My updates here are getting sparser and sparser. never mind.

Well, I’ve had a social life recently. OK, not a busy one but one all the same. There’s been a couple of occasions where I’ve needed to use my cameras for departmental events and a couple of BBQs.

After getting my PC hooked up to my HiFi and loading all my CDs into iTunes I’ve found that I need more CDs. This has been compounded by buying myself a 1GB iPod Shuffle at the same time as buying one for a friend’s birthday present. I got five new CDs in the HMV/Virgin sales on Saturday. I’m going to try to withhold from buying more for a while though.

As for the iPod Shuffle. I’m impressed by the sound quality and the size. It’s a marvel of miniturisation! Sir Clive Sinclair would love it. It reminds me a bit of his first product, the matchbox radio.

Only 1.5 weeks now ;til I’m off on my hols! Yippee.

OK, what’s been happening since the last update?

Well, mostly recovery from the week before’s antics, really.

The only things of note are the aquisition of bits to rebuild my “big” (read games) PC, its rebuilding and some well needed sleeping.

Friday was the day the bits arrived.. and it was also in the evening that I rebuilt the PC. Out went the Gigabyte KT400 based motherboard, Athlon XP 3000+, power supply with noisey fan and the old, cheap, blown speakers and in came the Gigabyte K8T800 Pro motherboard, Athlon 64 3200+, 2GB of fast memory, quiet power supply and Creative I-Trigue 2200 speakers. Dispite the small change in notional processor speed increase, the whole system now hums along and runs games (and iTunes) much more smoothly… and it no-longer sounds like a jet waiting for take-off while doing it! Obviously, it was the memory bottle-neck which was the main performance problem on the old system. (It also had a very strange effect in iTunes in that the music would constantly change tempo, faster then slower etc. without any real pattern or reason as far as I could tell.)

Saturday afternoon, after returning from Sainsbury’s, I intended to sit down and watch “The Sky at Night” but my body had other ideas. Almost as soon as I sat down to watch, I started missing great chunks as I drifted in and out of sleep. I think I managed to watch about 5 minutes of the 20 minute programme in the end. Obviously, the lack of sleep I’d had in the week and a half before had caught up with me. I turned the telly off and slept/dozed the rest of the afternoon until 6pm, when I finally felt awake enough to get up.

Yesterday I’d planned a whole host of houseworky things to do. However, other things got in the way, mostly work things. An outbreak of the new e-mail worm in the department meant that I had to at first spend about half an hour or so working out which machine had been infected and then i had to drive into the dept. to unplug it. The driving in bit was a problem as I didn’t realise that the Cowley Road Carnival was on, so ended up getting caught in diversions. Of course, when I did get to the dept. the job of disconnection took moments.

Seeing as I was in town I decided that I might as well take the opportunity to pop into Argos and get some filters for my cooker hood and on the way home pop into Sainsbury’s to pick up the stuff I’d forgotten on Saturday. The upshot of all this was that buy the time I got home it was nearly 4pm and very little of my plans got done.

This coming week is busy-ish on the social front, there being two barbeques (Oxford Polar Society tomorrow and Geolsoc one on Thursday) and a viva celebration on Friday. I hope I can get some of the houseworky things don in the two evenings I have free.

I can’t remember how many months ago I requested a MindMap to be generated. I’m sure it must have been last year sometime. Anyway, today I got an e-mail saying that it’s ready! So, I might as well post it.

MindMap

Last weekend my parents came down for the bank holiday. Nothing really exciting happened other than my Dad and myself managed to persuade my Mum to do a 3mile walk along the Ridgeway. She moaned all the time as she walked but she managed it without difficulty. Her mental health is really starting to decline now and it’s a great deal of pressure on my Dad.

After the bank holiday it was back to work but with the addition of two late nights out. Tuesday I helped Paul, a friend from Physics who I know via John, celebrate handing in his thesis and got to sleep about 1:30am. On Wednesday I went to see Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith with Grim, Holly and three of Grim’s visiting global colleagues. This time it wasn’t ’til 2am that I got to bed.

I didn’t really catch up on the sleep deprivation when the weekend arrived. It’s Lindsey’s birthday today, so this weekend she had her birthday party. So, I was up early on Saturday morning and drove up to Liverpool. Thankfully, the traffic wasn’t bad.

After arriving at about midday, and feeling shattered already, there was general talking, mayhem with kids etc. More people arrived, I tried to be intelligent and talkative, but I wasn’t in a fit state to think so this didn’t work out as well as it might have done. I did, however, use some of the time to pop into Woolworths in Waterloo with the stub from seeing Revenge of the Sith and bought the 3 original Star Wars films on DVD with £7.50 off. (This means that with the Orange Wednesday promotion as well, the effective cost of Holly and myself seeing the film was £-1! :-))

Anyway, the evening went on, the BBQ finished, the weather deteriated slightly and a bunch of us went to the pub before returning to Lindsey’s house with pizza, where the party continued in her room. And it continued for a long time… it wasn’t ’til 3:30am that people started getting into beds. Then they continued to talk and music played. I dozed as well as I could. 5:30am came and went. At this point I finally managed to sleep for a few hours.

Much of yesterday is a bit of a blur. However, after getting up, we all trekked over to Formby Point where red squirrels were seen and photographed and ice creams were eaten. I left Waterloo at about 3pm and arrived home at 6:45pm.. having had a large, strong latte at Knutsford services, the main effects of which lasted ’til Banbury, I managed to make it home safely.. it’s a pity that the secondary effects lasted ’til about half 10 as I could have done with getting to sleep earlier.

Pictures of this weekend’s trip can be found on my photo gallery under the cameras sections. There are some under the nikon section and the canon section under the dates 2005_06_04 and 2005_06_05. These include cute squirrel pictures.

I’ve not got around to updating this thing in the last month. It’s merely been laziness on my part, really.

What have I been up to then?

Well a couple of weeks ago I visited Steve and Leila Howe in Norwich. Lindsey also visited at the same time. The only thing of note which happened was that we got soaked in freezing rain on a beach near Cromer.

Today, I visited Bletchley Park with Jess and her friend Zoe. Other than rain later on in the afternoon, the weather behaved itself. You can see the pictures I took here. Some of the pictures were tricky in the low light levels inside as I didn’t want to use the flash and I couldn’t stand still enough. Doesn’t matter.

I took the opportunity to upload all the pictures I found on my laptop which I previously hadn’t put on my main machine. They’re mostly pictures from the Easter holiday.

Other than pleasure thingies, work’s been frantic and it’s likely to continue to be. Lots of “oh, we need you to do this by yesterday” things along with others where people are getting annoyed ‘cos their jobs are being pre-empted by the desparately critical jobs. Grrrr.

Ahahhh there Jim-lad!

This morning I worked out what the new “Road Safety Demonstration Scheme” on the Cowley Road in Oxford is going to involve, and I’m not impressed.

First, a background:-

The Cowley Road in Oxford is on the city’s most heavily used bus route. It is also one of the most heavily used cycle routes for those who commute. In the place where this new scheme is being implaced there is a reasonably large group of shops. In fact, it’s only third in size behind the city centre, Headington and Summertown in the size of the shopping area.

So, what’s the new scheme?

Well, they’re narrowing the road at several points. These narrow stretches are probably just about wide enough for two buses to pass with no space between the sides of the buses and the curb. I say probably just about wide enough as I’m not actually sure that it is possible to get two buses past them.

It’s obvious that this “safety” scheme has made no provision for the safety of cyclists. Indeed, it’s made the situation a whole lot worse. I’m not sure it’ll make the pedestrians any safer either, especially if buses keep having to ride over the edges of the pavements to get past each other.

I think all the local planners should be forced to commute along the Cowley Road everyday for a month before they cook up any more stupid schemes. These are Green Party members on the whole so they should know better… shouldn’t they?

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Liberal Democrat

Your actual outcome:

Labour -40
Conservative -21
	Liberal Democrat 58
	UK Independence Party 12
	Green 27

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

I spent most of the weekend trying and failing to wake up.

Dispite the lovely weather outside I just felt so shattered on both Saturday and Sunday that I couldn’t force myself outside the house other than to do the shopping.

I did force myself to move a lot of stuff I’m brought back from Cornwall up into the loft though, so the weekend wasn’t a total loss. I did also try to recover my old data from the Atari ST’s old hard disk but failed dismally. The old disk is the one which originally came inside the TT but I replaced it about 10 years ago when it got sticktion problems. It was good enough for use with the ST, however as I could shake the box it was in to start it. However, when I tried it out on Saturday it didn’t work well, or much at all. I got it spinning but a bad block analysis showed that about a third of the blocks were dead. Looks like I’d have to start again if I wanted to revive programming on that platform.. and I just can’t be bothered.

And so, now it’s Monday morning. It’s cold, wet and a whole lot of no fun… and I’m still tired.