which makes Present with the appearance of the Colonia album in the library.

Future ? Not got that yet. But I'm looking keenly at it in the hope it becomes available over here for a respectable price. The temptation is coming from getting Edie Brickell's Volcano album which is more excellence from a criminally underrated artist. Hey - why future if I've got the album ? Cos I've not got the next album yet ... There's a self titled Edie Brickell album which doesn't seem to be too available over here, I can't get it on iTunes and it would be £12.30 from Amazon. I don't like paying that for movies, let alone cd's.

Weird - the magical music box of Hannah Peel is a must check out. He says going off to Youtube to find Tainted Love to sing along to (which has actually turned into being an album track Don't Kiss The Broken One).

The Wall Of Text alarm just went off so I'll just summarise the others ... Cults, White Stripes and The Rasmus are worth checking out if you've missed them. Kaiser Chiefs Employment was ok but not up to the hype. Dirty Vegas (Days Go By acoustic is a stop n listen), Diamonds And Pearls and a whole heap of random classical has turned up too.

It's definitely enough music to keep me busy for a while :-) The library is up to 5202 tracks taking up 27 GB of my laptop now and I'd need to have the laptop playing for 14 consecutive days to listen to it all.

Back to werk ...

2012-01-03T21:20:00.000Z

So much for 2011 Xmas break :-)

Back to work tomorrow. I needed the long break as the batteries were running down. I've filled it with some gaming, taking advantage of Steam sales to get a few more for the collection. I managed to resist going berzerk on getting games I'd rarely play too.

It's not all been gaming though. Itunes tells me I've listened to at least 844 different music tracks since being away (recently played list doesn't count duplicates) and I've been struggling to stay ahead of all the recorded Xmas telly so much I've only watched 1 blu-ray. Hanna is a film very much worth watching although it earns its 12. Oddball characters, bonecrunching action backed up by an excellent soundtrack and a decent plot.

What have I been watching ?

Well - I currently have about 12 films recorded with Megamind and Dawn Treader being the highlights so far. There's also been :

Buffy - now at end of season 5
10th Kingdom - wonderful theme (Wishing on a Star) and passable story. Worth a second watch.
Deadliest Catch - this had a series break during the last season and I missed the second half. Caught up now :-)
Shaun and the Dead is on now - moderately amusing.
A Bridge Too Far - World War 2 film of the failed Operation Market Garden.
Sherlock season 2 - loved the first episode, likely to preorder the blu-ray.
Terra Nova - enjoyed this series, hopefully there will be a second.
Ice Road Truckers - still decent although it might be outliving its time and wearing itself out.
Puss In Boots - saw this one at the cinema, it's a good laugh. Well worth catching before it disappears ...
Doctor Who Xmas special - was ok but nothing brilliant. The strength of the current writer is in setting up series arcs, his individual Xmas episodes can be a bit weak.
There's been more too as I try to keep the box clear.

Stuff I started to watch but abandoned :

Snow Queen - first heard of this a few years ago and it inspired a nickname. The Snow Queen of the story steals the heart of the bellboy. I sadly gave up on the TV miniseries after being bored for an hour. Besides, the shallow one on screen doesn't compare to our Snow Queen.
Season of the Witch - Nicolas Cage film. Didn't last long.
Brain Dead - not sure when I'll learn that cheap flicks on horror channel will rot your brain.

Think there were a few more abandons too but I've managed to banish the memory.

Managed to get out to the Mall for the sales, although I didn't actually pick anything up. I think I've already bought the stuff I actually want or need.

Still - back to work tomorrow. And right back into keeping ahead of the game in terms of what's been going on over the Xmas break. It'll be good to catch up.

Thinking - Games & Distraction

2012-01-02T15:25:00.000Z

Been thinking (in the time when I'm not thinking of other stuff) of why I do the gaming thing ...

I think it's as a distraction. Something to stop me thinking of stuff that does drive me to distraction. There's someone I know. To save me putting ... instead of a name, let's just call her Dots (not Dotty cos that's what I seem to be).

So - at the moment my head is being dominated by thoughts coming unbidden of what's Dots up to ? Is Dots ok ? How's she doing ? What would Dots think of ... ? Etc. There's a word for that I know. I think the reason the thoughts are coming out now is because when I first knew Dots, there was no chance of thinking of her as anything more than a little sister. Now though, there is the possibility for more so that mental wall has come down. Even before then, it's always been about Dots. What did she think of the Bright Young Thing that caught the eye a couple of years ago ?

Where does the gaming come in with all this ?

It helps me forget.

Gaming tends to need either complete focus in the case of skill games or allows the brain to go to sleep in repetitive tasks (Moo2 in the endgame epilogue grind stage). That focus lets the part of my brain that's asking the Dots questions have a bit of respite. I'll descend into focusing on how to beat the game so much I'll barely hear the music blaring out over the other side of the room.

Some people might call that unhealthy or borderline addiction. I don't think it's addiction, at least it's not addiction any more. Game addiction is neglecting studies or work and a self destructing path of either alienating friends (like in the true WoW addicts) or destroying health. In my case, I should have flown through uni to get a 1st Hons MEng. I only have a 2:2 Hons MEng because I allowed myself to develop the gaming addiction that saw me firing up the PC as soon as I got in, not to do studies but to take over mystical worlds.

Game addiction means you are glued to the screen at every opportunity. You're not in the game for fun or the classic storyline or because it's a puzzle that's not been cracked yet, you're in it because that's what you think you should be doing. The quest/reward cycle that defines games like World of WarCrack is at the centre of the cause of gaming addiction.

I don't think I have the addiction any more, the various fallout from the breakup of the Mercenaries WoW guild gave me enough aversion therapy and lessons from seeing how other people behave under addiction to pull me out of that addiction.

So why do I game now ?

It's definitely not for my health. At 37 years and struggling to keep the weight off, I should be getting outside more and exercising. I can't get away with Natural Fitness as much as I used to for cricket. Sitting in a chair in front of the pooter barely moving anything but a finger on a mouse doesn't do much for burning calories or shifting fat. It's not for human contact either because I'm not playing the multiplayer aspect of the games I do have.

But as something that allows me to turn my brain away from distracting thoughts, to forget, it's a lot better than some things people do to themselves. I don't drink to forget. Even if I had the capacity to do so without being ill, I'd hate to think of what that would do to my liver.

And I can feel those "what would Dots think of this post" "will Dots realise who I'm talking about" thoughts coming through again. Need a distraction !

Time to continue the quest of a bionic man from the near future ... (Trying Deus Ex Human Revolution now that I have a pooter that stands a chance of playing it)

PS Wonder if the Snow Queen will guess the identity of Dots as quickly as she guesses the rest of my codenames :-)

Just Chillin'

2011-12-30T23:42:00.000Z

Been back since Tuesday now and I think I've pretty much got the "only be awake during night hours" thing sorted now.

That's something I seem to be very good at in holiday periods. I seem to work off a daily cycle that works out to about 26-27 hours a day. The day is literally too short for someone who likes to stay up really late in games or forum surfing but still needs 7-8 hours of sleep in the average day. I blame highly addictive games - they don't take anything out of you physically so you just keep on going playing them. It doesn't help when those addictive games are broken up into phases of activity, where "just one more" kicks in ...

It's been a Steam holiday sale period and while I haven't gone berzerk with getting stuff, I've grabbed a few bargains ...

Space Pirates And Zombies - yep. Bought this before from Impulse/Gamestop but I actually bought it again for a couple of £ from Steam. Why ? I remember it being a really good game ... Which it is.

Plus I really didn't want to install the Impulse/Gamestop client on my new machine. Something to do with them insisting on sending over lots of offers which I couldn't do anything with because they were for the wrong market. It's also unnecessary software, which is Bad. Never let software on a machine if you're not intending to get full value out of it. It's not the software you intend to buy that tends to cause issues, it's the baggage that comes with it. Like a certain freebie antivirus program that wanted to install the Yahoo toolbar (no ta) or one of the bits of software that came with the new machine wanting to inflict the Zynga button on me all the time.

Uhhh - sidetracked again ...

Terraria's an interesting little game. It's a sideways scrolling platformer based in a procedurally generated (always different and random but based on rules) persistent world that your character inhabits. Simplicity tends to be King in terms of good game play and this one really hits the mark with ease of figuring out what's going on. Ok, the crafting system and "What do I actually do here ???" need quite a bit of looking up to figure it out but the gameplay proves you don't need killer graphics to make a highly playable game.

In fact, as a Neverwinter Nights addict, I much preferred the simple NWN1 graphics and playstyle to NWN2. I could never get into NWN2, although hardware and software issues (it was the last game I tried on my last machine before realising the Windows XP install on there was terminally broken) didn't help me there.

I'll see how deep I get into Terraria. There's hidden depths there just begging to be whacked at with a pickaxe. Or a hamdrax. Terraria is built as a multiplayer game but also has solo options. I first became aware of it through the TotalBiscuit & OMFGCata series on Youtube. They have an absolute blast streaming that game exploring their world, although they never seem to achieve anything ...

Next up is Mount & Blade - Warband. This one has you riding around on horseback introducing bad guys to pointy objects. It's on a Totalbiscuit recommendation, not that convinced I'll spend that much time in this one but I thought I'd give it a try.

Star Wars Old Republic wasn't from the Steam sale but it's been getting some play time now that it has gone on general release. I like this one, although I've not done much group stuff yet (outside of the beta). The guild we hoped to have just didn't happen so I've been playing solo and so far resisting overtures to get me into Gutted Ewok. I'm just a little choosy over who I band together with. Conversely, World of Warcraft got cancelled. Dunno if I'll miss that, it just doesn't have the same challenge that got me interested in it all those years ago. Too much pandering to the wrong part of the playerbase has made it lose something.

Not spoken to many real people since getting back.

I have ventured outside the house (Wednesday) to go bargain hunting at the Mall. Also needed supplies ... Spookily a song called Communication has just come up on iTunes DJ. I like being around people, although Wednesday was definitely too much of that. The Mall is a very busy place at the moment and the crowding on Wednesday was triggering the "get out of here now" instincts.

So much so that I came home for coffee + munchie instead of hanging around overpriced places at the Mall. Didn't even do a peek in PC World for keyboards (the new one has got the sack after "key hit nothing happened" issues in a second game).

I guess it's not so much being around people in general but being around people you like. Facebook is one tool for keeping in touch with people you like but it's a bit like shouting into a crowd sometimes. That said, I've not put much in the way of status updates on there lately. The typical FB status doesn't tend to fit the Wall Of Text I like to do. I'm missing people but not enough that I want to be back at work yet.

Back again

2011-12-27T18:42:00.000Z

Tinkering done,

Xmas dinners (multiple) eaten

No presents this year alas (we've run out of things to get), although I'll get myself something with cash from my nan.

Lots of driving (the Volvo is mostly forgiven). 550 miles in mine plus however many we did in the Volvo.

Bit more weight lost (despite the multiple Xmas dinners)

Tired now. Although that won't stop me raiding supermarket and sales tomorrow or Thursday. Kinda missed Tesco today, I don't think it would have been good turning up with only half an hour or so to go until early closing.

Back to the games later, the only game I've had a go of over the last few days has been OpenTTD. That's a rewrite/remake of an old classic, Transport Tycoon Deluxe. I'll head back into SWTOR later when I've caught up on some telly.

Hibernation time - almost

2011-12-21T22:41:00.001Z

Started my Xmas leave today.

It was supposed to be tomorrow but a long period without bugs has caught up with me so I took today off ahead of a few days of travelling 150 mile + each day. Yep - Sleepy's on tour ...

Kinda. It's actually a cunning plan to make sure we have an Xmas dinner.

Trip 1 - up to see the parents. Hopefully the iPod will cooperate and give me tunes all the way. (I'll have the cd player ready if it doesn't)
Trip 2 - pick up munchies for Sunday
Trip 3 - take munchies to Sister's place on the Saturday
Trip 4 - take dog to Sister's place on Sunday morning.

We'll use my car for most of it (more comfy) but Muttley will go in my dad's Volvo, the boot is somewhat bigger. The CT is an awesome piece of machinery, in a cushycomfy kind of way. But ... one of the compromises made for having petrol and electric drive is less boot space than you get in most cars. It's actually not that bad, I should be able to get the cricket bag in there comfortably come next season. Oh - the Cunning part of the plan involves not putting Dog + Xmas Dinner in the same car at the same time. We don't want "Muttley" turning into "Barrel". Not decided when I'll come back yet, although it won't be that long.

Which takes me to :

Diet - this is going ok. I've not gone nuts with weird food, I've just enacted more discipline in what I consume. At work, I'd usually have a teacake in the morning, lunch plus something unhealthy in the afternoon. I still have the teacake (cos I don't have breakfast at home) and lunch but I've managed to cut out the cookie hunt in the afternoon. Biscuits are also lasting a lot longer at home.

I've not dramatically shed weight (that's not the plan, it's unhealthy to lose weight too fast) but I've arrested a trend of gaining and reversed it by losing almost half a stone. We'll see if that continues while I'm away.

Leg - is improving steadily. I still need to give it an occasional dose of the steroid/anti-biotic cream but those are becoming more occasional. And I think the need for it was being driven by a reaction to what I'd been wearing. I.e. my occasionally worn jeans which were last washed with stuff I think I'm allergic to. I have a new pair to test that theory.

The leg still isn't at the point where I'd want to wear a knee pad and therefore isn't ready for cricket, however the skin is all intact now instead of splitting when I walk ... It's in much better shape now and has time before the season starts again. Will the shoulder be ok though ?

Techie tinkering - Thought I had an idea to sort out the sound skip on dvd's being played back through the blu-ray players. Alas, while that's sorted out the sound problem, the video now skips. Oh well. Back to another idea, which is to use my Xbox to play dvd's and blu-ray player to play blu-rays. So far, it's through over an hour of Return Of The King with no audio or video blips.

So yes. I'm away from work for a little while now, time to rest & recharge the batteries ahead of a busy new year. I will definitely miss a few of the people at work though. People like Thelma & Louise (yep - new codenames I didn't think I'd use :-) ), the Canteen Girls who know what I want for lunch before I do and one very special little lady in particular who I'm hoping will stay in touch over the break.

Old games, new games

2011-12-18T23:33:00.001Z

I have my new PC fully operational now :-)

It still doesn't (quite) have Office on there but that's not something I call completely necessary on my home PCs. All I look for are internet browser and security, games, games, more games and an email client so I don't have to fire up the laptop in the morning. Thinking about it, I could do with a picture manipulation package ... but I have one of those on this laptop.

One thing about Windows 7 is that it is more restrictive about what it will allow to run on it. That's meant the card games my dad likes and the ancient strategy games I like don't want to run. How to get around that ?

Firstly, there's a gem of a piece of software from a company called VMWare. It lets you run a PC within a PC as a virtual machine, up to a point that is. I wrote a while ago about being able to have a Windows XP installation using an old licence inside to be one of those virtual machines. It works pretty well, with a limitation or two. It's great for the card games but while Moo2 works, it's fixed to a 1:1 pixel ratio with no scaling. Translation - postage stamp picture lost on big screen.

So. What to do ... Can't be without Moo2 for long !

Enter Dosbox. This is a PC in a PC again, although a lot less sophisticated than VMWare's applications. I don't think you can Windows (even 3.1) on this although it's spectacularly good for ancient Dos only applications. It'll even run the hardest to run of games like Master Of Magic, which was beyond the means of even some contemporary machines due to certain arcane memory thingys.

Trouble is, it needs familiarity with Dos to get what you want out of it and Dos is dinosaur territory in terms of PC programs. At least its programs weren't written on punchcards.

That's Moo2 back operational :-) Plus I'll have another look at Master Of Magic at some point. You'd have thought that with all the Civilisation clones and retreads, they'd have done a Master Of Magic 2 by now. MoM1 was effectively the Civ city and strategy engine with a fantasy tactical battle engine attached. With spells & stuff.

It's a sad reflection on the new games that I go back to Moo2 so much. This is after trying games like GalCiv (tainted by its developers' attitude on forums) and Sword of the Stars and a collection of other space strategy games. Moo2 has X factor. I'll fire up XCom again too at some point, that's definitely got something special about it. Other games are short term fun but these have a long term addictiveness to them.

I've also been on a new game, Star Wars Old Republic (SWTOR). I've been a Star Wars addict for years, although the depression of the New Jedi Order series of books broke me of the Star Wars reading habit. (SW Empire At War is another game that didn't grab me). SWTOR is a massive multiplayer online, instantly familiar to anyone who's played World of Warcraft. It's basically WoW in space with blasters and lightsabers.

Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.

I've been enjoying SWTOR as a Sith Inquisitor called Morrd, hopefully some more of the WoW people will follow me in and make themselves known. I've solo played so far and done fine. Its world is less seamless as WoW, with loads of loading screens breaking up the maps. I'll take that minus as a cost of the story and character progression being so much better than WoW as a plus that more than makes up for the non-seamless world. You're playing a living character, instead of just ploughing through levels.

What else ? I've written a few posts about League Of Legends and while I acknowledge it's a good game, it's critically let down by its players. 9 out of 10 games can be fun but the 10th will be tarnished by offensive idiots. The idiots are what you remember. I've not been back in LoL for a good few weeks now and I haven't missed it. There's no future in that game unless you always play with the same 4 friends so I won't waste any more time on it.

Not been back in WoW either, although I still have the subscription active. Dunno why as the only thing keeping me in WoW lately has been the wonderful guild people. Need to cycle the mailboxes ...

Settlers IV is another one I keep going back to. Surprisingly, it was happier in Win7 than it was in WinXP working straight off the cd instead of needing tweaking. I've had beta invites for Settlers Online. Trouble is that the publisher, Ubisoft, believes in using vicious forms of Digital Rights Management to protect their games. It treats the paying customer as a criminal, acting under the assumption that the honest customer will steal their stuff. My answer to that is to boycott the company. There's plenty of other games out there of similar or better quality and they won't affect the stability of my PCs the way stuff like Starforce did.

Any more ? I've been doing a Mass Effect run again :-) I've got about 80% through Mass Effect 2 after finishing Mass Effect 1. It's the first play throughs on the new machine so I've been collecting the achievements again. These are seriously cracking games. Looking forward to Mass Effect 3, due in 2012.

There's something about Bioware that has them consistently coming out with games I'll play forever. SWTOR is the latest from the stable that brought Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR and Mass Effect. And games like Baldur's Gate which is amazing but which I've never finished. Their competitors are missing something ... perhaps its the ability to resist calls of "Release now!!!" instead of waiting until the game is actually finished. Bethesda games are a horrid example there, Skyrim is still having trouble after a couple of patches and I'll not say anything about their bugridden Fallout 3 games.

There again - I'm avoiding anything spawned by a certain bad software company as I know it will lead to disappointment. DICE (makers of Battlefield 3) are on that list as well now, as are Sports Interactive for releasing numerous unplayable (bugs) versions of Championship Manager (now Football Manager).

Uhoh - ranting detected.

I think I need to get back to Moo2, the Krogan horde are about to be unleashed on the Silicoids who foolishly declared war on me at just the time I was ready to build my first warships ...

Party season

2011-12-15T23:00:00.001Z

Work's Xmas party today :-)

It's a fairly annual thing, where we will descend on an unsuspecting restuarant in the middle of Bristol before hitting the town. With 66 of us going today, that's quite a few. Mrs Sunshine (organiser from last year) was quite glad not to be organising that number of us again this year. That duty fell to the Snow Queen and the Queen Bee, who adopted the dictatorial (monarchial?) approach of telling us where we'd be going.

They did a grand job today too, despite all our efforts :-)

Last year's was memorable too, with stories from last year still being told today. I'll remember walking through the streets accompanying someone singing football songs :-) Not saying who that was because it might mean tears and I'd hate causing that. All that matters is that she had lots of fun last year and we were enjoying tagging along.

Had fun today, although I had to escape rather earlier than most of us. Think that's a combination of being around too many people and muscles that were one turn or one bop away from Ow. You'd think that lonely as I am at the moment, I'd want to be around people as much as possible. I guess there's such a thing as too much therapy.

I introduced a new person to the blog & the Zombiedwagon on the coach too. She's not been with us that long (feels like ages because she's someone you can get to know quickly but I don't think she was with us last year). No codename yet though. I don't like to talk about people here unless I can hide them behind a codename and inspiration has been lacking ...

Question from the coach was - how many people read this ?
Answer - I know I get about 10 hits a day on average. I know who some of them are but have no clue about the rest. I know I have a few regulars :-) And it makes me smile when I see the signature of a regular appear in the hit counter.

I'm very curious as to who some of you are :-)

Back to party. I felt the deep need to disappear a bit early, which was a shame. It was good to see the Snow Queen enjoying herself as she's another one who's had a very rough time of late. I feel guilty there as if I'd realised how alone she'd been feeling, I'd have adopted a mission of "Let's make SQ smile", with no limit on craziness. I'm feeling a little better too as well, certainly better than the deep well I was in when I wrote yesterday's post.

One of the commonest questions this time of year is "Have you got all your Xmas shopping done?" I actually have none to do ... Although I need to find a card shop. No presents this year, Xmas seemed to creep up on the Craziemob unawares and the family have been giving up on them. With no significant other, I have noone special to buy stuff for. But it's not just that, I enjoy the subterfuge around surprises. A surprise is sweeter if the subject has no idea what's on the way.

I think that's part of what's maintaining the depression cycle - not enough subterfuge happening.

Time to put this post to bed. I have to end on a downer though. One relatively new addition to the wider team is a little ball of feistiness we'll call the Little Warpath. Wouldn't want to get in her way when what she wants doesn't align with what we want. Anyway. The Little Warpath was waiting for news this morning. It was supposed to be wonderful news but has turned out to be a case of the OMG. Desperately sad for their loss. Thoughts are definitely with the family.

Get up and ... gone ...

2011-12-14T21:12:00.000Z

Really struggling at the moment.

I depend on feeling valued and a part of things. If I don't feel either of those, I start wondering what my place is in things. Bit like in the Fear post below (which was supposed to have the "The only thing to fear is fear itself" quote in it). I've been feeling isolated, the opposite of being part of what's happening.

I have a deep seated need to help people and if I'm isolated, then I don't get the opportunity/reason to satisfy that need to help out. And with the team situation at the moment where my old (fantastic) team has been disintegrated and splintered into numerous other teams, that isolated feeling has been growing. The team my section is currently in don't want us there. They see our project and shrug, while we shake our heads at them ignoring the incoming trainwrecks we try to tell them about.

Doesn't help that there's quite a few objectionable characters in there who set a bad tone. Whereas my mini-section escapes them in a few months with the next shake around, I feel bad for those who are being prevented from having the option to escape what is a bad team (with a selected few certain personalities forming some wonderful exceptions). It's strange how the culture of two teams doing the same thing, albeit a few years apart in progress, can be so utterly different.

It also doesn't help that it's gone cold, so as well as the psychological issue there's a physical issue as well with cold related pain coming through.

I don't have a total lack of appreciation, a little "VMT" (very many thanks) from the real boss for helping him out with the info he needs goes a long way. And I don't feel a total lack of value because I know I'm still contributing to the project going ahead. But it's being a strain for that to actually register in that part of my brain that governs my motivation.

I guess it's also tiredness, definitely needing the break over the Xmas period.

What I should be doing right now is getting happily addicted to Star Wars Old Republic (my early access code came through) but all I'm really wanting to do is curl up in a ball. And that's not me. I think I need either a burst of adrenaline or the confidence that would come from someone wanting to know me for my personality, not what they can use me for.

I guess I may be seeing some futility in what I Want to be doing, which suggests I should be looking at doing something different in both personal and professional life instead of what I traditionally do : wait and see what happens. One problem I have is that while I can put Wall Of Text here, I'm usually dumbstruck when it comes to actually saying things out loud.

Doesn't help when you're desperately in need of a hug.

But for the moment, I'll settle for a hot shower in the hope of warming up enough for my back to survive the team(s) Xmas party tomorrow.

Gamers behave !

2011-12-12T23:19:00.000Z

Yep - 2 posts today. The one below is too unfocused to stay at the top :-)

Made me laugh seeing a story around the media about how gamers should be forced to follow the Geneva Convention. The link goes to a short article by Metro, which sums it up nicely. At least the FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) spin that came out originally. The original "Red Cross is anti-gamers" article got refuted quite quickly. Here's an MSNBC article.

I'd like to think that the people who play games still know the difference between right and wrong, although there are a bunch of games out there which are just sick. They usually have an 18 certificate on them, so the only way they should be able to get into the hands of impressionable youth of today is if a parent ignores the question "Is this suitable for my child?"

It used to be like that when I grew up, with me being shielded from things like Evil Dead and other video nasties. I watch stuff like it now and I can recognise it for being silly and most important : Not Very Good. Mortal Kombat when it came out originally was infamous for its gore but when put next to the gameplay of other fighty games, it just Wasn't Very Good.

Just because I've played Carmageddon (briefly, it didn't hold a candle to -> ) and Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, doesn't make me into a nutcase on the roads. Hot Pursuit was actually a great laugh, the premise was 1v1 car races on public roads with Police getting involved.

Yep - NFS was a hoot but driving like that on public roads would get you arrested (boring) and cost money (less left for toys).

So - I'd like to think that some sanity is out there, although I know that's not actually true :
Parents keeping the 18 cert games away from children like what used to happen with Video Nasties
Gamers being able to tell the difference between pixels and people
Recognition of what happens when addiction takes hold

I've been addicted to gaming, although I think mine was more a hurting person retreating from a drab uncaring world. I think I'm clear of gaming addiction now, I just fire up the game as "something to do". Heh - I'm probably more addicted to reading forums now (anti-isolation again). I'm not someone who will fire up a game as soon as they get home, with them then being in the game until they go to bed. That's not healthy but I see it happen. It's why the Mercenaries fell apart, people got burned out, didn't recognise that their addictions were making them different people and got into fighting with their friends in game. And I was on the wrong end of that a few times too.

There is a question of trust : can the parent trust the child to know right from wrong or to figure the difference between real world and virtual. Sometimes I'm not even sure the parents know. Remember though that anything you see in a game has usually been done on film and usually even just at 15 certificate. And it's usually more graphic than what the game allows too.

Right - this was supposed to be a really short post to knock a bad one off the top :-)

Time to get back to seeing how many Human/Alien/Strange Life Form Rights I can wipe my tentacles on, although I won't be giving the Death Star treatment to any planets tonight. I ran out of those over the weekend. (Seriously!)

PS I'm actually going to read a book, with as much incest, sex, violence, human rights abuses and other nasty stuff (Game Of Thrones) as you'll see in most games. It's just presented a different way.

Thinking about - Fear

2011-12-12T22:31:00.000Z

(warning - long post, lots of rambling! Think I needed to talk through some stuff, not convinced it's all "out there" yet either ...)
There's a lot of "scared" out there ...

I was thinking and wondering about how other people see me. One random outside observation was "do I show fear ?". Yep, true thought. Completely random observation but it got me thinking about stuff ... I think it came from talking about what's happening in the future as work's going through changes at the moment. What happens when the current project work runs out of things to do ?

I prefer to worry only about things that I can change and accept the change that I can't influence, while trying to make the best of what I have. One issue there though is the change that's coming might end up being a change too far. We shall see.

I came to the conclusion that other people probably see me as fearless, as I refuse to allow fear to have any trace of control over me. That doesn't mean the fear isn't there, I've just quantified it, analyzed it and figured out an acceptable risk level. Risk can be fun too.

Talking risk - my fielding in cricket used to be pretty rubbish. I was scared of the ball. It's a reasonable thing, as a cricket ball hurts like hell if you fumble what you're doing around them. I've had amnesia from a broken nose and I've seen someone knocked out by one. I've regularly broken fingers and have a chipped elbow bone from one. I think I fractured my shin last year.

And yet I still play cricket (or I will if my leg recovers fully!). One question I asked myself was "Do I want to be ruled by fear or do I want to have fun?" I enjoy my cricket too much to chicken out. Another fear is the fear of injury, I have a pretty fragile body because I haven't put the training in the harden it. I realised that good technique and preparation is the way to counter that fear of injury (although there is one ground I refuse to play at because it's deadly). If you catch properly, it doesn't hurt. Drop a catch, you'll break something. Warm up and warm down well and your muscles will thank you. Drink fluid to replace what you lose and you'll be less prone to cramp.

There - fear of injury confronted, analysed and accepted. It'll still happen (like accidents) but preparation means the risk is lessened to the point where Fun > Risk.

Actually, I don't think it's a fear of injury, I think it's fear of letting people down. Season before last, I had 2 injuries that took ages to heal : Groin strain plus the shin. The groin meant I wasn't that agile (and it contributed to the shin injury) and the shin injury meant I lost a lot of speed and reaction. But - I managed it so I didn't let anyone down and I did that by fielding even closer than most sane people would ...

Ok. That's enough about cricket. How about other fears ...

I think that fear of failure is what dominates me. I love helping people out, I'll break out of the routine stuff happily if a challenge comes along. But if the answer doesn't come easy, then I'll go nuts banging my head against the question until I figure it out.

Fear of change. This is one of those where I've accepted I can't do much about the incoming changes at work because the people enacting them don't listen to my immediate bosses. So - I figure out where I'm going to fit in and see where I can get best advantage for me and my work.

Fear of being isolated. Being alone is boring. And I hate being bored. But with the team situation at the moment, I feel somewhat isolated. I'm away from the techie side and in with a bunch of people who don't care about the project I'm on. However, It's great being able to natter to (and hopefully make laugh) people like our wonderful Snow Queen. And there's others on and around the project too who alleviate the sense of isolation. I suspect that's because of helping them out with problems.

I think I'm a herd person at heart. I like being around people. Maybe that's part of the "help people" thing.

There's a few other fears too. I used to be scared of going down escalators. I think I've conquered that one. Same with a sense of vertigo. Not so sure about the "fear of losing control", I had to walk away from an idiot last week who accused me of stealing milk. I think he got an education in manners from the line manager for his temporary placement.

I'm rambling aren't I ...

I think I've conquered or accepted most of my fears and I'm pretty good at hiding the rest. So people may think I'm "fear-less". That said, I still have that fear of letting people down. And I'm pretty wary of the idiocy level on the roads these days, although Fun Of Driving > Fear Of Idiots. I also have a fear of having things stolen, don't we all.

There's a lot of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt out there. Some people even make a trade of rubbing in FUD to make money out of scared people. (I find that abhorrent).

If you have a friend who needs help to work through their fear, don't make fun. What seems funny to you will be very real to them. Fear is paralysis. Help them through it. They'll thank you later.

Spoilt for choice

2011-12-08T21:37:00.002Z

Cheers Cyberkitten :-)

Had a birthday present from my very good friend and neighbour CK tonight, an iTunes voucher. Now ... what to spend it on.

First up - Edie Brickell has 2 albums out that I don't have in my collection yet, Volcano and a self titled "Edie Brickell". Can't get the second on iTunes so it's just Volcano for now. Hopefully there will be something on there as good as No Dinero from Stranger Things. That's another slow burner that I wasn't sure about at first but it's a standout track from the album. Makes you think of abandoning your cares and just chilling out, ignoring the outside world.

I would like to get the Elkie Brooks collection, which is a semi-discovery from a Driving Songs collection of cds. I'm saying "semi" cos I always knew Elkie Brooks was a good singer, it just took an hour or so of scanning Youtube to find out just How Good. Check this out ... A pity that the compilation is £10 on iTunes (or about £4 on Amazon). Oh well, will restrict the Elkie Brooks just to Fool If You Think It's Over for now.

One thing that's kept me in WoW all these years is hearing the voices over the comms. There's some great people in the guild aka the Hot Swedish Girls. It's not just the accent, it's the attitude. And that accent and attitude came together for quite a few wonderful albums by The Cardigans. They split though, with the lead singer forming up into a new band called A Camp. Their second album (Colonia) is the next purchase.

And while I'm there, the Ping popup in iTunes is Piggin' Annoyin'. Even though I've disabled Ping, it still insists on telling me that it's ready to annoy me.

Oookay ... must not rant :-)

Few random tracks seeing as it's a certain time of year :

Tom Jones & Cerys Matthews - Baby it's cold outside - sure is !
And that's it for the random Xmas tracks. Just listened to Kylie's Santa Baby off Youtube which put me off the idea. Muahahaha
Although having just seen a version of "Fairytale Of New York" sung by Ronan Keating (don't care) and Moya Brennan, voice of Clannad, I'll couldn't resist that.

Another for the "not getting that just now" : Evanescence are back with a self titled album which I'd like to get ... But. £5 for the normal album, £11 for a deluxe version that has 4 extra tracks plus a remix and a video. I could upgrade the normal album with the extra 4 tracks for £1 each but that stinks of profiteering, which is something I go to lengths not to indulge.

What else, what else ... Having a peek through Amazon's recommended feature for ideas and it really wants me to grab that Elkie Brooks collection ...

Just watched the video for Laura Marling's (new artist to me) New Romantic. Love it, tempted. After watching a couple more though, the videos are better than the music and considering I listen to stuff as audio only most of the time, won't get this one for now.

Last one for now will be Snow Patrol's new album, Fallen Empires. Well, it will be if iTunes decides to cooperate ... I need to boost the available credit by a measly 6p before the transaction will go through ...

PS I fixed it by buying more stuff - Emmerdale by The Cardigans has some tracks I already have plus some I don't. I'm the sort of person who likes to have everything done by the bands I consider special, hence one nickname (old) of "Alisha's Addict" after me buying all the Alisha's Attic singles for the excellent B-Sides.

Hairy legs and shiny nails

2011-12-05T20:59:00.000Z

Oh and bad tech too.

I think I needed somehow to balance the excellent tech buy with the new machine (still rock solid stable). Bestbuy are getting out of dodge at the moment (retail sector's not so good here) so they have a lot of offers on at the moment. Pretty attractive offers too. Good enough to tempt me into a new keyboard and mouse. That's been on my list for a little while now, as it's a pain to move the old ones around if I'm wanting to put the desktop PC on the telly.

So I picked up a Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse combination. Oops.

Immediate comments - the mouse isn't up to the job compared to my old MS Razer mouse. I've actually switched back. Intellipoint gives a fair number of customisation options for the buttons but none where it really counts. There's no real option to change the sensitivity or to disable mouse acceleration. I like some sensitivity in a mouse, although that doesn't mean seeing the pointer go crazy across the screen at a twitch. Getting it balanced means I don't kill my wrist overcorrecting.

So I've gone back to my old mouse. The keyboard is similar although I've not fired that yet. They layout is mostly fine but there are little or no relevant markings on the function keys. I'm a touchtyper so I don't like to have to look for some keys. There's also very little definition to the keys, with them being much flatter than the chunky keys I grew up on. Qwerty is ok, function keys are not and you need those for gaming.

Anyone want a keyboard and mouse ? Still, as they're wireless I can use my old ones for gaming and use the wireless ones for Pooter-On-Telly. I have one more bit of the puzzle to go there though, need something for sound.

Getting my leg back :-)

After its wound that wouldn't go away, the red bit is now much reduced. It's still there but the skin looks in much better condition. While it was still healing, the skin would actually split again when I walked which has helped to make healing real slow. The real sign of progress will be when I get a hairy leg again :-). All the hair came off as part of the wound but it's starting to come back as bristles.

Dunno how it got caused, although I have a big suspicion that I was allergic to the washing machine blobs I switched to. I've switched back to what I used before. Weird that my mum & sister developed similar things with our skin at about the same time, can't figure a link there except from genetics.

Hopefully I'll get that hairy leg back soon. Otherwise it's totally ready for speeding across cricket fields, although I need to lose a little weight to get back the speed I used to have.

Last bit. I didn't move fast enough when passing the cosmetic seller stands at the Mall earlier. There was a very pretty young lady asking if I had a minute and while I was going "gaaaa", I got shown how a bit of buffing would make my fingernail very shiny.

And it's still shiny now ...

What can I say, pretty lady smiles at me I'll pay attention. Although she was pretty in a "OMG IT'S A RUSSIAN SPY" kind of way. Yep, I'm a sucker for a pretty lady but I also have defenses that come up and start to have fun with them in a "how can I drive 'em nuts" kind of way. Or I'll look in a completely different direction to the one she wants me to look in.

Not that I'd object to being at the beck and call of a pretty lady. As long as it's the right pretty lady. Hopefully when I see the next pretty lady who actually has a reciprocal interest in me too, it'll be Third Time Lucky.

Ultimamega PC

2011-11-28T21:18:00.001Z

A little while ago, ok years ago, one of the things I'd do to amuse myself was to see what the other extreme would be to the PCs I could build at the time.

It's only fairly recently that I'd had the spending power to build the PCs I wanted, instead of having to settle for quite rigidly budgeted cost/performance rigs. It actually works out cheaper in the long run, my early PC builds only lasted maybe 3 years before I was forced to upgrade them. This time around, it's been 5.5 years since Godzilla (and its later Shade incarnation) was built and the trigger for the upgrade has been software, not hardware.

That's right, if you have a 2006 era PC with the capability of a 2GHz dual core processor and a graphics card like an ATI 4850 then there's no reason to upgrade. It'll handle World of Warcraft at decent frame rates (admittedly with the graphics options turned down a bit). The only reason to upgrade is Microsoft's decision to force people to change (I refuse to call them an upgrade) to Vista or Windows 7 due to needing newer Directx versions.

Doh - I'm getting sidetracked again. I used to do budget builds for my custom build PCs but possibly as a bit of rebellion, I'd see how expensive I could make a PC. Just one rule, it had to be gaming capable and Not Silly. So triple display water cooled machines would be fine, needing a second case to put a RAID array in would count as Silly.

So what's the build ? Here goes :

Case first. I'd like to say Thermaltake here as, despite me thinking the manual was written by illiterate blind moronic monkeys, the case I have is top quality within its limits. £33 for a top quality case is really good but it loses out on not having multiple 2.5" drive bays (SSDs) or a removable motherboard tray. The expensive Thermaltake cases look a bit nasty though in an Anti-Bling kind of way.
Let's go for an Antec 1200 V3 for £153 (+£120 on what I paid)

Every case needs a PSU, to keep to the "what did I buy?" theme let's look at Corsair. To fit the rest, it's going to need to be big ... A 1200W PSU would cost you £239 (+£185).

Next comes the motherboard and a cpu to put into it. Make it an Asrock Extreme 7 Z68 board for £233 (+£113) and an Intel i7-2700K for £252 (+£84). There's really no point in going beyond the 2700K because you don't really gain anything. Unless there's dual cpu monster boards out there ... There's no real point actually in going beyond the i5 2500K.

Memory, we'll go for the maximum for the board (32GB). Looks like G.Skills, the people who supplied my memory, only go up to 4GB modules so we have to go for Corsair Vengeance memory. That's £465 for 4x 8GB modules, compared to the £45 I paid for my 2x 4GB modules. The difference is the top speed they will go up to, mine are rated for 1600MHz while the Corsair modules are rated for 1866MHz. Both are more than is needed and won't be put under any strain in a system that isn't overclocked.

Cooling is key to any system. Good cooling means great stability (especially in the summer) but you need to be careful to make sure you don't end up with the equivalent of vacuum cleaner noise. Mine's not too bad there with the Zalman cooler. I'm aware of the fan when in the room but not when in bed, which is upstairs a floor. Staying Zalman again, they have an air cooler for £69 (I paid £43). It's worth putting a few extra £ in here but I wouldn't go above what I paid. Watercooling is an option too, although it's harder these days to find the bits as mainstream suppliers like Novatech don't stock them.

Graphics. This is the fun part. I went for price/performance here by buying a single GeForce 560Ti for £185. That's not good enough for the Ultimamega PC, it needs not one but two GeForce 590s for £770 each.

Yes. This is a Silly PC.

Drives make a machine go. I've really appreciated having Pumpkin's Windows on a Solid State Device drive and Overclockers.com have made me appreciate that more with this review of the upsized version. Mine's a 64GB version, SillyPC needs 2x 256GB SSDs plus 2 of the biggest conventional drives on the market. The 2 conventional drives get paired up in RAID to keep the data safe. The bill ? 2x £305 for the SSD plus 2x £280 for 2 3TB Hitachi drives. I paid £84 for a 64GB SSD from Crucial and £73 for a 1.5TB drive from Western Digital

Oh - also noticing that SCSI drives (old tech) cost about £1 per GB still. Not putting them in this PC because I really don't see the point of getting an old tech drive that's far inferior to SSD for almost the same price/capacity as an SSD.

That's actually most of the machine now, it's just sundry items to go :
Windows 7 - Home Premium is £80, Ultimate is £155
Bluray drive - I bought a Samsung for £46 (Cyberlink's software bundle is repulsively bloated these days), SillyPC wants a blu-ray rewriter for £70.
Monitors - that's right - plural ! Actually, in the widescreen era having multiple monitors fails the Silly test. 3d monitors are ok though. £530 for a 27" 3d monitor from Acer.

How much is the whole thing ? I'll exclude the monitor as I don't have a good comparison :
My PC - roughly £930 plus or minus a bit
Ultimamega PC (but not really Silly) - £4346 + £530 for 1 of those 3d monitors. And you'd also want a Silly keyboard, mouse, headset and sound system to go with it.

Ouchies. But not as Ouchies as the SillyPCs I was having fun pricing up 10 years or so ago. Those had more stuff in too like DAT tape backup. Does anyone still use those ?

Is it worth paying Silly Money ? No. Definitely not. The only change I'd make from the My PC if money was completely No Object would be to replace the single 560Ti with a pair of 570's and even there, I think I'd just go for a pair of 560Ti's. A lot of the extra cash in the Silly PC is going on stuff that adds no real value past shininess and boast potential. Unless you're going for recording photorealistic 3d rendering in real time that is ... Example - my PC during the SWTOR beta test was using 4.7GB of its 8GB and could run it as maximum detail with no frame drops. Same for WoW, max detail at 1080p with minimal frame drops, including while raiding. Anything beyond 8GB is overkill.

But I have fun indulging myself pricing it all up anyway :-)

PS Just under £1000 is still hefty. But it should last me another 5 years, hopefully more. Which makes it more cost effective than doing what I used to do, which was to spend about £700 on a machine that wouldn't last more than 3.

A long time ago ...

2011-11-25T22:57:00.000Z

In a galaxy far, far away ...

Classic lines - everyone must know where they come from !

Been beta testing today. That's when you use a bit of software that's just about complete but the developer's not quite ready to unleash it on the world. Started at about 4.30, logged off at 9.30. Didn't even feel hungry, just knew I had to get some munchies inside me sooner or later. Good games can get you like that, they don't take it out of you physically so you just keep on going.

What's the game ? Star Wars The Old Republic.

In a moment of madness, inspired by one Totalbiscuit and a steady diet of Star Wars movies, books and games, I pre-ordered this one. It's expected around Xmas time and I'm now seriously considering extending my leave period to get some more gaming in :-) I won't. I'm not quite that bad plus however good the game is, it's not worth sacrificing being around some of the people at work.

Plus the canteen do great sandwiches. (Yes I have eaten, that's not the pangs talking!)

How's the game ? It's pretty awesome so far. Well, awesome wrapped up in the limitations of beta software and a look and feel that's immediately familiar to any player of WoW. It's heavily story based, far more story based than WoW.

WoW - quests are a way of tying together moving around where the mobs live. Apart from maybe the Cataclysm zones, which had a little more story involved. The story stuff felt very loose and fluffy.
SWTOR - you're playing through a story, the mobs just happen to be in the way.

I played through about 7 levels of Jedi Consular earlier, I'll try out one of the other classes later.

But for now, will head back in game soon and hope to extract myself before the sun comes up.

Bubble N Hearth

2011-11-22T20:07:00.000Z

One for the paladins ... We can do it too !

This being from the days when Horde didn't have paladins ...

Something for the weekend

2011-11-20T23:17:00.000Z

We headed up to Lincolnshire again this weekend - twas Birthday weekend. The "we" is me and my sister, although "we" doesn't really apply because we come from separate directions.

Good weekend too :-) Here's a few of the highlights :

I got to drive a manual gearbox car again for the first time since I changed to my Lexus. Quite pleased that I managed to switch straight back into a smooth driving style with clutch & stick, although I could have done without massive quivers in my left leg ... I blame the cold and caffeine.

Sister's just changed car too, her old MR2 was getting a bit long in the tooth with some big repair bills looming around the corner. She's traded to a Saab 9-3 turbo diesel convertible which definitely ticks all the boxes. She needed something with back seats and something with better mpg for work trips. It passes those tests quite well, we managed to get me & my mom in the back seats. It feels like a normal car with the roof up too. Performance is good, with a high boost turbo that caught me out when the turbo made the wheels spin up when it passed its lag phase.

CTs handle better than Puma's and definitely better than the Focus. There's a roundabout where if I'm lucky, I can test the handling characteristics out. The Puma could hit 60mph over the bump by carrying speed through the roundabout. The Focus never gave enough confidence to carry speed through there and didn't have the engine flexibility to get the acceleration. How did the CT do ? The chassis handled acceleration through the cornering, which is better than what I remember from the Puma.

There we have it - heavy medium 5 door hybrid beats small 3 door sports coupe on performance and handling and utterly thrashes the Focus ST. It got to 60 on that bump without the front wheels lifting up too. When you switch to Sport mode, it keeps its composure incredibly well when being asked to make sudden changes in direction, the Focus would just lean over and say "do I have to ?"

Old programs - there's a company out there called VMWare who make a fantastic bit of software. What it does is make a computer within a computer. Why is that useful ? Because you can run programs on it that won't run on newer machines. Just fire up the virtual machine, throw it some software and you're away. My new desktop and my dad's laptop have copies of it now running Windows XP meaning my dad can run his bridge games again. Those bridge games refused to work on our Windows 7 64bit machines.

VMWave make a freeware app called VMPlayer which really does the business. I really can't recommend it enough. I have to admit I gave up on getting Windows 98 to play on it but it gave a hassle free virtual installation of Windows XP on both machines. It's good to see companies offering trial versions of their software that aren't crippled in critical ways. If you're needing to do Virtualisation in a hefty way (it's handy for separating tasks out), VMWare's VMWorkstation will be the way to go.

(I have no contact with VMWare outside of being really pleased with their software)

From good to bad - Apple software quality has nosedived ...

Yes, I can now plug my iPod into my car and get the music playing on it. No, it isn't at all reliable. I had to resort back to using cd's earlier because the iPod refused to play anything after a leg stretch stop. This isn't an isolated incident either, the iPod forgets what it's been playing and in one instance, it even claimed to have no songs on it despite being connected to its host laptop not too long before. I may resort to an old solution, plugging the thing in with an analogue lead instead of USB.

I refuse to allow iTunes to update itself now because the last 3 times it did, it broke its link to the LittleWhiteBox Airport Express. Would I waste money on an iPhone ? Hell no. Would I buy a Mac ? I'd rather trust Windows.

Erm - was I ranting ? Lol

Mpg - I trust the figures more now :-) As it shows in the Fuelly badge on my sidebar, I've been getting just under 50mpg from my Lexus. That's a bit below the claimed 69mpg figure ... I'm a bit more confident now though, I filled up just outside Newark tonight and until I reached the 70mph parts, I was getting 70-72mpg. That's fairly incredible for a petrol car, although it was mostly in 40mph speed limit areas where the car can occasionally glide along on the battery power only.

Back to work tomorrow. I may actually break a habit and go to bed before midnight cos I am actually feeling quite tired.

Threshold

2011-11-17T22:22:00.000Z

Ever feel like you're on the threshold of something about to happen ?

I kinda feel like that at the moment.

Can't really explain it though. I know there's a few changes that are definitely going to happen at work sooner or later, although part of that is inevitable because no project lasts forever. One change has already happened with the car (novelty hasn't worn off yet). That's not it though. I have a feeling this incoming change will be far more wonderful than just mundane things.

I don't tend to deal well with change though. My mind likes a certain amount of stability which extends even as far as preferring other people to be happy instead of me. Even where there's some people I really fancy, if I know they're happy with their partner that adds another little rock for that stability. In a way, I value their happiness over mine. It contributes to an "all is well in the world" feeling.

Tis a little lonely though.

Maybe I've been thinking about relationships (and lack of) a fair bit lately. Maybe I've met my dream girl already but didn't actually realise it. Or I mentally locked out the possibility.

Who knows what the future will hold, what I do know is that there's a certain someone out there who dominates my thoughts to the point where there's barely any room for anything else. And as far as change goes, I have my granite like inertia but as soon as I commit to a change, I commit whole heartedly.

Oh, maybe my brain isn't completely mushed - other stuff going on lately includes :

Birthdays ! Cheers to Bionicdwarf, Craziequeen and Aginoth for much appreciated birthday stuff.
Cakes ! Birthday tradition at work. And with us merging with another team, lots of new people not believing me when I let slip my true age :
Age - people still think I'm at least 5 years younger than I am. They want to know my secret ...
Pooter - it's working well, handling a 10 man Warcraft raid without dropping many frames at maximum detail. Outside of power blips and bad software it has shown Total stability.
Leg - is improving to the point where The Boss looked at it yesterday without her running away screaming (I had lots of fun there with Vampire Eyes after my nose got fixed)
Dvd stuff - I know where the problem is for definite now with those silent audio blips - it's the amp. Meh.
Dvd stuff - Meh turns to more use for Xbox as dvd player :-)
Old games - I have these working again with a solution that I might put on my techie blog at some point.
Health - leg has improved but I've been feeling like I've been hit by a truck. My muscles are also rebelling. Need to figure out what I'm needing to eat to counteract that, it's usually a sure sign I'm missing something critical.

Right - time to hit the shower before a bit of gaming and music before sleep. And despite the theme of the first half of this post, that ain't gonna be a cold shower. My back would never forgive me !

Small, small world

2011-11-07T23:02:00.000Z

Not many people won't have heard about the big crash on the motorway near where I live. What reminded me that this is a much smaller world these days was the sad news that a friend of a friend lost his life in the incident.

I didn't know him personally but from the love that's been shown via Facebook, he is already being sorely missed.

I doubt we'll ever know the exact cause of the accident and it would be wrong to speculate without knowing facts, although people are blaming fireworks. Assigning blame would also be wrong here, although I believe accepting some collective responsibility is appropriate. Driving standards have collapsed lately (I know I road-rage more than is healthy) as people are getting a sense of invulnerability from modern cars that are built far tougher than when I learned to drive.

People have joked that the best safety device to go in a car would be a spike protruding from the steering wheel, I'd compare that to a Rover Metro loaner car I had. I drove that really slowly ... not because it couldn't muster much pace but because I knew from its swiss cheese construction that it would disintegrate if a juggernaut breathed on it.

What's really sad is that even with reminders of how dangerous the roads can be, people are still :
Driving way too fast,
Tailgating,
Saying "70mph is too low a limit for motorways" (badly wrong)
Not driving with any consideration to people around them,
Driving without due care and attention (that goes for those who use mobiles in the car too)
And many more sins shared by drivers these days.

Another sign of this being a small world is that I drove down the bit of motorway where the accident happened just a fortnight before.

Other (happier!) stuff :

Pumpkin* finally has all the bits that will go into making it a fully equipped PC :-) It was missing a conventional hard disc due to the floods in Thailand making hard disc prices go through the roof. A 1TB drive was £45 before the floods, the same drive is now £110, with that going up £5 today. When ultra rapid inflation hits, it's always worth a little bit of shopping around to see if you can take advantage of retailers who aren't keeping up with changing prices.

*(yes - I called it Pumpkin. Seemed fitting for something born on Halloween)

Cue a trip to BestBuy who are sadly closing down in UK. It would have been good to see them stay in retail here to keep PCWorld & Currys honest. (No chance of that with Comet). Anyway, I picked up a 1.5TB drive there for £72 today. More than pre-flood prices and it's an older model but still fits the bill :

It will have plenty of space,
It's not as quick as a current model but still quicker than the 250GB in the machine at the moment.

I can also assign 500GB of it to a Linux drive for playing with later :-). It's been a while since I looked at Linux and I'm hoping it will allow me to run some old Windows games that refuse to work in Windows 7. I just need to have a look at installation options, plus I'll need to move some stuff from the old drive to the new one. But - it means I can do now some of the stuff I was holding off on, like getting cheapie Office programs on the desktop.

Oh - rockets are fun. We had a Crazie fireworks evening on Satuday, with BionicDwarf, Cyberkitten and I all with our Mad Scientists hats firmly stapled to our heads. We also had the Craziequeen in attendance who had locked away her Health & Safety hat for the evening too. (Could have been handy due to bits of firework raining down on us). We literally had a blast, although I suspect we shall be avoiding rockets in the future. Why ?

Most were fine. However :
1 rose very slowly in "Houston we have a problem" style, barely getting to the treeline before going bang. The tree was still smouldering an hour later.
Another had been sniffing the alkyhol. It went up 10 feet, decided it was afraid of heights and promptly exited stage left before exploding in someone's garden. Oops.

Right - time to continue the Mass Effect campaign I started last week :-) But :

Always remember the fallen. Their sacrifice means nothing if we do not learn from it. Drive slower, get there safe.

Nutter magnet

2011-11-04T21:14:00.000Z

Had a Costa with a difference yesterday.

I'd come back from having a wander through the middle of Bristol and instead of pay more for my parking in the city centre, I went to the Costa near Tesco. All normal, nothing to report. Until the nutters come in ...

3 people to dominate 3 tables, unfortunately choosing the ones next to where I'd settled. (Lesson - it can be better to guarantee who you sit by instead of leaving it up to chance). The kind of people you really don't want sitting beside you. I can handle being included in a conversation by interesting people but people who have trouble stringing two coherent words together - please no. Especially when those people demand you join in with them. I'd have moved to a different table but I'm not quite that rude.

So that's the Costa nutters. I also seemed to be a magnet for the charity people around Bristol (must have been the poppy on display) and to finish that thread, Paintball Guy decides to try his luck at Tesco too. Can't be the appearance, I'm currently doing the impression of a derelict (not shaved for a while cos I'm on leave).

Oh well. People make life interesting but it's good to be able to choose your acquaintainces instead of having them thrust on you.

How's other stuff ?

The new PC build is working great, although the fan noise is currently a little intrusive. Also intrusive are the two blue lit fans inside the box. I get the feeling they'd provide a spooky backlight for horror films seeing as they're behind the sofa. Temperatures of the machine are just fine at 46 degrees C max for the processor and 60 degrees C max for the graphics card. That leaves loads of headroom for the summer.

Apart from the disaster which is Battlefield 3 (and a BOINC issue which I think was due to beta software), it's rock solid stable. It's currently idling away doing lots of distributed computing research under the BOINC umbrella that includes the SETI hunt for aliens, climate prediction and medical research. Doing distributed computing is a great way of seeing if a computer is stable when it's worked hard, as BOINC will make it give maximum potential over a prolonged period of time. It's tougher than game stuff.

Games are shiny. Well. For most of them, shiny = smoother as they can't really take advantage of the better hardware, the extra grunt just gives more frames per second (low numbers there make for jerkiness and bad playability). Warcraft looks about the same, apart from shadows and water. It looks more like a proper world is in there amidst the cartoony stuff. Water effects are incredible, instead of there being a white water wake behind a swimmer, it's proper ripples. Wonder what would happen if you dropped a Goblin Fishing Pole in the water. And they need to put that item back in the game where it belongs.

Not tried the newer Deus Ex yet, although I have downloaded it. I have a line on a potential fix for Battlefield 3 (wind down the wick on the graphics card a little) but haven't tried that yet. Maybe later.

For now, I've almost cleared the TV box of recorded stuff ahead of clearing it. It still has bugs with series linking which is why it needs a kick in the "back to factory settings" button.

Oh yeah - fireworks tomorrow. It's birthday season, so a few of us are meeting up to blow a lot of stuff up. Should be a blast :-)

Playtime = frustration

2011-11-01T19:03:00.000Z

Battlefield 3 = Do Not Buy

Don't touch it with a bargepole. It's crash-to-desktop hell not just for me but for hundreds of other angry people logging into the BF3 forums. Not just nVidia people, it's all of them - AMD cpu's, Intel cpu's, AMD graphics or nVidia graphics, they're all having problems.

Tried a few things so far, none have worked. I think the machine is ok as it ran the 3dMark11 benchmarks successfully. I'm currently downloading League of Legends again (WoW comes later) to get some quality gameplay time in.

Another comment - the Z68 based motherboard I have is supposed to support SSD caching, where the fast disc speeds up the slow disc. I've not been able to enable that so far though, dunno why. I'll check again when I have a new hard disc to permanently keep in the system, the one that's in there now is split up over multiple partitions which could be what's blocking it.

Oh - annual leave day 2 and I'm back to wondering what they're up to in the office. I've already emerged more than I usually do ... Novatech and back yesterday. Not planning to go out much more although I believe supplies will be required soon. I'm almost on my last cookies.

Brought to life on Halloween

2011-10-31T23:21:00.000Z

Now that it's (almost) complete, I've been wondering if it was a really good idea to bring a new machine to life on Halloween.

It is a night when all sorts of weird things are supposed to come out to play. Oh hell, maybe this is the best night of the year. All the gremlins will be out on the town instead of waiting to creep inside a machine as you build it.

By this point you're wondering : What's he been up to? While my laptop is almost 2 years old now (and starting to feel its age, aka it needs a dustbusting) my main desktop PC was built in April 2006. Even with a graphics upgrade along the way, that's Oooold for a games box. What have I got ?

Cpu - was Athlon X2-3800+ (dual core 2GHz + tricks) to Intel i5-2500K (quad core 3.3GHz +)
Graphcs - was ATi X4850, now nVidia 560Ti (overclocked)
Memory - was 2GB, now 8GB
Storage - was 74GB + 250GB, now 60GB solid state + the 250GB which I'm robbing
Motherboard - was Asus, now Asrock
And the rest is fairly generic : Thermaltake V3Black case, Corsair 600W power supply, Samsung blu-ray drive, Zalman cooler and Windows 7 Home Ed

I've been building my PCs for years and it's always guaranteed lost skin from somewhere. This time, I don't think I've lost any skin (decent case design) but it's definitely broken one build theme : Software install usually takes ages, hardware build not so much. Here's the timeline :

Build start - 17.49 as I have the PC box out of its packaging and I'm looking at the power supply.
Power supply is in at 17.59 after a fight with the case.

The Thermaltake case holds the power supply in quite tightly but has something you need to unscrew to get it in that tight. The instructions supplied with the case are utterly inadequate. As in : "Place the power supply in proper location and secure it with screws." Nothing about unscrewing the widget. And that theme continues with the rest of the build, lots of "ok, how's that supposed to work" when putting things in the case. A shame too, as the build quality of the case is pretty good. I'd like things a little different (the top is riveted on, cutting access) but it'll be a very solid case that will not rattle.

Ok - next is the hard disc, which took 15 minutes to figure out where to put it. More rubbish instructions. It lives on the bottom of the case. It'll be joined by another one later from my old box. Plan A was to get a conventional 1TB hard disc, which is plenty of space. However ... there's been floods around the factories that make hard discs and the prices have hit the roof. A 1TB drive would have cost me £45 a fortnight ago. Last week that was £65, now that drive is £95 and rising. So I went Plan B, which incidentally gets me a quicker machine :

Plan B : steal 250GB hard disc from old machine. Buy 60GB solid state drive (SSD). The difference with the SSD is that instead of taking 1/1000ths of seconds to find Stuff on the drive including moving an arm over to it, the SSD takes under 1/1000th of a second. (Thought it was quicker). As well as the latency being better, the SSD can read many parts of itself at once, which a conventional hard disc can't do. They're just a lot faster. Anyway, 40GB for Windows, 20GB for what's called SSD caching where it will make a bigger conventional drive much quicker.

What's next ? Blu-ray player didn't take long, just 4 minutes. The case has a quick release mechanism here, one for 5.25" drives and 2 for 3.5" internal drives. I then rearranged the power cables a little to get them out of the way for the motherboard to come in.

To make it easier, it's best to put all components into the mainboard before you put that into the case when you have lots of access to all the plugs. Better before, rather than after when you need Tiny Fingers for Tiny Plugs.

Here's where the headaches start. To make chips quicker, they have to make them smaller. There's no pins on the Intel i7 2nd Gen chip, just pads on the bottom. This is held in the socket by something that in no way can be called "Zero Insertion Force". Around the socket goes the heatsink arrangement. There's a plastic surround which bolts on to the mainboard. Mistake 1 was to put the surround on before putting in the cpu. Oops. Nothing broken. I left the rest of the heatsink for a little later.

Memory went in at 18.50, this is easy as it is push-fit. One issue is that my memory comes with heatsinks which protrude upwards a bit. The memory heatsinks almost clash with the cpu heatsink and let to me moving them to the other 2 sockets. (4 sockets, 2 used, 2 spare).

The cpu heatsink I've used is a Zalman CNPS10X Extreme. "Extreme" is no exaggeration, this thing is HUGE weighing in at 920grammes. With domestic fans, bigger is better to a huge degree, as a bigger fan can be run slower. A slow big fan is much quieter than a quick small fan. Installation of these is "interesting" though. There's a bracket that needs to be "just so" before you can tighten it down. That took some adjusting ...

Next step - putting the motherboard in the case. Interesting Times for sure. The Thermaltake case comes with its own spacers for holding the board away from all the conductive case stuff. That mostly works but it took a little swearing and poking to get the board aligned with the screw holes. Board finished going in at 19.52.

Graphics was next. My budget is decent but still modest. I've put money into cpu this time with graphics being "average" instead of "amazing". I've got a Gigabyte GeForce 560Ti card, factory overclocked to 900MHz (10% faster than normal). Curious to see how Shiny that will be. By this point, I was ignoring the case manual which made putting this card in much simpler.

Graphics in at 20.00, side of case on at 20.02, with Squeaky Bum Time (first power up) coming shortly after. Another difference this time is that I could hook it up to the telly, so an opportunity to test in the open before committing it to its hidey-hole. (I need to move the sofa to easily get at the hidey-hole).

From here on, it's almost without incident (eerily). First power up went with no hitches at 20.12. I had a good check of the BIOS (the bit that runs the machine behind Windows) to make sure things were configured ok. This is also a good time in a build to go to "Hardware Monitoring" and keep an eye on the temperatures. It doesn't give "in the green" but stable idle temps of 30 degrees C are Good. You don't want that going up much, it means the heatsink isn't doing its job.

I started off loading Windows 7 at 20.17 and the surprising thing is that it only took 23 minutes from starting to being able to see the internet on the machine. Bit less time to get a Windows screen up but it needed to be told how to see the net.

I decided to call a halt after a bit more temperature monitoring. Was getting hungry and could no longer focus-ignore that ... I'll reconvene tomorrow after moving the hard disc across to the new machine. Then I can see how Shiny the graphics will be.

How about the name ? I went for a Halloween theme name there : "Pumpkin". Although my mind is now thinking along the lines of "Frankenstein" or "Horrifido".

Happy Face, Sad Face

2011-10-27T21:52:00.000+01:00

Life's often contrasts, things make you happy or make you sad in equal measure. I have a few of those at the moment :

Happy Face - my Battlefield 3 preorder came through today
Sad Face - looks like I need new stuff as the box says no Windows XP
(just means I chill out Sunday night and have a huge reason to not be lazy on Monday)

Happy Face - I should get those new bits on Monday for putting together later
Sad Face - I know that Better Stuff will be out by the end of the week
(Just means I go for less expensive bits and save 2 bits for later)

Happy Face - I have all sorts of great toys
Sad Face - no one around to share them with
(I love popcorn but I like hugs more)

Happy Face - I appear to be getting my leg back (the wound appears to be fading at last)
Sad Face - the days of me enjoying running around a cricket field seems like it's in the past
(shoulder and back don't have many games left in them)

Happy Face - Car's great
Sad Face - it doesn't understand me (it's great but not perfect)
(the voice commands have about a 50% success rate at the moment, apart from that the brain of the automatic gearbox is perfectly in tune with what I want it to do)

Happy Face - England annihilated India in the Test series over here
Sad Face - England got annihilated by India at their place
(not much really to say there !)

Happy Face - I'm on leave next week
Sad Face - the house is messy and seeing it will remind me
(I have a lot of cleaning up to do)

Happy Face - work is quiet
Sad Face - it won't be when the printer gets fixed
(work has its successes at the moment plus enough unexpected stuff to keep life interesting and "quiet" has nothing to do with the activity level, just the deciBels at my desk caused by a printer)

Happy Face - I show the car off to more people soon
Sad Face - lots of driving (that's not really a Sad Face though)
(curious to see what mpg I get on the long run)

Happy Face - Tis Birthday season
Sad Face - Amazon's wish list system seems rather broken
(been trying to order stuff for someone, that met with utter failure of the ordering system and their customer services)

Happy Face - Fireworks party next week
Sad Face - you kiddin' ? Tis Explosions !

And on that last, I'll leave it there and head off to my desktop PC for what could be its last gaming session. There can never really be a downside to recreational explosives. Ok, pet owners will definitely disagree there.

Sleepy's Gaming : League of Legends Tristana

2011-10-24T21:41:00.000+01:00

Can't remember if I've written about this one before which means I probably have and then forgotten ...

Been enjoying a game called League of Legends lately. I'd been doing what you could call training by playing with bots only. Me plus 4 on my side versus 5 on the other. That got kinda easy after a while though so I started doing what was intended with a game like this, that is playing it with other people. Just against bots again for now, I won't enter Player Vs Player until I earn more levels.

It's one where it's better played with other people because of the variation that offers but the sad thing about the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena games is that the community is very badly behaved. I've seen that numerous times already where people descend into calling each other "noob". Yep, the quality of insults starts low and commences digging. So I'm not going to enter PvP until I'm ready for it. I'm more than holding my own in the Player vs Bots battles.

Waitaminute - what's this game I'm talking about ? Here's a few links :
Totalbiscuit plays LoL
Riot Games - these guys make LoL.
And finally - my referral link if anyone wants to give it a go.

So - I'm thinking I'm being effective in this game and through that, I'm avoiding the abuse that can come your way. I suspect I'm helping to squash some of it by carrying some games on my own. I'm using a character called Tristana who has special abilities that I have a lot of fun with. Not so sure about the other characters in the game and I know I have to have another in reserve so I can switch when Tristana gets picked first.

What's Tristana ? Here's another link ...

She's a little sniper champion ... Abilities are :
Long range - the closer she is to maximum level, the further she can shoot. Sometimes this is as far as off the screen (I have a widescreen monitor)
Fast shooting - little bit of extra damage when you need it
Rocket boots - love these. Jump in, go boom, jump away (if you can)
Explosive shots - kill something (in game) and it'll explode and hit things close by
Buster Shot - fires a big cannon ball that knocks bad guys halfway across the map.

So - the main Master Plan is to Rocket Boot ahead of someone and Buster Shot them back to your own lines. Works a charm if you land it right.

It's not just the abilities, part of my reason for this post is to put up a Tristana damage build. What path do I take with items ?

First is a Faerie Charm and Rejuvenation Bead for a little extra health and mana. You can afford these when the game starts and they go towards a later awesome item.
At 920 gold, it's time to head home and pick up the Berserker Boots. They make you move and attack faster.
Next is Tiamat, a damage item that does a few things, the best is to make your attacks splash to nearby targets. Tristana does most of her damage from basic attacks so this item is amazing when given to the little Megling.
After Tiamat I used to use Guinsoo's Rageblade which sped up the attack rate. Not sure this now because it might lead you to hit the maximum attack speed.
Ok, not Guinsoo's, how about the Phantom Dancer. It speeds up attack and movement. Nifty item ...
A Player vs Bot game can sometimes be coming to an end by now but there's still 3 item slots left :
Next on the list is the Trinity Force which boosts everything, the highlight being that it slows enemies when you hit them. Stops them escaping ...
5th is The Bloodthirster, which boosts damage and gives you health back when you hit things. This combines spectacularly with Tiamat which devastates groups of bad guys.
Lastly is the Frozen Mallet, to slow bad guys down.

Right - stats time for the LoL readers who might come by reading this :
Berserkers Greaves : +25 attack speed, Enhanced Movement 2
Tiamat : 50 attack damage, 15 health/5, 5 mana/5, splash damage
Phantom Dancer : 55 attack speed, 30 crit chance, 15 movement speed
Trinity Force : lots
Waitaminute - here's a link again. And another link.

Hmm - I've been typing all this time when I could have been powergaming my build even more. And this is quite enough about gaming for now :-)

PS Very quiet at work at the moment. The colour printer is broken and I am denying all suggestions of sabotage.

Can we get an epic length series again ? Please ?

2011-10-21T00:31:00.000+01:00

One thing that's been consistent is that when an interesting TV series gets going, the money people will can it ...

Just been reading about the new V, while it wasn't the best series it was (barely) good enough to deserve the chance to tell its story at least to a satisfactory conclusion. I was watching Chase until I heard it got canned, although I found out it was being canned because I was wondering if there was any point in persisting with it. There's other examples too :

Babylon 5 - lost its fifth season so 2 year's worth of story had to be compressed into one. And that earnt it a fifth season. It's spinoff, Crusade, wasn't so lucky. It was given the axe just as it was building momentum. Same with Firefly and Stargate Universe. Firefly was awesome from day 1, SG:U struggled due to a depressing setting but came out fighting in season 2.

Star Trek original series - was killed off early. Were they right ? The success of Next Generation, the spinoffs and 11 movies (so far) say "hell no". At least the separate Star Trek series had chance to wind down and close themselves out, although Enterprise deserved more of a run.

I was really enjoying Defying Gravity over its short run, it was warm & fluffy entertaining scifi. Outcasts not so much, that got a mercy killing as it really didn't have that much in the way of redeeming features with actors phoning in their performances.

I still think Farscape is the best scifi series to be on telly in recent times, it roared back in style after getting killed off by the networks.

What am I enjoying on telly at the moment ? I have series links going for Buffy and A Town Called Eureka. Buffy's always been good, although I'm not intending to buy the dvds. Eureka is a new one which I looked at because of its links with Warehouse 13. Top, top series both of them. Highly entertaining due to light hearted character interaction. Sanctuary is what Amanda Tapping did next after Stargate and she brought through a lot of what made Stargate great. It's fun to watch while keeping an edge in reserve.

I just think it's a shame that potentially great series get killed off before they get a chance to show off their stories. We have a saying at work for thinking like that : "Risk Averse". Well, if the networks are that risk averse, they'll never get the payoff that comes with all the merchandising for successful series.

So many great stories out there which will never get the chance to be told.

More playing on da interwebs

2011-10-17T23:28:00.000+01:00

Yep - it's another car type post :-)

I dunno if it's the interweb growing over the past few years in how much we actually use it these days or something else but I've looked up stuff about my current car much more than any car I've had in the past. Ok, I did end up getting a few magazines when Rover were bringing out their new 200 (the second one) which eventually led to me buying their 420.

I think I would have joined various owners club forums for the Puma when I bought it in 2001 had the interwebs been as active then as now. For the Lexus, before I bought it I was getting lots of very useful information from the CT200hforum and LexusOwnersClub.co.uk (will be adding links to the sidebar after I finish this post).

Reading around those websites let me get semi-impartial views on my prospective next car. Ok, views from people who have owned Lexus at least but I view those as far more impartial as what gets written in what passes for the motoring media in this country. People like Top Gear can be entertaining but they're as impartial as a football supporter at a game. They have their favourites, everything else is substandard.

The Lexus people are a little different there, they have their favourites but can give detailed examples of why everything else is substandard. From my personal experience, Prius build quality didn't feel as good, Honda salespeople didn't want to sell stuff and the German cars were too common. Being common isn't really a bad thing but it does mean "not special". And I like to have things that are a little different.

I've had my Lexus for a month now and the impression after that month is :

I want to drive it more.

Things like finding excuses to go places in it, like I may well be heading off to a kitcar show next weekend. My curiosity in kit cars has gone up again now I've been introduced to CVT hybrids. They're just a lot easier to drive and the CVT/motor combination gives amazing low speed flexibility. I've said byebye to having to wastefully work the clutch a lot when in stop/start traffic and if I get caught changing up too early on a roundabout or junction, the CVT box takes that in its stride and just Goes. The Focus gearbox had a long gap between 1st and 2nd which meant you were stuffed if relaxed getaway suddenly had to become fast getaway.

Anyway, one of those websites I've found is Fuelly.com, which tracks your miles per gallon. Here's a link to the stats that will be building up for my CT.

Fuelly.com gives a couple of little toys, it lets you compare your economy to what other people are getting. Mine is a fairly low 44mpg on the last stop, although the trip computer said 46.5. We'll see how that works over several fill ups. The accuracy always depends on "where does it think a full tank stops ?" which varies between filling stations. Like if the last station underfilled by half a litre and this one overfilled by the same amount, that gets the mpg of the trip computer.

44-46 is a bit low for what I should get out of the CT, although it's a lot less thirsty in the same conditions than my Focus was. That used to get about 26-28 mpg in city only driving, going up to 36 on motorway trips. I ran up the motorway a bit tonight and was reading 51mpg and rising :-) So that's 50% better for a car that's a lot more refined, has much better spec and is a "I want to drive this car" rather than feeling like a tool to get from A to B.

Fuelly gives badges too :

That's one that's supposed to go on forum signatures (I need to edit the name to something less boring) although it depends on the forum code being smart enough to run it. I've added a smaller version to the sidebar.

Anyway - that's me done for this post. I have a week off coming soon, when I'll look to build a PC capable of playing the latest games. Fingers crossed that Novatech drop their prices in time, otherwise it's mail order again. Kit car show next weekend if it's dry, should be fun.

Star Wars Conundrum

2011-10-09T23:42:00.000+01:00

Just finished watching the Star Wars movies again :-)

The blu-ray player "upgrade" (ok, it is an upgrade cos it'll play 3d but I'm not convinced about the engineering) gave me an excuse to acquire the newly released Star Wars blurays. They're definitely an improvement on the dvds :-) George Lucas has played with the content again though, introducing some questionable changes. The sad thing about the tweaks is that the tweaks coming in recently are wholly lacking in any value or meaning. Changing the krayt dragon noise that Kenobi makes ? Why - there's no point. It doesn't add any value and arguably takes value away.

That aside, the blu-ray movies look stellar, showing off the quality of the original prints (probably enhanced a little along the way). It's the best you'll ever see Star Wars, although if they bring out a £d special edition (meant 3d but my finger slipped freudian-like over the shift key) then I'll be avoiding it.

What's the conundrum ? You see there's a long series of Star Wars books out there that pick up the story and run with it. I've not read them all, partly because the New Jedi Order series soured the books for me and I don't buy the books any more due to that. However ... the conundrum comes because 3 authors in particular write Star Wars better than the movies.

That's :

Timothy Zahn with the original Post Movie Trilogy, where the Rebellion has become the Republic. It's not smooth sailing though as the last Grand Admiral of the Empire, Thrawn, has returned from out of shadows wanting to resurrect the Empire in his name.

Michael A. Stackpole comes in with the outstanding X Wing Rogue Squadron series. These slot in before the Thrawn trilogy focusing on "how the Republic was won". You see, the events in Return of the Jedi are just one battle in a much bigger war. The Rogue Squadron series follows lesser known characters under the leadership of Wedge Antilles, who was Red 2 from A New Hope and also appeared in Empire and Jedi. In these books, all bets are off as far as the characters are concerned. Body count is high ... which keeps the reader guessing as to what's going to happen.

Aaron Allston brings in the follow up to Rogue Squadron, with Antilles starting up a squadron of misfits. Call it The Dirty Dozen in space. They're not criminals, they're just pilots on their last chances. These are an excellent successor to the Rogue Squadron books, grittier and funnier at the same time.

The thing about Stackpole and Allston is that they keep the humour running through their books. Which really ups the interest level in the reader. They also treat the reader like an adult. It's not adult as in 18 cert, it's adult as in don't insult your reader by treating them like a child.

There are many other Star Wars books than the ones by the authors I mention above. They vary wildly in quality. The Timothy Zahn books are the highlights but some of the others are very poor. The New Jedi Order series in particular is one long epic of depression which I gave up on halfway through.

The conundrum is whether to dig those old books out again to give them another read :-) It actually fits in somewhat with my A to Z, with a few of the books being candidates to fill those empty letters.

Another conundrum is in gaming. In the era of the 486 PC (16 years ago), a lot of PCs were sold by one game, XWing. It was a space combat sim which if you got through the insane difficulty, would let you take on the Death Star trench run. I missed that one but cut my PC gaming teeth on the epic Tie Fighter. Really old games couldn't rely on visuals like the modern ones do, they needed gameplay and cunning level design. Tie Fighter made you feel a part of the Star Wars world.

I don't think I'll dig XWing and Tie Fighter out of the attic though, they need a flightstick to play and getting that to work on a modern PC (through emulators make it playable) would be a major headache. We don't see many space combat flight sims these days, which is a real shame. The X universe is the only contender but I couldn't get into that. Eve doesn't count because you A) are crippled by lag, B) don't have direct control of your ship and C) get lumped with half assed attempts to implement features the gamer base doesn't want.

Ok - that's enough about old games and poor games, time to get back to taking over the galaxy as my all conquering Krogan (I recycled the Mass Effect name for my Moo2 master race)

PS If any of the Bristol readers want to have a look at the T.Zahn, M.A.Stackpole or A.Allston books, lemme know and I'll be happy to lend them out.

Tardis blue ?

2011-10-04T21:23:00.001+01:00

Commented on Thumper's blog about a little Smart car ...

Here's mine :

Here's the Doctor's blue box :

(copyright on that belongs to the BBC)

Tardis blue ?

Maybe :-) But it's not bigger on the inside than the outside.

Random stuff

2011-10-03T22:42:00.000+01:00

This'll make a change, instead of starting on one theme and then going totally random, I'm just going to add random thoughts :-)

Honesty is good. Although too much honesty can upset people if it clashes with the opinions they have of themselves. (I kept quiet with some of the wildlife at the Mall)

Yep - Mall run tonight. The Panasonic blu-ray player works pretty well now that it has room to breathe. It actually says in the spec "Operating temperature range : +5 C to +35 C". For domestic electronics, that's actually pretty low. I'm not saying I'd want to have my living room at +5 C (brrrr) but +35 is very low for kit that is quite likely to be sharing a shelf with something else. For that reason alone, I cannot recommend Panasonic blu-ray players to anyone. Hell, +35 C can be a daytime temperature in high summer.

Car :

Been enjoying the car more. The best analogy I have is that this car feels like something I want to keep driving, whereas the Focus was a tool for getting around in. Some of the first impressions need to be looked at again, because as I've got used to the Lexus, it's answered the questions I had.

Petrol and economy - mpg has been going up :-) Plus I seem to remember issues with filling up at the Cheltenham place in previous cars ... I'm now averaging 45.5mpg on the car computer in town driving. The Focus would have been guzzling at under 30mpg. One of my amusements when driving to work is seeing the mpg figure steadily go upwards while in stop/start traffic where it's running off the electric. I'll be crossing my fingers for better economy on motorway runs.

Driving the auto - one major criticism I have of my dad's Volvo is that the brain in the gearbox always picks the wrong gear for how I want to drive it. Not so in the Lexus, it'll hold lower gearing for longer and make itself ready for acceleration instantly. It has less power than the Volvo (134bhp combined vs 167hp actual, same weight) but feels faster because it wants to Go Fast.

Satnav - not really used this yet but one thing I put in the First Impressions is wrong, there's more than 6 memory slots, there are Many (100+). Just need to figure out if I can use the phone with bluetooth connection to let me pick a destination without being in the car. I think it's possible ...

Leg

How's the leg been ? Since I started using the cream it's been steadily improving. To the point where the fella I showed it to today (serves him right for asking - muahaha) didn't run off to the loo to be ill. Heh - it was never that bad and has improved a fair bit. Hopefully I get my leg back soon. Had a short run the other day and the leg as a whole behaved itself.

Music - not done a music post for a while. After resetting the play counts on the library at the start of the year, I've managed to listen to All About Eve's Devil Woman cover 13 times. Recent buys have included Kasabian (interesting), Aimee Mann (luvit), Ani Difranco (meh), Michelle Shocked (8>) but I've left Tori Amos albums (great but inconsistent) and Edie Brickell (too expensive) albums on the shelf.

Furniture shopping.

Hey ! Don't fall over with shock. I was actually inside a furniture shop. Didn't find what I wanted though. I don't want a TV stand (happy with the one I got from Craziequeen) which is all that's on sale. Nope. I'm after a hifi stand to put an amplifier, KeepMeCool blu-ray player and Xbox on. The choice is either £25 rubbish from Argos (it has to carry a 10kg amplifier) or something from PC World costing £53 per shelf. That's expensive overkill.

The reason a TV stand is out is because they are too wide, I want to save a little space with having Amp, Xbox and Blu-ray stacked on a shelf each and a TV stand is too wide with not enough shelves.

Any more random thoughts ?

Given up on Deus Ex for PC as it was making my PC cry. Also have a date for Star Wars The Old Republic (SWTOR) ... it's coming out at Xmas 2011 which puts a drop dead date on my current PC. As in, if I don't upgrade it, SWTOR will kill it. Same with Battlefield 3, after watching a couple of preview Beta test videos, this one is hitting my Interesting list.

Apart from that, I've been hunting for a game to bury myself in. Fairly unsuccessfully. I guess that will be Deus Ex, SWTOR and Mass Effect 3 when they come out.

Right - time to have a look at what Richer Sounds have in hifi furniture :-).

More Good tech/bad tech

2011-09-29T00:51:00.000+01:00

Been playing with the tech again. Which has led me to think of furniture buying ...

Had a fairly long running saga with my blu-ray player, which was a Sony player that didn't really like to play dvds. So I've been looking for a while to upgrade my stuff to bits that are 3d capable. I was already there with the amp and speakers, a 5.1 surround sound set probably does more for 3d experience than the picture does. 3d pictures just makes things jump out at you, 3d sound has the bullets flying all around you.

Anyway - that's getting beside the point. Point is - it's a bit of techie kit that doesn't work completely as intended. It's a victim of a good solution (HDMI) compromised by being meddled with (Anti-copy Stuff aka DRM).

That was the old, what's the new ? Panasonic are currently doing a deal where you buy one of their players and can send off for free Star Wars blu-rays. Hmm. 3d upgrade, free Star Wars, planned upgrade = me buying earlier than I needed to. Oh, it also gave me an excuse to use the car.

Hang on - he mentioned "Good tech / bad tech" ...

Ok. Hook up the new Shiny. Immediate problem - it's too thin to fit properly under my V+ box (think Sky+ or Tivo) so the V+ box is half on, half off the blu-ray player. That wasn't a problem for the Sony but it apparently crippled the Panasonic. Cue lots of screenblinking as that HDMI cable thingy acted up.

Long story short - it didn't want to play Iron Man 2 (loss of picture) until I moved it somewhere it was in the open. I suspect heat sensitivity, which is Very Bad for domestic electronics. If you cram the bits into a box that's too small to fit with other stuff, then you're going to get heat trouble. That's bad design all the way. Make it so it's reliable, which means Total Design, which includes making sure it works reliably as well as looks pretty.

So that's bad tech - an item that does what it was supposed to but only after putting up a fight. Still, it's better than Nasty tech, which is what Belkin specialise in these days.

Impressions of the Panasonic player ? Picture seemed a little sharper but that's small improvements over an already good Sony. Sound seemed better. I suspect both of those are placebo effect though. And I had to fight to get Best quality lossless sound as a default setting makes the player give lossy compressed sound. (Tip - turn Secondary Audio to Off) Picture was jerky during Iron Man 1, however this could have been due to overheating in its cramped location.

Good tech - anything Lexus. Had the car 1 week now and I'm still having the buzz from driving it around. The Focus felt like a tool that you drove because you had to, the Lexus (and the Puma before it) feels special. And anything associated with it just Works, from the iPod integration to the phone integration to the tech that makes it go. It's a very intuitive car to drive, there's no clutch or gearbox ratios to manage. There's an engine to turn on and off but the car does that for you, anticipating what you want.

I thought I was a pretty smooth driver but the Lexus is teaching me stuff there. I'm learning how to make the most of the energy you carry when a car moves, steadily smoothing things out to get the best out of the car. It'll still fly and leave people in the dust at the lights when you want it to but the challenge is more in how efficient you can be. Any brute can floor the throttle all the time but not many will achieve the same results with finesse. And I value finesse over the sledgehammer. It's a rare car that can do both finesse and sledgehammer but the Lexus seems to be managing it.

Doh - I'm rambling again.

Will close out with :
Bad tech - domestic electronics. They do what you want eventually but fight you for it
Good tech - complex stuff presented simply with reliable confidence.
Nasty tech - our IT system at work. Or anything Belkin.

First impressions

2011-09-21T21:44:00.000+01:00

Been feeling glad today that I went for the ex-demo and therefore only had 1 week to wait to pick up the new car. I suspect if I'd gone New, the 3 month wait for delivery would have led to me winding myself up so much I'd explode ...

First - I have to say Lexus Cheltenham really take to heart the Lexus creed. They're courteous, friendly and patient. Even to things like the finance guy who chased after us when we were doing the final handover, just so he could shake my hand on Deal Done. They put Customer First. Which is something the customer definitely appreciates. Well, I do at least.

Ok - first impressions. I picked the car up after work and I'm kinda glad I did. I wear a suit as standard work clothes and I think I'd have felt underdressed taking it out for the first time without the suit. The insides of the Lexus feel as special as I remember them feeling when I first sat in a CT in Lincoln.

Hey wait - there's something from before the first impression. When I went in the showroom, there was a yellow CT in there. When I left, it had gone. And I hadn't noticed ! That's how quiet these things can be in electric mode. (I did notice them take away the IS that was across the showroom)

More impressions :
Petrol. Kinda weird fueling up, need to work on that. Only got £5 worth in the tank earlier because the pump kept refusing to let more in.

Economy. Hoping for more than I was getting, although hopefully the data will sort itself out. Petrol gauge didn't move on the way back :-)

Driving. The CVT gearbox is weird. As a driver, you have to ignore what the engine is doing, because it revs far more freely than a conventional car does. Apart from that, Super smooth and intuitive. Press throttle - goes faster. Press brake - slows down. Automatic so you don't need to balance clutch in traffic.

Power. Was struggling to get the speed consistent but figured it out in the end. "Normal" mode puts up an Eco-meter, which tells you if you're being naughty (Power sector), being nice (Eco sector) or slowing down (Charge sector). Motorway cruise was mostly in the Being Nice sector with power available when it was needed.

Overtaking. I like my cars to have "lean on throttle" power. That's where you're stuck behind someone at 50 (slow) and spot a gap. "Lean on" power means you can overtake without using too much throttle. The hybrid works well here because you get a hefty boost of power from the battery and motor.

All the rest - it's just so refined. Need to figure out the ventilation system to keep the inside comfortable.

Sound system ? Very impressed. My phone hooked up to it quickly which makes me hope that the Test Match Special via phone trick will work :-) Ipod integration definitely works well. All it needed was plugging it in. Easy as that. Byebye FM transmitter !

The satnav works but with just 5 memory locations plus "home", I'll be bringing bits of paper with postcodes.

That's quite a few first impressions isn't it ?

Closing out with a hope that I'll get used to Smart Entry (unlocking without clicking anything) quickly because it may make me Ultra Paranoid.

Careful what you buy ...

2011-09-19T20:47:00.000+01:00

Nope - it's not about the car, bit early to have regrets 2 days before picking it up !

Nah - this is about stuff that sounds like a Good Idea when they present it but will actually get you into trouble.

One thing I've been offered with the Lexus is a 3 day "get you home" insurance ... And it'd be free. Sounds good doesn't it ? So ... Plan last week would be :

Step 1 - update current insurance to take account of the new(ish) car coming.

That means ringing up my current car insurance provider and letting them know I'm changing the car. Qu : When do I want cover to start ? Thinking I'd have the 3 day policy I said midnight when I'd be safely tucked up in bed and not driving. (I did say midnight didn't I ? Oops - mustn't tell whoppers) Felt like a good idea at the time.

It makes sense to keep it consistent between insurances so you don't end up with the extra expense of cancelling one policy in favour of another. That spookily spreads the bills around the year too, although with the Lexus being registered in March I believe it matches up those MoT (in 2.5 years), service and insurance bills again.

Step 2 - phone the Lexus insurance people to tell them when to start the 3 day cover.

Oops - I get advised that what I'd sorted out with Admiral would leave me with duplicate cover for 2 and a half days.

That's illegal ! Oh well.

Step 3 - phone Admiral again (and get another nice Indian girl sounding spookily like the first I talked to) and tweak Step 1.

So now I'll have cover on two cars on Wednesday, the Focus and the Lexus. All sorted.

(Sidebar - why offer a "cover starts 2012" option in a form asking for quote details when you're only going to accept up to Dec 2011 ?)

So - if you get offered something ... and it's free ... Make sure you check what's involved, there's probably a catch ...

Oh - I'm currently sniggering my way through a blu-ray of the A Team movie. If you've grinned while the 80s TV show was on, you'll love this one.

PS I believe I'll be switching car insurance next time round anyway. Dunno the exact Admiral cost for my next car but Direct Line quotes £20 cheaper whereas Admiral asked for more.
PS2 Admiral may cost more but I definitely approve of their call centre staff. Courteous and they could even understand me ! That's rare ...

What's a hybrid ?

2011-09-17T14:58:00.000+01:00

I've said quite a bit here that I'm getting something Shiny soon ...

In fact, the anticipation is making me read all sorts of Stuff about hybrid cars. There's a lot of different types of vehicles out there that use electric to get them going :

Stop/Start :
These are still technically hybrids, although they will only work in hybrid when you're starting off. It's aimed at you not burning any fuel when you're sitting at traffic lights, while still being able to pull away while the engine is starting up. They have bigger batteries and as well as recharging the battery off the engine, they can recharge while you slow down. I think the idea is that you take the car out of gear at lights and the engine will turn off until you put the clutch pedal to the floor again.

It's the simplest form of hybrid but still offers up decent fuel economy gains. (And emissions but I don't personally think vehicle CO2/mile emissions are particularly significant to anything) Not convinced about the additional wear inherent in continually stopping and starting an engine, hopefully the oil and water is still circulating during the off time.

KERS :
This is what the Formula 1 cars have nowadays. It stands for Kinetic Energy Recovery System and is the next simplest form of hybrid. What will happen here is that while you brake or slow down, energy that would have gone into heating up your brake pads and discs will get harvested into a battery instead. With the F1 cars, that energy can then be pushed back into the wheels later when extra power is wanted.

I'd call these Series Hybrids as the engine always has to be turning to make the car go. A road example is the Honda CR-Z, which has a small electric motor supplementing a 1.5 litre engine. You have the better baseline economy of the 1.5 boosted to something like a 1.8 litre when you ask the car to give it. One difference between CR-Z and F1 is that the CR-Z will give the extra power when asked, whereas the F1 driver will press a button. Apart from that, they're the same.

The disadvantage is that the motor and batteries add extra weight. So whereas the CR-Z technically has more and better power available than my old Puma, it's slower to the magic 60 by over a second.

Range Extender Hybrid :
Still a Series hybrid, although this time the motor is connected directly to the wheels instead of the engine. Most of the juice comes from pure electric from the wall socket but when the battery gets low the engine fires up and recharges the battery. One big advantage there is that the engine can turn at the speed where it gives best Power vs Economy, most of the time a car engine is nowhere near that because the speed it goes is directly tied to road speed.

Sidebar - what do the Power numbers for an engine mean ?
Power : bHP - brake horse power (or PS or kW). This is the amount of energy an engine produces over a certain amount of time. When the car is moving, all sorts of things are trying to hold it back and it takes energy to overcome that. It's when Energy back = Energy forward that you get a consistent speed. Some cars have what's called an "Overdrive" 5th or 6th gear where the maximum speed is lower in top gear than in the gear below because lower engine revs = less power = less able to overcome what's holding the car back. The "Overdrive" means it's burning less fuel at cruising speed.

Power is what people look for but it only helps top speed which you are never going to do. Excess power is burned off and wasted as heat.

Torque : Nm or lb/ft. This is more interesting ... Torque is "turning power". If you've got a siezed nut you want to release or a jar cap that refuses to budge, it's irrelevant how quick you can spin the nut. Torque is the power that gets the nut or jar top moving.
High torque = lots of acceleration.

Where an electric motor helps is that it gives huge amounts of torque without any delay. The motor in the Lexus that's waiting for me gives 207Nm torque, the engine in my Focus gives 196Nm. That's more turning power in the motor as a boost than is in the Focus total and it's available at all speeds instead of just a small segment of the rev range.

Where was I ?
Range Extender Hybrids work off the motor and battery most of the time, with the battery being topped up by the engine when it needs it. The idea is that they have a long range on the battery, with you topping that up on your home electric. I'm not so sure about that, mechanical stuff works best when they're being used. If it took a while between needing the range extender engine, it's going to take time for the cobwebs to come off.

Nice idea - not convinced ... yet. We'll see how the Chevy Volt and Vauxhall Ampera do when they come out. Another issue is that you lose energy twice with the Range Extender - firstly when the generator gets it from the engine, secondly when the motor puts it on the road.

Parallel Hybrid :
This is what I'm getting. It's a car with engine and a motor, like the series and range extenders. However, either the motor or the engine can drive the wheels. Or both can join in for when you want maximum power. So you can do stuff like cruise on just the engine and then have a burst of acceleration using the engine coupled with the motor.

It's not the same as having a Big Engine, as that pulse of extra power from the motor only lasts as long as the battery does. But it gives you the power advantage of the big engine (temporarily) coupled with the economy of the small engine. The motor also adds some smoothness and refinement back in.

With the Lexus/Prius, the motor and engine are driving the front wheels through a Continuously Variable Transmission. That's like a gearbox with 1000 speeds instead of 5 or 6. What it means is that the motor and engine can go at the speed they want to go at, instead of being tied to road speed. So they'll give max power when you want it or max efficiency in the cruise.

However - all the energy ultimately comes from the engine, there's no power lead to plug in. So the ultimate economy is determined by that engine, boosted by how much the motor can scavenge.

There's a few interesting ideas coming too with the hybrids, things like :
Plug In Parallel Hybrid - just like the Prius/Lexus but you can recharge the battery at home. The Prius plug in will come with a bigger battery too, at the cost of extra weight.
Split drive - there's a Peugeot coming soon that sends engine power to the front wheels and electric power to the back. Curious as to how that will work. If it does, it could be handy - electric and engine could work to their full potential, however there's big chances for the front wheels to be spinning at a different speed to the back wheels. That tends to lead to not going in the intended direction.
Gas Turbine hybrid - Gas Turbines give great power ... but only work best inside a specific speed range. Which is perfect for Range Extender Hybrids !

Wow - I thought this was going to be a short "What's a hybrid" but it's gone Wall Of Text again. Oh well :-)

Shinies coming ...

2011-09-15T21:15:00.000+01:00

Finally did it, ended the months of procrastination by heading on up the motorway to Lexus in Cheltenham.

Don't get me wrong there - inaction can sometimes be the best form of action. Half the tech world points and sniggers at the early adopters who :

Can never resist going for the latest shiny,
Spend way too much on their toys,
Never really get much benefit from that latest little incremental upgrade,
Get stuck with something that gets replaced with a far better spec after 6 months
And they get all the bugs.

Sitting back and waiting lets you see whether that Day 0 Shiny is actually worth getting or is going to be a total nightmare. Happily the Lexus has just had good things written about it from the owners (the german car obsessed reviewers weren't keen) over the 6 months it's been on the market.

I also had the luxury of time this time around. Most of my previous cars have either been run into the ground or were getting more and more expensive. There were bills coming for the Focus but they were maintenance things (brake discs), items that wear out eventually. However, it's done 66,000 miles now, which is the point at which the Puma started getting really expensive.

It's cost a bit more than I'd have liked to pay (less reduction + less than expected for mine) but I'm expecting cost/mile to end up a lot less. Maybe not for the next 3 years while I'm paying but definitely for the time after that. I also get it next week instead of having to wait until December for a new one, which would also cost me cash to tax the Focus for a bit longer.

So what have I gone for ? Quick trip up the motorway to Cheltenham saw me arrive at the Lexus place there. Waiting was a blue Lexus CT (linky) which I'll be heading back to pick up next week. There will be a few changes :

It's an automatic - I've driven two but not owned any of these before but thankfully the Gearbox Brain of this one is fairly in tune with what I like
No long wave on the radio ! GAHHH!!!! That's where cricket commentary lives !!! However. I have a cunning plan. It involves a phone, mobile internet, BBC radio streaming and a bluetooth connection to the car stereo. Curious to see how that works.
Bluetooth hook up for the phone, which means it can go Hands Free. Dunno how long that will last considering the vulnerabilities of Bluetooth and the battery munching.
Byebye IpodFM - there's a direct link in the car. No more losing the signal in the middle of a favourite song.

Hybrid powertrain. This is actually fairly irrelevant from the driver's point of view. Press throttle - car speeds up. Press brake - car slows down. There's a lot of complicated stuff going on under the skin but the driver doesn't need to pay attention to any of that. Apart from maybe hitting "Sport Mode" occasionally :-)

Built in satnav. This isn't normally the sort of thing you'd look for in a car, as a Tomtom is much cheaper and can be programmed while you're not in the car. This is more Trip Computer not just on steroids but with an overdose of them, coupled with a better stereo. It just happens to come with a satnav.

It's a big step up in value from what I've been driving lately, bit slower but far better inside.

Already looking forward to picking it up next week.

Diet Pills

2011-09-14T00:06:00.000+01:00

Leg started getting worse again last week (I'm bored of it now and want the leaking to go away) so I gave in and saw the doctor ...

Result - diet pills.

Ok, they're not really diet pills (it's penicillin) but with instructions of "leave 2 hours after food and 1 hour before food", they're cutting in severely to my snacking time ! I have to take one 4 times a day too but I've figured out how to weave that into a breakfast, lunch & dinner cycle.

I suspect that cycle would have stopped me raiding, as it stops me from having dinner until after 7, which is when the raids are due to start. We've not been raiding much recently though and I've not been signing up to the New Content progress raids anyway due to stuff I've posted before :

Bored with the game
No motivation to join the progress raids
Silly rules being brought in

Been at Warcraft for a long time and I remember the challenge of the game as it was early on. It used to be a lot tougher, with you needing to think about tactics needed to get the enemies down. I reckon that's where the game has lost something, both in content and player skill. Skill isn't really needed in Warcraft now, just a memory of what to avoid. That's what the raid boss fights are : knowing what to do when the "One Mistake And Everyone's Dead" mechanic kicks in. I find those mechanics contrived and boring, although the boredom comes with knowing there's people in the group who will blatantly not be wary of the mistake triggers.

Hoping for better from Star Wars The Old Republic, which is coming "soon". I suspect diving into the Star Wars world, albeit a few thousand years before the movies, will get the desire to see content back. I'm even struggling for the single player gaming at the moment, my main PC has been cruising in No Game Mode* for at least one night when I could have been gaming and this will be another.

*No Game Mode - the original Windows on my main PC is hopelessly broken due to a combination of Kaspersky and other apps (I blame copy protection malware that you are forced to install). To game, I have to go to another Windows install on a second hard drive.

I'll not be gaming tonight, which means I've missed a week's worth of MC farming. Oh well. Gaming should be done for fun, not as a second job. That's one reason I struggle to keep going with the MMOs like Eve and Warcraft, the amount of grinding (repetitive tasks) time required detracts from the fun aspect of the game, especially when Expectations get piled on you from people in the corp or guild.

What can make that worse is when there's a perception that the people telling you to do stuff are not pulling their weight. You should only ask people to do stuff that you are willing to do yourself. At work, I'd happily do the filing and some of the other mundane stuff but ... I know there's a few people in the team already trained up to do that who will get bored if I take all their work away from them. They know what to do, so I let 'em get on with it and they're good enough to do it better than I can. On the other hand, I'm much better at analysis and engineering which is what I'm there to do :-)

You can cause trouble by being too keen - especially when you do the Bull In China Shop thing and trample on stuff someone has carefully set up.

Yep - gaming is suffering a bit at the moment. Or at least the online stuff is, we're looking to restart the DnD group soon. That's multiplayer gaming but with pens & paper on a table top. There's a bit more time to think about what you're going to do with pen & paper stuff and you don't lose the ability to chat to your groupmates.

Pen & Paper has one major advantage over Voice Comms - you can share the munchies instead of listening to the occasional nomnomnom over Mumble :-)

Other stuff - if I can get away early enough, I may well be looking at a car tomorrow ... It's in Cheltenham though which is at least half an hour away before traffic. It's £1000 cheaper than Lincoln as well as being closer. I cleared the car out earlier (needs portable vacuum though) but have a bit more prep to do in the shape of getting Car Change documents together.

And then there's the PC upgrade ... I bought Deus Ex Human Revolution last week, which looks awesome. It's easily the best graphics I've seen so far, even though I have the options turned down a bit. New bits would definitely help out there.

Doh ! I started typing about the Diet Pills and they appear to have Verbal Diarrhoea as a side effect. I've been typing so long it's almost time to take the next one.

What I am doing is chilling out to the Julianne Regan Mice album which really benefits from the decent hifi kit. Plenty of effects and clever stuff in the production and mixing coupled with Julianne Regan's sublime and unique voice. This comment was triggered by seeing an Imelda May advert come on - Imelda May's group is based around a poor, weak imitation of a music style that died out decades ago ! She's NOISE ! Why is it being hammered so much ? Maybe because it's so bad it needs the hammering to get into double figure sales numbers.

Lol - After that mini rant it's time for a chill pill and more Julianne Regan.

Into reading again

2011-09-07T23:01:00.000+01:00

With the irritation of RSI coming from too long engaging the enemies of humanity with mouse and key and the loss of sleep that comes from furthering the cause of the Horde, I'm trying to get back into reading.

There's another reason, at the start of the year I put myself up a challenge of looking to read books in an A to Z. I've been updating that as the year goes but there's 8 months gone now with 14 of 26 read. Need to get back into reading to hit the 26.

However ... The A to Z is feeling somewhat restrictive, there's books I want to read that have already had the gap filled. Books like Game of Thrones, which my sister has lent me. Or Polar City Nightmare to follow Polar City Blues (Katherine Kerr does sci-fi). The two Polar City books are bad examples because they can fit the gaps. I just got the next Lost Fleet book by Jack Campbell, it got released this week and on the strength of the first six has jumped the queue to be The Next Book.

I think I'll start recording the books that don't fit as Bonus Books. And of course I'm not recording all the stuff I read at work, that is far too Interesting to be put in a public place - muahaha. Except when I mention the people who make it worth coming in. I have them worried because I've told too many people about my poorly leg.

Erm - this was supposed to be about books ? Get back to the point Marine !

Latest finished book is Battle Of The Fang by Chris Wraight.

It's another in the Space Marines Battles series, which have a common theme of taking the superhuman (literally) warriors of the Warhammer 40k universe, putting them into impossible situations and seeing what comes out the other side. This time it's the Space Wolves legion up against the Thousand Sons traitor marines in a follow up to the Prospero Burns Horus Heresy book which I haven't read.

This one is not a bad read, although I think my interest in the Space Marines Battles books is rapidly dwindling. The dramatis personae have suitable gravitas but turn somewhat into caricature. There's big action going on but your interest in truly caring about what's happening is low.

Maybe it's because it's not a Helsreach, a Titanicus or a Dan Abnett Ghosts book. It just doesn't seem to have the same impact as the others, maybe due to similarity with the other two Space Marine Battles books I've read.

Looking forward to The Next Book, I get the feeling there may be another mini-book-review coming next week :-)

New car soon

2011-09-06T19:57:00.000+01:00

It's the long running saga of the car again !

Been busy since last week. Car stuff is the highlight.

Leg got checked out on Thursday, although I need to get it looked at again. It looks "miffed" or "slightly peeved" at me now, instead of the angry scabbiness of last week. Much improved but a doctor needs to see it to lock down the cause. Once you know cause, you can figure out how to stop it. I reckon I'm on to something with it being allergy related, last time I bought washing powder blobs I changed due to thinking what I was using has affecting me. I have a feeling I went the wrong way with the allergy stuff.

So that's my leg, looks like it's improving. Must put more of the cream on it to help it improve.

Car stuff ! Progress here, as I went to see my mum & dad for the weekend. The excuse was that my sister had acquired some tickets for the Senior European Masters golf tour at Woburn which was not far down the road from my sister's place. More in a bit.

That left Saturday to do Stuff, as we weren't at the golf until Sunday. Loose end ... what can we do ? Quick trip to Lincoln to have a look at a car ... I don't think I'll buy the car I test drove in Lincoln but I will definitely go for one very much like it. It was a Lexus CT200h, leather seat model with the satnav. The satnav is expensive but it's not just a satnav, it's a fairly comprehensive computer for the car. I think the stereo is better with it too.

How was the car ? It's very shiny. The CT is a medium sized luxury hatch that's built around a hybrid powertrain. Translation - it can Go with either a proper engine or a motor. Or the motor can help out the engine with you want to go faster. The motor means pulling away is extremely smooth. Smooth is definitely the word for this car, it's probably the most refined car I've ever driven. What I wasn't expecting was blistering performance, which you don't get. But it still gets up to speed quite nicely, especially when you put it into Sport mode.

Yes - I know what my next car will be. What's holding me back is price. I can afford it but what they're asking for is more than I think they should be. I have the luxury of being able to wait this time, with no major work anticipated on the car.

Golf watching ...

We didn't actually do much of this. When we got there, it was starting to get a little damp, although it help off while we had a cup of tea. However, when we headed out on to the course to watch the play, the heavens opened. This wasn't just drizzle, this was full on Noah's Ark rain. Standing water on the greens kind of rain. It got into everything, some of my stuff may still be drying out next week.

We didn't hang around to watch the resumption, heading off to get dry. So the golf was a bit of a letdown but we'll try again some time. After drying off, we had a great dinner at the Fox & Hounds in Riseley. If you're in the Bedfordshire area I'd advise checking them out.

Had Monday off due to anticipating lots of travel. Needed it too because on Monday morning I was extremely crabby due to combination of driving at least 400 miles with another 180 to come, coupled with doing a Drowned Rat impression on the Sunday.

Looking forward to the weekend already, although I won't be looking at cars this time. Instead there's cricket on the Friday, England rugby on the Saturday and Formula 1 action on the Sunday. I shall be glued.

Shiny !

2011-08-31T00:30:00.001+01:00

When I first started playing WoW, one of the things I spotted while reading the manual was the legendary items. I said to myself then, they're shiny, I want one.

It's taken 6 years but :

(click for big pics)

Creating the Sulfuron Hammer :

I didn't equip it in fear of breaking something but here's what the purely purple Sulfuron Hammer would have looked like :

Nice, but not so shiny.

Ooo - what's happened there ? I see the ding of a guild achievement ...

And there we go :-) One achievement for the guild and something very Red And Shiny for me :-)

It's a item from the very first incarnation of Warcraft so the stats are pretty bad but. It's shiny !!!!!

I did most of the farming for bits myself with a few parts bought off the AH but there are a few thanks to in game people :

Allenis for donating a Blood Of The Mountain
Laina for being there when the Eye dropped and for letting me borrow his characters to make raid groups with so I could farm stuff
Benii for the same on the raid group thing
Alex for letting Laina out to play
And Violence Reborn for being awesome.

Don't think I've missed anyone out there :-) I still have a bit of work to do, as I owe the guild 1 Sulfuron Ingot and 1 Blood of the Mountain. But that can keep for when my shoulders aren't aching from too much game time.

It's not quite as tough getting this as when it was The Best Item In The Game as 3 of the bits needed you to be in a 40 person raid to get the item. One part has a 4% drop chance, with one chance per week. Another item is about 33-50% drop chance, again with just one chance per week but 8 (+1 for a pattern) needed. The Blood of the Mountain were easier, it's something like a 10% chance to get one with up to about 10 chances per reset of the instance. You'd need a 40 person raid together though, nowadays one character can go all the way through on their own.

The open world farming is a bit easier too, as there's less competition now that people have moved on to higher level places.

However, just because it's easier than in the old days doesn't make it any less Orange (Orange > Purple) or any less Shiny !

Shopping List

2011-08-27T01:15:00.000+01:00

I have them.

I actually have a few of them now ...

No 1 - car. I'm still doing a "blink after the other guy" there, as the prices haven't dropped yet. But that should change in a week or so when the registration plates move on another step.

No 2 - pooter. This is another one like the car where I haven't been forced into a change of kit ... yet. I've had my eye drawn to a game called The Old Republic, which is a MMO set about 4000 years before the Star Wars films. I'm a Star Wars fanboi, have been for like forever. With the gaming that's been moderated a bit by a stream of mediocre games with Star Wars licenses. This looks like it could be something special though. And if it needs an upgrade to allow me to play it ...

I've had my current machine for quite some time. Looks like I've had my current PC since April 2006, although it's evolved a little bit since then. I'll be going from a dual core Athlon to a quadx2 core Intel, the improvement in cpu power will likely be 10x. Graphics will go from an AMD 4850 to an nVidia 560Ti. Not so much of an improvement there but still appreciable. Memory has its usual 4x improvement, going from 2GB to 8GB, same with the hard disc which will go 250GB to 1TB.

But that's a "wait and see", as I don't know the specs of this forthcoming and awesome looking Star Wars game yet.

No 3 - I've levelled my tank in Warcraft mainly for seeing if I can get a legendary item. Those things only get picked up by a very limited number of people on a server. I picked up one part today :-) And a mate picked up part of what will make a legendary for him too :-)

4% chance for each to drop and we got 2. That's out of 6 chances on the night. That's not all that's needed though. The shopping list this time is :

8 Sulfuron Ingot. I have 1 so far and they only come from one place. Or the server's auction house. If I get the rest of the bits, I'll spend some virtual money.
20 Dark Iron Bar. Sorted :-)
50 Arcanite bar. Got the bits for 17, the rest will need farming sessions.
25 Essence of Fire. Sorted :-)
10 Blood Of The Mountain. Got 1 so far.
10 Lava Core. Sorted :-)
10 Fiery Core. Sorted :-)

So we're still needing Sulfuron Ingots which will be expensive, Arcanite Bars which will need farming and Blood Of The Mountain which will be a 100% pain. Will see how long it takes to get those, hopefully not too long because I want to see my character with the legendary item :-)

Downtime - much needed

2011-08-16T22:10:00.000+01:00

Having a little downtime here at the moment, which is much needed :

Putting mind+soul into what I do at work,
General physical exhaustion,
Old injuries haunting me again,
And new health issues making an appearance.

The first few of those won't change. I don't believe in putting in less than 110% to what I do. Even when outwardly it appears I'm slacking, there will be something else going on. The injuries just get managed and thankfully I still don't need any kind of painkiller medication to handle those.

Nah - it's the new health issues that are slowing me down right now. The issue with my leg is still there, although the ickiness factor has gone. I suspect that means it's healing underneath the scab. Hopefully it won't take too long to heal ... I'm staying away from cricket until it does because the way I go in the field, I'd rip that scab off while diving around. And as it took so long for the scab to form ...

Also having issues with my breathing at the moment. Nothing serious, I suspect I'd be able to run around the block if I needed to. But it's enough that it disrupts me when I'm trying to get to sleep, with the knock on effects that has.

Anyway. Health issues aside ...

Been back into Warcraft lately. It's a curious place to be because of issues that are hitting the raiding at the moment. The raiding we do has a maximum of 10 players involved. I've only really been involved lately when the team is short of people. Dunno why but they don't seem to want me in there as a first choice person. Perhaps that's a perception that's based in paranoia but it's there all the same. Adding to that is much discussion that's happened around reserve players for raids. There's still more to come there, as the rules behind the reserves situation only seem to be only inside the head of the person picking the teams. And as a normal member of the guild sees them, they don't make sense.

Let's just say, it's not the way I'd have run a raiding team. And I'm talking from experience there, having juggled the pots and pans and tried to keep everyone on side and happy. It's not easy. It's not working at the moment in our guild, as there's a few (including me) people who are just not saying we're available right now because we don't know what's going on with the team stuff. With all that stuff going on, I have no real interest in raiding at the moment.

Ok, that's that little bit of angst out the way. Needed to say it.

I feel I've taken my main character (Iceangel) as far as I can take her right now, any improvements to come will come from raiding. I've got no real interest to play the character, although comparing her to when I started in WoW, it's like a God meets a minor imp.

I'm currently playing my warrior, Bashara 3 (the first was a tank on The Maelstrom server, the second was a druid on Auchindoun). Bash has now got to the maximum level and could in theory go through all the instances. There's still a fair bit of work to do as where you'd like to have a couple of gear sets for the different jobs, what I have now is a mix of tank and damage. Which achieves neither ... I'm going for tank stuff first because there's no real challenge involved with putting out enough damage to crush solo content.

Yep. Warcraft has a hold of me at the moment, when I'm not watching stuff off blu-ray/cinema or watching cricket. England no1 in the world ! Woo hoo ! It's well earned. That team has it all right now, with strength in depth too.

Being on hols means I'm more free to buy stuff off Amazon :-) I have trust issues with the postman, so I like to be around if deliveries are likely. This time around it was 4 blu-rays : Sucker Punch, Battle : LA, The A Team and Knight & Day. I've only watched Sucker Punch and Battle : LA so far of those. They had their critics at the cinema but what film doesn't. I enjoyed 'em both the second time around.

Sucker Punch - style over substance. The Real World backstory is still rather lame but the Fantasy World action sequence are amazing out of this world showcases that still work well on the small screen.

Battle : LA - Aliens invade. USMC saves the day. Still loud, explosive and gritty with the viewer not knowing who or what is going to survive. High body count here ... Won't be a classic but is still an excellent action movie. It doesn't try to be what it isn't, it leaves lame comedy aside, it avoids the temptation to go District 9 over the top, it just looks to be an action spectacular. And it succeeds beyond measure. I'll think I'll still be rewatching this one when District 9 is stolen by the Dust Bunnies.

Both excellent films, will the Apes movie (who's gonna say that whole title ?) live up to it ? We'll find out on Thursday.

Signing off for now, time to either dig up Uldum in Warcraft or take the next step in liberating Arulco.

One for the WoW people :-)

2011-08-08T21:19:00.001+01:00

First raid for a while.

And it feels good to get a guild first :-) Here we go :

(click + open for full HD 1080p goodness :-)

PS This is a shameless excuse for getting the screenie somewhere I can put it on the WoW forums :-)

Just finished : How To Survive In A Science Fictional Universe

2011-08-04T20:25:00.000+01:00

Bought this one as the last in a 3 for £x in Waterstones a while ago ...

A while ago ? Guess it's taken that long to read it ! This one is by a relatively new author called Charles Yu who certainly has a style I've not come across while reading for a while.

It's fairly free form and dips very heavily into the world of metaphysics and a certain amount of philosophy. I'll say right here that I'm not the most cerebral person, my brain tends to deal better with the absolutes of engineering and science. I can deal with the fluffier descriptions of an Iain M Banks Culture novel, as it makes sense within itself and stays consistent. This book tends to a making it up as it goes along style.

What's it about ?

How To Survive In A Science Fictional Universe is all about Time Travel, with a hefty dose of metaphysics thrown in. It's broken up into Modules with chapters making up the modules. There's usually a bit of third wall breaking extra narration/explanation thrown in between the chapters.

I hate to say it but in my first days/weeks of reading this one, I was getting a hefty sense of Wanted style deja vu with regards the utter self loathing the main character seemed to have. That turned Wanted into a not particularly pleasant film and it's similar here too. It does liven up though when the Main Event of the novel kicks off.

Main Event - guy returns to his time machine, only to find himself exiting his time machine. Guy shoots future self, time loop is initiated. The rest of the book has the protagonist figuring out how to get himself out of the time loop.

Can't say I enjoyed this book, although a person more into metaphysics or philosophy may love it. It took me a couple of months to read a 233 page book and there's something wrong about that. The author's style and readability leave something to be desired, like can we please have paragraphs less than 2 pages long ?

Hopefully he'll keep on writing, because there's the nucleus of a good author here. But I won't be rushing out to buy the next Charles Yu book. Next on the list is a book full of mindless explosions, courtesy of Space Marines.

Good tech, bad tech

2011-07-26T19:27:00.000+01:00

Random thought for today was on tech ...

Tech is getting ever deeper involved in our lives nowadays, to the point where we'd struggle to do anything without it. My recent pet subject (cars!) shows this to the nth degree, as cars have gone from purely mechanical carburettors and pumps and pulleys and chains to computer control, sensors, motors and all sorts of weird stuff that wasn't invented 10 years ago let alone strong enough to put in a car.

And now there's things like laser spark plugs coming through development ...

Some tech's good, some tech's a waste of time. Cars used to be pretty bombproof, albeit rather temperamental and never really at 100%. Nowadays, the computers keep the noisy bits working at top efficiency but if something ickle breaks ... Problems.

Phones are another example - my latest phone does everything. You could probably hook up a keyboard and screen and use it as a full computer. I could use it as a satnav instead of the clunky iPaq I use now. But ... with its tiny screen and short battery life, I'm not sure I'd want to use it as a satnav. Plus it's not much good for its primary function (it's a PHONE!) when it's being a satnav. Oh and you need a mobile phone signal and available data on your allocation.

Had a play with tech today - and it surprisingly went ok. We have an IT system at work that is much derided (they keep adding stuff before it's ready) but its major achievement is that we can log in from any site belonging to our organisation and get the access we expect. (That's if the hamsters have been fed of course) Could have done with a bit more tech to help out though, as I was jumping between doing notes and clicking a button to make the slides go. A wireless mouse would have been handy.

People go for the shinies ... but don't really consider "Is Shiny Better ?"

Wireless seems to be the next big thing. And it does have its place. Thing is though, that "place" isn't everywhere. Why have a wireless keyboard and mouse if they're used with a desktop type PC that doesn't move ? No point, plus the wireless stuff has limits that aren't an issue with a simple wire.

Connectivity - wireless uses either Infra Red (light we can't see) or radio. Put more than one of those together and you get interference. One IR device triggers off another, one radio causes mysterious jamming. I have to occasionally hit the reset button on my network stuff to make the iTunes audio streaming work ok.

With my wireless mouse (no longer in use), it was actually more restrictive than a wire because it used a sensor with a limited view that needed to keep its IR eye on the mouse. That's tech Gone Bad.

Batteries - most wireless kit works off batteries (duh !). The trouble there is that Strange Things happen when the batteries go down. Like a mouse or keyboard that goes to sleep (usually at the worst time) or a Totalbiscuit headset that deafens him because of those Strange Things.

Some tech is good, some tech is bad.

When you're buying stuff, always ask yourself whether what you're getting is :

Actually going to be of use.
Going to be reliable
Still be in use in 6 months (I don't use my PDA as a PDA any more, just as a satnav)
Too much or just enough

Shiny is good but too shiny can blind you.

And I think you're probably guessing by now that an early start and 4.5 hours (240 miles + lunch) on the road today means my capacity for rational thought is deserting me.

Signing off. Enjoy the shinies ! But don't waste your cash on stuff that's too shiny to be actually useful.

Hanging tough

2011-07-21T20:37:00.000+01:00

Thought I'd put a post in t'other day but it appears to have been eaten ... (or I didn't post it !)

Been struggling lately - I'm into Day 8 of a damaged back. I had 4 days of struggling to move at all which has moderated down to just being stiff with occasional flashes of Ow.

My back is one of my long term injuries, the ones that never really healed. I originally damaged it by trying to bowl too fast for too long, before my body was really ready for the loads I was putting through it. I've never been one for overdoing the training and it's the training that conditions you for using the muscles and techniques in games. So I get injured a lot. The problem in my back hits the lower lumber area (the bit just above your bum) and the issues it causes run down into my legs.

It's one reason why my left leg likes to tense itself up, the nerves controlling the leg get caught up in the restrictions when my back gets awkward one me.

But - after flaring up on Wednesday last week, it finally started releasing on Saturday night allowing me to go back to work on Monday. Despite what you hear about civil servants, there were no sick days involved with the Friday being annual leave :-). In fact, I've not had a sick day in probably 5 years. I don't get bugs too often, plus I'd rather struggle in than mope at home. Moping for me leads to a negative circle where I just feel worse.

I'd much prefer to be in to catch a grin from the Snow Queen, The Boss, Queen B, Mrs Sunshine, Lady P, Aphrodite & Athena and all the rest. Like the Raccoon plus the Scottish Go-To-Girl who I had the chance to grin at yesterday, usually it's just figuring things out over the phone. Yep, there's a few new codenames in there as we've moved around a bit and joined in with another team.

It's still a good place to be, although the old team has broken up somewhat as the organisation and project evolves. We've consistently kept on top of things over the years because we pull together as a team to crack problems professionally. Leaving it to someone else is not considered an option !

Yep - struggle with the back and all, plus I'm approaching the need for another easy chilling out week. No move yet for a car, I'm still waiting out the garages who are not wanting to admit to any prices. Hell - I have time on my side this time and in 6 weeks (End Aug, Start Sept) cars get cheaper because that's when the registration plates change.

No cricket at the moment, with the tiredness it's not a good idea as that's when you get injured. The back is a liability plus I have a wound on my leg (possibly a carry over from last year's shin thing) that only decided to start healing this week.

Thinking cars again

2011-07-11T21:27:00.000+01:00

Been thinking about cars again as I look to change what I drive again ...

Despite temptation from seeing the soft tops my sister tends to drive, I've had a steady stream of medium sized fairly normal cars over the years. Not actually too many cars considering, although it always seems to be the brakes that go wrong. So, what have I had ?

First up, 1982 Fiesta 950pop.

This is the car that I should have learned to drive in, although there wasn't much volunteering to take me out on the roads. Maybe they'd been watching me play Revs (driving game on BBC Micro). Not much really to tell about this one, it gave all it had, which was limited. However, it was off the road for a few months due to a broken brake master cylinder. That's the widget that turns foot pressure into braking effort. And another bit of time off the road due to being rear ended by someone in Sheffield, first time I'd gone any distance on my own. Meh.

Anyway - a puny 950ccs engine made it good for only 78mph, after a year it got upgraded to a significantly better Astra Mk1 1.6 litre.

Which was yellow. Which kinda added to the charm. It also had so much rust on the front valence (the bit under the bumper) that I'd say it had a beard. A 90bhp engine combined with Old School design (really light, minimal protection) meant it went nice n fast. Which worked out to a sub 10 second 0 to 60 time and decent overtaking power. It was a true wolf (ok, maybe wolf cub) in old banger clothing. It could also double as a van for the uni hall shop, one time having about £700 worth of sweeties & drinks in the boot. Enough to make it go Grindy over speed bumps.

This one was easy and cheap to fix, with me fixing most of what went wrong on it. Which to be honest, was a fair bit. However, despite what broke it just kept on ticking. It sadly had to go though because encroaching rust meant it was falling apart from the inside out. It died well, literally in a pillar of flame. It was sold on to a colleague/friend of my dad's, who was doing welding on it. In his garage. With the car window open. Cue welding spark hitting seat and WHOOMPH !

Cars (and sofas) are made differently these days.

The Astra got me through university (cheaply) and then we did somewhat of a reshuffle of cars due to :
Mum's Belmont was making her arms fall off,
Sister's Astra GTE soft top had just had an engine blow
(when people get nervous about "cambelts", this is why - broken cambelt tends to = dead engine)
Me needing something reliable as I started working

So I took over my mum's Belmont SRi, my sister borrowed my Astra until she got something better and my mum really got the short straw by getting a nasty, NASTY little Peugeot. (I know - I drove it once or twice when I couldn't avoid it). The Belmont was the first car I bought with my own cash, having got a "You're just starting working" loan from the bank :-).

The Belmont was a really sweet car. It was the last of a dying breed, being catalytic convertor free. I have to say, I'm not a supporter of catalytic convertors. They destroy fuel economy and hamper power. They eat precious metals and have a limited life. They're unnecessary. Anyway, 1.8 litre fuel injected for 130bhp made something pretty nippy and it did over 45mpg without trying.

But (there's always a but). I got the car a year after tearing up my shoulder and got it from my mum because she was having major issues with the heaviness of the steering (no power steering). So I had to switch to something lighter. I think there was a bit of "it's not my car" in there too, with me wanting to choose & buy my own.

That "My Car" was a Rover 420 Exec Limited Edition. Which translated to it having a couple of extra toys and leather seats. This was slightly slower than the Belmont but seriously gobbled petrol. It got a 32mpg average. It was also horrendously expensive to keep on the road, with bits falling off all the time. I drew the line at Alternator Number 2, which was a genuine Rover part which failed after only 18 months. That's on top of a pair of broken valves which cost £1000 to repair. And there was a lot more than that which broke.

Yep - horrendously unreliable, which is one reason why the new MG is most certainly not on my list of potential cars.

The Rover nightmare lasted a bit longer than I'd hoped, as I'd set my heart on the Ultra Shiny Ford Puma. It's a small sports coupe based on the Fiesta fitted with a bigger engine and improved chassis. It took a while for a Puma to come to the used market though, people tend to hold on to them because they love 'em.

Ahh - Silver Puma, ultra shiny and totally awesome. Handled everything I asked of it, including a house move. More speed than the Rover, plus 38-42 mpg. A hatchback gave it plenty of flexibility too. Loved that car but after 80k miles, it was pretty much done. I'd bought it at 20k miles and the breakages started happening at about 65k. I finally let it go at 85k miles, when it was getting near the scrap heap. The brakes were almost gone, plus the body was starting to rust.

Hence a bit of an emergency buy, with me switching the Puma for a Focus ST170. That's the sporty version again, a little bit faster on paper but not really feeling that. The Focus has done well again, staying reliable except for a broken inlet manifold.

But - I'm feeling those itchy feet again, looking for something different. What shall it be ? CR-Z is out of the running (it wants to be a Puma but is UGLY and not fast enough). Prius is curious but I have misgivings over the chassis, it's looking like little Lexus at the moment but that depends on the garages having a reality check over what they're asking.

To the webpages !

Been reading ... Surface Detail

2011-07-05T22:04:00.000+01:00

Been waiting for this one for quite a while and it definitely didn't disappoint.

Latest finished book is Surface Detail, the latest Culture novel from Iain M Banks. Despite the disappointment of Matter, I was hoping for great things from this one. And it lived up to that too.

I find the most enjoyable action scifi books tend to be those that go somewhat like a rollercoaster, where you have no idea whatsoever what's coming next. What's in this one ?

The central theme is Death and what comes next. The Culture universe is sufficiently high tech such that many sentients are walking around with "soulkeeper" type devices, designed to preserve their mind state. The purpose, to give them a bit of backup in case they die (when they're "recanted" into a new living body) or to guarantee them a trip to the Afterlife. With the Afterlives being simulated virtual realities.

Trouble is, in the Culture universe there's a lot of Afterlives ... including Hells.

Won't say much more about the plot cos of Spoilers (mental picture of a River Song waggling a finger) but will say that this is a Culture novel back to its best form. Lots of Science Fiction on show here and plenty of Culture. More than a few ships including a highly psychotic warship who enjoys his work far far too much.

And what really puts the magic in, a significant part of the story is told from the point of view of a non Culture person who in partnership with one of the Ships narrates the book. It keeps the Science Fiction tech readable and out of the Technobabble domain.

Most Highly Recommended, although I wouldn't choose this as the first Culture book you read. That honour falls to Consider Phlebas because it introduces the Culture universe. Excession is also a major Culture highlight.

So that's Surface Detail, which will be added to the "Likely Read Again" list.

Next book is by Charles Yu, titled "How To Survive In A Science Fictional Universe". I'm only 80 pages into this 233 page book and I'm having thoughts that it's channelling a bit of Wanted. That's a film that co-starred Angelina Jolie. It had its moments (most of them with Angelina's character) but was crippled by a streak of extreme self loathing. This book has a fair bit of that self loathing.

Struggling through it in the hope there's a good book in there trying to get out. I suspect it's suffering from the contrast with Surface Detail.

SD : fun and with technobabble translated by that narrator partnership
HTSIASFU : self loathing and with technobabble turned up to 11.

I shall finish it, if only to give a fair "I've actually read this" opinion to people I know are curious about it ...

Thunder Lords

2011-06-29T20:07:00.001+01:00

Yesterday was a very long day. But very enjoyable and definitely worth it.

I went on a work trip to Lords cricket ground (the true home of cricket) to watch the Inter Services Twenty 20 championship. First up was RAF vs Royal Navy, which was a close one won by the superior fielding of the RAF. Was a bit disappointing watching the Navy fielding, as they allowed 1's to turn into 2's and allowed singles which really shouldn't have been runs. If I'd been on the field, I'd have gone very quiet due to Anger. And I'm strangely a noisy one in the field ...

So after one game out of the way, I head off to the shop for some teasing of myself looking at £300 bats ... And to buy more stuff :
New mug
Lords shirt
Mini-ball
Rules of Cricket linen poster

Was going to buy a fridge magnet too (I collect them) but I wasn't about to put a Prise-It-Off-Shelf-With-Crowbar fridge magnet in the same bag as an iPod. The fridge magnet (or the iPod) may never have been the same again.

I picked the right moment to hunt Stuff - while I was in there the heavens opened. This wasn't just a deluge, this was the beginning of the Great Flood. One of my Facebook (send us an email and I'll tell you who I am on there) pics was subtitled "Expecting imminent arrival of HMS Noah's Ark".

For an idea of how hard it was raining here's a bit of BBC iPlayer video (UK only) from yesterday's Tennis ... (and Youtube for everyone else!)

It was enough to keep them off the field for a few hours, so we lost the middle game of the scheduled 3. The final game was RAF vs Army, with the RAF continuing the excellent fielding of the first game. We also had the highly comical situation of a runner being required. That's always good for chaos. Unfortunately we didn't see all of the last game because it was approaching bedtime for the coach driver and we had to go home so he could get tucked in.

(I suspect we'll be using a different coach firm next year ...)

The coach was bizarre actually. Not only did he find the most traffic possible (we were late to the game), he also stopped in 2 service stations. For all of about 5 seconds before setting off again. Bizarre !

As well as the cricket, we get a chance to meet up with old colleagues again. Good company makes the day. And Lords is a fantastic arena, at most other stadiums we'd have been going home after the deluge instead of seeing if they could get the third game in.

PS One of my offbeat theories got more evidence - the more raingear people wear, the more bedraggled they appear when it gets wet.

More car nuttiness

2011-06-24T17:46:00.001+01:00

Escaped from work earlier today and due to general traffic conditions, I ended up in the centre of Bristol.

Which is the side of the city that the Lexus garage lives ... Dangerous.

Actually had a look at them this time, although after finding out what I wanted to know I engaged the "Sort yourselves out before I consider talking to you".

The Lexus I'm after only came out at the end of last year, so used ones are only just starting to hit the market. You'd think that with a few thousand miles on the clock, they'd be a bit cheaper than new. Let's have a peek at what's out there :

New - option I'd go for is Cruise Control + sensible colour.
Base price - £25,200 (with leather)
Sensible colour - £510
Cruise control - £510 (satnav is not wanted but would be an extra £1850)
Total - £26,220, with satnav that would be £28,070.

There's a couple of CT's with leather in a Bristol Lexus and a bunch more appearing around the country on the used market. I saw 2 CT's today, one was £25.5k (not leather), the other was £27.5k.

That's only £570 off the price of a new one !!!! For a car with 5500 miles on the clock.

No thanks - general attitude to that is : "I will only set foot in your shop when you've sorted your prices out". With the price being so close, the only advantage to getting Used is that you get your toy NOW, instead of in 3 months. The major disadvantages are that there are miles on the car already plus you're forced to have a particular colour.

And the £27.5k car is yellow.

I have had a yellow car (and actually kinda liked it). The yellow showed a great contrast with the rustbeard that car had. I guess it's better than Prius White.

The really sad thing is that I had to go to the garage to find out how much they are looking for on this car, there seems to be a conspiracy among the Lexus garages where all but a couple of the prices for CT's have gone "POA". Which usually translates to "If you have to ask, you can't afford it". Let's just say - I can afford it, I just don't recognise there being any value in what they're asking and there's therefore no reason for me to entertain thoughts of spending money.

And I currently have the luxury of time, which I intend to indulge :-)

PS Also in the news - Return of the SNOW QUEEN !!!! Good for us, good for the IT Girl. Happy days.

Daft advert claims - debunk time !

2011-06-22T00:30:00.002+01:00

Just caught an ad for energy saving tyres that promised to save 80 litres of fuel over the life of the car.

Sounds ok - What's that mean exactly though ?

My Focus does between 28 and 36 miles to the Imperial Gallon. Call it 32. That's 7 miles per litre. (7.04 - close enough). So over the life of the tyre, which I'd expect to be 20,000 miles on the fronts, that's an extra 560 miles.

The 20,000 miles should take 2857 litres of fuel, with the oh-so-green energy saving tyres it'll take 2777. Petrol here costs about 133.9p/litre, so those 80 litres saved works out to about £107. I'll do those 20,000 miles over just under 3 year so that's a saving of £36 per year.

That's kinda - meh. And it's even worse with the rear tyres as they did 40,000 miles.

Mind you, I paid £80 per corner on my last set of tyres, so that £107 saved actually means Free Tyres ! Probably at the cost of having less grip around corners though, like my current pair of Famous Brand (not saying who - ads = bad) tyres on the back of the Focus.

With the next car it's better, because it's expected to do double the economy. 68mpg instead of 32. Not looked at the Next Car yet, although it's just the other side of Bristol. Friday pm is looking like a good opportunity to go peek, plus I'm having a sense of looking to out cagey the apparently cagey garages. I'm feeling a bit like Truck Roadkill at the moment, so I'm shepherding my energy carefully at the mo with just crashing out in the evenings. Gaming is really suffering to the point where it goes several days between putting the pooter in Game Mode.

Saying that though, Otis Cookies from the canteen were Awesome earlier. It even resulted in one of those Crazy Just Bounced Off Wall Emails to the long-suffering Mrs Sunshine.

I guess the lesson which I just distracted myself from is : Don't trust adverts. When they make a claim that sounds believable, see if you can work out what it actually means and from there, whether the claim is actually relevant to you.

Updates

2011-06-19T23:56:00.000+01:00

:-)

To the garage ! Or not ...

2011-06-17T17:48:00.000+01:00

Was intending to take a trip to the Lexus garage today to have a look at cars ... Didn't happen though, at least not today.

I now own my current car (had the "your loan is finished" letter come through) so that's the last of the barriers to changing now out of the way. The change is getting closer, as a few things are ticking away :

The Focus is out of its "Just Been Serviced" perkiness and has slowed down a bit. It still has its power but seems less free with it.
The rear brakes will need changing within the year due to pads & discs wearing out. What is it with me and brakes on cars ? I don't think I'm that heavy on them ...
Car tax - shouldn't be an issue as there's 5 months left but see below.
Impending mechanical failures ... The paranoia is ticking away saying that summat's gonna break.
Continuing pressure to raise base interest rates.

I still need to verify the choice with a test drive but it's looking fairly certain that my next car will be a Lexus CT200h SE-L with a couple of extras (see link for Toy Count + Pics). I was thinking that it would have to be a new model, as it's too new a car for used ones to be hitting the market in any reasonable quantity. However ...

Dunno if you've seen the news reports (how could you miss them !) about a massive earthquake in Japan ... One of the consequences is that the much vaunted Just In Time manufacturing principle falls to bits when the supplier base doesn't have the resilience through diversity to support operations after a disaster like the earthquake. That's lead to extended delivery times for new stuff as they run out of parts.

If that sounds a bit callous and unfeeling, it's unintended. I was one of the people keeping an eye on the news with fingers crossed that the casualty reports didn't increase. I just hope they get themselves back on their feet quickly and one sign of that will be that they crack the problems that lead to these extended delivery times. That will mean that Normality has triumphed over Earthquake Chaos.

Drawback No 1 of buying New : delivery lead time of over 3 months.

With that amount of time (possibly more), I have to wonder if I'd be buying another 6 months worth of car tax for my Focus (£143) due to the new one not turning up before the current car tax expires.

Drawback No 2 : Off the forecourt depreciation.

It's a fact that as soon as you drive your car away from the garage, it's lost a fair percentage of its value. Getting an ex demonstrator or other car with a few thousand miles on the clock means the garage takes that first few £1000 of lost value.

The penalty - you know that your bum isn't the first occupant of the driver's seat. You know, after owning 6 used cars I think I can live with that. And it's not like you can thrash a car to death inside 5000 miles, it would actually be an achievement in a CVT hybrid ...

Drawback No 3 : New costs more.

Even after the depreciation, it looks like the finance terms aren't particularly favourable ... Let's have a look :

Lexus CT200h SE-L with pretty paint + Tailgating Enhancement (aka Cruise Control)
Cost £26,220 new on the road.
The finance terms I'd go for include a big deposit (£9177), 10,000 miles a year and 3 year loan term. They use a wizz called Guaranteed Future Value that defers part of the loan until after the 3 years.
Cost - £9,177 early, £260 for 35 months and £12,141.90 of Guaranteed Future Value for a total of £30,392.

Guaranteed Future Value sounds great until you realise - there's probably interest going on it and that £12k means you're needing to set aside £4k per year (£333 per month), although that could be earning interest in savings until it's needed. That makes approx £593 per month going towards the car. That's more than my mortgage !

How about used ?
There's a CT200h in Swindon with 4000 miles on the clock that's listed at £25.5k. Similar spec to what I have my eye on, it would actually cost slightly more if new. Finance info :
£25.5k - £9,177 deposit again, £526 for 36 months, no GFV to pay at the end. Total of £28,191 on the same interest rate.

You can probably tell I'm going right orf the idea of being tied into a GFV contract ... Especially as it adds on an extra £2000 that I don't think a savings account would make up. Can I afford the £526 and big deposit ? You betcha :-) Although it does mean I'll shelve the PC upgrade plan for a little while longer. I'd probably do the loan over 4 years for £412 per month and £29k total.

So :

Buy new and be the first to own the car ... after waiting 3 months for it to arrive. I dunno about you but I prefer to play with my toys as soon as I buy them.

Buy used - at work we used to have a saying : Cheaper, Faster, Better. Well - a used one is cheaper, I'd get it much sooner and it would be More SHINY ! We don't hear that saying so much now because the procurement buzzword it belonged to went out of fashion a few years ago. It still applies though.

And there just so happens to be a blue mini-Lexus waiting at Bristol Lexus for me to have a look. Maybe after work on Monday because I finished too late today (CURSE YOU WORK NETWORK PROVIDERS !) to get there and back for a chill out ahead of driving tonight.

Books everywhere ?

2011-06-08T23:24:00.000+01:00

I'm a Culture fan.

They're the centrepiece of a series of books by Iain M. Banks, starting with the outstanding Consider Phlebas where the benevolent Culture dominate the galaxy. There's 3 distinct type of being that inhabit this universe, humans, drones and Minds. The Minds run the universe for the benefit of the humans and are the ones firmly In Charge. I'll not say too much more there as Consider Phlebas gives an excellent introduction to the Culture. Excession is the next best.

I've just bought the newest ... Surface Detail. I'm amazed it took me this long to find a copy, it's been out in paperback for just about a fortnight now and I've literally only seen the paperback in one shop ... (Waterstones at Bristol's Cribbs Causeway). Got it now and in a 3 for 2 offer where I found 2 easily and then took half an hour to choose a third.

New books :
Iain M Banks - Surface Detail - 3 for 2
Chris Wraight - Battle of the Fang - 3 for 2
Charles Yu - How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe - 3 for 2
(yes - I was really struggling to find a 3rd!)
E.E. Doc Smith - Triplanetary - Hay
R.A. Heinlein - Between Planets - Hay
R.A. Heinlein - Beyond This Horizon - Hay
Larry Niven - Convergent Series - Hay

While away for the week I managed to read :

Ben Bova - Exiles Trilogy

This one continues Ben Bova's favourite theme of near future scifi. The basic premise is that scientists in fields including genetic engineering have been identified as a disruptive influence and the world government has decided to get rid of them.

The trilogy weighs in at about 480 pages (shorter than a lot of single books) and tells the tale of the originals escaping from Earth, the machinations of the second generation and finally the arrival of the last generation. They're ok as books go but they don't develop as deeply as other authors. That's good and bad, some authors can flog the dead horse and drag out a story for far too long. With these, there's not really enough meat on the bones.

Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

This is the second novel in the Warhammer 40k Gaunt's Ghosts series. It's a bit disjointed because the narrative jumps from short segments on Monthax to what amount to flashbacks focusing on one of the Ghosts at a time.

It works after a fashion but the focus is not as tight as in the first book in the series. Hoping for better from the third in the series (Necropolis) which I'll read after gapping to different authors for a couple. It kept me reading because the characters are interesting enough for you to want to know what happens with them. The Warhammer 40k universe is brutal enough such that anything can happen, no character is safe.

There's a contrast here between Ghostmaker and Exiles. Ghostmaker gives a good look at individual characters during their flashbacks but the narrative suffers for it. Exiles keeps a reasonable narrative going but at the cost of limited characters.

Alistair McLean - HMS Ulysses

Last book I managed to read while away is set in World War Two and is centred around the fictional ship HMS Ulysses, an advanced heavy cruiser charged with defending the convoys of war materiel being shipped to Russia.

This book is quite possibly more brutal than the Warhammer 40k books. At least in WH40K the characters get some respite, here there is none. Everything is against the crew of the Ulysses, including the elements, the naval hierarchy and not least, the Germans.

We should never forget what we ask of our Servicemen and women. Books like HMS Ulysses bring home the fact that conditions they face can be every bit as bad (or worse!) than what we read in books or see on the screen. And they don't have the option of putting the book down when they've had enough.

If you can find a copy of this one, it's well worth a read. Very instructive.

What's next ? I had started Triplanetary by E.E. Doc Smith but with the arrival of Surface Detail, I'm swapping to that because it fits the A to Z that I'm a bit too close to schedule on, having read 11 of 26 in 5 months.

Last note - I've reawakened the techie blog with a post about that Easytether app. Managed to avoid using too much GeekSpeak too :-)

Back again, off again

2011-06-05T22:54:00.001+01:00

Hmm - week away, where to start ?

The Crazies, including the Sleepypete, Cyberkitten, Craziequeen, Bionicdwarf, RCA and the HamsterKat went to Herefordshire last week under the pretence of visiting the Hay festival. We were holed up in a cottage near Clohengar. Well recommended that cottage, although with 6 of us the single loo was in high demand.

So - here's a few numbers from the stats junkie :

2.5 books read (was in the middle of one)
4 books bought (all written before I was born I believe)
5 cds bought (technically*)

*Yes - I went to Hay and bought more cd's than books. Maybe that's a sign of Modern Times. Or it could have been that 2 of the cds were for RCA and were part of a 4 for £10 deal.

Much music listened to
Lots of tasty dinners from Craziequeen and RCA
159 tracks added to the library (I bought a couple more things after coming back)
135 miles from me
450 megabytes of internet consumed (see gremlins below)
101 chavs spotted (at least !) in Hereford
6 movies watched
1 cathedral and 1 chapel visited
1.1 castles scouted (Hay castle only counts 0.1)
1 tour guide lusted over (BD and CK have pictures)
Too many biscuits bought (I had to bring some uneaten ones back)
And a bunch of technical gremlins taken out back and shot

Fun, relaxing week. Really don't want to go back to work tomorrow. Although that last could have something to do with me taking a trip down south for the day. I got my prep for that out the way before we broke up.

Bit more detail ?

I love helping people out (sometimes whether they like it or not, which can get me into trouble) and big aspect of that this week was the internet connection ... Since I changed to an Android phone (SonyEricsson X10i mini) I've been finding new stuff it can do. This last week's new thing was being able to provide an internet connection :

Take 1 Android phone (with slightly dodgy in-the-country 3g signal)
Connect to laptop
Apply software to both (Easytether Lite)
Laptop can now speak to internet
Peek in wifi networking setup, think wotdat ?
Create "Ad-hoc wifi network"
And share the phone connection across to the wifi network
Voila - several laptops seeing the internet through my phone.

There are limits to the Easytether Lite software, in that the free version doesn't support https or a few other things. So no logging into MSN Messenger or sites that need a certain level of authentication. For everything else, it worked perfectly. It's so useful that I'm seriously considering paying the £6 to upgrade my Lite copy to a bought copy. The massive advantage of this software is that it works without breaking into the phone to activate "Root" access. Translation - no warranty worries. I highly recommend Easytether.

I did find other wibblies (Windows issues) going with the sharing though, I may well add these to the Techie blog (linked in blogger profile*) at a later date because I'll be using GeekSpeak for it.
*(it was in the links list but I removed it because I'd not added anything to it for almost a year)

I could do with another holiday now to recover from the last.

Trainee plumber

2011-05-27T22:18:00.000+01:00

Think I'm going to turn myself into a trainee plumber soon.

The jobs seem to be adding up ... They're fairly minor at the moment but being just minor doesn't mean they don't have to be done at some point. What needs fixing ?

1 - taps in kitchen. No big deal, just the hot tap sticks open and needs a towel in hand to close it. No big deal, it's not like it's locked shut and I'm needing to boil water to do the dishes.

2 - washing machine. I suspect I'm going to have to replace it again on the usual "They don't make 'em like they used to." It's about 6 years old, so just long enough out of the guarantee for the built in gremlins to come out of cryosleep. No big deal in changing over a washing machine, although see No 3.

3 - washing machine fittings. The cold water shut off works ok but the hot water shut off weeps. Or rather, if there's nothing on the other end it'll spray. Answer, don't take the thing off the other end. Will have to take a good look at this when I change washing machine (I haz plan).

4 - Dripdripdrippy cold water tank. Switched out the ballcock & valve, no result. Still dripped. Then I got muscly ... Bending the bar got the level down :-)

5 - Loo flusher. This is the current "needs doing urgently" because it's slightly icky. What I'll need to do is replace the siphon thingywidget that makes the flush work. I have a backup plan that's keeping things ok for now but I'm just restricted to 2 litres of flushing water rather than 6-8. I have the part I need to fit but will need to fight Old Bits (think - rusted in place) to do the switchover.

But not yet, cos I'm away for a week :-)

The loo flusher is the only one of those that really needs fixing NOW but it's a little daunting in what I'll need to do :
Cistern emptied of water.
Prevent new water getting into cistern.
Take cistern off wall.
Switch over siphony thing.
Put cistern back.
Cross fingers and hope for no leaks.

I'll get it done some time but I have a feeling I'll need to stock up on WD40.

Oh and Blogger is pants right now. The occasional logout it'll do for you was ok (if annoying) in the past but is now yet more annoying because broken formatting means you can't log back in as easily as before. Why change stuff if the change is for the negative ?

Surprise runabout

2011-05-21T18:48:00.000+01:00

With the impending car change thing, I've started taking more interest in the freebie local paper. Ok, probably not much point in that because the car ads in there are all Used car and I'm looking at new. But there is the occasional story in there worth reading. This week's Wednesday paper arrived today*.

*Current paper boy waits for rain or Saturday. Dunno why but he doesn't get the job out the way when he could, plus if there's a chance to deliver while it's raining he will. He'll also leave the paper hanging half out the letterbox so it gets wet. Never did that in my day ... honest guv ! (I was a paper boy for a few years, which is where overdeveloped leg muscles came from)

Anyway - today's paper. What's of note there ?

Only a Bristol Motor Show :-) Ooo - shinies.

I hadn't been round the centre of Bristol for a while, so this would be a good excuse to combine having a look in record & games & book shops for stuff I bought already with having a look at all the various cars on the market at the moment.

Come into Cabot and what's on show : Lexus ... Toyota ... Dangerous. Lexus were closer so I got caught talking to one of their girls first. They were in Brand Uniform mode, 3 bottle blonde ladies in matching outfits. (Erm - wasn't I supposed to be looking at cars ?) Anyway - it looked good and the little lady who ended up talking to me for far longer than I thought I'd be chatting was very articulate and coped with my provoking questions quite well.

Not provoking as in "this car is rubbish" but more "why is this car better than the Prius ?" There's been a lot written about both cars and at least half of that is just plain wrong. Lexus Lady achieved something today, I've put the CT200h back as an equal to the Prius instead of it lagging behind. Seems like some of that Brand Loyalty comes from a sense of "WE LOVE OUR LEXUS" from the people who work for them.

So the odds just shifted back to 45-45-10 Lexus-Prius-Honda. Gotta say, the Lexus does look good in blue. I could have a Prius in a week with just delivery miles on it but 95% of Prius are white. Meh. White's not a bad (non)colour except when it's the only colour you see something in.

Who else was there ?

The Bristol Motor Show is being held in the open air around the fairly new Cabot Circus shopping centre in the middle of Bristol. There's not too much space in there but there's enough for the more popular models to go on show. Lexus just had their CT200h on show and to be honest, that's the only one in their range that is in reach of most.

Toyota had their Prius, Aygo and Yaris models on show. All small city cars. Only interested in the Prius of those, although their red looked good. Ford were up next, showing off their Fiesta, Ka and Focus. The current Fords still do the brand proud with tightly packaged workmanlike quality. The Fords are good with feelings of "it ain't gonna fall apart" but don't really inspire. Same with their staff, who were enjoying their day out in the fresh air.

Lexus Ladies - we're keen, we love our little car and think you will too
Ford kiddies - gosh this makes a change from being in the showroom all day

Guess which of those I'd rather buy from and it confirms the impression I got from Lincoln Lexus.

Who else ? Jaguar were the next stand and I avoided them like the Plague due to potential for the IWANT factor to take over. Jaguar make very sexy (and rather expensive) cars.

This took me to the Galleries for a little interlude of looking around the usual shops wondering if they have stuff I haven't bought yet. (Usually it's stuff that they don't sell anyway). Outside the Galleries was Mitsubishi. Shiny but way too big. Got no need for a 4x4 so I have no interest in looking at them.

Gotta say, the Alfa Giuletta looked very Shiny inside and out. Much shinier than their MiTo. The Giuletta impressed me actually, whereas the MiTo looked a bit tacky. Wouldn't have an Alfa though because the chances of getting through a warranty period without a claim on those is slim to remote to nonexistent. There's probably more chance of me bowling again than one of those staying reliable.

There were more cars on show, from people like VW and Hyundai but not that much I'm actually looking at. Nissan brought their supercar along with a few 4x4 and crossovers. Same comment as Mitusbishi. It might be shiny at what it does but that purpose is the complete opposite to what I want.

Good day out all told.

Didn't buy anything (as usual) but it got me out the house for a bit (never a bad thing). And it's got me a bit more info too, with me reminding myself what the little Lexus is actually like instead of what the car reviewer people tell me it's like.

Must ... do ... test ... drives ...

Old car, new car

2011-05-18T23:52:00.001+01:00

Once upon a time there was a company that made decent cars.

Not special cars, not terrible cars. Just solid, reliable cars that did their job. They do cars of all sizes, trucks too. Nothing really spectacular, well - not often. They weren't a company for producing the awesome but then again we've rarely seen anything really bad from them. (Bug Eyed Scorpio is one I can think of)

Cars for everyone.

And then they take the humble Fiesta and make something rather special out of it :

(piccy was taken a few years ago when snow was a bit of a novelty ...)

That's my old Puma in the foreground. The Puma started life as a little Fiesta and then got a bit of attention on the oily bits to make it feel like a gokart. It got a bigger engine with Clever Stuff that gave it great power at tickover and at high revs.

(Yeah - with great power comes great responsibility. But that's boring. We want to go round corners at Silly Speeds. Responsibility be damned)

Oh and it also got a futuristic body that had a tendency to make small children go "MOMMY MOMMY IT'S A SPACESHIP". Yes. Remembering that still brings out the Silly Grin. (A semi photographic memory and occasional perfect recall has advantages)

Best car I've had so far. The Focus struggles in comparison. It's a shame that people like Ford aren't making the Puma any more, like it's a shame that my sister's Toyota MR2 isn't made now. To get similar, you need hot versions of normal road cars.

But they're not special.

All the people who I know have had a Puma have something in common. They all want another one. And with cars, that's very rare. You might take a second Focus to replace your current one but that's because it fits a need. It's not a "IWANTIT", it's a "I suppose it'll do". It's a decision made with the head instead of the heart.

Ahh - time to scan rumours and see if a decent version of Honda's CR-Z is on the way. I'm looking at 3 cars at the moment. Lexus are now a distant 3rd because it looks like they botched it with the CT200h. Toyota's Prius is my head's current favourite with its hybrid geek magnet. But I think the heart is hoping for a faster CR-Z to come along.

We shall see. I suspect a Prius would draw out a few "IT'S A SPACESHIP!" of it's own :-).

Spaz-ing out

2011-05-15T13:32:00.000+01:00

No, I'm not being rude to disadvantaged members of society, I'm looking to talk about my latest Big Game.
(warning - this post is a Scattergun post)

Space
Pirates
And
Zombies

Aka SPAZ. It's an indie game that's actually still in development, although you wouldn't know it from the current package. I'm almost saying "final" package there because "final" is the perceived quality of the current beta. To non pooter people, there's several stages to software development :

Alpha - bits work, other bits aren't included yet. Bit like getting the engine into the car but not having a gearbox. It's the way things are done - finish bits & polish them and then move on to the next thing.
Beta - everything's just come all together and it's representive of a finished product. This is the testing phase where you hunt bugs and make sure it all works together.
Release Candidates - not everyone does this but people like Microsoft do it for pre-release versions of their Windows stuff. There's only so much you can do in a lab, for really complicated stuff you have to expose it to users.

And finished product that goes on sale. To be honest, far too many software people never get beyond Beta and some even try to release Alpha rubbish (Sports Interactive's CM3). I'd definitely describe Dawn of War II as Beta quality, I've not got too deep into that because it keeps crashing. Waste of too much money.

If you think I'm blaming developers there, think again. It's often the publishers that force software on to the market long before it's ready. Or, like Lucasarts, they will refuse to allow patches out that fix crash bugs (KOTOR).

Oh hell - I'm going way off the point again. This was supposed to be about SPAZ !

Here's one link - http://spacepiratesandzombies.com/
That's the site run by the developers. There's a big hefty Buy It Now on there which would take you to Impulse, which appears to be Stardock in disguise. I'd forgotten I'd had dealings with Stardock before when boredom overrode prejudice making me buy GalCiv. The prejudice was there because of the attitude of the GalCiv developers on usenet forums, you should only trash other people's games on forums if you have a good one of your own. And I thought Galciv sucked. Didn't even finish a game cos it was as tedious as yesterday's FA Cup final.

Difference between watching cricket and football - cricket you're waiting for something to happen but you're quite able to do something else while it's on because the action happens when the bowler lobs the ball. Football, you're also waiting for something to happen but you have to stay glued to it in case it does. There's a subtle difference there that you'd only get if you're a fan of cricket. Or rugby.

Did I warn about a scattergun approach ? Doh - time to add a comment up top.

Space Pirates And Zombies - top down shooter with space ships. And zombies, although I haven't seen the zombies yet (I'm using selective amnesia with the TotalBiscuit preview). Some games I classify as tedious. Other's as playable, more as Pretty Darn Good (I'm selective with what I buy) and the occasional one as "OMG I have a sore neck".

The last one comes from firing the game up, doing a few missions and then before you realise, it's gone dark outside, your neck has frozen and you think you should have gone to bed ages ago because you gotta get up for work in an hour and on top of that, you forgot to have dinner.

Addictive personalities need watching. Or alarm clocks. I'd actually prefer the "watching" choice of those two especially if she was pretty.

Moo2 is the original "OMG I Have Sore Neck" game and Master Of Magic was up there too. Warcraft has it up to a point. It demands you do Just ... One ... More ... Quest ... but suffers from running out of things to do. How about SPAZ ?

It has a storyline mode tying it together, which points you towards exploring the galaxy. Early days for me so far but what I've seen so far is HARD. I finally beat the Graveyard mission last night after much bashing of head on desk. It gives just enough to keep the gamer interested while keeping the complexity down. A lot of modern games have gone so overcomplicated that they're just Not Fun to play (Football Manager).

Dungeon Overlords on Facebook (which I quit just not too long before Sony online gaming imploded) fell foul of the overcomplication. So much depth included in there but it got tedious and boring to play, especially with resource leaks (game slowing down when you Did Stuff) endemic. I never actually got to the deeper parts of Dungeon Overlord because the Time Invested vs Enjoyment Gained was not equalling Fun.

I'm enjoying it so far. At 25% off (£9.50ish) for the "Beta" version, it's a bargain. As far as beta goes, I've not made it crash yet and I'm fairly happy with the balance and gameplay. I think I've got my value out of it already. Can't talk too much about gameplay here with words but there's a "WTF is ... ?" by TotalBiscuit that's linked on the SPAZ site.

Take a peek - you may end up getting drawn in by TB's video too. Although I will say, he's a great commentator but sounded like he wanted to get let off the leash as narrator ...

Looking for magic

2011-05-09T00:06:00.000+01:00

I've been reading stuff again.

Not so much actual paper books, although I am a little way through Ben Bova's Exiles trilogy at the moment. No, I've been reading alternate timelines written by a fella who goes by the forum name : Whatisinaname. That's a link to him on an Alternate History board. To get to most of his stuff, you'll need a login on there.

So what's it about ? I first got to reading his Star Trek non-Federation Timeline. He'll take scifi and then introduce something different ... For example, his Non Federation Timeline is set in the same Star Trek universe we know from the various TV series but the POD (Point Of Divergence) is that the Brits went ahead with the HOTOL project.

HOTOL was a Space Shuttle competitor that would have seen a single stage to orbit space craft that landed and took off mostly like a conventional aircraft. If it had survived, I bet we'd have seen a lot more space development than we have from a rather sluggish NASA. There's actually a Son Of HOTOL in development at the moment called Skylon. (Link to Reg report) Crossing fingers that this gets off the ground. So to speak.

I'm digressing again - the Non Fed timeline takes the events of Star Trek but instead of a unified earth, we have 2 major powers. There's the Royal Space Corps led by the Brits and the Commonwealth, with the UESPA taking the place of the Star Trek Federation. It's well worth a read if you've got an age to read through it all.

Gotta say, his English could use a bit of work but his ability to keep the narrative interesting is much better than some established authors I could name. I've just finished reading his British Stargate thread and am eagerly waiting for more.

What's that about magic ?

There's a very famous quote : "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

The very best sci fi authors don't attempt to explain how their stuff works, it just does. To the reader, descending into technobabble tends to take the gloss off the magic. It feels like padding to flesh out the episode to the 42 minutes demanded by the TV execs. Better stories establish their rules early on and then play with narrative within those rules. Or they'll just ignore rules and make it up as they go along a la Doctor Who.

But even there, Doctor Who has certain rules it will follow. And a fez.

The Jack Campbell Lost Fleet books are a great example of keeping the scifi magic, as are the David Weber books up to a point. In the Lost Fleet, the equipment rules are established early :
Ships run on fuel cells, giving them limited range - cue needing to stop off along the way to resupply
Weapons are grapeshot, missiles, lasers and null fields
Can't cheat light speed

And a few other rules. They're established early, being integrated into the narrative instead of being allowed to dominate. The same holds true for David Weber Honorverse books, although lately the narrative in those has been allowed to submerge underneath irrelevance.

That's the good, how about the bad.

I've been having mixed feelings about Iain M Banks books lately ... His early Culture books are about a society managed by Minds (highly advanced computers), some of which will run ships with others running space stations. There's also the Drones (less advanced mobile computers) and their companion people.

It's magic. When he's talking Culture specifically, it's a magical universe where anything is possible. The explanation for why things happen is handled without descent into technobabble. But you still need that magic to make the books Interesting. That's where Matter fell down, I wasn't particularly interested in reading about the industrial age society that dominates this book, I wanted Space Ships.

Heinlein does particularly well with keeping the Magic intact, as does Larry Niven. It's not so much about the science, it's how to write great fiction in a scientifically advanced world. R.A. Salvatore is good at this too, although his specialty is magic in a fantasy world.

I suspect finding that magic is one reason I may be a little off gaming at the moment. The games I have are ageing and not particularly fresh. (Plus there's game breaking bugs like those introduced in Mass Effect 2 Arrival). I have my hopes up for Mass Effect 3, although that'll be waiting until next year. I'm also hoping for a bit of magic in Iain M Banks' Surface Detail, which is due at the end of this month.

Right - my hair is still damp after shower, time to look for a little magic before bed time :-) (a few chapters of Exiles I think)

Game on !

2011-05-04T23:37:00.001+01:00

New cricket season has started :-)

Which means instead of my evenings mostly being taken up by keeping up with recorded stuff, gaming or keeping up neighbours with loud music, occasional evenings are spent being the Comic Relief on the cricket field.

I approached this game with trepidation cos I've done literally no training this year. I'm one of those obnoxious people who has natural fitness. I may have a spare lorry tyre around my waist but I can still run quick and throw myself around. Which is rather useful if you have no technique to back you up. Cricket's a game that rewards practice, as the practice lets you hone all the complicated technical things the game involves. Everything needs to come together in those fractions of seconds after the bowler sends the ball down. People with no practice behind them tend to be all arms & legs & unintentionally fielding while upside down.

We had awkward conditions tonight. There's been no rain in Bristol for what must be a month now, so the pitch was a bit hard underneath. However, because we play in the evenings, that's when the dew starts coming up making the ground a bit greasy. When I ran my first single I was wishing I was wearing my spikes as my feet nearly kept going with the intention of putting my (ample) bum on the floor. Lots of cloud cover (and light drizzle for a while) made for swinging conditions that were making me wish I could still bowl.

Bowling woulda been fun out there :-)

What are spikes ? Trainers are fine for indoor sports (mostly) or artificial surfaces but for playing on grass you really need something more grippy. Footballers and rugby players have their studs, athletes and cricket players use Spiky Shoes. Mine are a bit old and encase the foot in leather (who said "is the leather a bad thing?") so I'm acquire a set from Globe Sports "soon". Make mine a pair of the Original Pro boots.

Why do you need them ? Simply put, it's dangerous not to. Cricket calls for fast acceleration and lots of leg power being used to turn. If you attempt to field in flat soles, you'll tear muscles due to compensating for slipping. Spikes let you field better and keep your legs intact.

I'm rabbitin' again aren't I ? How was the game ?

Early season affairs can be quite comical as those who have practiced try to put what they've learned indoors to good use. And then there's the numpties (me!) who didn't practice at all. That said, we had a decent game tonight. I definitely enjoyed it although I have a few things to relearn and a few things that need to improve a lot.

Relearn - with the batting, I can be very still. You need to move your feet very quickly while batting to get into position to play your shot. If you aren't in the right place, you'll miss or hit very weakly. Either way, you don't achieve very much. I have a couple of things that I try to see if I can trigger myself into moving when I need to. Need to remember to use those ...

Score - I got 10 runs tonight, bit laboured again (missed stuff I shoulda smashed) but I achieved a couple of targets : Don't get lowest score, Don't get out first.

Fielding was pretty comical at times. I make up for missing practice by running like a headless chicken and throwing myself around. I missed one fairly easy catch but made for it by taking a smart running catch late on. It was too dark to see it which is probably why I caught it. I'm weird like that.

What I need to do is wire my brain into doing baseball slides (long leg barrier to stop ball going past) as well as making sure I'm in the right body position to pick up and throw. I missed another catch which may just have been in range because I was a) on the wrong foot to launch and b) didn't commit to a dive.

Must do better. Will do better :-)

Close game - they needed 10 off the last over to win, with that going to 6 off 2 balls. Very close. We finished off strong though with 3 catches in that last over. I held one, after being inspired by a catch by the bowler that he nearly wore because it was getting rather dark.

That was a theme for tonight. One of the catches our side held was going straight towards someone's mouth. He could have opened wide and had it for dinner :-)

Did I get away without breaking anything ? Almost. I have a finger that is trying to be bigger than my thumb (dropped catches hurt more). My replacement knee pads are a waste of time because I skinned a knee through them. And I appear to have a bruise on my (rather too large) belly where I edged the ball into it. But apart from that, no groin strains, didn't need to throw Big and my legs appear to have survived. Should be no problems coming out next week.

Right - wall of text alert went off half a post ago, so I'll sign off and look forward to making some sensitive souls run away tomorrow when I show the unsuspecting people a PLAGUE FINGER ! (it's gone purple - lol)

PS Tonight saw a first ... I'm usually in a Floppy Hat but due to the light tonight, I wore a cap for the first time in probably 20 years on the cricket field.

In the doghouse and out again

2011-05-02T14:36:00.000+01:00

I ended up in the doghouse for a couple of days ... It's birthday season at the moment and I hadn't sent a card to either my mum or my nan.

Doh !

Fixed that by heading up there this weekend just gone. Decent weekend, we headed off to my sister's place to check out one of the pubs down there. My techie knowledge expanded a bit too.

Windows Vista - is an obscenity (knew that already, remembered it this weekend). My sister's Vista laptop got rebuilt a couple of months ago (hard disc failure) and she's looking to get her iTunes library back on it. iTunes has a very nifty feature called Home Share, which lets you sync libraries between different machines. I use it to progressively back up my library, taking advantage of the "show me what isn't in my library already" feature.

Works well if Vista allows it. Which it wasn't. (iTunes application, reckon Vista was blocking it). Vista was also not allowing our other Windows 7 laptops to see it.

In the end, not so much of an issue, because there is a workaround that dates back to before Home Share became available. Awkward to use but it does the important thing - it Works.

Apple reliability - Apple used to have a rock solid reputation for quality. Dunno why but they've been allowing that to slip in recent years. Maybe it's because the workers in their Foxconn factories aren't happy bunnies. My original iPod was 100% reliable, plus my LittleWhiteBox Airport Express worked 100% before I allowed a firmware update. I refuse to allow iTunes to update now due to issues.

iPod - my 4th Gen 16GB has let me down a couple of times. There's the can't sync error which is solved by emptying it and refilling it. I was about to head off home yesterday, only to find "Shuffle - 0 songs" on an iPod which was full. Cue factory reset to fix that. Shouldn't happen if the software was up to the job.

Airport Express - This either works standalone, setting up its own wifi network or it can join in on a wifi network that is already there. It switches to standalone just fine but you have to put passwords in when you're making it join another network again. Those settings should be remembered, those software flaws are making it forget.

iTunes - the last 3 times I've allowed it to update itself, I've had to uninstall/reinstall to have it talk to the Airport Express over Airplay.

We expect better from a premium brand like Apple, it's disappointing when these silly software flaws spoil the experience. It definitely means that I will not consider changing my computing to Apple machines.

What else ? Volvo cars.

Yes. My dad retired and bought a Volvo. Don't tell anyone.

To be honest, it's not a bad car. It's plush, solid, well put together and has a decent amount of toys. It should also last well. What is it ? It's a C30 2.4 litre with an automatic box.

I found driving that to be quite a useful experience as it allowed me to give a Long Cruise test of an automatic gearbox car with cruise control :

Auto box - Gotta be honest, looking at the specs of the C30 the autobox cripples the performance it gives. It goes from 7.5 secs to 60 up to 8.5. That's a huge drop in performance and it shows behind the wheel. A 2.4 litre engine car shouldn't feel laboured, although that could be my reluctance to ever use 100% throttle. I.e. There's a mismatch between what I want the car to do on a lean throttle and what the car thinks I want it to do. The 100 mile trip told me I could happily live with an automatic, you can't really do 100 mile test drives as the garage starts up the search party.

I'm getting on with the Focus much better there, since the service it's been feeling very Perky indeed. Almost like it's giving its full power instead of something like just half that. The Focus has become far more responsive and that's going to delay my jump into another car for a couple of months at least. (I'm enjoying it while it lasts)

The Volvo isn't a terrible car, I could definitely get used to having Cruise Control (as long as there's a place to rest my right foot, which the Volvo doesn't really have) and I could live with the auto box, as it would help out a left leg that likes to tense itself up (dunno why). The only time I've really driven an automatic was a Jeep in the USA, which I had as a hire car for a fortnight.

Would I get a Volvo ? No. What they currently offer doesn't fit what I'm looking for. They're all too big and heavy.

Anyway - decent weekend and I learned stuff that I'll put towards my next car. That's still likely to be a Prius T Spirit but with what's happened in Japan where they're built, they need a bit of time to get themselves right again. Plus more time before buying gives :
More Payment Holiday
Enjoyment of a Frisky Focus
Time for something better to appear ...

Will add something in when I (eventually) decide to jump for a new car.

Best films never made (voting)

2011-04-27T21:21:00.001+01:00

They're at it again :-)

The Reg have turned their earlier Best Films Never Made (that's my link to it) story into a poll now. Here's a link to the story with the poll : Reg Link.

Different list this time around, I definitely recognise a lot more on it :

The Algebraist – Iain M Banks ****
Altered Carbon – Richard K Morgan
The Atrocity Archives – Charles Stross
The Baroque Cycle – Neal Stephenson
A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter M Miller, Jr.
Childhood's End – Arthur C Clarke
The Chronicles of Amber – Roger Zelazny
Cities in Flight – James Blish
The City and the Stars – Arthur C Clarke
Consider Phlebas – Iain M Banks ****
Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
Deathworld – Harry Harrison
The Demolished Man – Alfred Bester
Dorsai – Gordon R Dickson
Downbelow Station – CJ Cherryh
Dragonriders of Pern – Anne McCaffrey ****
Ender's Game – Orson Scott Card
Eon – Greg Bear
Excession – Iain M Banks ****
A Fire Upon the Deep – Vernor Vinge
Footfall – Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle ****
The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
The Forge of God – Greg Bear
Foundation – Isaac Asimov ****
The Gap Cycle – Stephen R Donaldson
Gateway - Frederick Pohl
Hyperion - Dan Simmons
The Legacy of Heorot - Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes ****
Lensmen - E.E. "Doc" Smith
Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny
Lucifer's Hammer – Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle ****
The Man in the High Castle – Philip K Dick
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A Heinlein ****
The Mote In God's Eye – Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle ****
Neuromancer – William Gibson
Night's Dawn – Peter F Hamilton
Old Man's War – John Scalzi
On Basilisk Station – David Weber ****
The Player of Games – Iain M Banks ****
Protector – Larry Niven (have it, not read it yet)
Rendezvous With Rama – Arthur C Clarke
Ringworld – Larry Niven ****
Skylark – EE "Doc" Smith
Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson
The Stainless Steel Rat – Harry Harrison
The Stars My Destination (aka Tiger! Tiger!) – Alfred Bester
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert A Heinlein (gave up on it)
The Technicolor Time Machine – Harry Harrison
Titan – John Varley
Use of Weapons – Iain M Banks ****

Same as before - the ones in Italic with ****'s are the ones I've read. 14 this time.

Just finished : Inversions

2011-04-26T19:26:00.000+01:00

Started reading again :-)

I have cycles where I'll devour several books very quickly, interspersed with periods where it takes me ages to get through one. The latest is Inversions by Iain M. Banks.

He's a decent author but his books tend to be somewhat inconsistent. I think it's the aim behind the book. Is the book relating to galaxy shaping events or is there something more philosophical going on. I tend to deal more in absolutes and have trouble getting my head around philosophical stuff. Page turners for me tend to be more about will that starship make it through, which of the crew have the Sword of Damocles hanging over them. I like things to happen.

Maybe that's why I like watching rugby and cricket but find football tedious. Lots of narrative in football but very little in the way of game changing events (goals & sending offs).

Anyway - Inversions is a tale set in two countries in a far off planet. It's not earth but a similar analogue. The narrative alternates between a Doctor and her apprentice in one country and the bodyguard of the Protector (King) of the other. You have intrigue inside the court and intrigue between the countries. There's lots here that should make it interesting but to be honest, most of that is telegraphed long before the actual action happens.

Yep - it's more a philosophy message book than Armies Invade Spacefleets Clash. Must read Consider Phlebas or The Algebraist again soon as they keep the reader guessing much more in a "how the hell can the characters get out of this mess ????" kind of way.

Not a bad book, just not as many surprises here as in his other books. Not much "science" fiction here too. There's touches of sci-fi in there but it's very light.

What's next ? That'll be the Exiles Trilogy by Ben Bova. It's a trilogy two thirds written before I was born. I'm 100 pages out of 450 in so far and it's escaping the obsolence trap that a lot of older sci-fi books fall into. The tech is what you would expect from extrapolating from what we see today, in that it thinks we'll have Better versions of what we have now. Progress through evolution instead of revolution. Computer tech is a bit behind though. We have advanced in hardware (if not AI) far more than what anyone in the Apollo years would have expected.

Ben Bova's books can be a bit "Writing By Numbers" (the way David Weber has gone) but they usually keep the reader guessing along the way. And that's what counts, we don't want to know the outcome before we read it.

Another tick for the checklist

2011-04-23T15:49:00.000+01:00

MoT & annual service again today - shiny car is still shiny.

For non-Brits, the MoT is an annual test all cars over here that are more than 3 years old have to pass to say they're ok to go on the roads. I thought I'd get whinged at this time around for brakes, as that was something noted on the last test.

What was the damage ? Nothing "needed" fixing. Well, nothing except the tyres which were changed a couple of weeks ago. They were still legal, just. Let's say it was more fun driving on the Fluffy Stuff end of last year than at the start of last year.

Advisories on :
Brake pads at the back (80% worn)
Brake discs at the back (same width as last year)
Exhaust heat shield (my first proper car actually ran better without the heatshield)
Coolant a bit low

Translation - nothing to worry about right now. The brakes is the same advisory as last year and with the low mileage I do, they will last. Exhaust heat shield explains some rattlies from a couple of weeks ago (think this was actually something different). Same again, not bothered.

So - another tick in the box. The only one left now is the letter that says the finance has finished paying off on the Focus. I don't actually need to wait for this but extra time means a bit more chance for the "There's Something Better Coming" feeling to be satisfied.

Hmm - that would be the same feeling that's had me holding off on upgrading the main PC, although with the PC I know there's something better coming soon. (It's called V68 Sandy Bridge chipset)

It's a lovely sunny day today so I thought I'd indulge myself in a wander around the centre of Bristol. Lots of good outfits on show. Lots of not so good outfits. Lots of good outfits worn really, really badly. Oh and a wardrobe malfunction by someone who intended to run across the road but she ended up going bouncy-bouncy instead.

Didn't buy anything, although I did stop off at ToyotaWorld Bristol South on the way back (yeah right - it's in the opposite direction). Prius T Spirit is definitely something that belongs in a scifi movie in the near future. Things like the dashboard computer which will require a few evenings learning the manual. There's even a head up display which I think could work nicely.

The dash in general wasn't nearly as plush as the Lexus though. It'll be a tough choice there :

Lexus - definitely fits the "luxury" bill. Not so sure about the level of toys and reports generally saying that they messed up the chassis.
Prius - Many toys. The car is a toy. It's the third generation of its type. It proved the tech while the Lexus just borrowed it. Build quality not quite the same as the Lexus but I'd prefer build quality effort to go into chassis and toys.

At the moment, my opinion is going to the Prius. It's a bit cheaper, the offers are better (saves £1000 in servicing) and it has extra toys :

Satnav - meh, I'd prefer to use a standalone Tomtom.
Smart (keyless) entry & start - not sure about this, could they get in with the key kept at the front of the house ?
Cruise control & reverse camera - £510 option on Lexus
Head Up Display - it works but I'm old fashioned and like dials.
Fancy trip computer - £1500 on Lexus for shiny knob thingy
Bigger car (inside) for same weight
Deals ...

What you miss from the Lexus is :
Heated front seats - my back would love these :-)
USB socket for iPod - meh. A headphone jack does the job.

So - still making my mind up, although today's MoT pass lifts another of those barriers. Dunno about resale value on the Lexus because it's too new but the Prius holds its value well ... 1 year old average mileage lost £4k, 2 year old higher mileage lost £6k (£18.5k) which compares very well with a 3 year old Guaranteed Future Value of £9k.

Best films never made

2011-04-19T19:56:00.000+01:00

Spotted a story on the Register today - they'd (foolishly?) asked for suggestions on what was the best film never made.

And then they got an Inbox Explosion :-) Here's a link to the story with the full list.

Here's the list - the ones in italic with ****'s are the ones I've read. Need to get reading more !

Ace Trucking Co – John Wagner and Alan Grant
Against a Dark Background – Iain M Banks (it's waiting in the Pile)
Agent To The Stars – John Scalzi
The Amtrak Wars – Patrick Tilley
Anvil of Stars – Greg Bear
The Ballad of Halo Jones – Alan Moore
The Black Cloud – Sir Fred Hoyle
The Caves of Steel – Isaac Asimov
The Chanur Saga – CJ Cherryh
Chasm City – Alastair Reynolds ****
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant – Stephen R Donaldson
The Chrysalids – John Wyndham
Citizen of the Galaxy – Robert A Heinlein
Creatures of Light and Darkness – Roger Zelazny
Daemon – Daniel Suarez
The Dark Wheel – Robert Holdstock
Desolation Road – Ian McDonald
The Difference Engine – William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
The Dispossessed – Ursula K Le Guin
The Dosadi Experiment – Frank Herbert
Earth – David Brin
The Expendables – Edmund Cooper
A Fall Of Moondust – Arthur C Clarke
Feersum Endjinn – Iain M Banks ****
The Fountains of Paradise – Arthur C Clarke
Glory Road – Robert A Heinlein ****
Hammer's Slammers – David Drake
Have Spacesuit – Will travel – Robert A Heinlein ****
Hinterlands – William Gibson
Icerigger – Alan Dean Foster
Inferno – Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
The Integral Trees – Larry Niven
The Invincible – Stanislaw Lem
Kiln People – David Brin
The Kraken Wakes – John Wyndham
The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K Le Guin
Liege Killer – Christopher Heinz
Macroscope – Piers Anthony
Mars – Ben Bova ****
The Mars Trilogy – Kim Stanley Robinson ****
Mindstar Rising – Peter F Hamilton
Mockingbird – Walter Tevis
Moving Mars – Greg Bear
Mutineers' Moon – David Weber ****
Nimbus – Alexander Jablokov
The Number of the Beast – Robert A Heinlein ****
Orbitsville – Bob Shaw
Only Forward – Michael Marshall Smith
Otherland – Tad Williams
Out of the Silent Planet – CS Lewis
Pandora's Star – Peter F Hamilton
Planet of Adventure – Jack Vance
Pushing Ice – Alastair Reynolds
Revelation Space Saga – Alastair Reynolds
Rocheworld – Robert L Forward
Rogue Trooper – Gerry Finley-Day
The Saga of the Well World – Jack L Chalker
Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future – Mike Resnick
The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr
The Skinner – Neal Asher
Spinneret – Timothy Zahn ****
Startide Rising – David Brin
The Survivors – Tom Godwin
Tales of Pirx the Pilot – Stanislaw Lem
Time Enough for Love – Robert A Heinlein ****
Timescape – Gregory Benford
Transition – Iain M Banks
A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! – Harry Harrison
Ubik – Philip K Dick
The Uplift War – David Brin
The Void Trilogy – Peter F Hamilton
The Voyage of the Space Beagle – AE van Vogt
Vurt – Jeff Noon
Who Goes There? – Bob Shaw
The Wreck of The River of Stars – Michael Flynn

How many have you read ?

Still agonizing on car

2011-04-19T00:43:00.000+01:00

Still weighing up my options on the next car.

What isn't helping at the moment is conflicting reviews. Some people hate the new Lexus, others think it's ok. I suspect it's a bit of a marmite car. Either that, or the quality coming out of the factory is not consistent. This is what scares me at the moment - I've previously bought used cars, which has good and bad side :

Good side to buying used :
You can thoroughly check out the car. Most Gremlins get bored quickly and surface early. If a car has Gremlins, they will usually start messin' with your mind quite quick. Buying used means you are test driving the car you would eventually buy. If it has specific quirks, you can walk away. If it's rough or otherwise coming apart at the seams, walk away.

Bad side to used :
Mechanical stuff wears out. Get a used turbo car and you should expect major bills to come on that turbo at some point. Same for the rest of the car. The best time to own anything is when it's shiny & new.
With a new car, the car you get is not the demonstrator, it has come over from the factory. You get the best years out of the car but you're also at risk if the factory puts in the Gremlins.

Lexus have a stormin' reputation but that inconsistency of reviews is a bit of a concern. There's also inconsistency in the performance shown in tests, with figures going from below 10 secs to 60 to 12 seconds. That's a fairly sizable margin that makes you wonder what the testers were getting up to. A hybrid car will only give maximum performance when there's juice in the battery, so if they've drained the battery before doing their 0 to 60, of course it won't be particularly brilliant. Similarly, if the battery pack is on a par with a Red Bull F1* car (their KERS hasn't lasted a race yet), that's seriously bad news for a hybrid.

*Let's just say the Infiniti hybrid (Red Bull's partner) is off the menu. Ok, it never got on the menu cos it's out of my price league but there you go.

I'm thinking again about the cheaper options - Honda's CR-Z and the Toyota Prius. Gotta be honest, I've not actually sat in a Prius to check it out properly. Maybe the Lexus has been rushed to market a little too quickly.

Another car thing that's melting my brain at the moment is finance.

There's a scheme called Personal Contract Purchase, which is something I'll likely go for. It works by deferring some of the payment to the end, as a Guaranteed Future Value (GFV). The GFV is what the car is expected to be worth after the period of the contract.
Start - car cost £25k.
Take a deposit off that - £5k - leaves £20k remainder
Set a Guaranteed Future Value - £10k
£20k - £10k leaves £10k to come from a loan.
The usual APR is 9.9%, making that £10k over 3 years cost £330 per month (35 payments) for a total of £11,554.

After the 3 years, you have the option to pay the GFV to buy your car, or you can hand it back, or you can say "ta muchly, same again please". Where my brain is melting is the difference between calculated loan and what they quote - for the Lexus, there's almost £3000 getting added in somewhere. With the Prius10, the offer quotes £429 per month with £15k of the £26k purchase price being outside the loan. If I work it out, that £429 should be £351.

I must be missing something ... Need those finance details spelled out in small words.

Simple rule - if you don't understand completely what you're being offered with finance, walk away. That goes for all those things where someone is trying to sell you something you either don't need (payment protection insurance) or have no real world purpose (warranties).

Depending on what happens on Saturday with the car service, I should have time to make up my mind :-) Maybe something better is just around the corner ...

Oh - only 2 (maybe 2.5) working days left until an extended break. Definitely feeling the need for it, especially judging by me having trouble getting my MathBoy Brain around that finance stuff ...