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42 blogs from May 01, 2002 to May 31, 2002

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May 31, 2002

The Moby tickets arrived this morning, I'm amazed. Now all I have to do is keep them somewhere safe for the next 6 or so months!

Posted by Jane at 12:29 PM

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Well, here we go. World Cup coverage has started on the tv, and for the next month we have football to look forward to. Today we have the opening ceremony and the first game (France v Senegal) to watch. I'll try not to let football take over my blogging for the next month, but, to be honest, chances are slim :-)

Posted by Jane at 10:08 AM

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May 30, 2002

In the last week or so there have been some gardeners doing some work near Babylon Lounge. They've planted a load of plants in the flowerbeds near the footpath/cycle lane. Tonight, as I was cycling home, I watched a lady dig one of them out and put it in a plastic bag. Strange!

Posted by Jane at 5:33 PM

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We've gained an office toy! Susie leaves us tomorrow to head back to New Zealand, and whilst she was in London the other day she stopped off at the New Zealand shop. She brought us a packet of Minties and a wind-up Kiwi. He's currently sitting on my desk, hopping around every now and again and staring at the unopened pack of Minties. Thanks Suz!

Posted by Jane at 8:56 AM

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May 29, 2002

Here's an interesting article on how lucky we are to be alive: Amid the Universe's Chaos, a Few Habitable Places (spotted on Slashdot). It's a look at how dangerous the universe is, and how small the window for life is. The conclusion: life (as we know it) may be harder to find that we thought. The other side of the coin is that we should probably make plans to get off this planet. With that in mind, there's some good news -- it's not Star Gate: SG1 yet, but I'm told that quantum wormholes could carry people.

Posted by Richard at 12:26 PM

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May 28, 2002

When I ordered the Moby tickets, I decided to save the extra £1.25 and collect them from the box office. Only then did I remember that by November I'll have changed my name and will have to go through a bit of a performance to prove that the tickets are really mine (Ticketmaster require you to have the purchasers credit card and the reference number as proof). And as I could only collect the tickets on the day, this didn't give me much "proving I'm really me" time. So, I've arranged to have them posted to me instead with the hope that this will work out easier.

Posted by Jane at 9:38 PM

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Woohoo! I've just bought us some tickets to go and see Moby when he's in the UK in November.

Posted by Jane at 1:43 PM

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Bacon sarnies

One day last week Susie was complaining about being hungry and wanting lunch. It was 10am. We sent her over the road to our local greasy spoon to get a bacon buttie. She returned with sandwiches for all, and my bacon and mushroom sarnie was lovely and possibly one of the best I've ever had. Today, the weather is horrid (raining and windy and generally yuck) and we needed comfort food, and so we had bacon sandwiches for lunch. I was going to miss this and stick to the lunch I'd brought with me, but then realised that I couldn't sit in an office with 3 people eating lovely, lardy, bacon butties. So, I gave in.

Posted by Jane at 12:54 PM

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We went to see Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones last night. This is a much darker story than The Phantom Menace and despite what the first trailer implied, it's not all a love story. Phew! I was dissapointed that the annoying Jar Jar Binks is still alive and wasn't killed off but he doesn't have much screen time and I guess I should be grateful for small mercies. Natalie Portman (as Senator Amidala) takes on an almost Lara Croft role with cropped tops and guns, and Yoda, with the help of CGI, walks. It kept me amused and entertained but it doesn't feel "complete", which I guess it isn't, whilst you are watching it you know that this is a passage to get us to where we were at the start of the original Star Wars films.

Will we go and see the third one? Of course. We've invested too much time and effort into the Star Wars films to not go and complete the story. Will we buy this one on DVD? Well, only if the original series gets relaunched and we need it to make up the set.

Posted by Jane at 8:47 AM

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May 26, 2002

We've been doing some work on the blog over the weekend. We've changed the way that comments work, so that they now appear below the blog, rather than on a separate page. Let us know what you think.

Posted by Jane at 9:29 PM

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May 24, 2002

I've just been having a look at some technology news on yahoo, and spotted this article about six people being arrested on suspicion of being involved in the Nigerian email banking fraud. It seems like they'd been managed to rake in hundreds of millions of US dollars during their time of operation.

Posted by Jane at 3:04 PM

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Someone posted on BNM this morning about the new O'Reilly book "Essential Blogging". This is due for release in August, but is currently available for technical review in PDF form. It's aimed an novice bloggers and people who don't have a blog at the moment and want one, and reviews the different options. I've had a read of the first chapter, and it seems to be pretty well written, and very readable.

Posted by Jane at 1:59 PM

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May 22, 2002

Tonight we went to see The Two Terries (Terry Jones and Terry Pratchett) on stage at The Dome Concert Hall. We didn't really know what to expect, and given that the Terries had never met before tonight, I guess they didn't either.

For us, the worst thing it could have been was very very Literary -- but it turned out to be mostly anecdote telling followed by questions at the end. There was a host to keep things moving, so all in all it was sort of like a chat show. An entertaining chat show. For example: Terry Jones telling us about what life in the 14th century would have been like for a food taster to the Pope; or how the restaurant where the Mr Creosote scene from The Meaning of Life was being used the next day for a wedding; or how Terry Pratchett may or may not stumble around hotel rooms at 5am trying to avoid peeing in the wardrobe.

One of the stranger things: Terry Jones showed us the scar he acquired after being in hospital. Apparently the surgeon took a photo of Terry while they were working on or around his intestines...and then emailed him the photo (warning: that link not for the faint hearted or those eating).

The DVD of Monty Python and the Holy Grail sounds good at least for the subtitles for "people who don't like the movie", and we'll have to go check out some of Terry Jones' books. Jane already has pretty much all of the Pratchett books already.

Oh, brilliant moment: when it came round to time for questions, the first person stood up and said "This is a question for Terry" :-)

Posted by Richard at 9:26 PM

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May 21, 2002

What soup?

When we were planning our menu for our wedding dinner the other day, we were offered "Soup of our choice" as one of our starter choices. We can't decide which soup to offer, so please help us out by voting.

Posted by Jane at 8:11 PM

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I've just been listening to the England v South Korea friendly on Radio 5. And didn't we do well, not! We drew one all. Hmmm, not the start that we were hoping for I'm sure. It must be hard to bond a team together when you change 8 players between the interval and the end of the second half. Surely that makes it hard to play together as a team.

And how does this affect our chances in the World Cup, well it doesn't really, except that there might be some negative press comments and that always seems to spur England on. The chances of us getting beyond the first round have to be slim, the climate doesn't suit the Europeans very much, and Nigeria and Argentina are both pretty strong. And Argentina are one of our two bogey teams (fact: in the 5 most recent competitions we've been knocked out by only 2 teams - Argentina and Germany (or West Germany as it was before)).

Posted by Jane at 12:10 PM

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I was catching up on the reportings of The Register this morning, and I noticed this article. Basically, it's about 4 people who are "living" in Harrods shop window for the week to publicise some of LG Electronics new gadgets - a fridge freezer which has a built in MP3 player, LCD display, camera and full internet access, a microwave which can download recipes from the internet, a washing machine which you can turn on remotely via the internet and an air conditioner which you can adjust remotely via the internet. Interesting products, and a strange way of advertising them. I guess it is all part of the UKs current need for more "reality tv" type situations (the third series of Big Brother starts on Friday evening). If you're interested, you can watch them or catch up on their news.

This did make me think about something we saw on Saturday at Fenwicks in York. As we left the shop clutching our wedding related purchases, we heard a voice coming over some speakers. I turned around and realised that it was a beauty consultant doing a facial on some poor lady in one of the main windows of the store. The lady was lying down whilst the consultant talked us all through what she was doing, and what particular problem areas this lady needed help with. Weird, very weird!

Posted by Jane at 9:14 AM

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May 20, 2002

Radios should be more like TVs. Dials? A limited number of stored stations labelled "1" or "2"? Why not have a bit of a screen, a few logos so I can select a channel and go there, rather than scanning for channels? Anyway...

I have a thing about needing a radio version of TiVo, and today Jane tempted me with a couple of URLs.

TiVo for radio' set for UK launch is a story in the Guardian... but from 14 Feb 2001. Alas the company in the article, sounds like it's sort of lost the way. Shame.

The second, Bitbop Tuner is TiVo For Radio is from Jul 27, 2001 sounded better, in that it's a download for your PC. I go for the download button but the site has an important notice telling me that they've "discontinued distribution". (Amusing moment: The system requirements list "Minimum Ram: 64MB", fine, "Processor: Absolutely Necessary" :-)

So it seems people have tried to make better radios, but there's no money in it.

Labels: TiVo

Posted by Richard at 8:04 PM

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After my accident on Thursday, I bought some Activheal plasters (supposedly help your wound to heal better - certainly worked pretty well, only my cut was in such an awkward place that it was hard to get a plaster to stick so I gave up after 2 days). On the back of the packet it says "Use once only". Please tell me people don't re-use plasters.

Posted by Jane at 8:50 AM

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May 19, 2002

Whilst we were in Hull at the weekend we decided to buy a couple of spoken word tapes to amuse ourselves on the long drive back to Brighton (between 5 and 6 hours). We happened to be shopping in York and were in Waterstones, and so were limited to their selection. We chose a P G Wodehouse Jeeves and Wooster story (The Inimitable Jeeves read by Simon Callow) and a 4 episode collection (Volume 5) of Just a Minute.

These really helped pass the time on the journey, and I am still in awe of the participants of Just a Minute. We've listened to 2 of the 4 episodes so far, and there were a good selection of participants - Clement Freud, Graham Norton, Linda Smith, Tony Hawkes, Paul Merton and Stephen Fry. There really is such a lot of skill involved (for those that don't know, Just a Minute is a radio show where the contestants are given a subject to speak about for a minute during which they mustn't hesitate, repeat themselves or deviate from the subject. It really is very hard, and the participants are very good at it (I'd have just failed for repetition of the word very there). I have high hopes for the other 2 episodes.

Jeeves and Wooster was an entertaining story and I enjoyed listening to it. It was very light, and didn't need much concentration. It was kind of strange listening to Simon Callow reading it, as I always picture the Jeeves character as being Stephen Fry, and Hugh Laurie being Wooster following the TV series in which they both appeared.

Posted by Jane at 8:53 PM

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May 17, 2002

15 reasons to serve alcohol at work

1. It's an incentive to show up.
2. Reduces stress.
3. Leads to more honest communications.
4. Reduces complaints about low pay.
5. Cuts down on time off, because you can work with a hangover.
6. Helps save on heating costs in the winter.
7. Encourages carpooling.
8. Increases job satisfaction because if you have a bad job, you don't care.
9. Eliminates vacations because people would rather come to work.
10. Makes fellow employees, of the opposite sex, look better.
11. Makes the cafeteria food taste better.
12. Bosses are more likely to hand out raises when they are wasted.
13. Employees work later since there's no longer a need to relax at the bar.
14. Eliminates the need for employees to get drunk on their lunch break.
15. Babbling and mumbling incoherently will be common, not just restricted to the higher ups.

Thanks to Komal for brightening up my day with this :-)

Posted by Jane at 9:38 AM

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May 16, 2002

I was just listening to Five Live and heard a news story about a woman destroying lots of art work which her son had stolen. Bizarre. If it isn't bad enough that someone steals all this art work (worth £960m), but then to have his Mother destroy it all because she is angry with her son. Shocking!

Posted by Jane at 12:08 PM

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Accidents 3 - Jane 0

What a bad cycling week. What with a small graze on my leg on Sunday when we were out cycling in the downs, and then Tuesday's incident - the result of which was a nasty bruise, I should have known this was all leading up to something worse. This morning, I was cycling in the cycle lane down Preston Street (for those who don't know Preston Street is a one way street going up, with a cycle lane going down) on a beautiful sunny morning, when a bloke appears from behind his van with a piece of aluminium sheeting which he slams into my hand. Fortunately, it was a glancing blow and I've only ended up with a small cut on my hand. Could have been a lot worse. Again, he didn't seem too concerned about hitting me. I stopped my bike as soon as I could, and found myself being looked after by a lovely crew of builders who found me some plasters and took down the license plate of the van (just in case). Just as I was getting ready to leave, he reappeared with his boss and they both loitered around their van (about 20 metres further up the road) but didn't bother to come and check if I was ok.

I pedalled on to work, and then went hunting antiseptics etc at our local Boots. Paul (guy in the next office) suggested I get some Hydrogen Peroxide as it cleans wounds up well, and it fizzes which is an added bonus, oh and it can fuel rockets.... I did, it worked lovely (on the wound, haven't tried a rocket yet), and I'm now sitting having a nice cup of tea (hey, I'm english, what can I say :-)) and a yummy Chocolate Brownie.

Posted by Jane at 9:06 AM

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May 15, 2002

I know we go on a lot about TiVo, but this impressed me...

We'd notice a problem where TiVo had confused a bunch of channels: what it thought was BBC4 (say) was actually something like the Parliament channel. This is bad, because when TiVo spots something good to record, it changes to the wrong channel and records something else. Bah.

On Monday I put a call into TiVO to see what was happening, and they said they'd look into and probably update our TiVo. Today, they call back. The problem, they'd figured out, was actually with our set-top box. TiVo was right, the set-top box had the channels confused. Now, I'd have expected most companies to say "we're right, it's somebody else's problem, give them (your now out-of-business set-top box manufacturer) a call", but the TiVo folk knew what set-top box we have, and gave me the detailed instructions on what to do to fix it.

TiVo: expensive, but in the end, good value.

Labels: TiVo

Posted by Richard at 12:00 PM

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Mini Motty

There I was reading the BBC sports pages this morning to check what Jeremy had just told me (about Gerrard definitely not going to the World Cup) and I stumbled across Mini Motty. Now if you're not British, chances are you haven't heard of Motty - John Motson - but Motty is a famous football commentator for the BBC for television and radio, and seems to have been around for ever. He is most often thought of as being somewhere cold wearing a sheepskin coat (which are the clothes Mini Motty wears). Mini Motty can be downloaded from the site and allows you to select up to 5 teams to hear news about. When new news is posted to the BBC site, Motty will let you know. And in the meantime, he'll entertain you by dancing, kicking a ball, sending you off, having a walk around your screen and any number of other things. What a really entertaining concept. Well done BBC.

Posted by Jane at 9:04 AM

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May 14, 2002

Nearly an accident...

There I was cycling, or more accurately being blown, home this evening along the cycle lane which leads from Hove Lagoon all the way along the sea front. Just after I passed the King Alfred Leisure Centre there are 2 people on rollerblades hogging the cycle lane. I try to swerve off the lane to avoid hitting the girl (the guy had already moved off) and she stumbles (she wasn't very confident on her skates) right into my path. I pull my brakes as hard as I can to avoid running into her, they screech loudly, and I feel my bike balance precariously onto the front wheel, I let go of the brakes to get the bike back onto the level, and then immediately have to pull them again to keep from running into her. Again my rear wheel left the ground and slammed my saddle into my leg. Nice. So, they skate off and I stop and assess my damage - just a sore leg, nothing serious. The guy shouts to see if I'm ok, the girl says nothing.

I cycled on, rubbing my sore leg, and speak to them as I go past them saying "I suggest you keep out of the cycle lane if you can". When I look back a couple of hundred metres further along they're both skating in the cycle lane. Fools!

So, this leads me to wonder what the rules about cycle lanes are. I mean, I know that generally they're a lot smoother than the normal footpaths, and so they would appeal to rollerbladers and skateboarders, but are they allowed to use them. If I hadn't manage to stop, would it have been my fault or hers?

Posted by Jane at 6:42 PM

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May 13, 2002

On Saturday night we cycled down to Preston Park to catch Groupe F's A Little More Light firework show. These are the people who did the fireworks around the Eiffel Tower for New Year's eve 2000. It was impressive (but short) and I've not seen so many people for a long, long time. 15,000? No idea.

Actually, going cycling on a Saturday night felt like one of the nerdiest thing I've done for ages. But it was top fun.. especially having to twist and turn through so many cars and people on foot on their way to/from the fireworks.

This was at the end of the day, after having been caught up in the events of the North Laine. Jane's put together the pictures.

Posted by Richard at 9:54 PM

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iMac advert I can't think why, but just recently I've been feeling the need to buy an iMac... This can be seen in Brighton on the scaffolding surrounding the Clock Tower.

Posted by Jane at 8:19 PM

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Susie went to London on Saturday to do a few more touristy things, see a show and have dinner with her brother. Whilst she was there she popped into Fortnum and Mason's. Being the sweetie that she is, she bought me a tin of Fortnum and Mason's Drinking Chocolate Flakes. So, this afternoon, an afternoon when it's wet and miserable outside, we've just been drinking some. And it's lovely. It's actually flakes of chocolate, not a powder as they usually are, and unusually it's dark chocolate rather than milk chocolate - it's just a shame that we're only going to get 4 or 5 cups out of the 125g can. Yummmmm!

Posted by Jane at 2:36 PM

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Other people's blogs

For one reason or another I've read a few other people's blogs recently, and I thought it was only fair to give them a mention.

Posted by Jane at 1:44 PM

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There I was in Tesco's minding my own business when I stumbled across The Sven-Göran Eriksson Classical Collection in their CD section. It's a 3 disc collection of Sven's favourite classical music - alegedly. I must admit that this is something I can't really imagine many of the previous England managers doing!

Posted by Jane at 12:24 PM

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My hatred of spammers increases by the day. The latest trick I've seen hitting my mailbox is spam that looks just like message failure reports. Messages from "Mail delivery subsystem" with a subject of "Returned mail: see transcript for details". This is so annoying. Or would be, but luckily I use SpamAssassin to clean my mailbox for me. Every so often I check the "spam" folder to see what it's caught, and that's why I've seen all these "Returned mail:" spam. SpamAssassin works; but how long before the spammers get the upper hand...?

Posted by Richard at 9:36 AM

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May 09, 2002

England's World Cup Squad

Well, the squad has been announced and as usual there are a few surprises. The squad is:

Goalkeepers
David James, Nigel Martyn, David Seaman
Defenders
Wayne Bridge, Wes Brown, Sol Campbell, Ashley Cole, Martin Keown, Rio Ferdinand, Danny Mills, Gareth Southgate
Midfielders
David Beckham, Nicky Butt, Joe Cole, Kieron Dyer, Steven Gerrard, Owen Hargreaves, Paul Scholes
Forwards
Robbie Fowler, Emile Heskey, Michael Owen, Teddy Sheringham, Darius Vassell

For me, one of the bigger surprises is the inclusion of Teddy Sherringham - I didn't expect him to make it this time, not at 36 years old. I'm also slightly surprised to see so many defenders named, but I'm sure this is a good thing. I'm pleased to see Owen Hargreaves included as he has impressed me the few times I've seen him play.

C'mon you England....

Posted by Jane at 12:04 PM

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May 08, 2002

We've been watching the UEFA Cup Final this evening between Feyenoord and Borussia Dortmund. It's been one of the dirtiest and cheaty matches I've seen for ages - players diving all over the place, a Dortmund player sent off after 32 minutes, 2 penalties - one to each team. And to cap it all there is a hoarding that says "Fair Play", yeah right.

Posted by Jane at 8:15 PM

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May 06, 2002

I've been a subscriber to Wanderlust - a travel magazine designed for more independent travellers - for about 4 years now, and today I've been catching up on the last few editions. The first I read was the 50th edition, and had an article of 50 things to do in New Zealand - by my calculation we achieved 5.5 of them when we were there. Must try harder next time :-). They also had a small article saying that they'd relaunched their website. I've just been for a quick look, and it is much better than it was, being able to look at the events section is really handy. Well done Wanderlust.

Posted by Jane at 9:48 PM

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I've just finished reading The Salmon of Doubt. I'm not much interested in unfinished novels, but it was great to read some Douglas Adams one more time -- and actually, the bulk of the book is a collection of magazine articles, newspaper articles and interviews.

The annoying thing is there's not going to be any more, what with him being dead and all. I'm so glad I saw him speak. I thought it was at the Turing 1990 Colloquium, April 6 1990, held at the University of Sussex campus (which I went to and got the t-shirt). But I think it was more likely to have been the Computers And Writing conference, also held on campus on March 23, 1991. I don't think I would have gone to that conference, but I guess I would have found a way to get in to see Douglas Adams talk. From what I remember Adams was supposed to talk about user interfaces, but twisted it into something from Last Chance to See. And yes it was very entertaining.

Posted by Richard at 2:04 PM

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May 05, 2002

The Zvon Character Search is one of those really useful geek sites that I can never remember the name of, or the address of. Okay, so it's not going to be of interest to many people, but if you ever code xml it might just be of use as it gives the codes for entitys.

Hopefully now I'll have a good way to track it down everytime I need it :-D

Posted by Jane at 6:51 PM

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Poor old Tivo, it's still suffering with our lack of channels - we caught it recording 2 hours of QVC the other day :-o

Labels: TiVo

Posted by Jane at 6:43 PM

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May 04, 2002

Brighton Festival kicks off about... now. So many things on, but we've only just started to get tickets. That's because the festival web site is horrid. It's not just the usability of the site and the missing features (let me get this straight: I can't book on-line? Hellllooo?), but it's that it doesn't have all the information that the printed guide has. So we waited until the printed guide came out, and we're using that. Shame.

Posted by Richard at 11:10 AM

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May 03, 2002

ASP Upload Components

A bit of a geeky blog this one. Today I've been researching Upload components for ASP to use in the project I'm working on at the moment. Ideally I want one that does the following:

I had a quick discussion on BNM about this, and also consulted 15 Seconds.

I decided to try ASPUpload first, as this was recommended both by BNM and by an ex-colleague of mine. I got this working pretty quickly, but it doesn't seem to be able to present me with the Mime Type (i.e. image/gif etc) and so isn't very useful for handling different kinds of binary data. I know that I could code around this issue, but I'd rather it did it all for me really.

My next thought was to try SA File Up, a product I've used many times before. Unfortunately their evaluation copy expires on 1 May 2001, that's 2 days ago - helpful.

Attempt 3 was ABCUpload. On the plus side, this is a free product. This took a bit longer to get to work, as the help documents are not as comprehensive as ASPUpload. Hidden, on the Object Reference page I found the property I was looking for - MIMEType. Woohoo! But alas, it only seems to be able to work out the Mime Types for images so, PDFs etc are out of the question. And more annoying still, it won't even upload the damn things. Bah!

Attempt number 4. The last of the BNM recommendations. Dundas Upload. Another free offering. The examples don't seem to cover saving to a database, but a more thorough hunt through the documentation found it hidden away. This component has a ContentType property, and seems to insert pdfs, excel spreadsheets as well, so we might just have found our answer. Hurrah!

Posted by Jane at 1:37 PM

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*Coff* Well, as well as the local elections yesterday, there was also an election in Hartlepool for their new town mayor. The winner was H'Angus the Monkey, the Hartepool United Football Club mascot... Read more.

Posted by Jane at 8:39 AM

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May 02, 2002

Since ITVDigital's shutdown in the last couple of days, we've lost quite a few TV channels. It may be coincidence, but TiVO has gone mad and has started recording all sorts of rubbish, such as Richard and Judy, Newsround Lite (ok, not rubbish, but not something we need recording), and various other day-time TV junk. Poor thing must be desperate for things to record for us. Bless.

Posted by Richard at 6:50 PM

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May 01, 2002

The secret of a good surprise...

...is that it should be a surprise, but not a shock. We had fun at Jane's Surprise 30th Birthday Party, but for the first couple of hours Jane was still shaking. This is the kind of "surprise" you have when you've been in a car accident. So, for anyone organizing these things for anyone else: consider dropping them a few clues -- or be prepared to warm up the defibrillator.

Posted by Richard at 3:46 PM

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