graeme.blog

Category: toreview

  • Ghost Bus and Ungrateful Cat

    A couple of incidents to report. Last night it was extremely foggy, so much so that even walking through the underpass, there was fog forming inside the tunnel. Very eerie walking to the bus. When it arrived, I almost missed it as it was so quiet. It was a really old bus for Oxford, single-decker, with really tall steps. What disturbed me was that it was so quiet, it barely made a sound as it moved. We were travelling fairly slowly due to the fog, but it was odd, something really wasn’t right. To clinch it, the bus driver was incredibly courteous and polite. I thus believe it was a ghost bus, manned by a driver sent back to earth to atone for his bus-driving sins.

    Then this morning, waiting for my bus to work, a cat shot out onto the main road, and was clipped by a car. I turned to the noise of a huge screech from the cat, and caught the sight of it somersaulting through the air. It landed in front of a van, the driver of which stopped to attend to said cat. Fair play to him, he ignored the shouts of the other drivers as he blocked the road so he could try and get it to safety. He made some encouraging motions and noises, but the cat circled round a bit limping, then sat down. He then decided to try and pick it up. Big mistake. I heard a screech as loud as the first one, and saw the helpful chap jumping back about 10 feet to get out of scratching distance. I think he learnt a valuable lesson there.

  • Choosing Software – What if you’re wrong?

    During an onerous task today, I think I learnt a valuable lesson in choosing an appropriate software package. We’re moving from a Blosjom-based blog to a WordPress one. Now I’m happy with this change, seeing as this past year I’ve spent so much of my own time using WordPress. The issue we had was moving the content. WordPress supports importing from a lot of different blogging platforms. Blosjom is not directly supported, however WordPress does offer import from an RSS feed, so we were able to import the posts in the main.

    However, the comments were unavailable in feed form. So it fell to me to sort this out, and after thinking through some options, the low volume of comments meant that the best way to do this was to just re-enter them into WordPress, and then edit the post dates for accuracy. This was straightforward, but took some times still.

    And this was where I starting pondering. We used Blosjom for a year or so, and whilst it was the right choice for us at the time, did we consider what might happen if we wanted to migrate from it? A year on, it still doesn’t have a large user base (to be fair, being Java-based, it wasn’t likely to compete with the PHP/MySQL-style platforms, and being Java-based was one of our requirements at the time). Would we have chosen it if we had considered how easy it would be to leave it?

    It happens all the time, with software, with websites, with hardware. Your requirements change, better competitors come along, brand new technology launches. In an ideal world you make your choice and stick with it, but sometimes you are wrong, and other times you are right  until a better thing comes along. Something worth bearing in mind as you chose in the first place is what might happen if you wish to leave. Do the competitors for your database of choice support conversion to their software? Can you import your e-mail contacts from the webmail you want to use into Yahoo Mail, should they suddenly become the bees knees? Is your forum software built on the same base as the majority of its competition, or is it using something obscure? Obviously it is hard to consider every variation, but migration away is well worth considering when you make a choice.

  • Getting More Done

    I’ve started using something approaching a Getting Things Done philosophy for organising myself. I read the book during our Isle of Wight holiday, and it is very useful. I’ve now got a calendar (Google Calendar in fact) in which I am organising all my tasks to do personally, In/Pending/Out trays for all our mail and filing, and some new things put in place at work that I hope are going to make me more productive as well.

    I’m going to try and keep them up for a few weeks before I start plugging it as the way forwards, but this weekend I seem to have got a lot of things done around the house, including some decorating, and still had time to relax.

  • Pacman Chart

    This amused me greatly.

  • Xbox 360

    I am now the proud owner of an Xbox 360. And a happy owner too. I wanted to get it to play Project Gotham Racing 3 (PGR3), which is a wonderful racing game that has evolved over time from a quirky game called Metropolitan Street Racer on the Dreamcast. I loved that then, have played PGR2 on the Xbox, loved that, and this is a great version of it. Keeping me very busy.

    I’m also going to try and use it as a media centre, as it claims it can be used for that. Have got all the necessary bits almost in place, so shall try that out tonight hopefully. I’ll try and write a more detailed post about the 360 soon, but so far it really has been a joy to use. If I don’t know you have on, and you want to play against me online, just say so in the comments and I will get in touch.

  • Learn to Juggle

    All you need to know in 6 minutes, by one of the world’s best jugglers
    I’ve tried this method out late last night, and it does work. I’m a rubbish can juggle a few times 3 ball juggler, and would like to be a decent four ball juggler. I’m going to study this and see how I get on.

  • Weird Al Yankovic playlist

    A little something I’ve collected together on Youtube:

    A collection of Weird Al videos

  • East Cowes

    Well today was an unwinding lazy day. We had a lovely Indian meal last night, a traditional Isle of Wight speciality. Took a lot out of us, so we took it nice and easy.

    We had a wander over to East Cowes, which doesn’t have that much to it. However, if you walk through it, you get to a gorgeous walk along the seafront. It was really warm and breezy, and we managed a good couple of miles, just ambling and talking, and I occasionally annoyed mrsfb by stopping to take lots of photographs of random sea things.

    We walked back, and had a larger than expected pub lunch, which was followed for some inexplicable reason by a massive nap. Great.

  • Shanklin

    So, last night we went and experienced the delights of Cowes’ pubs. Very chilled in fact, quiet pints in a couple of places, the latter of which had an online jukebox with two million tracks to chose from. Which leads me to make a public apology to anyone in that last pub for anyone there who had to listen to mrsfb’s choices of the Backstreet Boys and Blazin’ Squad.

    Today we decided to go off and explore the island a bit further, so we got a bus into Newport, then another into Shanklin. The bus service is frequent and exceptionally fast, as we discovered at the front of the top deck of a double-decker bus, racing over the hills to Shanklin. Best of all was when the driver speed up for a hump back bridge.

    Once there, we had quite a decent walk from the town own to the seafront. Nice views around there, but it was already shutting down for winter in the main. We did manage to find a hotel bar that was serving cream teas (and playing early rock n roll hits just that bit too loud for comfort). Then onto the arcade to play a selection of very good machines. I think the river-rafting game was the most fun, as we both sat together to control the paddle. I was also beaten on the mini-bowling alley by mrsfb. No excuses, she played well. And a mountain-biking game, that was a bit of a mistake for us both to play just before we had to walk back up the cliffs into town.

    So we’re both a bit tired now, and are back at the house supping tea, and considering what we may eat tonight (fish restaurant is favourite, if it is open).

  • Arrival in Cowes

    So we’ve made it to Cowes. Nice straightforward journey, apart from our ferry nearly crashing into a boat. It was sounding off the horns, and we thought at first it was the very large yellow boat that did appear to be heading right for us which was the problem. In fact it was a small yacht that we couldn’t see, and given the size of the ferry we were on, we wouldn’t have felt it either had we hit it.

    The house we are renting for the week is fantastic. We knew it was bigger than we needed, but it was still a decent price. We didn’t realise though that it had four bedrooms and was on three storeys. We are rattling about in it a little, but we do have a fair old bit of space in which to relax, so we will manage.

    We’ve ended up just off the main street in Cowes, up quite a steep hill. Not too far up, thankfully. I think we are about 3 minutes from the nearest pub, so it suits us. However, bar a nearby annoyingly loud dog, the place is utterly tranquil. I am sat here on my own whilst mrsfb has a little nap, and I can only hear my pen (no laptop with me), the clock and the wind outside. Today is quite breezy, we’ve had a couple of spectacular little showers, but it has also been quite warm.

    Last night we explored Cowes a bit, went to a pub, helped a local figure out his data-transfer issues between a dvd/hard disk recorder and his laptop (busman’s holiday for me), and then took home fish and chips for a quiet night in.

    Today we’ve wandered through Cowes, tested a couple of pubs for suitability, had a good long walk out of town along the quayside, then stopped off in the Octopuses Garden for tea. Actually, tell a lie, it was coffee. It is a Beatles-themed cafe, filled with memorabilia, which plays nothing but Beatles records all day. I imagine there is the potential for losing long-term staff to mental illness due to that last feature. For a quick coffee mind, it was great.

    In a bit I will cook some nice pork chops, then I think we may wander out for the evening. Ow my hand hurts, I’m so not used to writing these days!