Made it home. Phew. Was a lovely time – as you’ve noticed I didn’t quite get around to writing a LfL on t’beach, mainly because I didn’t fancy taking my phone+PDA into a wet, salty, sandy environment! Weather was gorgeous, and we had lots of fun (went to a Donkey park, plenty of swimming and sun-bathing, some nice walks), and I managed to fill up the memory card of my camera (in the order of 300 photos, I think). Course an awful lot of those are dups and/or duds, many of which I could have deleted in Cornwall.
Great excitement when Half-Blood Prince arrived, although I shall refrain from sharing my thoughts as they would all be spoilers. Read it twice; once at full speed, second time a bit more slowly looking for clues. I personally think it’s one of, if not the, best Potter book in the series – and the reactions to the various ‘shippers’ at what seems to be the shakedown of the relationships is really quite amusing. Will try and get round to a review.
And, of course, Here’s the Love single has been released – think I might try out this iTunes thingy (79p can’t be bad, especially compared with Amazon’s 3.99 or something). It’s a shame about all the DRM stuff though – I just want to pay her/her record company the money and download an MP3. 🙁
Speaking of money, I’m a bit depressed about my toy budget. It would seem to be Feburary before I’ll have saved up enough for a new GPS, or April if I save up a bit longer for a PSP. Reason is that various widgets for the ‘ol PDA (memory card, WiFi) don’t come cheap. Ah well. Still, I think I might ask for Jem’s album for Christmas.
Well, that’s it for me – off to Cornwall for a fortnight, for what I hope will be our first proper holiday since before Ben was born. If we can twist granny and grandpa’s arms sufficiently, that’s potentially up to 10 days of sleeping in; possibly as last as 8.30!!
Nearly all packed now – the important stuff (camera, battery chargers, GPS) was all ready at the start of week; last night was throwing boring stuff (clothes, etc) into a bag – tonight it’s loading the car, then hit the M1.
We were in two minds about whether to go halfway down tonight, or just spend the whole of Saturday travelling. We plumped for the split journey, as much as anything because our car has no air-con, and we didn’t think we could hack 7 hours in a baking hot car with a screaming toddler.. Turns out this was an extra smart move, as it’s the British Grand Prix this weekend, so the Silverstone area will no doubt be heaving tommorow. So it’s a service station on the M5 tonight, then the Cornish coast tommorow, hopefully by about 11am.
Of course, my new E2 plays very nicely with my K700, and will let me browse the web over bluetooth/GPRS, so I guess I might not be able to resist the urge to blog from the beach (just as long as A. doesn’t see me). Which reminds me, A and I have a little wager afoot. I reckon on at least one morning I’ll go out for a jog before breakfast. A says she’ll eat her hat if I do. I will report back who wins…
Here’s the Love, by Hayley Hutchinson (my current favourite track) continues to end up pretty high on my playlist. Had a go at playing along over the weekend, and it would appear that there’s no minor chord in it! I might be mistaken – and was certainly surprised – and there’s definitely one point when you could squeeze in a minor, but it’s basically a major chord song. It’s just so fab though; puts a smile on my face everytime I hear it.
The other thought I had is that it’s just screaming to be put into a film – probably over a “falling in love/courtship” montage.. hopefully some movie mogul listens to Terry Wogan and has had the same thought.
Oh yes, and I’ve realised why there’s been such a flurry of activity on here… Nothing like the possibility that someone might actually be reading to hot-wire creativity. Got readers to keep happy now; no good leaving it months between entries.
Today’s excitement – our new shredder arrived. Aint no-one going to nick our identities, oh no. Apparantly if one’s compost heap is getting filled up with grass cuttings (which end up as sludge), you can add your shredded paper which helps fix the consistency of the compost!
Been pondering – it’s a fair bet that one day I’ll no longer work in Leeds, and then what do I call these missives? The rather tacky Letters from Life would enable me to keep the initial letters, but is just too cheesy, even for me. I’m sure something will come to me.
Anyway, got a rabbit update.. was watching Man on Fire this evening, when there’s a BANG BANG BANG at the door. I rush to see what the emergency is, and a young lady with baby on hip is standing there.
“Sorry to disturb you,” she says. “But there’s an escaped rabbit on next door’s front lawn and we wondered if you knew who the owner is so you could let them know?”
So I explain to increasingly wide-eyed lassie that it’s a feral rabbit that’s been on the scene for probably 5 or 6 weeks now. She explains she lives around the corner, and her babe was making a fuss, so she was taking it out for a walk. I explain we quite like seeing said lapine, she wondered if it ate our flowers. She carried on her walk, I went back to the film.
Although this is not the only wildlife excitement we’ve had today. At about 4 ‘o’ clock, we were lounging in the sitting room watching Live 8, and A. squeals and points out the window. Lo and behold, there’s a tiny hedgehog snuffling across our patio!!!
We both thought that they were essentially nocturnal, so wondered why it was out in the heat of the day; although it was a very little one (it would have comfortably sat in the palm of my hand, at least as far as its size went), so may have been a lost baby hedgehog. Ben was very excited, but hedgehogs are not only prickly they are also flea-ridden, so in this instance we didn’t let him out of the patio doors.
It snuffled into our flowerbed, and we didn’t really see it again; chances are it nipped under the fence and through to next door. H’mm – actually next door also had the rabbit on her lawn this evening, must be a veritable wildlife haven.
I can barely remember the last time I saw a hedgehog in the flesh, it’s just a shame it didn’t linger. Perhaps we’ll put out a saucer of milk…
I’m getting in lots of entries before we go to Cornwall! 🙂
Anyway, my top favourite pud:
Raspberry Yum Serves approx 4-6
You make it straight in the serving bowl; I like using a trifle bowl that’s around 1.5 litres or so.
Ingredients:
2x 400g tins raspberries
175g Sponge fingers
250ml double cream, whipped
Dash of sherry/rum/.. (optional)
Method:
Drain the rasps, keeping the juice, and put to one side.
Dip the sponge fingers in the rasp juice, so that they are saturated but not soggy, and line the bottom and sides of the serving bowl. The easiest way to do this is to dip each finger and put it straight into the bowl. Make sure you hold back a few sponge fingers for step (6).
Throw 2 or 3 tablespoons of juice of the juice over the fingers for good measure. If you are using alcohol, throw it in here too.
Put in half the raspsberries, and level-off to form a layer.
Make another layer using just under half the whipped cream.
Make a second layer of dipped sponge fingers, with a bit more juice/alcohol thrown over
Use the remaining raspberries to form another later.
Finish off with a covering of whipped cream.
Leave in the fridge for long enough for everything to soak through – probably an hour or two will do it.
Comments:
It is the yummiest pudding ever, and the precise construction doesn’t matter. I personally think it doesn’t need any spirits in it, but a dry sherry or even rum might just add a nice tang. Other options include using Marscapone instead of whipped cream, in which case you’d stir the drained raspberries through it, and put in half and half with a layer of sponge fingers between.
Update 2/7/2005
H’mm – the above isn’t quite right; I’m not sure the layer of cream in the middle really works, and the sponge fingers that line the side of the dish didn’t really end up integrated properly. Perhaps a longer soaking in the juice would have helped? It was still yummy, but not quite right, somehow…
By the way, I moved my private network at home onto a new subnet, and not had any more
routing problems; although I am still using the Buffalo. It’s a huge pain in the bottom moving a Linux server onto a new subnet, or indeed onto a new IP address. It’s the master DNS for my private network, so all that needed changing, plus of course iptables, web-servers, etc, all depend on heavily on IP addresses (or at least they do on my set up). Still, nothing seems to have broken; I just need to remember to move the PS2 onto the new subnet next time I do an online thingy with it.
I also discovered something very interesting about apache httpd – the directive
HostnameLookups off
is global, in the sense that everything running as apache is affected, which of course includes mod_php. This caused me all sorts of hassles getting a web-based management thing going for LfL, as I was trying to fire an sql query to my webhost’s MySQL server, but having no joy – as the server was unknown. The solution, as discovered by a mighty guru at work (he did a better Google than me!) is to explicitly let PHP do hostname lookups:
HostnameLookups off
<Files ~ "\.(php|cgi)$>
HostnameLookups on
</Files>
You want hostname lookups off in general as it doesn’t ‘alf slow things down to be doing a DNS lookup everytime you log a hit.
Incidently, I accidently made up a possibly useful description of binary and binary counting at my Mum’s. Imagine you own 2 shirts, a red one and a blue one. This means you have two choices of what to wear. Now imagine you also have 2 shorts, a red one and a blue one. You now how 4 choices of what to wear; red shirt and red shorts, red shirt and blue shorts, blue shirt and red shorts, and a blue shirt and blue shorts. Let’s say you use ‘R’ to represent a red item of clothing, and ‘B’ to represent a blue item of clothing, and you say that the first item given is the shirt, and the second is the shorts, these 4 outfits can be written down thus
RR
RB
BR
BB
Right – let’s say we now buy two hats, (you’ve guessed it) a red one and a blue one. Straight away we’ve doubled the number of outfits we’ve got, as we can wear the red hat with the 4 outfits mentioned above, or we can wear our blue hat with them (ignore the possibility of not wearing a hat – or indeed any of the other items of clothing – imagine you’re at ascot or something!)
For each item of clothing we only need to store a ‘bit’ of information – either it’s red or it’s blue, and so instead of using ‘R’ and ‘B’ we could just use ‘0’ and ‘1’, which gives the 8 choices of outfit as (with a red hat, if we call the first bit the ‘hat’ bit:) “000”, “001”, “010”, “011”, (and a blue hat:) “100”, “101”, “110”, “111”.
This hopefully shows how we can encode information just using bits, but also how the total amount of information we can store is dependent on how many bits we’ve got. Each time we add a bit we double the amount of information we can store (or, to phrase it another way, the largest number we can represent) – so if we were to add another bit to represent what is the colour of our socks, we now can represent 16 outfits (red socks with the 8 given above, or blue socks with 8 given above).
The clever part is that bits are very easy to encode as voltage inside a computer. If you have +5V (or + 3.3V, or whatever) on a wire then you say this represents a 1, and if there’s 0V on the wire than this represents a 0. so if give me 4 wires, I can encode up my outfit of shirt, shorts, hat, and socks by either applying a voltage or not to the appropriate wire.
And once you’ve got a voltage on a wire, you can do clever stuff with it using flip-flops, transistors, gates, …, and thus a computer is built; which means in turn I can write this nonsense! 🙂
I like Radio 2 – they play cracking old music, and cherry-pick the best of the new stuff while avoiding all the trash that seems to fill up the charts. I’ve mildly gone off Jem at the moment (probably over-exposure), but just love “Here’s the Love” by Hayley Hutchinson, from her Independently Blue album. Turns out she’s from York (as far as I can tell), and working in a soldering factory. The album is – in one sense – yet another female singer/songwriter country type album – but I don’t think that does it justice, from what I’ve heard. “Here’s the Love” in particular is a really uplifting track, and just puts a smile on my face! Plus it’s got that cheeseboard scrape-y instrument that they was on the old Grange Hill theme tune. 🙂
Her website is progressive in as much as it’s got the first minute and a bit from several tracks of her album on MP3 – but is not quite so hot in that it’s entirely flash based. Still, the content is good, and from the photos she looks like a sweetheart! Anyway, the album is out on the 25th July, and “Here’s The Love” is out on the 18th, and I reckon it’s a good tip for the charts. Probably not quite a No. 1, as I don’t think it’s appeal is mainstream enough, but wouldn’t be at all surprised at a top ten.
What’s also probably worth noting is that she recorded and financed this album herself (and sold it from her website at first!), but after our Tel noticed it it got a bit more exposure and now she’s signed up with a record company who are releasing it more formally. Seriously tempted….
The good thing about bad weeks is that they always end, and then more often then not the following week is an improvement. I had Monday off as the Handley-bug finally caught up with me, but now all three of us seem to be back up and fighting fit (well, nearly), and absolutely gagging for our Holiday.
Was down in London over the weekend for my Mum’s 60th birthday- isn’t it funny how certain numbers are meaningful almost entirely due to the fact we have ten digits on our hands? If we counted in binary, we’d probably decide 64 was a big birthday (which indeed it would be; the first one needing a new digit since 32). Mind you, who’d like turning 1000000? I guess the point is partly that 60 is retirement age for ladies.
One thing that was quite funny was a family friend was there who goes a long way back, and who’s daughter I used to play with (apparantly) when I was a sprog. “Oh yes, she’s 31 now”. “Thirty-one,” think I? “Goodness that’s old for a friend I knew when I was young”. Then I remember that I’m actually 31 too!
But is was lovely to see my mum and the rest of the family, and also lovely to see various people who I haven’t seen for – probably – decades, certainly a decade. Lots of my childhood friends are married with kids now, which freaked me out until it happened to me too…
On a completely different note, I now claim a readership of about 6. My Mum and one of my sisters admitted to reading this website, as did one of my ex-students. Add that to the chap at work who I caught out, and I course I read it.. H’mm, well, ok so that’s only 5 – but still 4 more than I’d put money on (and I concede the fairly loose definition of readership too). While we’re on the subject, this is also my first entry ever via a web interface, as opposed to manually running an SQL query to make an entry! (hey, it worked for me)
Final excitement – my Dlink died (or so I thought), so replaced it with a Buffalo (30 quid from ebuyer; can’t argue with that), only to discover it exhibiting exactly the same problem. Sigh. My diagnosis of the Dlink was that it had overheated and stuffed some memory, but it doesn’t seem very likely, somehow, that both would fail in exactly the new way (especially when one is new out the box). New diagnosis is that the NTL cable modem is stuffing up the routing table, although I haven’t thought too much about how this is happening (the paranoid part of me wonders if it’s deliberate because NTL don’t like you having more than one computer hanging off broadband). I’ve moved only a new subnet to see if this helps matters at all.
It’s been one of those weeks – you know the type that make you want to jack it all in, sell everything, and live in a caravan. Started off with A. coming down with tonsilitis (or however you spell it). So James takes charge of young lad, taking him to and from nursery, and indeed book him in an extra day because A’s not up to looking after him…
Halfway through the day, James gets a phone-call from Nursery:
“Ben’s coming down with Chicken-pox; can you come and pick him up please?”.
I’d booked today off work anyway, and had all sorts of plans arranged for
a day in on my own, and in the event all of us were holed up! I’m not feeling so hot myself (collapsed into bed at about 7 last night, and more or less slept
’till morning, and was still exhausted). Been really tired today with a bit of headache to boot. 🙁
Mind you, A’s feeling a bit better, and is back to work on Friday at least for part of the day. She is having to take at least one day off next week to look after Ben though, which is a huge hassle for her work. These things are sent to try us. I know it’s the world’s favourite lie to say “life would be easier/better/etc if only..”, but at times it’s tempting to buy it!
On a much happier note, I am now the proud owner of a Tungsten E2, which is lovely; does everything I want and “just works”. My Palm III has totally died (so it was only just in time), and so has become a toy for Ben. He straightway picked it up, pulled out the stylus (which I had meant to leave in!), opened the flip and started scribbling on the touch screen!!! Of course I’d taken out the batteries, and he’s too young to have a small sharp thing like that – but I was still amazed! The E2 is lurvely – the bluetooth stuff all worked with zero hassle (for SMS, e-mail and web browser), everything installed properly, and it’s bright, colorful, fast and responsive. I want to get a memory card for it, and then the WiFi card (it’s only drawback is that WiFI is not built in).
Our much beloved Fiat Punto is sadly nearing the end of it’s life. Well, the end of it’s life with us anyway. It is most certainly entering that sad phase of car life when things start to go wrong, and it just gets more and more expensive to run. Can’t complain; we’ve had it for about 6 years now, and we got it second hand, and it’s to/from Cornwall on several occasions. Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure it’s got several years service left in it, but I worry it’s going to start breaking down and becoming less reliable, which is no good for our needs.
The decision is aided by the fact that we find ourselves a little bit squeezed inside now we have a baby (and all the baby paraphenalia) to transport. And with every possibility of another baby at some yet-to-be-determined point in the future, perhaps the time has come to get a slightly bigger device? H’mm – perhaps I should be absolutely clear (you never know who might be reading): we’re not expecting a baby!
The missus needs to drive (and park) around town, so a monster people carrier would be impractical as well a waste of time and money, but at the same time buying a car that’s not large enough for potentially two sprogs plus luggage would be silly. Perhaps what I believe is classfied as a “small family car” might do the trick, i.e. Vauxhall Astra, Renault Megane – that kind of thing. Apparantly the Punto is a “super mini”, which I’m a little surprised at, but there you go! Of course the Megane adverts are good, with the Groovejet Armada song (Shaking that Ass!) – not that I’m influenced by advertising, you understand. Alternatively, we might be able to persaude the father-in-law to sell us his cheap. 🙂
In any case it’ll be second hand (the depreciation makes it not worth buying a new ‘un, I reckon), and we might be able to get a bob or two for the Punto.
Speaking of second hand things, Christmas might be coming a little early for James! My faithful Palm III is on it’s last legs (looks like the connection to the LCD is wonky), so I’ve had special dispensation for a toy budget advance to get my E2 instead. It also just so happens that someone at work is selling one second hand right now (and the two events are pure co-incidence, although I admit it might seem suspicious that an E2 comes up for sale just as my III dies…)
A workmate also inadvertantly let slip that he’d read some of these babblings when he turned to me and said “feral rabbit?”. Knew that would catch someone out (no more sightings, incidently). Told you you never know who might be reading…
Am wondering about adding the facility to comment. Pros are that it would be fun to do, and a nice feature to have. Cons are that it’s an extra administrative burden, making sure the comments are all ‘family friendly’. We’ll see – as for now, it’s time for bed.
