One of the nice things about working for a uni is that the university closes for two days on most of the bank holidays – so yesterday was another painting day. I discovered that it takes me about 2 hours do a single coat on the walls and ceiling of our spare room – plus obviously another bit either side preparing and then cleaning up. So I managed to get two coats on yesterday, which was fab – but sadly it looks like it will need another. And we’ve still got to do the wood too.
We’re going for an off-white blue for this room – blue is a colour that’s very under-represented in our house, and the spare room has drawn the lucky straw. Got 5 tester pots on standby, but we’re going to wait for the white to be finished.
Incidently, one of the disadvantages of working for a uni is that everyone assumes that you get huge summer holidays when all the students are away, and it gets a bit boring having to respond “Oh no, I just get 5 weeks annual leave like most people.” Actually it is probably about 6 weeks when you add the times the university is closed (around bank holidays and over Christmas).
Well, another day of decorating; a-painting, a-sanding, a-papering, a-caulking, and a-sawing, although not in that order. Got the replacement wallpaper up very quickly and easily (far more so then we were expecting). Got the new skirting-board bits on, and got all the bare wood primed. I had hoped to get a coat on the walls and ceilings, but it was not to vbe. Tommorow’s job.
We had loads of fun yesterday – went to the York Maze, which is a maze carved out of a field of maize (aka sweetcorn). It was great, although we did get lost and so decided to cheat and use the map (boo!). But I would highly recommend it.
We’ve started The Decorating of Our Spare Room – first task was to strip the manky old bit of wallpaper by the door (which got trashed by the electrician doing the re-wiring), and then put a new strip of wallpaper in it’s place. Inevitably the bit we’ve removed is an inch wider than the strip we have to replace it. Ah well.
It actually went quite well today; almost all the prep work is done (little bit more sanding to do, and the walls need washing down), plus I got the clever trick with the radiator to work – the one where you don’t have to take it off the wall and drain it, you just loosen the valves enough to rotate the radiator through 90 degrees and lie on the floor. Groovy. We’ve also got to stick down some new beading strip (or whatever you call the wood that goes at the bottom of skirting boards), but I’ve got that so shouldn’t take long.
Got this evening off, as a friend is coming round for food (Cheesy Marrow(!)) + video (Napolean Dynamite). Oh yes, the story behind the Cheesy Marrow is that we’ve started getting a fruit and veg box one a fortnight, that’s jam packed full of all sorts of things we’d never usually buy, such as marrow, artichoke, pineapple – so we’re having lots of fun dreaming up meals to use up all the veg! Think we’re going to use a Jamie Oliver recipe for the artichokes, which involved roasting them with potatoes. Oh yes, and loads of fresh parsley arrived too, so we made parsely pesto (yes, that’s really true), but have ended up freezing most of it as we weren’t sure we’d get through it in time.
Sunday is a day off, of course (although we might do some cooking), then Monday and Tuesday are full on DIY days (double bank holidays are one of the perks or working for a university!)
I feel very unoriginal, but I’ve taken a shine to another new artist that R2 have been heavily playlisting, this time KT Tunstall, who did Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, but also the more engaging (in my opinion) Suddenly I see, which was enough to make me visit iTunes and part with another hard earned 79p. 🙂
Anyway, it turns out that she does “Cherry Tree” live using a looping sampler pedal, specifically the Akai E2 Headrush, and lays down a loop one part at a time, starting with a guitar body ‘thump-splat’ as basic rhythm, then a muted strum, then a tambo bash, and finally a couple of ‘woo-hoo’s in a harmony type fashion. This is apparantly called overdubbing a looped sample, but it looks and sounds fab and very clever. Anyway, I found this out from a video of her playing live that you can find on her website, via the albums link, or go straight to the ‘hi’ video stream. I had to freeze the video on her pressing the pedal to work out which make it was!! Sad man.
You can see where this is going…
.. Yup – I want one of those!. Comes in at 120 squid, sadly – but on the positive side my Toy Budget is sprinting towards credit, after a burst of selling on eBay and a book review for Wiley (although the cheque hasn’t appeared from the latter yet…). The PSP is a definite fixture on my shopping list, but I’m wondering if the E2 might be more fun than a new GPS?
The game of the title is Jamie Kane, which is an interactive online game based on the fictional character of the same name. Basic premise is that he’s been killed in a ‘copter crash, but then turns up alive in Thailand. The interaction is all initiated via the fansite jamierules, with a message board you can read, and then launch an Instant Messanger client with a chatbot on the other end, pretending to be one of the other members of the fansite.
But the attention to detail is lovely – you get send to all sorts of fictional websites that have been setup by the Beeb but look like real websites. You get e-mails every day that initiate that days activity, and when it’s complete that’s it for another day. But it’s very clever how it inserts your name into the message-board, etc – the other members talk about you, that sort of thing. Probably best not to register as “Jamie”, as that woudl get very confusing (bad enough being “James” on there). The chatbot is well written too – ok so I didn’t try to break it, but the suspension of belief wasn’t hard at all. I even went scurrying off to ‘whois’ at one point, just to make sure a website was a BBC creation. 🙂
Going out tonight to the Starbeck Tandoori, in our opinion one of the best curry houses in Harrogate. No time to say anymore as the baby sitter’s here! 🙂
A sad (but possibly understandable) habit of (computing) folks is to search for their own name in search engines – primarily Google these days. The main point is to see how far down the list one appears, but also because it’s interesting to see exactly what pages there are. Guess where this is going…
So WAAAAAYYYYY down the Google list (like page 18), there’s a page or two from the Your Sinclair archives. I was a religious reader of Your Sinclair every month, as I played various games on my ZX81 and subsequent Spectrum +2 (with a whole 128k of memory), indeed I wrote in to YS Adventures from time to time – well, twice to be exact; May 1989,
Ah, a tender 15 year old, back in the days when I had time to write to magazines!
Nearly all the results are nothing to do with me – I’m hardly the only “James Handley” in the world after all, but the YS stuff was a shock, as I’d forgotten all about it, and was hardly expecting it to be online! There’s loads of genealogy stuff, and one or two hits from processings and the like. It’s a little disappointing how far down eutony comes, but nevermind.
A far more rewarding venture, at least in turns of number of hits, is to do the same in the Google Groups archive. I was a significant user of usenet in my college years, indeed I just found a post where I gave my full home address and phone number in my signature! Those were more innocent days, I guess. Before usenet (at least in my personal history) was fidonet which was fab too, and I regularly posted on there, but I’m not sure if Google groups also grabs fidonet. I’ll link if I find any particularly interesting or amusing usenet posts…
Phew – Busy life. Had to give a reference for a friend last night, which ended up taking the better part of an hour, was out this evening with work, tommorow is kitchen painting (second, and hopefully final undercoat), Friday is shopping, and Saturday is going to the tip and writing Sunday’s sermon!
Actually Sunday should be fun; I’m using an image from Google Earth that shows our little neck of the woods from a low earth orbit. Actually it looks a little bit like the new BBC Weather graphic… I was going to show a clip from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as well, but I think there’s a danger of ending up all gimmick and no content.
Still, had time to fiddle around with this ‘ere site as well; added the fancy ‘RSS’ logo in the appropriate places, and finally got around to paginating my journal archive so you don’t get served a huge page of 70+ entries when you go there. Will probably tweak, but it’s a start.
Most importantly of all, have set the video for tonight’s Lost on C4. Far too late to watch this evening; probably Sunday evening’s fare (it would be a pretty lame excuse; not having a sermon on Sunday ‘cos we’d watched a video on Sat night).
A-ha; I’ve finally found a decent use for my Linux for Playstation 2 kit (well, at least until I get around to writing a game…)
For a while now I’ve been thinking that if we ever have a party, it would be good to have music, but the problem with party music is that it normally always comes off a CD or tape shoved in a sound system (or at least it does in our household). This is fine, except that each one only lasts about an hour, and then of course you either get an hour of a pre-printed CD, or have to spend AGES putting together compilations.
I’m a fairly late converter to the MP3 thing, but for a while I’ve thought – shove a load of MP3s onto a DVD, throw it in the DVD player (which is meant to be able to handle such things), and hook it up to the sound system.
The obvious next development is to just have all the MP3s on a computer, and hook that up to the sound system instead – but this is where we hit a small snag, in as much as the computer is in the study, and the sound system is in the sitting room. Ok, so there’s spare cat-5 running between the two, but it’s a lot of effort to make all the connectors and run the ‘last mile’ of cable between the wall boxes and the PC/stereo.
So, into the breach steps the Playstation. It lives in the sitting room, and is hooked up to the surround sound; and is the obvious answer! I’ve already got most of my CDs into MP3, as I listen to them at work – so in three easy steps (mount the music over NFS, install the mpd, and hook up the PS2 to the stereo) I’ve got a jukebox I can control either over the web (I’d already got Apache httpd running on it), or directly on the PS2 console.
It’s no coincidence that if you say “RSS” out loud it comes out “arse”.
I discovered that I’d completely stuffed up the RSS feeds from eutony.net, so much so that it was a surprise they worked at all. Should’ve gone to the Feed Validator before I made a song and dance about them. Anyway, I think they are right now (they certainly validate), so accept my apologies in case of the extremely unlikely event that anyone except me uses the RSS.
Incidently, I know the timestamp isn’t right – or to be more precise the timezone doesn’t take into account daylight saving – so for instance this will probably be stamped as 21.30 GMT, whereas it is in fact 21.30 BST. If I was excited I would do something about this, but I’m not. 🙂
Thursday night is painting night in the Handley household. Our task for August is to paint all the remaining bits and pieces of unfinished woodwork (the door, skirting board, couple of shelves – that kind of thing). Last week was sanding, tonight was priming the bare wood and putting an undercoat on the door. We aim to do around an hour each night, but have a specific task, rather than a time limit.
Finished off by watching Extras, which is quite amusing, but also a bit sad, somehow. Biting satire is one thing, but it sometimes feels like a bit too accurate a reflection of life. Dilbert manages to be just enough over the top not to fall into this trap, and actually speaking of everyone’s favourite office worker, today was a particularly good one I thought.
Anyway, the DIY doesn’t end with the Kitchen, oh no – August bank holiday (which means Monday and Tuesday off for slackers like me) I shall be attacking the study with abandon. Looking around as I type I could get disheartened, so I probably should just wrap this up and go to bed. The lady of the house is on t’phone, so there’s no point in getting too excited about bed just yet – mind you I could always read a bit more of Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down
(it is the book I’m reading, incidently, but it was born out of that website).
Oh go on then – if we’re doing books, I just finished In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (by all accounts the last in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series), which was fab, and also managed to get hold of Shadowmancer, which is probably my next read. That said, someone at work has recommended Snow Falling on Ceders to me, which both A. and I were sure we had on our shelves, but I can’t find it so perhaps not… Anyway, said colleague is going to lend it to me, so I can make my own mind up.
I should probably keep a record on here too of the religious books I’ve read, but that seems a bit heavy somehow, although I do get them dreadfully confused. I’m partially reminded of this because I got my first copy of the Apocrypha today – mainly inspired by Miss Garnet’s Angel, which in turn is heavily inspired by the story from the Book of Tobit (which, I confess, I’d never heard of before). But I was also thinking it was about time I had a copy of it too, so it was a good spur.
P.S. Top strategy is to think of the title after writing the entry – I always end up writing more/differently from what I thought I would when I write the title!!
