Occasional Solipsism

Bandwidth Theft

2009-10-22T11:59:00.000+02:00

This can be a problem here in SA, and having come across a few people lately who've been having a problem I typed up the following explanation to send to them. It's brief, but covers the main points; if you think I've left anything out or gotten anything wrong, feel free to say so in the comments!

There are basically 3 levels where bandwidth can be stolen:
1) On your PC - if you have a trojan, spyware, or a bot that's installed itself and is sending or receiving data
2) People tapping into your network - particularly if you have wi-fi enabled
3) People using your account name and password on their own network

If it's something on your PC, you should pick up the increased usage on netmeter. The best thing to do is install an anti-virus package, and something like Spybot or Ad-Aware, and run both to make sure your system is clean.

If it's someone tapping into your network, the best option is to disable wi-fi if you're not using it. If you do use it, make sure you have security enabled (use WPA rather than WEP).

If someone's using your details on their own network, the best steps to take are:
1) Change your router username and password (keep them somewhere safe!) so that no-one can access your router settings.
2) Change your account password. This will have to be done via your ISP; if they have a control panel you might be able to change it yourself. The biggest problem here is that many ISP's don't encrypt your password; they do this so that if you forget your password they can give it to you over the phone. The problem is that they then know your username and password, and can use it themselves if they're less than trustworthy.

Installing Oracle 10g

2009-10-14T09:08:00.000+02:00

A couple of colleagues and I have had endless problems lately, trying to install Oracle 10g. It wasn't a problem with configuration, or any of those normal things - no, Oracle threw an exception in the middle of copying the files!

There were no useful error messages about the crash, nothing in the log files - VisualStudio's JIT Debugger just popped up with the message "An unhandled win32 exception occcurred in javaw.exe".

I googled and googled, and found some things about not having a space in the folder name that you're installing from; and potentially some problems about fonts; but nothing helped. After ages, I tried googling the stage it got to: "copying files for 'Oracle Universal Installer", and found the answer! We have archiving software called Zantaz on our machines, and that somehow interferes with the install. All you have to do is rename the easfa.dll to something like easfa.bak, then run the install. After it's installed succesfully (yay!) you can rename the dll back to its original name.

Since it took me a day of googling to find it, I thought I'd post about it with all the relevant keywords in the text, so as to help any others struggling with the same problem to find the solution :)

In Denial (Or More Accurately, On De Nile)

2008-09-02T22:26:00.002+02:00

I realised after my last post that I hadn't blogged about my trip to egypt yet.

I went in April, trying to get the good weather but miss the worst of
the heat - which didn't actually work. Cairo was fairly hot, but
Luxor and Aswan were incredibly hot! It was close to unbearable, and
i'm only glad that I didn't go in June or July.

I went with a company called Egypt Today, who specialise in trips to
Egypt. They were really good, very well organised, and they look
after you every step of the way - you're never left wondering what
you're supposed to do or how to get to where you're going.

The local guides do try to sell you extra tours, but then that's
egypt. Everyone tries to sell you something, and as it says in the
guidebooks, you have to tip for everything. And unfortunately they're
used to rich american tourists who throw dollars around, so they're
often not happy being tipped in egyptian pounds.

It's an amazing country, though. I flew to cairo, saw the pyramds and
the egyptian museum, then caught the luxury sleeper train down to
aswan. Then I joined a cruise boat to cruise back up to aswan. Both
the train and boat were a great way to see some of the countryside.

All the temples do get a bit much - there are so many, and in the heat
they all start blurring together in your mind. But they really are
all amazing, and they're in amazing condition considering how old they
are! It's all really impressive and awe inspiring.

Here are a couple of photos from the trip. The Temple of Philae:

And Pyramids, Desert, Camels, and me:

Teddy Bears & Adult Ed

2008-08-24T19:35:00.004+03:00

I haven't blogged for a while now; partly because I've been busy, and partly because I've been hanging out on MyBroadband quite a lot - and since I've been talking to real people, I've had less need to come here to talk to myself :)

But there's something I wanted to share, so I'm back. I decided I needed to branch out and learn some new skills, so I signed up for some adult ed courses at Bergvliet High School. And so far it's been really fun!

The first evening was a course on making chocolate truffles; there were about 7 of us there, and we made 5 different kinds of truffles. Relatively small batches - 5 or 6 of each type - but more than enough to take home and enjoy over the next week ;)

The next two weeks was a Teddy Bear making workshop. This was even more fun than the truffle course, even though it didn't involve any chocolate. It was run by Carol, from Bears and Beads in Plumstead, and we made a bear called Lilly (everything to make the bear was supplied - fur, joints, needles, pins, stuffing, everything). There were 4 of us on this course, and apart from making the bear we had a lot of fun joking around and chatting. The bear itself was a lot of hard work, but so worth it! I decided once I started assembling mine, that he was more of a he than a she, and so he became Billy instead of Lilly :) Every time I look at him I'm so proud that I made him!

Isn't he cute?

I bought a kit for another bear - this one is called Boet, and he's a gangly, long-limbed, and yet cute bear. I forgot to take photos of the process of making Billy; my plan for Boet is to take photos and post them here as I go along.

Casio Baby G Review

2008-01-13T07:42:00.000+02:00

About two years ago, I needed a new watch. I'd been through several in a very short time, and I was getting really annoyed with cheap watches that just don't last - or watches with straps which don't last, and cost more than the watch to replace. So I decided to go back to Casio - deciding to pay for quality. I got a Baby G, since I need a digital watch, with day/date, 24 hour clock, and alarm - and you don't get many lady's watches that do that.

Well. I guess I can't say that they're crap, since I've only had one (unlike the Logitech Bluetooth headphones for the iPod, where I had 3 and none of them worked). It could just be that through the luck of the draw, I got a bad watch. But this watch is really bad, and Casio customer service here in SA isn't any better.

It started just before the 1 year warranty period was up. For no reason, the watch would suddenly go "beeeeeeep". But nothing else happened, and it only did it very rarely, so I wasn't too bothered. Then the display started fading. Rarely, only about once a month or so, and shaking the watch or pressing on the face would bring it back. I emailed Casio's reps in SA, and they said it sounded like the battery was flat. This didn't really make sense to me, since it would carry on working just fine afterwards, but they were adamant that it was the battery.

At about 18 months, the battery did go flat. The watch didn't fade, it just went dead. Now I'm not really impressed with a watch battery that dies after 18 months - my first Casio lasted for 10 years - but what can you do, so I had it replaced. Not to my suprise, a few days later the display started fading again, proving that it wasn't the battery. It's happening a lot more frequently lately, and pressing on the face doesn't work so well any more, to stop the fading - what works best is pressing a button. Any button. Except that recently I've noticed a rapid "clickclickclick" or "bzzzzz" sound when I press a button. And four times now the watch has spontaneously reset itself, losing all the time, date, timezone, and all those settings (I was using the memory function it has to store a couple of passwords - after the first reset I never bothered to set them up again). Once it just started flashing - every single LCD element flashed - and I had to push a button, any button, to get it to come right. And I just can't live with a watch that I can't rely on.

I can't even use the alarm function at all - either the display fades as the alarm triggers, and the beeps fade too, or, as now, the watch resets itself as soon as I try to change the time the alarm is set for!

I contacted Casio's reps in SA again, and started a long discussion with them which still hasn't been resolved - it's been impossible to get a straight answer out of them. All I want to know is: (1) how long might it take to fix, (2) will there be any cost to me (since they were wrong about the battery when I first contacted them, and (3) if there is a cost, how much might it be (since I don't want to pay more to fix the watch than the watch cost in the first place).

This is just so not the quality I expected from Casio. Nor the level of customer service I expected. So now I'm stuck - do I get the watch repaired, and at what cost? Do I give up and buy a new watch, but what brand?

Update: I finally received a reply, saying that they won't charge me for the repair, they just want to figure out what's wrong with the watch. Still don't know how long I'll be without a watch for, but at least it's progress :-)

eBooks and DRM

2007-12-18T09:59:00.000+02:00

One of the things I miss most about London are the libraries. Maybe they're not all that good, but the libraries I used were excellent, compared to those in SA. They not only have books that have been published in the last ten years, but new best sellers! And they have a range of books... And they're actually open over the weekends, and at times when people aren't at work! (And, as a bonus, you can access their inventory list on the net, so you know if they have the book you're looking for, at which branch, and whether or not it's out. )

Books are just so much more expensive here that libraries can't afford to buy new books; but neither can readers. I'd love to get the whole Harry Potter series, and I started reading the Agatha Raisin books while I was in London, and I'd like to read more of those. But books are really expensive here, and they're not books that I want to own - I just want to read them. While libraries here do have some of the HP books, they're so popular that they're always out - and I always feel bad taking out a 'kids' book, since I feel like I'm depriving some kid of a chance to read.

So, to get to the point of the post, I turned to eBooks. Now eBooks aren't my preferred method of reading - it's hard to snuggle up with a laptop - but if it's cheaper than buying the physical product, it can be worth it. Unfortunately, I ran slap bang into eReader DRM.

Firstly, eBooks aren't cheap. The Agatha Raisin books go for about 6USD on fictionwise, which is fairly hefty when you convert it into ZAR - especially considering that you aren't getting a physical book that you can hold in your hands. But it's still possible, except that the 6 USD books are eReader, whereas the only MS Reader version that they have costs 23USD! So unfortunately, I will not - can not - buy any Agatha Raisin eBooks.

Why not? Well, 23 USD is waaay too much for an eBook. And eReader is a particularly nasty form of DRM that I won't support. (And just to add insult to injury - I know that the HP books, and probably the AR books as well, are available online, illegally, if you know where to look. I don't. And that's not an invitation to tell me, because even if I did know, I don't want to download illegally. I want to pay a reasonable amount, and get a reasonable product in return). So instead, I sit with nothing, and a writer has lost a reader.

So why is eReader DRM so bad? Well, all the usual arguments against DRM still apply here (do a search on boingboing.net for DRM, if you want to know more). And fictionwise have already experienced how DRM can lock you out of your legitimate purchases - they changed DRM supplier in 2004, and had to put a lot of effort into maintaining customers' purchases; even so, you still can't do everything with an eBook you bought before 2004 that you can do with one you've bought since.

eReader DRM I particularly dislike, since it uses your credit card number as the token to unlock your eBooks. Apart from anything else, I don't want to use my credit card number for anything other than buying via credit card. It also locks out anyone without a credit card, and apparently it can have problems with unlocking books purchased with an international credit card.

You see, it works like this. You buy an eBook, and you can read it on your PC or on your PDA (using the appropriate versions of the eReader software). When you load an eBook onto your PDA, you need to enter your 'unlock code' - the credit card number you used to buy the eBook. I think, although I'm not sure, that this then gets sent (or rather, a hash of it is sent) to the eReader verification server, and if it checks out, the eBook is unlocked. Which means that you have to have internet connectivity on your PDA. (As I said, I'm not sure about this - nowhere is it explicitly stated, but there are hints here and there that this is how it works. But I could be wrong; maybe it's all done on the device. ) You also need to enter the unlock code every time you want to read the eBook on your PC.

One of the reasons why I think it connects to the server is because your credit card must be active to unlock a book - if it's expired, and you've been issued a new credit card, you need to switch the unlock code to the new credit card. Now there are two ways of doing this with eReader - buy a new eBook, and then you'll get an option to add a new credit card, and you'll have to download all your eBooks again (which would imply that the hash is stored in the eBook itself, not requiring server verification); if you don't want to buy a new book, you have to phone them. Yup - really helpful for international customers, isn't it? In a way, it's fair enough - they don't want you to send credit card info via email. But surely the best way to avoid that is for them to assign you a unique unlock code when you create an account, rather than using your credit card number?

Those are the big problems I have with eReader DRM, and it's enough to put me off using them. But you also can't print your eBooks, not even little sections of them (and I'm guessing that they've disabled the 'select -> copy' functionality as well). And oddly, hardback/paperback pricing still affects eBooks (although presumably this isn't specific to eReader) - eBooks are priced as hardback until the paperback comes out, at which point the price comes down. And this is purely to avoid competition with physical books, since the cost of producing the eBook (and the value of the eBook to the 'owner') don't change. Just another sign that the business model is outdated and has to change!

TomTom SatNav

2007-12-06T07:03:00.000+02:00

A while ago I decided I hadn't bought enough gadgets recently, so I went out a bought a new HDD (and an enclosure so I could use the old one as an external drive), an extra gig of memory, a 2Gb flashdrive, and a mini SD Card for my phone. But while those were all great, they weren't things that I could play with. So I went out and bought a TomTom One :)

Overall, it's pretty good. I haven't used it much, but what I have used I like. I love the 'Help Me' menu, which gives you directions by car, or walking, to the nearest police station, hospital, train station, garage, etc.

You can customise it pretty well - you can choose a voice, and colours, and decide what information you want displayed on the screen. You can make your own Points of Interest, and save your Home location and favourites.

I haven't tried the Garmin Nuvi, but apparently it doesn't allow you to make trips with multiple waypoints, which sucks because the TomTom not only lets you do that, it lets you save them and load them again as well. So I'm glad I didn't get the Nuvi ;)

It can tell you how fast you're going, and if the map supports it, whether you're exceeding the speed limit. It gets louder as you go faster, and zooms out. As you slow down, it zooms in. The instructions are given in plenty of time, and are really clear.

There are a couple of things I don't like, but I'm not sure if they're features or bugs.

One is that if you use 'Advanced Planning', you can set up a trip from A to B. If you don't have a GPS signal, and you want to view the route, it asks for a start location and all is good. If you do have a GPS signal, it tends to start the route from where you are, rather than from the starting point. It doesn't seem to do this all the time; I haven't worked out all the circumstances when it does and doesn't, but one of them is if you recalculate the route to go via a certain point. Then it will always start the demo of the route from where you are, which is a problem when I'm trying to set up a route from somewhere to home, when I'm at home. (Edit: sometimes it does even odder things; if you've previewed a route, and stopped the demo at some point, it takes that last point as your starting point. But only sometimes, and I'm sure it's also related to whether or not there's a signal.)

Another is that it can take a minute or two to pick up the GPS signal when you switch it on. I find it frustrating, but apparently it's pretty good that it can do it that fast.

A third is that sometimes it seems to miss out instructions. At times it will give you lots of detail, like "turn left, then keep to the right", but driving home today there were two forks in the road where it didn't tell me which one to take (and yes, they are on the map).

And sometimes it works out slightly odd routes - going the long way around the block when it could just route you the short way. Not important, but I can see whole generations growing up being used to taking the long way round just because their satnav told them to. (Edit: this is where the delay in getting a signal comes in useful. It always routes me the long way around from my house on to the nearest "big" road; by the time it's picked up a GPS signal, though, I'm on the right road and it recalculates from there :-)

Overall, it's great - I've only used it for driving places that I know how to get to anyway, so far, but as I get used to it and start trusting it more, I'll be more adventurous :)

Events & Inheritance

2007-11-30T07:59:00.000+02:00

I came across something odd the other day concerning events and inheritance.

I have a class which inherits from a TextEdit. I created this derived class so that I could add some behaviour to the Click event, without having to hook up the event for every TextEdit I use - so that I could just myTextEdit instead. My first approach was to hook up a OnClick event handler to the Click event in the constructor:

public myTextEdit()
{
InitializeComponent();
Click += new EventHandler(myTextEdit_Click);
}

void myTextEdit_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
// do stuff
}

But while the code hooking up the event was executed, my event handler was never run. So my second approach was to instead override the eventhandler:

protected override void OnClick(EventArgs e)
{
base.OnClick(e);

// do stuff
}

and this worked perfectly.

But I don't understand why the first approach didn't work. While the two approaches are doing radically different things under the covers, they should amount to much the same thing in the end: the event handler should be fired (since it's the base class that's actually raising the event, not the derived class). Maybe I'm just missing something obvious?

I did a bit of reading, and it seems that the overriding is the 'better' way to go, since if you're creating a derived class you're the publisher of the event, and shouldn't be a subscriber. This totally makes sense, but even they seem to think that either method should work. After all, if I’d overridden the base class without touching the events and event handlers, then instantiated my derived class, and then created a 3rd class and hooked up event handlers in that class to the event, I’d expect them to be fired. How does the internal event firing mechanism differ if the event handlers are hooked up in the derived class rather than a 3rd external class?

The next step, of course, was to write a set of test classes to try this out in a simple demo - and just to confuse the issue, both methods worked! So either my demo wasn't set up correctly, or it only occurs on GUI related .NET methods like OnClick(). I'll keep investigating, and report back if I find anything useful... but in the meantime, if you have any ideas, please leave a comment!

Edit: Okay, I think I've figured out what's happening, thanks to a bit of experimenting and this thread. If you declare an event as virtual, the base class and the derived class each have their own delegate list, which is where the problem comes in. If you have an external class which subscribes to the derived class's event, but doesn't subscribe to the base class's event, then trigger the event in the base class, the event isn't fired in the base class (since the delegate is null), and therefore it derived class's event handler can't react to it. I'm not sure if that is what's happening in this case, since the actual event and the base handlers are declared somewhere within the depths of .NET and DevExpress, but it would make sense - and would explain why my simple demo app works perfectly.

Toyrun 2007

2007-11-27T07:40:00.000+02:00

The 2007 Toyrun was last Sunday, and it was a particularly special one as it was the 25th Anniversary.

As usual, it was great fun. They estimate there were 6000 bikes at Maynardville, although it seemed like more! And this time I was riding in the thick of it - bikes as far as you could see in front of you, bikes next to you, and if you got a chance to turn around, bikes as far as you could see behind you! It really is the most amazing feeling, and the atmosphere is incredible. So many people lining the roads, clapping and cheering you on, trying to touch the bikers - it really makes you feel good. And of course, the most important part is the toys for the kids; they had two full trailers of toys at Maynardville alone.

We had tried to organise all the bikers from work to go together. Unfortunately it ended up with only two of us being able to make it, and then we couldn't find each other in the crowd at Ottery - and looking at the pic below, you can see why - and that was only a tiny section of the parking area! (Mine's the one on the right, in the front of the photo).

Unfortunately, it's crappy cellphone photos again, but here are a couple of photos from Maynardville:

New Google Things

2007-11-08T06:36:00.000+02:00

As you can probably tell from that scintillating title, I've been working really hard lately and am completely exhausted. Hence the lack of posts in the past few weeks (or months).

But there's a bunch of stuff I want to talk about - like flow, and how it's easy to work hard when you've got flow; and my new TomTom One that I bought; and the Wii that I bought. But right now I'm struggling to form complete sentences, so I'll stick to an easy topic.

There are two new developments from Google that affect me. There's a whole lot of new stuff from them, of course, like updated docs and the new google phone OS, but that's stuff that I don't use so isn't really relevant to me right now.

What is relevant is the GMail upgrade. At first I didn't notice it, to be honest; when I did, it was mostly negative. A lot of people have said that it's amazingly fast now, but I really find it to be a lot slower than before. It's slower to load, slower to bring up your emails, slower to send. And often after I apply a label or achive a conversation, and then try to close my gmail tab, I get the message about how the server is still busy and I'll lose my changes if I navigate away from the page. Leave it a few seconds, and you still get the message; leave it a few minutes, and you can navigate away all you want. So for me, the Gmail upgrade is largely negative.

What isn't really new from Google, but is new to me, is Google Bookmarks. Often I'll come across something at work which looks cool, and I want to remember when I get home. So I end up sending myself email with the link. This works, but it's not really elegant. So today I went looking and discovered Google Bookmarks. It's really simple, and I know that there are other places that do similar but more advanced stuff, but this does everything I want. I don't want to share bookmarks, or turn it into a Web 2.0 social networking thing - I just want a list of things that I can add to at work, and read and remove at home. It's a bit schleppy to use manually, since you have to add the url, the title, etc manually - it doesn't pick it up from the page itself. But this does allow you to bookmark pages other than the current page. If you don't want to do it manually, but you don't want to install the google toolbar, a great firefox extension is GBookmarks. The only downside of it is that you can only bookmark the current page; the good side is that it picks up the title and all that automatically. It also allows you to create folders and organise your bookmarks, which you can't do on the Google Bookmarks site.

That's it for today - more posts on that other stuff coming soon.

Slow Clocks

2007-10-26T07:59:00.000+02:00

Something odd is happening.

Over the past two weeks, all my electrical clocks (alarm clock, microwave clock, VCR clock, etc) have been running slow. They're all losing exactly the same amount, and they're losing 2 to 3 minutes per day.

What's even odder is that it's not just me - I know of other people in the same area who have noticed the same thing.

I have two theories. Either the aliens are coming, and have embedded their timing signal in our electrical supply (similar to Independence Day), or our electricity supply is acting up. It's as though instead of 50Hz, we're only getting 48Hz.

Now I know very little about our electrical supply, and even less about the motivations of aliens, so I can't say which of these theories are right, or if there's another reason that I haven't thought of. But it's very annoying to have reset all my clocks every day!

Waiting For Wii

2007-09-02T09:42:00.000+03:00

Yay! The Wii is finally being released in SA, with an official launch date of 28 September. I have my pre-order confirmed, so hopefully they won't run out of stock and I'll get it by the end of the month :D

It's priced at R2800 - that's the pre-order special price. Not as good as I hoped, but not as bad as I feared. The biggest problem is the game prices - varying from R550 to R650, you only have to buy a couple of games along with your Wii to double the price! Many imports, sold via local sites, are between R400 and R550, so odds are you'll be better off getting imports than buying the local releases, which is a bit sad. You might even get imports cheaper if you import them yourself, but then you run the risk of paying more on shipping, exchange rates, and customs, so buying from take2 or have2have seems a better bet.

So I won't be able to get all the games I want, right away. I'll have to wait and build up my library slowly. The Wii comes with Wii Sports, so that's cool, and then I figure that for the launch I'll get:

Rayman Raving Rabbids
Ninja Bread Man

Then in the next batch, I'll get:

Super Paper Mario
Wii Play

I'm more into fun, run-jump-shoot-collect games, and I don't have hours to dedicate to gaming. So I'm going more for the short, humorous mini games and sports games rather than things like Metroid and Medal Of Honour, and those types. Equally, though, I don't want to spend a lot of money on silly little games - Chicken Shoot costs almost as much as a 'real' game, so I'd rather get something a bit more complicated that I won't get bored of quite as quickly. I'd also like to get a driving game, and maybe a flying game, but those will have to be in batch 3 :-)

Edit: well, it doesn't look the games I want are available in the format I need from the local guys; nor from the local importers. So I'm going to be getting them from Oz, which fortunately works out a lot cheaper anyway! So the new plan is:

Raymond Raving Rabbids
Red Steel
Need For Speed Carbon

Then:

Super Paper Mario
Ninjabread Man

And then maybe Wii Play at some point, I'll have to see if it's worth it.

Another Telkom Ripoff

2007-08-28T07:59:00.000+03:00

I know, it's not exactly news that Telkom is ripping us off, or that Telkom's monopoly and backwards thinking is bad for the country.

But I came across a new way that Telkom is ripping us off, and it's one that I certainly wasn't aware of, and I'm sure most people don't know about it.

I noticed a bunch of phone calls on my last Telkom account, from my landline to a cellphone, which weren't answered, didn't go to voicemail, but were charged for.

Astonishingly, I got a reply from Telkom today saying that the charges are correct. Their explanation is that even though the calls weren't answered, they crossed to another network and thus will be charged for.

This is pretty shocking - I'm sure most people aren't aware that you're charged for any call from a Telkom line to another network, regardless of whether or not the call is answered! I suspect it's not actually legal, although Telkom would probably say that it was 'answered' by the other network, therefore it was connected and will be charged for. So all those "missed calls" that you make are actually costing you money - you might as well chat to the person for a minute, because it's costing you the same. And because the minimum call charge is so high, this is even more of a ripoff. And don't try testing your ringtone by phoning your cell from your landline, becasue it's going to cost you each time you try it out.

I wonder when this started, and whether other networks do the same thing. If I phone a Telkom line from my Vodacom cell, and I hang up before anyone answers, will I be charged? Or, if we take Telkom out of the equation - if I phone a MTN number from my Vodacom cell, will I be charged then if the other person hangs up without answering?

So be aware that you might be able to cut down on your phone bill by not phoning cell numbers that you think might be engaged, that you think the other person might not answer (even if you don't let it go to voicemail), or that you think the other person might not be able to take your call and might hang up without answering. Kinda cuts down on the usefulness of the phone system, doesn't it?

Problems With Properties

2007-08-26T07:07:00.000+03:00

I've always been a bit suspicious of properties in C#. It just seemed a bit dangerous to be actually calling a method when you're seeming to just be setting a value.

Of course it depends what you use properties for. If you're using it purely to, say, check that the user has permission to set that value, it should be fine. But properties are so useful that they tend to be subject to feature creep. Why not set value A at the same time as you set value B? Since A depends on B, it makes sense to set B in the setter for A; that way they will always stay in synch. But now you're introducing side effects that aren't immediately visible when reading the code.

Here's one that bit me the other day: if A should always be rounded to two decimal places, why not do the rounding in the setter? Then you know it will always be rounded. Well, yes - but then you run into this situation:

myPropertyA = someValue;
myPropertyB = someValue;
if (myPropertyA == myPropertyB)
doSomething();
else
doSomethingElse();

And you find that counterintuitively, doSomethingElse always happens instead of doSomething. Whereas this works as you expect:

myPropertyA = someValue;
myPropertyB = myPropertyA;
if (myPropertyA == myPropertyB)
doSomething();
else
doSomethingElse();

Or at least it does if you're not doing anything odd in the setter. It's also easy to give in to feature creep in getters; after all, does it really matter what the real stored value is if you can control what is provided when that value is asked for? Instead of rounding in the setter, for example, you could round in the getter - so the unrounded value is still available by other means, but most code will see the rounded value. The problem is that it's not clear what you're going to get. If I call a method 'GetRoundedValue()', I know I'll get the rounded value. If I use a property, I think I'm getting the stored value but I might really be getting any manipulation of it.

So I tend to keep my property code basic - provide (or deny) access to values, but don't manipulate those values unless you want to have to trace through every step to see what your code is actually doing.

Couches and Coricraft

2007-08-16T07:37:00.000+03:00

So with moving last week, I've had to go shopping :-) I've got a lot of stuff from before I left, but I needed to get some furniture, like a computer desk, mattress, and couches.

I looked all over for nice couches, and just couldn't find anything I liked. And not just not at a reasonable price, but not at any price! (Well, except for some lovely leather couches at R20000, but that's a bit more than I'm willing to pay).

But then I found some lovely couches at Coricraft. Slip-cover, so easy to clean, and incredibly comfortable. And on sale! The only catch is, they make them up specially for you, so it takes 4 to 5 weeks. And I've seen a lot of bad things about Coricraft on the net - delivering late and damaged, etc.

But they're so nice that I ordered them anyway. They're just so amazingly soft and comfortable!

I was pleasantly suprised - their original estimate was pretty much spot on (I got a call after 4 weeks saying that the couches were ready). The only problem was with delivery - apparently I live in a morning delivery area, so they didn't want to deliver in the afternoon, which is the only time that anyone was available to be at my place to accept delivery (a bit of a cheek, considering how much delivery costs!). But I got it sorted, and they did deliver in the afternoon, and when they were delivered they were in excellent condition.

So kudos to Coricraft, and hopefully this post will counterbalance some of the negative things I've seen about them :-)

Online Again!

2007-08-16T07:20:00.000+03:00

Finally I've got broadband! Dealing with Telkom is always tricky, but it actually wasn't quite as bad as I thought it would be.

I moved last month, and so I needed a new telkom line installed (well, activated, since the physical line was already there) and thereafter adsl.

Picking up the form wasn't too bad, although they neglect to tell you on their site that you need your ID book to be able to apply. Amazingly the telkom shop wasn't busy, but nobody could tell me if a deposit would be required, what the criteria for this were, or how much it might be (and I'm not prepared to pay a deposit, since you only get it back when you cancel your line, so it's effectively a donation rather a deposit). I actually still don't know, since you can't get a realtime balance, and you only get your first account about two months after your line is activated!

When I picked up the form, they said it might be about 2 weeks for the line to be installed. The next working day, I was amazed to receive an SMS from them! But it quickly turned to dismay when I read that the installation date has been set for 30 July - *5 weeks* from when I applied. Remember that there is a physical line, etc - all they have to do is plug it in at the exchange (although for some reason they still need access to my premises, requiring a day off work). This is so ridiculous - how do they expect to get new customers if that's the fastest they can get it done? It's insane. Oh, and did I mention that for this privilege of waiting 5 weeks for installation of nothing much, I have to pay them R432?

Telkom phoned me up about 4 weeks later, and left voicemail saying that they'd be installing on Sunday! Which was pretty cool, except that they didn't give a time. And trying to phone 10219 was useless - it just rang and then cut off. Phoning the telkom shop was useless, because it said that their voice mailbox was full (this was while supposed working hours). Eventually, I got through to someone who put a note on their computer system that they should only come in the afternoon, and that they should phone first. Sunday, just after lunchtime, I got a call saying that they were on their way. And about an hour later, I had a working phone line. So that wasn't too bad. It still took far too long, I think - they really need to start processing these installations more quickly. But at least it was done relatively painlessly (in retrospect, at least).

I then applied through WebAfrica for a line and usage package, and after two days they told me that Telkom told them that my exchange isn't enabled. Which was odd, since it's a fairly major exchange. So against my will, I applied through Telkom, and the install's gone through just fine. Ether Telkom's being extremely anti-competitive, or WebAfrica caught them at a bad moment and might have got a better answer if they'd tried again. Either way, pretty shoddy of Telkom (not that we expect any better!)

My adsl was apparently activated after just one day, but it took them a week to let me know (and, more importantly, to put a comment in the 'comments' section on their system to say that it was activated and that I could fetch the modem). Then I had a problem whereby the verification step of the self-install had failed, but didn't give an error message. That was sorted relatively easily, by phoning them on 0800 375 375 and asking them to reset the 'verified' status to nothing (and they even work 24 hours a day, which is impressive!). After that, it worked beautifully - and it's much faster than I expected! (Which is great, seeing as my Vodacom connection has been terrible lately - but that's another issue).

Thanks to all the mybroadband guys for help and advice :-)

Pair Programming Part 2: The First Two Days

2007-07-17T10:55:00.000+03:00

So how did my first two days of Pair Programming go? Well, much as I expected, to be honest. I can't say that there's a single point in my first post that I don't still agree with. I'm still trying to keep an open mind, though, since it is early days and none of us really know what we're doing yet. But now that I'm trying it, I can add emphasis and clarification to some of the points that I made before.

Ergonomics in particular is a huge problem; even with sitting in front of a straight desk it just doesn't work. You can move the keyboard and mouse backwards and forwards, but you can't move the monitor. And if the monitor isn't square in front of you, you're going to be sitting slightly twisted, and that ends up hurting your back muscles, and makes it difficult to lean back in your chair and use the support that your chair gives you. And even though you can move the keyboard and mouse, often you just reach for it instead, and that's not really good for your wrists.

I don't know that it's particularly efficient, either. Things will probably improve as we get more used to it, but so far it just seems like a waste of resources. And it's boring! Admittedly, at the moment we're doing fairly simple tasks, that doesn't require two brains, but it means that it's not really taking up a lot of your attention.

And speaking of attention, I do find it difficult to pay attention when I'm not typing. And even when I am typing, I feel that I'm only working at a surface level - I'm not really engaging my brain. And yes, I'm learning stuff since my colleague knows more about this part of the system than I do, but I don't know if I'm really learning it. Learning by doing is important, and learning by watching doesn't work. And even if I drive, I'm not getting enough time to absorb what I'm doing - and I don't have the opportunity to learn by making mistakes, which is even more important! And because I'm not the expert on this section, I feel like I'm not really contributing - in fact, I'm just slowing things down because everything has to be explained. And yes, I know that the XP principles say that I shouldn't feel like that, but I do.

I'm also very aware of the process, rather than the programming. I guess this is partly because it's new, and as we get used to it it will go away, but it stops me from getting really involved in what I'm doing.

I feel that pair programming tries to stamp everyone into the same mould, so that developers become interchangeable. But we're all unique, so it can't work. I agree that from a system point of view, it's good - if someone leaves the company or gets hit by a bus, someone else should be able to take over. But if someone's off sick for a day, is it really necessary that someone else can pick up their code and carry on? And what frustrates me is that everyone customises their PC and their IDE differently. Some things are important, like keyboard shortcuts, and some aren't, like syntax highlighting colours. But if people are interchangeable, and can work with any partner at any PC, you don't get to use all your customisations. And why should we all have to have a work environment that's exactly the same as everyone else, just in the name of redundancy?

There are two things to consider - will it help the company, and will it make me want to come to work or make me want to call in sick? I don't know if it will help the company; maybe, maybe not. But it certainly doesn't make me want to go to work, and while it may seem selfish to think about the effect of paired programming when everyone's interested in doing the best for the company, it's kinda important to me that work is somewhere I want to go.

I don't feel like I'm contributing, and I don't really get any sense of accomplishment when we get something working. I don't get involved in programming like I do when working on my own, I just don't get any sense of flow. And it's draining, being involved in a social situation all day long. And you just can't do anything personal - from checking your mail to clearing your throat, someone is sitting right next to you hearing and seeing everything you do. I know that there is no privacy at work, but this is extreme.

It's a lot like being in meetings all day. You can't do anything personal; you don't really get much done; you have to be polite and friendly all the time; your time just isn't your own.

As I said in my first post - I think a lot of the Agile/XP principles are great. And collaboration is essential - essential for team cohesion, for learning, for enjoyment of your work environment. I'm not saying that everyone should sit in a dark corner and not talk to anyone all day - I'd go insane! But informal, ad-hoc, as needed collaboration is the way to go - forcing me to work with someone all day will also drive me insane.

Paired Programming Part 1

2007-07-13T05:28:00.000+03:00

The company I work for has decided to try out a more XP approach to programming. We use a lot of XP and Agile techniques already, but they feel it's time to bring it all together, and go to paired programming.

I'm going to blog about this process, because I think it will help me, and might help other people out there too. I don't think they'll mind - I generally don't blog about work, but I'll make sure not to mention them by name, give away any company secrets, or get too much into specifics.

Okay. So to start with, I'm sceptical. I don't see how it will work. The only thing that gives me hope is that the guy in charge of this did it for 2 or so years and says it works great.

So I'm negative, but I don't want to just slam it down. It has been done, and it has been successful, and just because I don't see how it can work doesn't mean it can't work. But not only do I not see how it will work, I don't want to do it. I can see the benefits to the company, and in theory, to an extent, the benefits to developers. But I see huge problems as well, on a developer level. These kinda fall into two categories: practical issues, and development issues. Now maybe some of these have been solved by other teams doing this kind of thing, but these are the issues I see looming.

So let's look at the practical issues. Some may seem silly, but remember that you spend the majority of your waking life at work, so it has to be an environment that you're happy with.

Synchronising work times. You and your partner have to work the same hours. You have to have coffee breaks at the same times. You have to have the same lunch times. You have to have bathroom breaks at the same times. And all these breaks have to last the same amount of time for both of you.
No personal business. Since every time you do something personal, you're holding up the other person. No phone calls. No browsing. No msn/googletalk/whatever. No email. No email notifications, since you might not be using your PC. And while this might seem like a good idea to management, distractions are useful. They keep us sane, and focused, and human, and in touch with the outside world.
No snacking. Not only does it seem somewhat rude to have a biscuit or a chocolate without your partner having some, it's just not practical if you're both working. This can be difficult enough anyway; if you have to sync your lunchtimes too, it becomes really difficult. Get used to being hungry.
No personal space. Now you're sharing a desk, you don't have your own desk. You don't have your little family photos. You don't have a space that's just yours. You probably get to use your own chair, but you won't necessarily be using your own keyboard.
Physical arrangments. How do you arrange the desks? I hate sitting skew; I have to have the monitor right in front of me. How would that work? Where does the keyboard/mouse live? I have the monitor way closer than most people, and use a slightly bigger font, otherwise I can't see. How will that work? What if different people have different brightness/contrast on their monitors? Different lighting? Different keyboard shortcuts?
No music. Can't listen to music on your headphones when you're working with a partner, can you?

And development issues:

Who types?
Will the non-typing person pay attention? And be able to follow what the typing person's doing?
I hate typing with people watching - I end up making mistakes. Same goes for coding - I can do something fine on my own, but with someone watching I get flustered (this post explains it better than I can)
I like to take time to internalise a new concept. I make notes that I never use again. How can I manage my learning process to match my partner's? And should I have to?
I think better while I'm typing and writing code. I know that's not always right, and in a TDD approach you're supposed to do all that thinking first and coding becomes almost perfunctory thereafter. And maybe that's one of the 'benefits' of paired programming. But it's not how I work, and I don't think you have to do it that way to be a good developer.
I don't want to spend all my time teaching my partner. And I don't want to spend all my time learning from my partner, and feeling like I don't have anything to contribute. Both are frustrating and boring.
What if one partner (not me!) has a dominant personality? How do you prevent the other person being railroaded?
How do you prevent the non-typing partner from switching off, either because they don't understand or just don't care? I've seen the quotes about people who've worked in pairs complaining that after that, when working alone, they felt like they only had a half a brain. But I feel that in a team, sometimes team members only bother to use half a brain, and relies on the other person to be doing the thinking.
What if you get a personality clash? (It happens - no-one's fault, but it makes life unpleasant).
I just don't like having to talk to someone for every little thing every minute of every day! (I've been reading a lot about XP, and I'm not going to post millions of links. But this one describes my reservations relating to this point really well).
I'm not sure that productivity will increase. Each team now has to be twice as productive as an individual, during the same amount of time. Which means you have to do everything twice as fast.
I understand the value of everyone knowing every part of the code. But I much prefer having areas of expertise - you have ownership of a bit, you can be proud of it, you feel of value to the team. Have a backup or two, of course - you don't want only one person to know the module, or you'll have problems if they get hit by a bus or leave. But let people feel that they have an area that they feel good about. I know, paired programming proponents will saw that the whole codebase becomes your area of expertise. But it's just not the same.

Communication is good. Collaboration is good. Redundancy (in terms of who knows how much of the code base) is good. A lot of Agile development is good. Working purely on your own sucks. But seeing as developers are often not the most socially adept of people (and I totally include myself in that), and for all the reasons above, I just don't think I can be 100% on board with this.

So while it may work, I don't think it's going to work for me. They're asking us to trust them, and try it for 2 or 3 months, and I'll give them that. It may turn out okay. And if there are any big problems, they're open to sorting them out. But I think going to work is going to get far more painful, fast.

Practical Testdriven Development

2007-06-29T09:12:00.000+03:00

We never learned much about testing our code when I was at university - the tutors told us about trying out boundary cases and that sort of thing, and for some tutorials we maybe had to draw up a simple test plan or describe how we tested the program; and the testing phase was mentioned in the Software Lifecycle module, but that was about it. No mention of automated testing, unit testing, etc. Partly that was just the way things were done - this was just before Java was starting to be widely accepted, and we were coding in c/c++.

So I always used to test my code manually, trying to run through everything I could think of. Then a couple of months into my 2nd job we decided to start doing unit testing with nUnit, and I hated it. Partly because I'd already written a bunch of code and now had to go back and write unit tests for it, which is always boring. Partly because a lot of the stuff I was doing wasn't really well suited for automated unit testing, being GUI stuff and stuff that was dependent on initial settings on a piece of hardware which I didn't have control over. And partly because because I hadn't designed my code in a way that allowed for easy unit testing. Now, though, I use it as an integral part of my dev process. It's still not quite testdriven, since the idea there is that you design and write your tests, with expected inputs and outputs, before writing your code; I find that difficult to do, because I think best about what I want the code to do while I'm writing, not sitting with a pencil and a piece of paper.

But what I do is write a chunk of code, then go write unit tests. I find that that's when I start thinking about things like, what if this is null? Or, what should actually happen in this case? I use the unit tests not just for automated regression testing, but also an initial way to exercise my code - it's actually than creating a temporary test gui to run each of your methods, which is what I mostly used to do. And then you have the advantage of being able to easily rerun your tests to make sure new code or changes hasn't broken anything.

Another benefit is that your unit tests can serve as an example of what what the code is supposed to do, what kinf of input it's intended to take, and the kind of values it returns. Sure, this should be described in your xml method comments, but sometimes an example just explains it so much more clearly. And if someone needs to know what your code will do in some odd situation, they don't have to wade through the source or hope that your documentation covers that case, they can just look at the unit tests (and hope that they cover that case).

In theory, unit testing is whitebox testing - you should exercise every line, every branch of your code. In practice, I try to do as much as I can but don't worry too much about about it all, since that can be really tricky, and can take more time than it's really worth.

I often don't write any asserts until after I've run the tests, which isn't quite the way it should work, I know. But it's easier to run the test, see what output you get, figure out if it's what you want (and if not, what you do want), and then write the asserts to match. Not exactly the testdriven philosophy, but I find it works well for me.

One of my initial arguments with unit testing was that you shouldn't write unit tests for your own code - if you think of writing a test for something, you've most likely thought of that issue while coding and have dealt with it. It's the things that you haven't thought of that you need to test, and someone else is more likely to see those things than you are. I still think this is true to an extent, but I tend to go into 'test writing mode' where I do think about things that wouldn't have occurred to me while coding - somehow I seem to switch mindsets.

I mentioned above that originally my code wasn't well designed for unit testing, and this is a point that I often find difficult. I don't believe that you should write and design your code with the ease of unit testing in mind; but generally, following good design principles does lead to easily tested code (short, simple methods;
loosely coupled classes, etc). The biggest issue, for me, is private methods. I refuse to make private methods public just so that I can unit test them; and unfortunately you don't have friends in c#. In a way it doesn't matter, since all your private methods must be used some public method at some point, otherwise it needn't exist, so by testing all your public methods you will test your private methods as well. But it makes your unit bigger, and makes it more difficult to test every branch - specifically where you want to vary the inputs to the enclosed private method, in ways that wouldn't come up in normal execution. And while you can use reflection to call your private methods, in practice it's just too clumsy and annoying to set up to do it foe every single method. I don't have a solution for this one yet.

Update: There's a good discussion about testing private methods here, although there is a shorter way to use reflection to invoke private methods, described here - basically, get the type of the class you want to test, call GetMethod() on the type to get the relevant MethodInfo, then call Invoke on the MethodInfo. Simple.

Update (29/06/2007): I came across a very good discussion on 'designing for tests' vs 'testing what's designed', and whether you should make methods public just so that they can be tested.

I've also started working with RhinoMocks, a mocking framework. This helps to keep your tests modular, and helps with some of the issues I've mentioned above. If you're testing methods in Class A, and they call something in Class B, you just mock out Class B telling it what you expect in return when you pass in a specific value. Sometimes this seems like you end up duplicating tests: you could just write a test that calls Class A's method, which calls Class B, and check you get the right value, and avoid writing tests on both Class A and Class B. But that's merging units, and you should test the two issues separately - testing Class A's reaction to what Class B returns, and testing what Class B generates based on the input from Class A, are two different things.

Of course, you're actually testing Class A's reaction to what you think Class B will return - if Class B was written by someone else, it may not return values you would expect (you may think it returns an empty string rather than null, for example). And that's where using Class B instead of a mock of Class B would reveal issues. On the other hand, is that what a unit test should be testing? Or does it rather belong in a higher level integration test?

RhinoMocks also lets you perform interaction based testing, as opposed to just state based testing. In other words, instead of checking what's returned, you can also check that certain methods, in various mocked classes, were or weren't called during the test. This is obviously pretty powerful, but can also get really complex. Especially when you're coming from a state based testing mindset.

I haven't quite got the hang of mocking frameworks yet - they seem like a really cool idea, but in practice, for non-trivial examples, I find it's often quite tricky. Sometimes it seems easier to just set up a higher level system test using something like Fitnesse. And sometimes that's okay, but sometimes you really need the unit level tests as well.

Tiscali

2007-06-27T13:56:00.000+03:00

I'm very pissed off with Tiscali - I've been trying to get a refund from them since I cancelled my account more than 3 months ago. It's only a small amount, but dammit, it's my money and not theirs, and I want it back! (At the very least, I don't want them to have it - I'd rather they send it to a charity than just give up and let them have it). Here's a summary of what happened - I'll try to keep it short, but there was a lot of bouncing backwards and forwards so it'll be a long post.

At least in this exchange I mostly manage to avoid the script-people. But because each time you reply it's picked up by a different person, you lost a lot of continuity. Also, there's no incentive for them to solve the problem - they know that when you reply it'll be someone else's issue, so why put any effort into trying to sort it out?

Here goes. In February, I phoned Tiscali to cancel my account as of 15 March, told them I was moving overseas, and gave them my non-UK forwarding address. At no time was this a problem, nor did they mention any potential limitations on refunds.

At the end of March they took a full month's fee from my bank account, and I emailed them to query this, since it should only have been a pro-rata amount. I struggled to find the billing email address, and got stuck in a loop with the script people who said I have to phone the billing department. Eventually I got the email address, but by then I had found info on the web which suggested that they take a full month then give you a refund at the end of the next month.

By 11 May, I hadn't received a refund so I emailed them. Person One replied saying that I am due a refund, and they would post me a cheque. I immediately replied asking them to rather refund directly to my bank account since it's very expensive to deposit foreign currency cheques in SA. Person Two responded saying they can only refund by cheque, or I can email them my credit card details and they would refund to that. Admittedly I misread his reply slightly (mentally added in a 'not' where there shouldn't have been one) and replied asking them to refund to my bank account. Person Three replied saying that I could phone them to have the refund sent to my credit card, since they couldn't accept credit card details via email (contradicting Person Two). I replied explaining why I can't phone and can't accept a cheque (since the forex fees would be too high), and asked if there is no way it could be refunded to my bank account. Person Four then replied asking me to phone them so they can refund back to my credit card. I replied, again saying that I cannot phone since international calls are extremely expensive, and asked if the cheque could be sent to someone else, made out to some else, or sent directly to my bank.

On 12 May, Person Five replied asking me to write to their head office, and saying that the cheque could only be made out to me. I also received a reply from Person Six, saying that they can make the cheque out to anyone I request. She suggested that I write to their head office to request the cheque to be sent directly to my bank. I replied saying that if I have to post something to the UK regardless, they might as well send the cheque to me here, and I could decide how to proceed from there. I again gave them my non-UK address.

On 16 May, I emailed them request a confirmation that the cheque was being processed. By 21 May, I had received no reply so I emailed again, again giving them my non-UK address.

On 22 May, Person Seven said she would put through an escalation to the billing department, but it could take 28 days to be processed.

By 25 June, I still had not received a cheque. I emailed them again, asking them to look into whether the cheque had been processed, and what address it had been sent to. On 26 June, Person Eight replied saying that the cheque was sent to my UK address on 23 May, and that a note had been attached to my account saying that it should be sent to SA instead. She said that if I cannot get hold of the cheque sent to the UK, they would cancel it and send a replacement to my SA address. I replied asking them to do so, giving them my SA address again (and complaining about how ridiculous the whole situation was). I received a reply from Person Six, asking if I have received the cheque since my last email, and if not, to advise them of the address I want the cheque sent to. I replied with a copy of my previous reply.

I then received a reply from Person Nine, saying that they cannot send cheques overseas, and I must confirm if I have a family member in the UK who they can send a cheque to who can then forward it on to me. At this point I nearly freaked out, and replied saying that this was not acceptable, that I do not have any family members in the UK, that no other company had had a problem refunding either to my bank account or sending a cheque to SA, and I did not not understand why it could not be done, especially since no-one had previously said it would it be a problem. I asked her to sort it out ASAP or escalate the issue to someone who could sort it out.

I have had no reply today. I don't think I can take another reply from them - we're just going backwards. I've going to email this summary to them, asking them to escalate to the Customer Service Manager or General Manager as per their Code of Practice, but I just know it'll end up having no effect - I'll just keep floating around the support pool. I'd take them up on their offer of mailing the cheque direct to my bank, but since I have to do it in writing they'll probably lose or ignore my letter, or send it to the wrong bank, or not include my account details, or wait another month and then tell me they can't do it.

Edit (28/06/2007): I've removed the names from the story, since one of the Tiscali customer service reps was uncomfortable with it (see the 3rd comment below).

I've since asked them just to send the cheque direct to my bank - Person Six replied saying that they will do so, and that they apologise for the problems and that they take on board all comments with a view to improving their services. I wonder if that includes laughing at their customers? (See the 1st comment below).

It's become two - no, three - issues: getting my money; getting contradictory answers; attitude towards customers. But I just want to get the money I'm owed. The customer service reps clearly don't care, and I can't force them to care. The head of customer service should care, and the general manager should care, but I've been fighting with them for over three months and I'm too tired.

Stay Away From Acapulco Spur

2007-06-26T09:52:00.002+03:00

I have had a really crappy day. So I'm in rant mode, not just about things that happened today (not all which I can blog about), but going back to Saturday. So there'll be more ranting posts over the next few days - I apologise in advance, but sometimes you can't help but vent. I'll follow up with a fun cartoon when I'm done, to make up for it!

For this post: Acapulco Spur in Bergvliet. Apparently they are busy renovating, but are too scared of losing business to close the Spur.

We were shown to a table which was sitting on a plain concrete floor, and had to walk past building materials to get to it. There were no lights in this section, and we had only one candle for a fairly large table. We had to take turns using the candle to try to read the menus! The table and seats were filthy with building dust, and when we asked for the tables and seats to be cleaned the waiter brought two wet wipes to wipe the table (with which he wiped half the table, only). We then started wondering how clean the mats, cutlery, salads, etc were!

The menus themselves are impossible to read in good light, never mind in the light of a single candle. We have complained about them repeatedly in previous months, and nothing has been done. The printing has rubbed off to the point where the menus cannot be read - the prices are 'blob blob. blob blob', which is simply unacceptable. On some menus, if you know what you want, you can find the item and attempt to read the price; but if you want to browse the menu to see what's available, well, you're out of luck because large sections are simply blank.

At this point we got up and left. I didn't want to spoil what could have been a nice evening out by eating there, and I didn't feel I could condone their staying open in such a mess. And I certainly didn't want to pay good money for a shoddy experience. And with only one candle, I doubt we would have been able to see what we were eating anyway.

I emailed Spur about this, via their website. They passed the query on to the manager, who basically said that they've been operating for 35 years; they're very forward thinking; and they have a notice up aplogising for inconvience during the renovations. In other words, he basically said "tough, we don't care". Which makes me even less inclined to go back there. As I replied to him - inconvenience is sections being closed off, or having a longer waiting time. Dirt is not an inconvenience, it's a health hazard. The only good thing he had to say is that their new menus are being delivered on Thursday - sorry, too little, too late, and too little customer care.

Update: I've since been contacted by someone higher up, and they apologised profusely for the service and the reply. I've also spoken to the manager, who apologised for the renovations and explained how they're having a hard time but are almost done, and he's offered to make reparations. So while I think they were wrong, it happened and they're doing their best to make it right, which I appreciate.

Cape Town vs London

2007-06-18T08:22:00.000+03:00

It's taken a while, but as promised, here are the photos to show why I prefer working in Cape Town to working in London :-) These were all taken from around my office in London:

And Cape Town:

I'm not going to get into the relative advantages and merits of each place - I'd have a list that goes on forever! I do miss London now that I'm in Cape Town; but I missed Cape Town when I was in London. The difference is that I miss London less from Cape Town than I missed Cape Town from London, if you know what I mean. What it comes down to is that Cape Town is home, and while London is great, it's not home for me. Although there are two things I particularly miss at the moment - central heating, and Green & Black's Hot Chocolate! If it didn't come in a great big heavy glass bottle, I'd consider requesting some via post for my birthday next month ;)

And while I'm posting photos, here are some totally gratuitous photos of my car (a Kia Picanto, which I'm very happy with):

The Jigsaw Model of Software Development

2007-05-16T10:09:00.002+03:00

Last night I came up with (what I think is) a pretty good analogy for coding. Coding is like a putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

Putting that last bit of code in place that makes the whole system work is just like fitting that last jigsaw puzzle piece in place - you get the same kind of feeling, whether it's a 'wow, cool' or a warm and fuzzy feeling. The difference is that when coding, you're not so much trying to find the piece that fits as making it.

Now, there are two ways to make a piece that fits. You can look at the specs to figure out what shape the piece should be, or you could look at the surrounding pieces and figure out what shape would fit in with them. When you're coding on a single person project, it's fairly easy - you know what the pieces should look like, and if one piece you spent hours on doesn't quite fit, you can change some of the surrounding pieces a little to make it fit. When you're coding on a project with lots of other people, it's more difficult. They might not have created their pieces yet, so you can't use those to create the shape of your piece; you have to use the specs. And you can't really tweak their pieces to make yours fit.

Of course, it's even more difficult when the specs aren't very detailed. Then you only have a vague idea of the necessary shape, and the developer coding the neighbouring piece may have a different interpretation.

It's even more difficult when you don't know the system. Then you're trying to do a puzzle without being able to see the neighbouring pieces, and without seeing the picture on the box.

And if you're really unlucky, you're sometimes not even sure which part of the puzzle you're supposed to be working on, and which part of the puzzle you're actually working on.

Modularity helps, though. If you can build up a chunk of the puzzle, then fit your entire chunk into place, you have fewer unknown neighbouring pieces to worry about. If you have to add two pieces here and a piece there, and you have only a vauge idea of what shape they should be, and the neighbouring pieces aren't in place yet (or they are, but you can't see them properly- i.e. they haven't been explained to you), it's extremely difficult.

Low coupling helps too. Sometimes your piece has to merge so much into another piece that it's more like one piece was torn in half, than two separate pieces.

You also have to consider the picture on the box, not just the shape of the pieces. Think of the picture being the coding style - how do you handle exceptions? Do you cache objects locally? Do you use factories, or do you just 'new' objects? All these things contribute to the picture, and while you may have the right shape, your piece needs to fit into the picture as well. And if you can't see the box lid, and the other pieces haven't been created yet or are obscured by bits of paper of lying on top of them, it can be extremely difficult to get the shape and the picture right.

So. Coding by yourself is like doing a small jigsaw puzzle - difficult at times, but possible. Coding a system with other developers can be like doing a little jigsaw puzzle that fits into a larger one - you get to complete a piece, and together you all make something that none of you could have done alone; or it can be like doing a jigsaw puzzle where you don't know what shape your pieces should be, you can't see the surrounding pieces, you don't know what colour and patterns your pieces should have on top, and you can't see the box lid.

Good Service, Bad Service

2007-05-11T11:57:00.000+03:00

I haven't been blogging much lately - but that's mostly because I tend to blog about things that either really bug me or make me happy. Which would be fine, but there tend to be more bugging things than good things, and I don't want to be complaining all the time :-)

Especially when it's things that only affect me in a 'no man is an island' kind of way. Copyright issues, Telkom, eNatis, that kind of thing. But there are a few things that have been irritated me on a personal level, and so I might as well vent and get it out of my system.

Firstly - what is the use of estate agents that only work during work hours? I'm looking at townhouses to rent, but the agent with all the good properties won't show them after 5pm or over the weekend. Which is pathetic - most people work during the day, all day, every day.

Secondly - and I've mentioned this one before - companies (in the UK) that will take money from your bank account, but will only refund by cheque. I'm trying to negotiate with Tiscali at the moment, but I suspect it will, again, end up being a refund cheque. It may work in the UK; it doesn't work if you've left the country; and it specifically doesn't work if you now live in South Africa. And as an aside - British Gas still haven't replied to any of my queries or complaints, and the Energy Ombudsman won't even consider stepping until 3 months has gone past with no reply. Again, pathetic.

And my last complaint for the day - Satrix. This is an ETF/index tracker investment fund in SA, and the nice thing is that you can invest directly and don't have to go via a broker (thus avoiding brokerage fees). I'm sure the investment side is great; they've been posting really good returns. But the admin side is, again, pathetic. Really unprofessional and disorganised. They lost my application form; they lost my internet access application form. They have different fax numbers on the form and on their website. Their website looks like it was designed by some who thought they were being really clever, but were just being an idiot by being totally non-standard. Queries get answered by multiple people. Queries get answered incorrectly (I was told my internet account had been activated, and it took 3 or 4 days of errors to be told it hadn't been activated). A letter I received in the post from them had a phone number written on the back, scribbled out. The grammar used by the customer service agents is barely primary school level: "I have tried to allocate it on our systems but was not successful. it seems that your forms had been missed place and no submitted through." Notice the allocate instead of locate, missed place instead of misplaced, and no submitted instead of not submitted. And "We apologies for the inconvenience." So I just hope their money management is better than their customer management!

On the good side, and just to prove that I don't only complain, I bought a new car a few weeks ago and I was very impressed. It's a Kia Picanto, in Diamond Blue (I'll post a picture sometime), and the whole experience was remarkably simple. I thought it might be a problem to get the model I wanted in the colour I wanted, but luckily one was just arriving by ship when I started talking to the dealer. The salesman (from Kia Cape Town - the other branches aren't as good) was pleasant, friendly, knew what he was talking about, and wasn't at all pushy. They delivered the car to my house, and every now and then phone up to see if everything's going okay (which it is - the only problem is the licencing, and that's the government's problem, not theirs). Really, they were brilliant and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them to anyone who wants to buy a Kia. The car itself is also great, although I haven't driven for a year, and not much before that, so I need to practice a bit before I'm comfortable driving to work :-)

Merging MSN and GoogleTalk

2007-05-04T11:21:00.000+03:00

So now that I'm working at a company that actually allows me to run MSN again, I had to decide if I wanted to run MSN, GoogleTalk, or both.

The thing is that some friends are on GoogleTalk, and some are on MSN - but I don't really want to have two different windows to monitor. And I like the GoogleTalk interface; I did consider installing Psi, or something like that, but the interface is pretty important. So I did a quick search on the net, and found a way to trick GoogleTalk into loading my MSN contacts :-)

It's really easy - basically, you set up Psi using your GoogleTalk account, then connect to a server that supports MSN. Load your MSN contacts, and then log out of Psi; and the next time you log into GoogleTalk, you'll see all your MSN contacts as well as your normal contacts! It supports personal messages and images, although you might have rename the MSN contacts to something a bit more aesthetically pleasing.

For more detailed instructions, go here.

Fees, fees, fees

2007-04-15T07:53:00.000+02:00

Excuse the rant today, but I've just been looking at bank fees and medical aid costs, and it's ****ing ridiculous.

My bank used to give cheque books free; now I have to pay R17.50. I also have to pay a 'monthly management fee' of R17.50 - just for the privilege of letting them keep my money. If you want to query a debit order after 40 days (which is quite possible, since you only get a statement every 30 days), you have to pay them R125 for the privilege of saying that someone took money out of your account when they shouldn't have! Withdrawals, or using your debit card at a shop, costs R3.10 + 0.6% of the amount of cash you're using, up to a maximum of R14. Same goes for debit orders, too. That's just insane, and I get so angry but there's nothing we can do. And banks overseas prove that it is possible for banks to make money without all these fees - my banking in the UK was 100% free: no cash withdrawal fees, no debit order fees, no debit card fees, no monthly fees, no annual card fees. So why do we just sit here and get ripped off?!

Medical Aids are the next issue. Gone are the days when medical aids actually acted as medical aids, in that they would pay your doctor's bills, and everyone paid into a fund which paid for everyone's claims. It's moved more to a model where you paid a monthly amount for potential hospital cover (which hopefully you'll never use), and the day to day expenses (dentists, doctors) you pay for yourself. But the amount that you're having to pay for this hospital insurance (because that's what it is, even if they don't call it that is insanely expensive and an absolute rip-off. The plan I used to be on before I left for the UK is now R745 per month - and I get absolutely *nothing* from that, unless I'm unlucky enough to need hospitalization. Luckily my salary can cover that without a problem, but what about normal average income earners? And why should I have to pay such a huge amount every single month? Because medical aids now exist for the benefit of their shareholders, and not their members. Same goes for the banks.

And to add insult to injury, try getting details of bank fees from the bank site; or get the details (limits and sublimits) for the medical aid options. Not so easy. Lots of blurb, but very little detail. Take my money if you have to, but don't try to distract me with blurb! If I have to pay the money, I damn well want to know what I'm paying, what I'm paying it for, and what I'm getting for it.

Allfreight: A Review

2007-04-13T10:32:00.000+02:00

Here's a quick review of Allfreight International (allfreight.co.uk).

In summary, they're okay as far as they go, but that's not very far. Their best point is that they're cheap; far cheaper than anyone else that I looked at. The two worst points are that their website is mostly incorrect; and that they don't manage the process past the point that they put it on the ship.

Starting at the beginning: they were pretty helpful with inquiries that I had, and their website was very informative. You can order box delivery and collection online, which is great.

Their website is often incorrect, though. The site says you can pay via bank transfer, but in reality you don't have that option (neither for the deposit for the boxes nor for the actual shipping).

The site says that you can check on the site the morning of the box delivery/collection to see whether it's morning or afternoon; in reality, they send you an sms the day before to remind you, and you have to phone them in the morning to find out which 4 hour slot your delivery/collection will be in. On the good side, they do seem to be fairly accurate, and when they're delayed they do let you know.

The boxes were delivered fine, and you get bubblewrap with them; you're supposed to get packing tape as well, but somehow I didn't get any.

Boxes are only collected from the ground floor; again, the website says that the driver will phone you about 20 minutes before he arrives so that you have time to take boxes down; in reality, I had about 1 minute warning. Luckily I had space in the entry hall and had taken the boxes down early.

The website was never updated with the correct invoice details, however. They say you can track your shipment online, but you can't. I received an email saying that my boxes had been shipped, and only a week or so later was the website updated to reflect this. The email gave me the vessel details, and the details of the local agent - although the website said that they are their own agents in SA. The email said the vessel sailed on the 23rd and was due on the 9th; and that the local agent would contact me one week prior to the vessel's arrival. This was the last I heard from Allfreight. (Incidentally, the same email was sen to all Allfreight customers who had boxes on that ship, and all the email addresses were visible to all recipients - which is very bad business practice).

Nobody contacted me. After the 9th, when the ship was due, I mailed Allfreight to ask what to do. They just sent me the local agent's phone number; they didn't seem to care that I hadn't heard from the agent. I asked for an email address or a Cape Town number (rather than a Joburg number); they replied saying that they don't have an email address, and that the number they sent was a Cape Town number (which it clearly wasn't: +27 11 is not Cape Town).

So I did some investigation, and found that that vessel only arrived in Cape Town on the 12th. Eventually I managed to find a local number for the local agents, and gave them a call. Unbelievably, my boxes were in a container that contained mostly boxes headed for Joburg, and so even though the ship called at Cape Town, my boxes are going to sail on to Port Elizabeth, clear customs there, then be sent by road up to Joburg. They will then be sent from Joburg back down to Cape Town - and the entire process will take another 2 weeks! But no-one from Allfreight or the local agents bothered to tell me this - even though Allfreight claim that they manage the process from the time you order boxes till the time they arrive at your door. And how I'm supposed to sign customs forms when my boxes are in PE rather than Cape Town, I don't know - I guess they'll want to fax them to me and have me sign and then fax them back, which is awkward anyway but more so since I don't have a fax machine (and I'm sure most people don't).

So my boxes will take about 3 weeks more than Allfreight indicated, and Allfreight are not interested in finding out any information about my shipment.

I just hope my boxes arrive in good condition, and without too much more delay. But I do get annoyed when the website promises things that the company just doesn't deliver on (although they do get the basics done, to be fair). And while they're cheap, I do still expect decent customer service; especially when they say that they don't consider themselves to be cheap, they just consider everyone else as expensive - that certainly shows that they don't think of themselves as a budget solution which doesn't require decent customer service.

Refund by cheque

2007-03-25T12:09:00.000+02:00

I don't get it. Most companies in the UK are globally aware, and when I contacted them to say I was closing my account and leaving the country, not one of them had a problem changing my address to a non-UK one.

Most companies did a refund of any credit owing to me by refunding directly to my bank account. This is what I expect - I pay via a bank transfer or direct debit; I expect a refund the same way.

But Merton Council, and BT, just have to be difficult. They won't refund directly. Merton wanted to send a refund cheque, to my OLD address, within 28 DAYS after I left! How does that make sense?! BT, at least, are posting the cheque to my new SA address; but that doesn't help. To deposit a foreign cheque here will cost me more than the cheque is worth!

I've arranged with a friend that he'll accept and deposit the Merton cheque for me; I guess if I can stop BT from sending the cheque here in time, and I can get them to send it to him instead, he can deposit that one for me too. But if I can't stop them, they'll have wasted postage sending it here, and I'll then have to post it back there to him. What a monumental waste of time.

Really, get with the 21st century. If I pay by cheque, refund by cheque. But if I pay electronically, refund electronically - especially if I'm in a different country, for pete's sake!

Update: So I thought it was easy to cancel all my UK accounts when I left, but it turns out I was mistaken. Apart from the issues above, British Gas thinks my electricity account is still active, and is still taking payments from my bank account (even though it was cancelled in the same call as my gas account, and that was cancelled) - they now want me to phone them to cancel my account, which I refuse to do since it will cost an absolute fortune from here in SA. They have a facility to cancel your account online, but firstly they want 3 years worth of UK addresses (why!? and I only have one year's worth), and secondly they won't accept non-UK addresses as the new address. So I can't use it.

Tiscali is still taking money from my bank account, even though my account has been cancelled - in fact, they sent me an email saying that I can view my final bill online, but then said that I can't login since my account's been cancelled.

British Gas has made a huge mistake with my gas bill, since their previous estimate of my usage was about 5 times higher than my normal (and actual) usage, and they then ignored my final reading and based my final bill on an (even higher) estimate! And they've ignored my last two emails asking them to look into it.

So it looks like the UK is just as screwed up as SA :(

Update: It's about a week since my last update, and I continue to be amazed by the sheer incompetence of British companies.

BT, after all that, sent the cheque to my SA address.

Tiscali still hasn't replied to me.

Merton Council tax department has emailed me to ask if I want the cheque sent to the address on the refund form, or my bank. This is over a month since I sent the form in, and I thought it had been processed and the cheque posted already!

British Gas is still ignoring my query about the incorrect charges on my gas bill.

British Gas is ignoring my email about cancelling my account. I tried to cancel online, but firstly, they want 3 years worth of valid UK addresses. If I fudge that, they want my new address to be a valid UK address. If I get around that, it doesn't accept my 12 digit account number - it wants a 10 digit number. If I arbitrarily leave out 2 numbers, it asks me to acknowledge that I'm applying for a new account (when what I'm trying to do is cancel an old account). Absolutlely pathetic, and as I say they're just ignoring me now via email.

This is what I find most frustrating with UK companies - if they think you're being too persistent, or too annoying, or too awkward, they just ignore you.

And it's so annoying because I tried so hard to do everything right. I knew it would be difficult to sort things out from SA, so I cancelled everything and sorted everything out before I left. You don't expect to have to cancel your electricity account, and then phone back to check that it was cancelled. You expect that when you cancel your telephone account, they'll tell you there and then if they can only process refunds by cheque. You don't expect to get home and then have endless hassles! The only company that I haven't had a problem with is TMobile (yet); and my tax refund came through fast and without a problem, which was amazing. But everything else just sucks!

Update: Hmm, looks like I haven't updated for a while. Pretty much everyone got sorted, except Tiscali and British Gas for gas.

After complaining to EnergyWatch, and only a couple of days short of the Energy Ombudsman deadline, British Gas deposited a refund into my account. No letter or email from them, just money in my account. But who cares, at least I got my money!

Now I'm fighting with Tiscali. Actually, I'm so angry with them I can't put it into words. Expect a post about it tomorrow or the next day - I'll link to it from here.

What's up with Virgin Mobile today?!

2007-03-25T11:51:00.000+02:00

What's up with Virgin Mobile today?

After a bad experience trying to get my sim set up in the first place, things have been going fairly smoothly. Until today.

I tried to access my mail via GPRS - and was told the remote modem disconnected.

I tried to get my balance from the VM menu - and nothing happened.

I tried to get my balance by dialling *101# - and was told 'invalid password'.

I tried to dial my landline - and was told 'invalid operation', and asked for my PIN.

I entered my PIN - and was told that my sim is locked, and to enter the PUK.

I entered the PUK - and was asked for a new PIN, then told that my unblock code was invalid.

As usual, when there's a problem, I can't even dial 123 to get them to sort it out. I can't email them, because they take 24 to 48 hours to reply, and because I'm not dialing up every five minutes to see if they've answered yet.

I dialed the 123 equivalent from a landline - and there was silence. It didn't even ring.

So yet another weekend without any service from VM. I might as well not have a cellphone at this rate. I will certainly not use VM in future - I plan to use up my remaining balance and then switch to VC or MTN. I'm only glad that I didn't get a Virgin Money card, like I was thinking of - it's one thing if your cellphone stops working, but imagine if your credit card stopped working! Although, I'm not actually sure which is worse...

Update: Tried to login to their VZone site, and got this:

We'll be back soon

There appears to be a glitch in the Virgin Mobile matrix. Please try again in a few minutes. If you continue receiving this message please send an e-mail to webmaster@virginmobile.co.za

So they definitely seem to have problems today.

Update: Later I switched my phone off, then on again; it asked for my pin, accepted it, and worked fine. A week later, I still haven't had a reply from customer services.

I've also noticed that premium rate SMSs aren't sent; fortunately, you aren't charged for them either.

I'll certainly never recharge with VM, or get a VM sim again. I really don't recommend them - signal strength varies wildly, data is slow or just doesn't work, and their customer service levels also vary wildly. Pity, because we could have used a decent cellphone provider in SA; but not one with an inferior product who then wants users to help debug their network!

Virgin Mobile: First Impressions

2007-03-22T07:35:00.000+02:00

I've been using Virgin Mobile for a few days now, and here are my initial impressions.

I haven't used the phone much, but judging by the signal meter on my phone, the signal varies drastically throughout the day. With the phone in exactly the same place in the house, I'll sometimes have full signal strength, and sometimes minimal.

The GPRS is slow. It's been a while since I've used GPRS in SA, but this seems slower than I remember. It's particularly slow in connecting, and it seems to drop the connection a lot. And maybe it's my phone, but it's as if it drops the connection but doesn't disconnect - so next time I try to check my mail, it just can't find the gmail site. I then actually have to manually tell it to disconnect; then I can go ahead and load a page and it'll automatically reconnect (which, as I say, is very slow - so much for always-on internet, or the simulation thereof).

I also suspect - although I have done *no* investigation into this yet, so I could be totally wrong - that I'm being overbilled. I browsed El Reg, Boing Boing, and Bruce Schneier's blog, and checked my mail a couple of times, and have been billed about R1.50. At 50c per mb, that would imply I used 3mb, which seems a bit high for that amount of browsing. But I've (hopefully) set up the traffic monitor on the phone, so I can see what kind of usage that's recording and compare it to the billing.

I haven't quite managed to set my phone up as a modem yet - I seem to have packed my motorola cable in the boxes being shipped over, so I can't use the motorola; and the Vario seems to have a very different setup, so I haven't got that working yet.

I'm not impressed with their customer service - emails sent to 'sortmeout@virginmobile.com' seem to take at least 24 hours to be answered, and sometimes take more like 48 or 72 hours.

A few things that I've found out that may be useful:

to change your pin, dial **004*Old pin*New pin*New pin# (although I get an 'invalid parameters' message when I try it)
you need to activate your sim before you can use it; read the reverse of the sim holder
they say they'll zero your balance if you don't recharge in 90 days; that's not quite true. All you have to do is use your account; making any calls, sending sms's and topping up all qualify
the MMS settings are:
Description: Virgin MMS
Connects to: WAP Network
Access point: vmms
User name: blank
Password: blank
Name: Virgin MMS
MMSC URL: http://mms.virginmobile.co.za
WAP Gateway: 196.31.116.242
Port: 8080
Max Sending size: 100Kb

Virgin Mobile off to a bad start

2007-03-18T13:55:00.000+02:00

So I arrived back in the country from the UK on Friday, and needed to get a SIM card for calls and checking my mail from my phone. So yesterday I figured that Virgin Mobile have the best no-commitment GPRS rates, I'd pick up a VM sim. I'd heard that they'd been having data problems, via the mybroadband forums, but it seemed to be mostly in outlying areas, and I hoped that it'd be fine here in Cape Town, at least as a temporary measure.

Well, I can't say whether it will be or not, because I haven't managed to get it to work yet.

I bought the sim yesterday; and I think their marketing strategy needs to be rethought because at first glance, when you're browsing the Cell C/MTN/Vodacom/VM sims, you notice that all the others are R4.99 while the VM sim is R55. Then you realise that it's because R50 airtime is included, so it's fine, but my first reaction was "never mind, I'll get a vodacom one".

Anyway, I bought the sim, opened the pack, took out the free lanyard and business card holder, read through the Virgin Family specials, noted that you get R100 airtime if you get a Virgin Money credit card (which I was considering, but if Virgin Mobile is typical of Virgin in general, maybe not), read the instruction booklet. Okay. Took out the sim, inserted in my phone - brilliant, it connects to the Virgin network. Then I tried a test call to make sure it works, and got a message saying "you have been automatically redirected to this message because your connection to the network has been cancelled. Please call customer service." Huh? Okay, I think, maybe the sim has to be activated first? But they don't mention in the instruction booklet, nor does the message really make sense. But okay, I'll phone customer service. So I phone 123, only to get a message saying "You have been automatically redirected...".

Nice. So I can't use my sim, and I can't even call them to find out why I can't use my sim. The first is bad enough, the second is downright pathetic. Sure, you can call their customer service line from a landline, but charged at mobile rates. And not everyone has a landline or internet access, which is the route I chose - I emailed them to find out what's going on. 24 hours later, I'm still waiting for a response. Maybe they don't work over weekends?

I did some more testing and found that I did get the Virgin Mobile menu added to the phone, but not the WAP/MMS settings. When choosing 'check prepaid balance' from the menu, I get a message saying 'subscriber locked'. When I request the settings, I get told they're in the pipeline and I'll receive an SMS shortly... 12 hours later, I'm still waiting.

Maybe when it's all up and running it'll work great. But it certainly doesn't seem to be a quick solution. I expect to buy a sim, pop it in the phone, and be able to make and receive calls, send and receive sms's, and use the net, all within a few minutes. But at this rate it looks like it might be a few days, and that's pathetic.

Update: Ok, partly my fault. The back of the sim card holder has activation instructions, which I didn't see. I looked at the side with the PIN number and the cell number, but not the reverse. But it's still partly their fault, because: (1) the getting started guide doesn't mention activation at all, even though it goes into excruciating detail about how to get started, (2) I couldn't get through to customer service, (3) customer service never replied to my email, and (4) even though I've now activated the sim and can call customer service, I get told that my account is locked if I try to phone any other number or check my balance; and I can't send SMSs, even in reply to their WAP/MMS settings (they send one, then you have to reply with 'Y' before they send the next batch). Hopefully the sim just isn't fully activated yet; we'll see.

Update: A hour or two later it was working fine; and this morning I got a call from customer services. I guess they don't work over the weekend. I guess they also don't realise that if I couldn't make any calls, even to 123, I probably wouldn't be able to check my voicemail either. And I guess that they don't realise that if I email them, I probably want a reply via email, not a phone call. Oh well, at least it's working now - I still need to get GPRS working, because they can't automatically push the settings to my Vario, but that's a separate issue.

Update: Got GPRS working on my Vario, but it seems *really* slow. Don't know if that's Virgin Mobile, or just South Africa. Still need to get it working as a modem so I can connect my laptop to the net using GPRS; hate using dial up!

Quick Review - Windows Messenger Live

2007-03-10T11:28:00.000+02:00

So MSN Messenger suddenly started complaining that there was a new update available, and eventually I gave in and installed MessengerLive.

I haven't used it yet (I've only had it installed for about 5 minutes), but I'm trying to get it set up the way I like it. The first thing I did was install MsgPlus, since it adds a lot of extras (and I know it's gotten a lot of bad press recently, but it's really unjustified).

MsgPlus used to disable the ad at the bottom; it doesn't seem to do that any more. I find the ad really annoying, for three reasons: (1) it uses a lot of screen real estate; (2) it's distracting when it changes; and (3) in some countries, we actually pay per KB downloaded, and I don't really want to pay for someone else's adverts.

Screen real estate is the big issue, here; I like to have my msn contact window open most of the time, on the corner of my screen. But I want to see my contacts, not all the other gumph. If I want to add a contact, I can do it from a menu; I don't do it often enough to need a button on my contact window. Searching my contacts... maybe. But if I want to search the web, I'll do it via my browser. I don't need to see my display picture; I know who I am. My status I want to see, and my personal message. But I don't want an email button; I don't want two Windows Live related buttons; and I don't change the colour scheme often enough to need a button rather than a menu item. And if I have sharing folders disabled, I don't need an icon for it, surely? I realise that other people may have different needs; but why not make the display of these elements configurable?

And my biggest complaint: the window title can't handle being in a small window; instead of truncating, it just gets squished up really small and distorted. Which is pretty pathetic, and indicates that MS think you want your msn contact window to take up half your screen.

So I'm annoyed that I had to upgrade. The new version doesn't add any functionality I want; it uses up a lot more screen real estate; and the old version worked just fine, until it started nagging me about a new version being available. Typical Microsoft.

Update: Ah ha! A quick google turns up APatch, which does exactly what I want. All the things I listed above, and more!

Augmented Reality - Not Just For Academics Anymore

2007-03-08T11:37:00.000+02:00

When I was at varsity, I did my honours and master's degrees in virtual reality. We focused more on 'real' virtual reality, but did come across research on 'augmented reality' - which is like a mixture of real and virtual; generally, virtual information superimposed on the real world using translucent head-mounted-displays. The idea was to provide extra information, so for example surgical med students could look at a body and have labels superimposed on the organs; or a wiring diagram could be superimposed on a house wall.

Google maps kinda does this, by superimposing a map on a satellite view of an area. But it's not real time, and it's not dynamic. And it's not the real world - it's a picture of the real world.

But PalmOS game company ToySpring have taken a huge step further, and as usual it's gaming driving the development. They've brought out an arcade shooter for the Treo 650, which uses the pda's camera to generate the backdrop for the game. Bad guys and targets are superimposed on the image coming from the camera, in real time! And if there's a baddie behind you, and you physically turn around, the game will track changes in the camera field so that you can see the baddie. That is just so awesome. My only concern is that it might be terribly slow, but the idea is really great. More info and some screenshots at El Reg.

This is the way that virtual reality is going to filter into everyday life. Not through all the academic research, but via games.

War On Errorism

2007-03-07T10:33:00.000+02:00

I was at the Science Museum shop the other day (yes, the shop is more fun than the museum itself), and as part of the merch for their Spy exhibit they have a pin/badge/button saying 'Self Destruct'.

Luckily this is in London, not Boston - otherwise wearing one could get you blown up. As Bruce Schneier put it: 'Boston PD - Putting the "error" in "terror".'

You can't cross the same river twice

2007-02-24T13:49:00.000+02:00

I enjoyed going to Oxford the other day; it was nice being in an academic town again. It's odd, but there really is a certain studenty feel to the place. It made me miss wandering around the UCT campus; it made me miss being at varsity, doing the whole academic thing. Going to lectures, studying - just learning new things (although I don't miss tests and tutorials and exams).

And then I started thinking about other things I miss; I used to do First Aid for the rugby team at school, and each Saturday I'd wake up early, collect a pile of ice from the freezer, and go down to the rugby field to watch the game. We'd have to be there rain or shine, and somehow it was always fun.

I miss the holidays in Robertson we used to have when I was a kid. We'd stay in a chalet, and go swimming and ride the supertube, and go into Barrydale to do shopping. It was fun.

I miss doing archery - I only did two lessons, and the first time I got horribly sunburned, and the next time I managed to bruise my arm really, really badly, but I enjoyed it anyway.

I miss working at Axcess - we were working on interesting stuff, with cool people, and it was really great.

The thing is, that I miss UCT, but I wouldn't want to go back and do another degree now. I wouldn't want to wake up early and go to rugby. Robertson would be unbearably boring. (On the other hand, I would go back to Axcess in a heartbeat, if we got all the same people together again). And I know I'm not the first person to think this, but the time, place, and activity are all tied up together, and you can go back to the place, or do the same activity, but you can't go back to the time.

And I have to keep that in mind, with moving back to SA - I'm not going back in time; I'm not going back to Axcess, I'm starting something new, just in an old place. Doesn't mean it won't be good, but it won't be the same as before :-)

There are some things that I'm not looking forward to:
- Lack of communications infrastructure. Ridiculously expensive phone calls, mobile contracts, and don't even mention broadband (or what passes for broadband there; I think that the ADSL is too slow to qualify as broadband, and GPRS certainly isn't broadband).

- Bank fees. Paying for every transaction, even getting a balance from an ATM, is going to take some getting used to again. Not being able to use a debit card will be the worst; not that they don't have debit cards, but you get charged each time you use it - the same charge as drawing money from an ATM. Mostly I used to use my credit card as a debit card, but you can't really use a credit card for small purchases like you can with a debit card. And while I'm on it, why are charges always a percentage of the transaction amount? It's an electronic transaction; whether it's for R1 or R10000, it doesn't take them any more effort to process it. So why should you pay more?

- Politics. I know everywhere has political problems, but it just seems so much worse there. It's partly the race thing; for example, the ANC is going around renaming roads and places to honour ANC heroes. I think that most people agree, if reluctantly, that some current place names may be offensive; but then rename things to be neutral, rather than ANC-centric. What if, say, the IFP comes into power, and then renames everything after IFP heroes? And then the DA, and they rename everything, and then the ANC, and they rename everything again... I understand renaming the airport from DF Malan to Cape Town International, but now they want to rename it again to... something or other, after some ANC guy. It's just silly. And our politicians seem to all be pushing their own agenda; they're generally incompetent or corrupt (although there are some exceptions, like Trevor Manuel).

But the thing is, while those things are important, they don't really affect your day to day life :-) You get used to the expensive communications; you learn to optimize your banking transactions and stop thinking about it; and if you don't read the news, you can avoid most of the politics ;-) And there's the mountain, sea, sun, kirstenbosch, familiarity, and family. People to laze around with over the weekend, in the sun, with the blue sky and green grass... I'd put up with a lot for that!

Sightseeing

2007-02-22T10:49:00.000+02:00

So I finished work on Monday; it was kinda sad to leave. The first job I had fell apart so quickly that I was just stunned; the second, it kinda fell apart and I resigned, but I really hated leaving. The next one, well, I was really glad to get out of there. This one I didn't hate, and I didn't love; I wouldn't have left, except that I wanted to go home. So I kinda had mixed feelings about leaving (for someone who doesn't like change, and who gets really attached to things and people and places, I really make life difficult for myself!).

I go home next month, and then the whole thing starts again - finding a flat, finding a job (and going through interviews again, aargh!). I want to get a car, and at least I'll have a bike again, yay! Hopefully I'll find a job I like, and make friends, and maybe, hopefully, even meet a guy ;) In the meantime, though, I'm catching up on some sightseeing; yesterday, I went off to Oxford and the Cotwolds.

I went on the London Walks trip, which is reasonable value. We went from Paddington to Oxford station, where there was a bus to take us to the Cotwolds. First stop was Minster Lovell, where we wandered around and saw the ruins of Minster Lovell Hall. Very pretty place, and it was cool to stand in a real ruined building - you see it on TV, but it's different being there in person. And to see the foundations of the outbuildings - it was a bit of a Time Team flashback :-)

At the village church there was a scene that I just had to take a photo of; file it in the dictionary as a definition for 'irony' (hmm, maybe I should have cropped and zoomed a bit; if you can't read it, the sign says 'Welcome'):

And this picture is exactly what I always imagined when I heard the word 'cottage':

We then went off to Burford, for lunch, and then on to Oxford. We did quite an interesting walking tour of Oxford, and even got to go inside New College, and saw the dining room (again, just like I always imagined!) and the chapel. All very cool, and I was really chuffed to be able to buy a real Oxford sweatshirt, from a real Oxford college store :-) I got to see the Ashmolean Museum, although unfortunately there wasn't time to go inside; same with the History of Science Museum, which sounded really cool.

I also particularly liked the gargoyles at New College:

Tomorrow I'm off to Bath; this time, I managed to get really cheap train tickets, so I'm going on my own rather than on a guided tour. I'll do a City Sightseeing bus tour round the city, and go to the Roman Baths and the Pump Room; hopefully it'll be interesting! Monday I'm off to Edinburgh for the day; I know it's insane going all that way for one day, but... well... for some reason I decided to do it, and it's too late to change my mind now :-) I'm really excited about that one; again, it's a bus tour round the city, and entrance into the castle. Woot!

Things That Bug Me

2007-02-15T11:30:00.000+02:00

Some things really bug me. Really, really bug me, to the point that I feel like a frustrated little kid throwing a temper tantrum, because complaining just doesn't help and nobody cares.

Here's a cartoon chaser, though:

It's from xkcd, a brilliant comic I just discovered. Some of them are funny, some are cool, some are insightful. But this one made me burst out laughing, out loud, even though there was no-one else around :-)

So, things that bug me. Like Google deciding that I have to switch my blog to the new GoogleBlog system, associated with my google id. I don't want everything connected to the same id; maybe I want to keep my blog and my searches and my email and my usenet posts and my googletalk logins all separate. But Google just doesn't give you that option. And being signed into one automatically signs you into all the other services, even if you use them in a different window - so while I could theoretically use a different google username for each service,
it gets really difficult to do so. It frustrates me, and I know that they don't care, won't do anything about it, and I'm just going to have to change the way I want to do things.

Which, incidentally, is what bugs me about Microsoft - I have to change the way I want to do things, because it doesn't fit in with the way they do things. Even just on my own PC.

And here's something else - my dad's Epson printer stopped working yesterday. Without warning, it started blinking red and green lights. Eventually he managed to find out that this means that 'parts are worn and need a service'. It turns out, that after a certain number of pages, the printer decides it needs a service and refuses to print until it's been serviced. There's no way to override it (although I suspect flashing the bios might fix it; after all, there must be some way for the service tech to reset it, right? But there's no user way to override it). So to be able to continue printing - and remember, this happens without warning, halfway through a print job - you have to take it to Epson to have it serviced. And the service costs about 80% of the price of a new printer. And there's nothing you can do!! And no-one at Epson cares! And it certainly isn't on the packaging; you don't know this when you buy the printer. This really should be illegal; it's planned obsolesence. Your printer essentially expires, with no warning, and there's nothing you can do. I know we always joke about things breaking the day after the warranty expires; this is like that, except it's not a joke.

And broadband in South Africa bugs me unbelievably much; but I'm not even going to get started on that one. All I'm going to say is that it's ridiculous and pathetic; both in terms of monthly costs, installation costs, speed, stability, and customer service.

Well, enough complaining for now. Enjoy the weekend :-)

This one's pretty good, too:

Oh, and here are some more things that bug me: companies who have email addresses, but never reply to their email, or who think that just because their ToS says they'll respond in 14 days, that really is a reasonable amount of time to have to wait for a reply, or who do reply but with an automated or monkey-driven scripted reply, based on keywords in your email, that just regurgitates the info on their website and doesn't answer your question at all (tiscali's particularly bad with this).

And websites who check your browser version, and if it isn't one they recognise, advise you to upgrade to the latest version of IE. Firstly, I'm not going to change my system for the dubious privilege of viewing their website; secondly, while I don't expect everyone to design their sites for access by mobiles, at least acknowledge the possibility that your visitor is using a perfectly up-to-date version of, say, PocketIE. Or that they might be using a system which they can't upgrade - a mobile, or a *nix system on which IE wouldn't install, even if someone, bizarrely, actually wanted it to.

I'm sure i'll be back with more. But for now, goodnight :-)

Aaaaargh! And Blogger, who's site works on a mobile, in that you can log in, choose a blog, view your posts, edit a post - but then doesn't let you click submit. Aaaaarrrggghhh!

Snow!

2007-01-24T10:02:00.000+02:00

Wow! It's snowing!

I can't believe it - I woke up ths morning, looked out the window and everything was covered in snow. It looks so pretty, covering the trees and roofs and cars! It really looks like someone sieved icing sugar all over everything. And it's so funny to see cars driving down the road covered in snow, with just the windows clear :)

It almost makes up for it being so cold the past few days. I thought it was a bit warmer today, but maybe I just didn't notice, being too amazed at the snow - after standing at the station waiting 20 minutes for a train, i'm pretty damn cold. Not as cold as in Lapland, but still cold.

And this is proper snow - 1 or 2 centimetres deep, and soft and fluffy. This is the stuff you can make snowballs out of, not like the icy stuff in Lapland.

And now that I've reported in, i'm going to sit back and watch the snowy landscape out the train window until I get to work :)

Update: finally got around to putting up a couple of pictures:

Moving Back Home

2007-01-21T00:30:00.000+02:00

So, I've decided to move back home. London's great, but it's not home, and I'm getting tired of that. I've been here almost a year, and I've gotten a lot more used to it, and learned my way around, but it's tough living in a place that just isn't quite... normal, what you're used to.

And it's tough being away from family - not only because I miss them, but because they're there and I'm here, I don't have a support circle here. Sure, I phone them a lot, but it's not the same; this really hit me when I got sick over New Year. Having no-one around to make me lunch, or go stock up on medicine, or just be around to help me feel better really sucked. I've proved (if only to myself) that I can cope on my own, I can be independent, I can handle it - but while I can do it all on my own, I'd just rather not any more :-)

And I miss biltong, and the sea, and the mountains, and the sunny weather :-) I know it won't be all sun and sand - it's not like when I went back on holiday, and it's not as though I'm going back in time to when I worked at ATC. It'll be a new life (again), and I'll have to go to interviews (aargh!) to find a job, and find a flat and organise a phone line and internet access and change all my addresses and basically re-do all the stuff I did when I moved over here, but in reverse. But it'll be worth it, because I'll be home.

It will be tough leaving London. Each place has it's own good points and bad points, as I've mentioned before, and I could add a million more things to that list. In the end, it comes down to where your heart is, and mine's in Cape Town. It might be different if I had tons of friends here - it wouldn't stop me missing familiar things, or my family, but it would help to have some support. And it's always more fun doing things if you have people to do them with - to point out all the cool sites, that kind of thing. But then again, having a bunch of friends might just have made it more difficult to leave.

There's a lot that I thought I would do that I haven't done, like travelling around Europe. But when you're working full time, weekends become about cleaning the house, and resting up for the next week of work, and shopping, and you just don't have the time or energy to go be a tourist. But I have a week or so of leave left, which I'll take at the end of February - and while I don't really feel like travelling around Europe, I do plan to do walking tours of Oxford and the Cotswolds, a day trip to Edinburgh (I know, it's pretty far to travel for a couple of hours! But there's a tour package for it which includes a sight-seeing bus trip and entry to Edinburgh castle, which should cover all the bits that I want to see), and a trip to Bath. My mom's coming over, since she hasn't been to visit me yet and won't get a chance now that I'm moving home, and we're going to spend two weeks packing up (aargh, gotta decide what to sell, what to ship home, and what to get rid of, and how to get rid of it), and doing touristy stuff that I haven't done yet, like Madame Toussauds and going out to Pooh Country. So all that should be fun.

And then, it'll finally be time to go home :-)

Magic Kingdom in the Sky

2007-01-15T23:19:00.000+02:00

This is brilliant (although possibly not for the easily offended, religion-wise). It's "Magic Kingdom In the Sky", by an a capella group called DaVinci's Notebook. It's absolutely hilarious, and I recommend listening to it immediately!

All my life I have been searching for that fabled promised land,
With my sisters and my brothers we shall walk there hand-in-hand.
Through the trials and tribulations and the devils cruel temtations.
I know that we'll all get there one day!

After years and years of wandering, oh that kingdom we shall find
and the doors might not be open but we'll gather in the line.
And our hearts will swell with pride the day those gates swing open wide and take a walk down Main Street USA!

Ban Reclining Seats, Please!

2007-01-13T00:13:00.000+02:00

I've mostly recovered from the tonsillitis and subsequent cold, although I'm still a bit sniffly. And I know that I promised a post on my Lapland Christmas when I got better, and it is still coming! But the other day I read a thread on banning reclining seats on planes, and then today I read this blog post which mentions the same thing. Now this is something I feel really strongly about - I hate it when the person in front of me reclines their seat. So this is the comment I posted on the blog:

the Knee Defender -- a mischievous little gadget that allows you to be a tad more comfortable at the expense of making your fellow traveler a tad less comfortable

Nope, that's the other way round: reclining makes you a tad more comfortable at the expense of your fellow traveller's much greater discomfort.

Try spending a 12 hour flight with your knees jammed up against the back of the seat in front of you, with no room to stretch or move your legs even just a tiny big.

Try reading anything larger than a small paperback - there just isn't room between my body and the seatback to hold it at a reasonable angle!

Try viewing the seatback LCD screen, with the seatback reclined - the viewing angle means that half the screen isn't visible.

Try eating your meal with your elbows bent out to the sides because your traytable is right up close - except that you have someone sitting on at least one side, so you have to try to eat one-handed.

Try getting in and out of your seat when the seat in front of you is reclined - you have to climb over the armrest to do it.

I don't mind as much if the person's actually trying to sleep, but on most of the flights I've been on lately they're just watching the movie or chatting to the person next to them, while I'm getting more and more cramped and frustrated and claustrophobic.

I really wish they would ban reclining seats!

Tonsillitis!

2006-12-30T20:40:00.000+02:00

So I dragged myself off to the Tooting NHS Walk-in Centre this afternoon, since I'd tried all the home remedies I could find on the net and nothing was working. It wasn't fun, catching a bus and walking in the cold and the rain while you're sick, but I got there in the end. It's a strange setup - you go and tell the receptionist what's wrong with you, then you fill in a form with your address and stuff and what's wrong with you; then you wait (about an hour, today) and then you're called and you tell someone else what's wrong with you. Then, it turns out, that isn't the nurse - you have to go back to the waiting room and wait for the nurse to call you! Luckily for me it was pretty quick, I'd practically just sat down before I was called again. The nurse was very nice, and it turns out that I have acute tonsillitis. This surprised me, rather, because I had my tonsils out when I was four or five years old! But apparently the tissue bed can still get infected.

It's a pretty generic term, though - basically it's just an infection, and it could be viral or bacterial. They gave me antibiotics, and 2 hours later I can actually swallow without flinching, which is amazing! The effect might wear off later, I guess, but for now it's such a relief to be able to swallow and drink with minimal pain (not no pain, but it is greatly reduced).

I'm suprised that I got tonsillitis at my age, as well - but then there were a whole lot of little monsters on the plane and the coach and the hotel in Lapland, and it's quite possible I picked it up from one of them. One of the less enjoyable souveniers of the trip, I guess.

Finding a Doctor in London

2006-12-30T07:02:00.000+02:00

So, my throat is killing me and I can't sleep. It feels scraped raw, and it hurts when I breathe, never mind swallow.

So I figure I better try to get to a doctor tomorrow (well, later today, really).

Yeah right. There certainly aren't any 24 hour doctors in London, and very, very few that are open on a Saturday at all! One place near me that is supposed to be open on a Saturday morning according to the NHS website, isn't according to the message on their answerphone; another is, but is out in Southfields somewhere and seems to require a lot of walking to get there.

I normally use the on-site doctors at work, but they don't work on a Saturday. I thought I'd try the BUPA private doctors, but they're not open on Saturdays either.

I could trek along to the Tooting Walk-in Centre; they're at least open, and not _too_ difficult to get to (although when you're feeling sick, anywhere further than down the road is difficult to get to), but they only have nurses, not doctors. Which might be fine for advice, but I don't need advice, I need medicine! And not over-the-counter stuff; I think I probably need antibiotics. But it seems to be my only option - I don't want to not go, if it would help, but if it's not going to help I'd rather not waste my time in the first place.

And if hardly anyone is open on a Saturday, you know no-one's going to be open on a Sunday, especially not on New Year's Eve. And then Monday is New Year's Day, so no-one will be open then either. So then it's Tuesday until I can get to a doctor - by which time I'll either be recovered, or so ill I won't be able to drag myself out of bed.

Sheesh, what a country.

Happy New Year?

2006-12-29T22:21:00.000+02:00

So as I think I mentioned, I went to Lapland for Christmas. It was amazing, it was really great - although really cold! It made me miss home even more, though. Every time I thought of leaving Lapland and going home, it was SA home that I was thinking of, not UK home. And I wanted to tell my mom and my nieces and everyone about what I'd seen and done, but in person, not on the phone.

But it was great fun, and I'll do a post about it later. At the moment I'm really not feeling well. I've been off work the past two days, and luckily it's the long weekend now, otherwise I'd have to take more time off work. I don't know if it's a cold, or flu, or something else, but I have a fever and my throat is sore and my muscles are achy and I just feel _awful_. And this is another thing about not being at home - I don't have anyone to go get me medicine or food from the shops, or to talk to to distract me from feeling sick, or to check my temperature, or make my bed nice and tidy. Sure, I _can_ cope by myself, but I'd rather not have to :(

So it doesn't look like I'm going to have a very happy new year. I didn't really have much planned - I was going to go to a movie, maybe the carnival or fair or whatever it is at Hyde Park, but I doubt I will, unless I improve dramatically - at the moment I don't know if I'll be able to go buy food tomorrow, but I have to because I've pretty much eaten everything in the house!

Oh well, there's always New Year next year. And at least I had a good Christmas.

Strange Horizons

2006-12-21T23:18:00.000+02:00

There's a really good online sf/fantasy site, called Strange Horizons. They publish an edition every week (although I mostly only read the fiction). The nice thing is that they keep an archive of all (or most) of their fiction, and I've been reading back in time for the last few months, whenever I'm stuck on the train and don't have a library book to read.

They have really good stuff, too many to point out and link to, but here are 3 that have stood out in the past few days (there are a lot more outstanding ones, but these are 3 that I've read most recently):

Heroic Measures

Looking Back

Snow Day

The first two are really moving; the last one is just really fun ;)

Winter in London

2006-12-17T19:26:00.000+02:00

So this is my first winter in London, and it's certainly an experience.

I don't really know how long winter is here, or how long it lasts, so I don't know if we're half-way through or just starting. But so far, it's not too bad. It hasn't been nearly as rainy as I thought it would be, so there are really two components: the cold, and the dark.

Luckily, with central heating and double glazing, it's not too cold inside (and you can always sit wrapped up in a blanket if you have to!). It's pretty cold outside, though, and not just in the morning and evening - it doesn't make too much difference during the day, because I'm at work where it's fairly cold in the office anyway, but going out for lunch it's pretty damn cold. But it's a nice cold, an invigorating cold, and I carry a scarf and gloves with me in case it gets too cold :-) And it's actually quite pretty - clear, cold sky, with skeleton-ish trees... and of course all the christmas decorations. And it's perfect weather to see the contrails of the planes flying over London, which are just amazing when the sun catches them.

What's worse is the dark. It's dark when I get up, although it's light by the time I get to work. But it starts getting a little bit darker about 2:30 in the afternoon - not dark, just not bright sunny afternoon any more - and by about 4, I guess, the sun is really going down. So during the week, by the time I leave work, it's fully dark. Over the weekend you get to see more sun, but you end up with a very short afternoon and a very long evening - so you feel like you don't get much done, but then you feel like the evening's dragging on and on and it's time to go to bed, even though it's only 7. And of course, if it is cloudy and rainy, it's dark all day round.

I can see why people are affected by winter - not just people with Seasonal Affective Disorder, I think it's a bit depressing for everyone. I try to go out every day at lunch, just to get some sunlight, and that helps. It's not too bad, but I do hope winter doesn't carry on too much longer, get too much colder, get dark too much earlier, or get more rainy!

Green & Black's

2006-12-17T00:18:00.000+02:00

One of the best things about London is Green & Black's chocolate. It's the best chocolate I've ever tasted.

And everything they make tastes incredibly good. Their icecream is creamy and fluffy and incredibly chocolatey (but not too sweet, since they use a bit more cocoa than normal). I once had to make space in my freezer, so I took the icecream out and left it in the fridge... then forgot about it for a few days. Eventually I remembered it, and was surprised to find that it wasn't liquid. I tried some - it tasted just like a lovely, creamy chocolate mousse. Delicious!

Even their hot chocolate is amazing - I didn't know that they made hot chocolate, but the instant I saw it at Sainsbury's I knew I had to buy it :-) You make it with milk rather than water, and again it's amazingly rich and creamy, and just a touch bittersweet. Highly recommended!

Spamalot!

2006-12-10T19:23:00.000+02:00

So I haven't blogged for a while, but that's because I was off in Sunny South Africa, the Land os Sun, Mountains, Sea, and Dial-up Internet. Despite that, it was very difficult to leave there and come back here - I've been happy here, but seeing my family again I realised just how much I miss them, and how difficult it is being on my own here.

But anyway, today I went to see Spamalot. I booked my ticket ages ago, and got a front row seat. What I dislike the most about booking via seetickets or lastminute is that you can't choose your seat - they just assign you the 'best' available seat - and I'm not quite sure what algorithm they use to determine that. So I was quite impressed to get a front row seat, except that when I got there it wasn't quite as good as I'd thought it would be.

You don't get to see the rest of the audience, of course, so you don't so much feel part of a large group. But the problem, at this theatre at least, is not so much that it's too close as that it's too low! The stage itself is at about eye-level, which was really disappointing, (although you do get a good view into the orchestra pit, for what that's worth). The upper levels aren't as far back as they are in othe theatres I've been to, and the next one up (the grand circle, I'd guess) or the back of the stalls would have given a much better view, in a vertically-balanced sense. Although sitting in the front row is nice, since you can stretch your legs - but the front row of the grand circle would have been much better Kand possibly cheaper, although I have a vauge feeling that the stalls and the grand circle were the same price).

Once it started, though, I didn't mind very much. It was great being that close - you could really see everyone, and every expression. And it was absolutely hilarious - so funny, you just can't help laughing out loud... continuously :-) The songs were awesome, and they did my favourite: 'Always look on the bright side of life'.

The cast was really good, too - Tim Curry as King Arthur (and I got to see him up close!), and Christopher Siebert as Galahad (and I got to see him up close too! - in case you don't recognise the name, he was Simon in 'It's All Relative'). The guys playing Lancelot and Robin were also familiar, but I don't recognise anything they've been in.

Brilliant play, and I really recommend that you see it - even if you haven't watched any Monty Python before.

On Holiday!

2006-11-17T23:57:00.000+02:00

So tomorrow I'm off to SA for a two-week holiday :-) I'm not sure which I'm looking forward to more... going home for a few weeks, or just being off work!

What I'm not looking forward to is the flying... don't get me wrong, I love flying (not so much the flying as the take-offs and landings), but the new security restrictions are driving me insane. Sure, they've been relaxed slightly, but it still makes life difficult. Particularly if you wear contact lenses - the maximum size container you're allowed to take on board is 100ml, but the minimum size bottle of contact lens solution is 120ml! And considering that I'm going to be flying or in airports for about 15 hours (I'm flying via Frankfurt), I really will need to take my contacts out a couple of times. But I'm not going to get started - the whole thing's ridiculous, and I just get so annoyed that I'm trying to avoid thinking about it at all.

I'm also not looking forward to flying with Lufthansa - I've never flown with them before, but I've already decided that I won't be flying with them again. They just don't reply to queries; they don't have individual entertainment sets; you can't book your seat online or via the travel agent (you can request an aisle or window seat, but it's just a request - most other airlines let you pick your actual seat!); and you can't use web checkin if you booked via a travel agent.

The best airline I've flown with is KLM - not only do they have individual entertainment units (games, tv, movies, everything), it's all totally on demand, so you can really watch whatever you feel like, whenever you feel like it. And they're constantly handing out food, chocolates, chips, icecream.... yummy :-) (Actually, the best airline I've flown with is American Airlines - but that was First Class, so it's not really fair to compare them :D)

Anyway, it's great to have some time off work (I've been working for 7 months solid, I deserve a break!) and nice to be seeing my family again - and it'll be amazing to be in a country where it doesn't get dark at 4 in the afternoon!

Cadbury World

2006-11-05T22:10:00.000+02:00

I went out to Cadbury World today, and it was both more and less than I was expecting. Some free chocolate, a very brief view of the packing plant, and a bit of the history of chocolate. I got the impression that they've tried really hard, but couldn't think of much to do - so you get a fake Amazon jungle, and a ride with singing chocolate creatures, and some other stuff that's a bit more relevant, like Cadbury's adverts trhough the years, and the story of how Cadbury's started, and how chocolate is processed. They've certainly put a lot of effort into their presentations - they use a lot of back-projection mixed with real props to produce great 3D effects, so it's worth a trip just from the tech point of view. But somehow it alls feels a bit disconnected, like they were reaching for ideas, and got some good ones, but couldn't tie them together to form a coherent presentation. The layout is pretty good though - there's a one-way
flow throughout, so not only can you not get lost, you can be sure you won't miss anything either.

Needless to say, I came away with lots of chocolate and Cadbury's merchandise - after all, the aim of the place is really just to get you to buy chocolate, not really to teach you about chocolate!

The downside is the time it takes to get there. I'm still on the way home - it's the London General excursion bus trip, and it took about 4 hours to get there (and presumably the same back). I had no idea it was so far, although I guess that if I'd looked at a map first I night
have had some idea :) Not too many kids on the trip, surprisingly, but plenty of irritating people who don't seem to realise that you need to have some consideration for the other people on the bus - sitting with your little group spread out along the length of the bus is fine, but not if you all want to have a conversation together. And playing I Spy with your kids might keep them occupied, but isn't necessarily something the entire bus wants to hear.

But it was a fun trip, although it sucks to have to go to work tomorrow after getting back late tonight - which is why I prefer to go out saturdays, rather than sundays. The trip home in the dark is kinda nice, although boring; it's amazing how in the dark, roads in all countries look the same. The streetlights are the same, the roadmarkings are the same, the road signs are the same, the overpasses are the same. I could be back in SA :)

Lots of fireworks to look at too - although last night was the best, I could see different fireworks shows depending which window I looked out of, and they were all amazing (and incredibly loud!).

Hmmm, really don't feel like getting up for work in the morning :( I'm amazed at how cold it is already, although it's been very clear lately so I guess that contributes to the low temperature. I suspect winter's only just barely started, though, and I just hope it doesn't get too much colder! I'll have to get a scarf and gloves, but it's difficult to bundle up too much, since not only do you end up feeling like the michelin man, you have to unbundle for the bus/train/tube/office or overheat - and carry all your bundling around with you, and not lose any of it. I wonder how everyone else handles it... I'll have to learn all the London winter tricks :)

Cartoons

2006-11-04T01:11:00.000+02:00

I love cartoons; some I read regularly (like For Better or For Worse) and Snoopy, others I read when I remember (like Dilbert, and Arlo 'n' Janis) but I enjoy them anyway.

And every now and then I come across one that's just so funny, and so right that I want to keep them forever :-) Something like this Snoopy one that I saw today:

Here or There

2006-10-30T01:09:00.000+02:00

So further to my previous post, I've been thinking about some of the advantages and disadvantages of London and Cape Town. Just as a matter of interest, really - I'm not planning on making any decisions based on this, I'll be here for a couple of years still, but it's interesting to consder since you tend to take things for granted wherever you happen to be at the time.

Here, there's places to go and ways to get there (locally and further afield, like Europe). There, there's my parents, my sister, my nieces, my dog.

Here, there's earning good money and good career opportunities. There, there's the sea and the mountain and Kirstenbosch.

Here, there's cheap and fast internet. There, there's familiarity and knowing how things work.

Here, there's a rented flat that never feels fully yours (short term) or impossibly expensive house prices (long term). There, there's crime and not feeling 100% safe even at home.

Here, there's insane politicians. There, there's insane politicians who don't seem to know how to run a country, and are more interested in their own profit than the good of the country.

I guess it's a tie.

More thoughts:

Here, there's you pay effectively no bank charges; there, people have a sense of personal space.

Here, it's crowded and noisy and dirty and busy. There, there's peace and quiet and space and trees and plants and room to see to the horizon.

There, there are birds, and animals, and pets. Here, there are very few mosquitos and other insects.

Here, even I can't get sunburned. There, I know where to go to the dentist, have my hair cut, buy whatever I need.

Here, paying for utilities is incredibly complex - insurance gets paid for a year upfront; other things are paid monthly, but only over 9 months in a year; gas and electricity is paid every month, but on an estimate basis and you only get a bill every 3 months. There, things make a lot more sense.

There, you get Niknaks, biltong, droewors, koeksisters, Steers, and decent steaks. Here, you get Green & Blacks chocolate, icecream and hot chocolate (although: when I went back for a visit, I did see Green & Blacks chocolate... so maybe they'll be getting the icecream and the hot chocolate too!).

There, I got to wear jeans to work.

There, my bathroom actually had a bath.

Here, there's waaay more TV channels. But then, there's a higher proportion of rubbish, so it about cancels out.

Soundtrack

2006-10-30T01:04:00.000+02:00

So here's the latest in the 'songs that could be a soundtrack for my life' series: Starlight, by Muse, definitely; and parts of Talk and The Hardest Part by Coldplay.

Probably some others, but those are the three that I've particularly noticed lately.

Of course, if there was a song with lyrics going something like, "why I can't just go to sleep on a Sunday night so that I'm wide awake for work when I have to get up early on Monday rather than sitting in bed writing silly blog posts", that would be a good contender for the number 1 slot.

Other songs I like at the moment, that aren't particularly relevant: Chasing Cars, by Snow Patrol; Dani California (Red Hot Chilli Peppers), When You Were Young (The Killers), Naive, and She Moves In Her Own Way (The Kooks)... oh, and America, by Razorlight; and both Fill My Little World, and Never Be Lonely, by The Feeling. Really cool music, that I'd probably never have heard in SA.

Six Word Stories

2006-10-25T22:30:00.000+02:00

Some really, really short stories - there's more at Wired, but these are my favourites:

Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer?
- Eileen Gunn

Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
- Alan Moore

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood

The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly.
- Orson Scott Card

Batman Sues Batsignal: Demands Trademark Royalties.
- Cory Doctorow

Bang postponed. Not Big enough. Reboot.
- David Brin

Visiting Home

2006-10-22T23:16:00.000+02:00

Well, not quite yet - still a couple of weeks to go, then I'm off back to SA for 2 weeks. I'm looking forward to it, although I'm trying not to think about it too much yet - it seems silly to spend a month waiting for something that's only two weeks long. On the other hand, maybe all that anticipation draws it out into something longer than just two weeks.

I enjoy being in London - I'm certainly glad I came, and I've experienced a ton of stuff that I'd never have done back in Cape Town. But it does get lonely, and I miss my family, especially at times like now when I should be getting to sleep so that I can be all bright-eyed and awake for work tomorrow. Thanks to my T-Mobile flext plan and YourCall, I speak to them pretty much every day (which is almost embarrassing to admit, but hey, why not use the technology we have?), but it's different to being able to visit and see them whenever I like. Particularly my nieces, who have grown such a lot since the last time I saw them. They should invent faster, cheaper planes so that it's easier to go home just for a few days, rather than being a once-a-year event - that would make life much easier!

So I'm looking forward to going home, and I think it will be difficult to come back - although, of course, there are advantages to living in London, and (almost) all of the reasons I came over in the first place are still true.

In a way, though, I don't so much want to go back to a place as to a time... back to when I was working at ATC and everything was fun, or back to when I was at varsity and the future seemed to be all sorted. Or even back to when I was a kid and didn't have any responsibilities - sure, you still worry about stuff when you're a kid, but you get tucked in at night and looked after when you're sick and don't have to do your own washing and ironing :) Obviously that's not going to happen, but the time and the place tend to get mixed up in your mind, and maybe this trip home will help to break that link.

In a way, by moving to London I've set myself up to always be missing somewhere - the plan was to come over for a year, then when I got a really good job, that got extended to 2 or 3 years. I still don't plan to live here the rest of my life, but I know I'll miss it when I go back to SA. But while I'm here, I miss SA. It's odd, thinking back to when I was at varsity and thinking how I thought I had everything planned out and knew how the rest of my life would be - and was happy to know that it was all settled. Since then, I've learned not to count on anything specific happening, and I've actually come to dread the thought of my entire life, settled, stretching out in front of me... not that that's an issue, since I don't have any plans for my life. I know I don't want to stay here for more than a few years; I don't see myself staying in SA for the rest of my life either. Each place has it's advantages and it's disadvantages. I guess the solution is to move back to SA (in time - certainly not yet, I'm not done here yet!), find a great job doing lots of coding, with people I can become friends with (like at ATC, although I suspect that only happens once in a lifetime, if you're lucky), earn a ton of money, with lots of leave, and then travel to the UK and Europe and the US every year on holiday :-) It's still a bit scary, thinking of your whole life stretching out before you... I know, I think too much; I worry too much about the future, and get too nostalgic about the past. But still, it would be nice to have someone to face this stretching-out-before-me future with, someone who would be a part of it. I suspect that's how most people get through it (and not thinking too much, of course). But, there's not much prospect of that, and I've (mostly) learned that I'm (mostly) totally capable of doing it alone.

Anyway, this is turning into a terribly introspective and sad-ish post, and one that's probably a bit too personal for a blog that anyone and everyone can (but doesn't) read, but I feel better for having said it. I blame it on being tired, and a bit lonely, and having been off sick for most of the past week. I don't think it's because winter's starting and the weather's getting miserable - I do miss the sun, and I never thought I'd say this, but I miss getting sunburned! - but the weather can be pretty bad in winter in Cape Town too, and I managed there fine. And most of the time I'm at work, anyway, where you don't even notice whether it's sunny or raining. So while it will be nice to get some sun on my holiday, I don't think winter should be too depressing here.

Hmm, let's end of on a more upbeat note... I'm thinking of going to the MCM Expo next Saturday, which should be fun. And the week after, I'm going to Cadbury World - hmmm, yummy. And I'm doing some shopping, buying presents to take home, which is always fun. Some London-y tourist stuff, just to prove I was here; some London-y goodies, like Green & Blacks (the best chocolate ever!); birthday presents for the two birthdays around the time I'll be there; and of course, Christmas presents for all. And I plan to do some shopping there, since my money will be worth about 14 times it's value here - clothes, goodies (biltong and droewors! and I better not get started on NikNaks); and I want to bring back some stuff that I couldn't fit in my suitcase when I came over - like my buckwheat husk pillow, which is really comfortable and which I really miss! Hmm, maybe even a teddy bear, if I have some spare room... I do miss my Harley Davidson bear :-)

Campaign For Real Beauty

2006-10-15T19:28:00.000+02:00

One thing I appreciate about advertising here in the UK is that some companies - most notably Dove - are trying to use realistic models rather than these idealised women who, lets face it, don't look like anyone I know. The more people (and kids, especially) see these super-thing, super-beautiful women on TV, on billboards, and in general advertising, the more it becomes accepted that that is women are supposed to look like, and it doesn't do much good to the self-esteem of those of us who don't (i.e., 99% of everyone!).

So the Campaign For Real Beauty is something that I fully believe in. BoingBoing has a post about a video by Dove on how an ordinary, plain woman is transformed into a gorgeous model, and goes to show how (and why) our perceptions of beauty have become incredibly warped into something totally unrealistic. It's definitely worth watching; I've seen these before and after type photos before, but this video shows the step-by-step process, and it's absolutely unbelievable.

There's a flash version, and now a quicktime version as well. And learn more about the Campaign for Real Beauty (US and UK versions)

How Private is Private?

2006-10-14T22:22:00.000+02:00

Okay, there's a lot of things that that title might refer to, but this post is about the most boring interpretation :-)

I came across an odd line of code the other day, and after doing some investigating I found out something about private members that I never knew. This is in C#, but I would assume it applies in C++, Java, and any other object oriented language as well.

This is what I discovered: any instance of a class can access the private members of any other instance of that class! In other words, this code is fine:


public class MyClass
{
 private int myVar;

 public void accessPrivate(MyClass instance2)
 {
    instance2 = 42;
 }
}

Thinking about it, it does make sense (I almost said, on reflection :-) - the access modifier applies on the class level, not the instance level. And it could come in useful, for example when overriding .Equals - but I still find it somewhat disturbing. And I suspect that with intellisense, people may be using this feature without even realising it - you see the private member in the drop-down list, and select it, without stopping to think that you shouldn't even be able to see it (yet another reason that intellisense sometimes makes life too easy).

Doing some googling, I found several discussions about this - in summary, though, someone posts saying "isn't this odd", someone else posts saying "yes, but it's useful", and someone else posts saying "it's data-hiding, not security".

A Day Off

2006-10-09T20:21:00.000+02:00

I took the day off work today - I had to have a gas safety and maintenance inspection done, which of course they don't do after working hours, so since I had to take at least half a day off work for that I figured I might as well just take the whole day off.

It was really nice - I think I need a holiday, actually. The only time I've had off during the last 6 or 7 months was when I moved to London and was looking for a job; when I moved to Wimbledon; and a day or two when I was off sick and spent the entire day asleep. So it was nice to have a day off - the weekend doesn't count - to do whatever I liked (provided I didn't actually leave the house, since I had to wait for the inspection guy).

So I spent most of the day on the net, and watching TV. I got some things sorted that I've been meaning to do for ages (like organising my photos), and got to watch some mildly amusing tv shows that I don't normally get to see. And I got to chat to some of my friends via msn/googletalk, which I don't normally get to do since I'm not allowed to use instant messaging at work :-(

Admittedly, I'm starting get a little bit bored and feeling a little bit disconnected from the world by now (especially since there isn't anything to watch on tv any more, and no-one's online to chat to), but it was a nice peaceful day. Of course, now I don't feel like going to work tomorrow...

This Is Cinerama... or not.

2006-10-08T22:59:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I went out to Bradford to watch This Is Cinerama as described in Bill Bryson's 'Notes From a Small Island'. I didn't really realise how far away it is from London until after I'd booked my train tickets, but I thought it would be a fun trip anyway. Which it was, but... I'm really going through a bad luck phase. I couldn't believe it, but after watching the first half of This Is Cinerama, one of the projectors broke down! I mean, I know it's an old film and old equipment, but one of the women who works with it said she's been there for 6 months and they've never had a problem. The day I spend 3 hours on a train to get there to watch this one movie, the equipment breaks down. Unbelievable!

The first half was pretty good, though - the rollercoaster in the beginning was absolutely awesome, and I'd really recommend that anyone in the area goes to watch it. But I have to agree with Bill Bryson about Bradford - it's incredibly confusing and easy to get lost. The roads themselves are bad enough, and the map from the NMPFT website isn't very useful. And the signs to the museum point to... I don't know, but not the way you need to go to get to the museum! And then of course you have the pedestrian subways - you really feel isolated down there, and of course you have no way to get your bearings and figure out where you're trying to go! I got there fairly easily, but got a bit coming lost since I came out of a different door that I went in.

The museum itself is small but really cool - they have the original sets from The Wrong Trousers (Wallace & Gromit), and the 1997 version of the Wombles, and, best of all, the original set from Morph! I remember watching that when I was a kid, and it was so cool to see the actual set. I was amazed by how small it is. They have a bunch of other stuff at the museum, and it's well worth going to see (it's even free to get in).

So after wandering around the museum for a while, I went to the Pictureville Cinema for This Is Cinerama, and enjoyed the little bit that we actually went to see. The curved screen is really effective, and it's a very nice theatre. There were only about 10 people there, and when the projector broke and they offered to show The Queen instead, everyone but me and one other person left! I only stayed because otherwise I'd have had to wander around for the three hours before my train, and I couldn't face that. It was okay, although not really my type of movie, and nowhere as good as the rest of This Is Cinerama would have been :-(

No Bike

2006-10-08T22:50:00.000+02:00

After struggling for a month to get my bike brought over, a friend of a friend of the guy I was buying it from brought it over on Friday night.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the battery not only was flat but wasn't holding a charge... which means that I would have had to find a replacement battery, then replace the battery (and while I ride bikes, I know nothing about working on them). And it just raised issues about what else may be wrong with the bike... and after waiting so long for it, and being messed around (this was the 5th time I was told it would be delivered, only for it not to arrive) than I was just sick of it. So I phoned up the guy I was buying it from and told him that I wasn't going to buy it.

It's very disappointing - it's a great bike, and I would have loved it, but I was just so sick of the entire thing by then. I've been stressed out for the last month because of that bike, and I was starting to hate the thought of it. It was supposed to be a fun and exciting thing, buying a bike, and it just turned into a miserable, stressful experience.

Anyway, so that's the end of that story. I missed the last of the good weather, I think, as well. So while I'm still determined to get a bike, I think I'll wait until summer and then get a newer bike from a reputable dealer. Maybe one of the 2006 model CBF500's, since the 2007 models will be out and there should be more 2nd hand 2006 ones floating around.

So I'm very disappointed, and still miss having a bike; but on the other hand, I'm relieved that it's all over at least.

Brilliant Anti-DRM music video

2006-10-04T21:09:00.000+02:00

In keeping with yesterday being anti-DRM day, here's a brilliant music video: Futuristic Sex robotz - F**K The MPAA (RIAA & BSA). It's available on YouTube, as an mp3, and here's the original post about it on BoingBoing.

Lots of swearing, so don't watch it if you're easily offended.

Bikes and Internet - More Trouble Than They're Worth

2006-10-03T22:04:00.000+02:00

So, I'm still bike-less - it was supposed to be coming today, and it seemed very definite this time. But at the last minute (again) it was postponed until tomorrow.

And my internet connection is.... problematic, again. It connects, it says it's connected and that the signal's excellent, but it's as if the DNS server is down because I can't go anywhere or sign in to msn or googletalk. This is how it started last week, and I've only just got that resolved! It's yo-yoing tonight, though - it'll be fine, then down, then up, then down. Even had a problem connecting via the cable, although it seems stable-ish now. I just wish I knew where the problem was - router, wireless, isp, other people connecting to my network and stealing my bandwidth? (Shouldn't be the last one - I do have security in place, although nothing's foolproof. But it's as good an explanation as any). I just hate having an unreliable connection. And there's no reason for it being unreliable, it's not like it's new unproven technology!

I dunno, I'm not even angry about it all tonight. I'm just getting so used to it, I'm more resigned than anything else. Which is kinda sad, in itself.

On a more positive note, today is anti-DRM day, so go out there and don't support DRM!

Saving Visual Studio Settings

2006-10-01T18:53:00.000+02:00

I always customize my Visual Studio settings - colours, keyboard shortcuts, window positions, and all that. It's always been difficult to backup those settings, though, either just to keep them safe, or for if you need to reinstall VS, or if you want to copy those same settings to another installation on another PC. After doing that a lot of times, you tend to start only customizing the major things and leaving the rest as default, which is a bit sad.

I know VS 2005 has the facility to save and restore settings, which is great but not so useful for those of us still using 2003. Which is why I went looking - again - for a way to save settings, and this time I actually found something! Basically it amounts to exporting a couple of registry settings, and copying a couple of files in your app settings directory - the full details are here on SteveHarman.net.

Haven't tried it yet - I backed up the settings on Friday, and will try a restore with my fresh install of VS on Monday. Looks like it should work though.

Can nothing just work?!

2006-09-27T00:20:00.000+02:00

Seriously, is there some kind of cosmic law that nothing works for me?

Sorry, this is going to be another rant. And I know, none of these
things that go wrong are really important - everyone I care about is
safe and healthy, and that's what really counts.

But come on! Today I come home planning to do some stuff on the net
that i've been meaning to get done for ages, and my router goes
haywire! So i've spent the whole evening trying to fix it, because I
can't just ignore the fact that I have no internet connection and do
something else instead.

It started that I could use http, but nothing else. Then I couldn't
connect at all. At various points throughout the evening i've not
been able to see my wireless network; been able to see, but not
connect to it; connect to it, but not be able to see the internet at
all; been able to do everything, as long as i'm plugged into the
router via an ethernet cable; pretty much every issue that could come
up has. Randomly. Without any apparent cause. And been replaced by
a different issue, again without any apparent cause.

And it's still not working.

Aaaaaaarrrrrrrggggghhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!

I keep giving up, and then going back to it because I can't rest until
I get it working! But I have to get to sleep now. Thank goodness for
gprs, at least.

I'm hoping it'll spontaneously be right tomorrow when I get home from
work. But if anyone has any suggestions, please post a comment - i'll
be eternally grateful if anyone can help me fix this.

Update: Still not working. It's bizarre - it will connect, wirelessly, if the network cable is plugged in. Unplug the network cable, and the wireless card suddenly can't see the wireless network at all.

Then I reset the router, and it connected briefly - wirelessly, without the cable. Now it won't connect wirelessly even with the cable plugged in. The only thing I can think is that the router's wireless component is faulty - I'd expect it not to work wirelessly at all, if that was the case, but it can't be a settings issue if it does sometimes connect. I don't think it's my wireless card either, because I can see other wireless networks (although obviously I can't actually test it, since I can't connect to them). Damn, I guess a support call to Netgear is required. And it's a difficult one to look up on the net, because there isn't even a consistent set of symptoms, nevermind nice easy words to search for.

Update: Kinda working, but not quite. Damn, I hate this! I reset the router to factory defaults, set it up again, it wouldn't work, then it did work, then it didn't work - I reset all the keys, and it seemed to be working. Yay. Went downstairs, and the laptop can't see the network. Come back upstairs, it works. I hate things that work intermittently. And I struggled for months at my place with a router that just wasn't strong enough for me to get a signal in my room, which is why when I moved into this place I bought a super-duper expensive mimo router that should work through walls, floors, ceilings, etc. And it WAS working! So I don't know what's suddenly changed, or how to fix it. But I don't want to go through that again, where I can only use my laptop in one spot in the house. And it was working, so surely it should work now!

Update: Seems to be working now. I changed the channel, and it seems to be working much better now. I guess there was a new source of interference or something.

Random Thoughts...

2006-09-25T21:44:00.000+02:00

... that occur to me while I'm trying to sleep.

While public transport in London has its problems, at least it's always available. You barely have to think 'how will I get there', and you never have to think 'can I get there'. But still, there are some things that annoy me - mostly the other passengers. Why women think it's okay to do their makeup on the train, I do not know. And people who smoke until the second they get on the train, and then sit right next to you, with such a thick smell of smoke you can hardly breathe. But even that's nothing compared to a guy in Australia flossing his teeth on the train. Eeew.

I bought a proporta crystal case for my ipod mini the other day. It's really nice - you can still see the cool shape and colour of the ipod, but it's protected. The hinges and the lip of the lid spoil the effect but only slightly; I do wish there wasn't a seam running down each side because it totally spoils the feel od the rounded sides, but it's not too bad. The screen is protected too, but the plastic isn't perfectly flat so it does distort the light slightly. Other people have said that it's very difficult to remove from the case, nut mine just slides right out - I haven't tried it with my iHome yet, but I hope I'll be able to leave it docked in the case. Overall, it's a rwally nice case and I'd recommend to anyone who still has a mini.

I went to see Trust The Man yesterday - it was okay, but not as good as I thought it would be. Although the giggling girls behind me probably had something to do with it being a sub-optimal movie experience. And is it just me, or did James Blunt's Three Wise Men appear in the trailer but not the movie?

I tried to transfer some photos from my MDA Vario to my laptop last night, via my wireless network. You don't seem to be able to do that, though, which is somewhat disappointing. I can connect to my internet connection, and use it to browse the net, but I can't connect to the pc. I'll try again, though, just in case I selected the wrong option somewhere.

It's getting dark earlier now, and being cloudy and raining more. More like the stereotypical image of London. I'm very aware that I haven't spent a winter here yet, and it worries me slightly - I suspect it will be cold, dark, wet, and depressing. I'm going home for a few weeks in mid-November, and I think it'll be really difficult coming back after summer days there. Maybe I should plan to do something something fun when I get back, something I can only do in London, just as an incentive to come back :) Like go see Spamalot, or something. Mind you, after 2 weeks without broadband, I'll probably be happy to come back!

I've decided to start Tai Chi classes again - I used to do it back in SA, but I never really got back into when I came back from Florida. Now I've decided that I need to do something, meet people, be more active, and just get out there and do something rather than coming home and watching tv/reading/browsing the net. So I've found a place that looks cool, although maybe a bit organised, and I start the beginner's class on the 12th. What's nice is that it's the same style that I was doing before, so I'll know a little bit about what I'm doing, although they do the long form whereas we used to do the short form. Still, it should be good. Now if only I had my bike, I would be able to ride down there and back!

Mind Tricks

2006-09-23T13:45:00.000+02:00

I have the TV on in the background, and they just had one of those mind tricks on - you know, the kind you always get via email, where they make you do a bunch of things in your head then ask you to think of a colour, and they manage to predict which colour you'll think of (well, I always pick something different, but that's just me - I never claimed to be normal :P).

So this one went like this:

What is 2 + 2?

What is 4 + 4?

What is 8 + 8?

What is 16 + 16?

What is 32 + 32?

What is 64 + 64?

Now think of a vegetable...
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
You thought of a carrot, didn't you?

I always wonder how these things work. Surely there can't be something in the sequence that makes you think of carrots... maybe carrots are just the most obvious vegetable? I would think that the calculations are just to distract you, so that you're not thinking of the broccoli you're having with supper!

So what I'd love to do, being into the scientific method and all, is a a proper test: pick 50 people at random, and ask them to think of a vegetable. Then pick another 50, and do the whole calculation bit and then ask them to think of a vegetable. Are carrots chosen as often in both groups? And if not, why not?

Would be interesting :-)

Tickle Me Elmo Turns 10!

2006-09-19T22:31:00.000+03:00

Okay, here's a happy laughing post.

Tickle Me Elmo turns 10 this year (I can't believe it's been 10 years!), and the new Elmo is really great! More about him here, including a video, which is the funniest thing I've seen for ages. It starts off a little bit freaky, but then you just can't help laughing along with Elmo. It's so funny. I'm sitting here on my couch by myself, laughing out loud. From the article:

"T.M.X. Elmo has three tickle spots on his chin, tummy or foot. When you tickle Elmo once on any of the tickle spots, he starts to laugh and slap his leg twice, then falls down into a sitting position and rocks himself back up to standing while laughing.

When you tickle him a second time, he repeats the pattern, then sits down again and falls backwards, kicking his feet while laughing even harder. And on the third tickle, he rolls over onto his tummy, thumping his hand on the floor in laughter, and then stands back up again."

I just wish the video was downloadable, so I could keep a copy. And I want to send it to my parents and my nieces back home (but they're on dialup, so it'll be terribly slow - and they'll have to dial up every time they want to watch it or show it to someone). Guess I'll have to watch out for a low-quality, ad-free version on YouTube, which at least will be a bit faster to download.

Why Me?!

2006-09-19T21:05:00.000+03:00

I know, I said I was going to stop complaining and only post happy
thoughts... but... why do these things always happen to me? Why does
nothing ever just run smoothly?!

The bike, first of all. The guy I'm buying it from was supposed to
bring it round last monday, but he couldn't find the registration
docs. So he ordered a copy from the dvla which was supposed to arrive
last wednesday, but which only arrived yesterday. In the mean time,
he's gone off to Spain to visit his sick mother. So I'm trying to
arrange everything through two of friends of his. In the end, it
looks like I should eventually get the bike tomorrow, but I'll believe
it when I see it.

In the mean time, I've having a problem with the letting agents who I
had to go through to get my flat - Rentals and Sales Wimbledon. It
turns out that the account that they told me to pay my rent into
doesn't belong to my landlord. It doesn't belong to them either. In
fact, they don't know who it belongs to. Nor do they seem to care.

I discovered this when my landlord phoned to remind me that I hadn't
paid my rent yet - which I had, just apparently into someone else's
account.

The letting agents don't seem to care that they made such a monumental
mistake; there's bee n no apology, probably because they don't want to
admit liability. They've just told me to ask my bank for a refund.
But the bank didn't make a mistake, they did. And from what I've
found out, it's very, very difficult to recover money paid into the
wrong account.

So I'll go speak to the bank the money was paid into tomorrow; but in
the meantime I'm out a month's rent, which really sucks. And any
resolution won't be quick.

I'm determined that I will get the money back from the agents, if I
can't get it from the bank. Even if I have to take them to small
claims court. Although I don't want to have to... I have no idea how
much that costs, and it won't be fast. But I won't let them get away
with it.

I guess I'm just lucky that I have money spare - I won't be broke
because I've effectively had to pay double rent this month. I know,
there are people who couldn't do that, and people who don't have
houses, or bikes, and compared to all that I've got nothing to
complain about.

But it sucks, and it's not fair!!!

Wednesday Update, because you just can't make this up: still no bike. The guy who's supposed to be dropping it off phones me, says he's leaving in 5 minutes. Then he phones me back, says he has to go home first and he'll be about half an hour later than he thought. Then a bit later, the other friend phones me to say that the other guy can't make it! And that he'll let me know what day he can make it. So it doesn't look like it'll be soon - I suspect he's delaying until the original guy gets back from Spain. Seriously, if I hadn't paid a deposit I'd just forget about the whole thing. Not that it's dodgy or anything, but it's just so much hassle.

And speaking of hassle... not much luck on the bank story either. Actually, this might be useful for anyone else who's paid money into the wrong account and want to get it back - my bank's website says that you have to speak to the bank whose account the money was transferred into. So I went them during lunchtime, waited for ages, only to be told that I need to speak to my bank. So I stopped at a branch on my way back to work, only to be told that I need to go back to the same branch that the transfer was done at. So, running out of time, I go to that branch, only to be told that I need to phone the "disputed transaction" line, whose number I can get by phoning customer services. Aargg!

Half a Year in London!

2006-09-11T23:21:00.000+03:00

Last Saturday was exactly 6 months since I arrived in London. It feels like a lot longer... on the other hand, it doesn't.

I'm pretty settled by now - I've got a nice flat, a good job, great internet connection, and any day now my bike will arrive. But I do still miss SA. So here's a roundup of my thoughts on London, what I like, what I don't like, things I've noticed... just me thinking aloud again (so very much on topic for this blog, then).

The main thing I love about London is how you can get anywhere. It might take a while (and that's one of the things I don't like about London - it takes an hour to go from anywhere to anywhere else), but you can get from point A to point B without stressing. You get used to so quickly, and start complaining about the overcrowding and the heat and the fact that sometimes you have have to wait 10 whole minutes for a bus - but there's transport from anywhere to anywhere any time of the day or night (there are even night buses!). And it's safe. Compare that to Cape Town, where there are a couple of train lines, which don't run in the evenings or weekends, aren't really safe, don't run very frequently, and don't actually go anywhere useful. I can do so much more here than I ever did at home, just because I can get places and get home again.

Which is the second thing I love about London - there's always so much to do. There are always new movies to see, theatre to go to, and you could spend a lifetime here and still not get finished doing all the touristy stuff.

What I don't like, as I mentioned, is how long it takes to go anywhere. It takes me an hour to get to work, and an hour back again, which is a huge chunk out of your day. I don't like how it's always crowded, and noisy - but then that's why it's so nice to live out here, where there's greenery and peace. And winter might be worse, admittedly, but the weather's really not as bad as everyone thinks. Summer's short, but it's worthwhile - you imagine London as being this drab, grey place, but it really does get blue and sunny.

I like my flat - I like how it's small and compact and all my own, and I barely even notice the sloping floor any more. What I don't like about the flat is the shower - it's tiny, and I really miss having a bath. And I don't like the dryer, which gets way too hot, even on the half-heat setting, and I'm sure it's not good for my clothes. But I can live with that... there are little things, like no mixer taps, and the stove is really ancient and uses gas, and the couch is comfy enough but not quite what I would have chosen. But considering that I'm not going to live here forever (even if I stayed in London, I'd get my get own place and furnish it myself) it's fine.

I don't like the way insurance works here. You pay for a year up front, and generally in one lump sum (you can pay monthly, but you pay extra). And then you're locked in for the year. And it's expensive. In SA, you can switch around as you like, whenever you get a better quote!

I'm starting to get used to the shops - I know where to go for what, mostly. It sounds dumb, but it's difficult at first when even the shops are all different to what you're used to :-) And I'm getting used to the money, and I've almost stopped converting everything back to ZAR. And I love how I earn so much, when you convert the amount I put into savings everything month back into Rands!

I love the way they always have these "50 greatest" type shows on TV. It means there's always something to watch, and there's a definite popcorn effect... oh, I'll just watch _one_ more! And the TV's pretty decent, in general.

But SA's still home (although I've been told it takes a year for that to wear off). I know how everything works there, and I grew up there... it's home, basically. And my family's there, and I do miss them (and I feel a bit guilty because I know they miss me too). I phone home a lot, which is cool - with cheap phone calls, and email, and msn, it's like you're not that far away at all.

Walking around in London, you know that you're not going to run into anyone you know; if someone looks familiar, it's not going to be who you think it is. But it's not like I'm not forming any attachments here, and as much as I miss SA now, I know I'll miss London when I eventually go home (whenever that may be). I did hope that I'd meet more people here, and make more friends, but I guess I should have known better - I'm the same shy, not-very-outgoing, find-it-difficult-to-talk-to-people person that I was in SA, and being in a new country wouldn't change that. But I should make more of an effort to make friends with the people I do meet; although I still don't really know how to meet people.

I know, this is another monster-long post all about me - but then if you thought this blog was about something else, you didn't notice the title :D Some more techie stuff isn't coming, really, it just takes more effort than rambling on about myself! And really - if anyone reading this has any questions about living in London, especially coming from SA, post a comment and I'll do my best to answer. I've already written a bunch of stuff on moving to London for a friend of mine back in SA; I really should reformat it sometime and post it, since it might be useful to someone else sometime. I guess the biggest difference between SA and London is that there's just so much more here - more to do, more career opportunites, more everything.

Update: Other things I've thought of since I started this post - I miss my dog (well, my parents' dog, but still); there just aren't that many animals in London, and I miss that. And when I was saying about SA being home, and familiar - it's little things, like shopping centers, and the mountain and the sea (I miss them both!), and just the look of the houses and gardens and roads and pavements.

Bike Gear

2006-09-10T21:46:00.000+03:00

I had great fun today - went out and bought some stuff for the bike :-) Boring stuff was a cover (since it's going into winter, and I'd hate to see it get ruined by rain - although a cover seems somewhat... I want to say geeky, but that's not quite right in the context); and a disc lock (along with one of those gizmos to hook on to the lock and the handlebars, so that you don't try to ride off with it still attached; a very important thing).

Cool stuff is my helmet - it's a Caberg Justissimo flip-front, black, with sunshades :-) Not so useful in the UK, I would have thought, but then I guess the weather can get pretty sunny even here. It's even treated with Sanitex, or something like that, which stops the growth of mold and bacteria; and the inner lining is removable and washable (although there was a rather bizzarre warning saying that petrol shouldn't be used to wash it). The padding is also supposed to be super cool and wickable, which can be quite important since your head gets really hot wearing a helmet at times.

The other cool thing is my jacket - it's truly awesome. It's a Spyke, black, with a removeable inner lining (which can be worn as a jacket on its own, if you don't mind wearing silver). It's really comfortable, and it's got shoulder armour as well as elbow and forearm armour, and it's got a 3M reflective strip so it'll be nice and visible in the dark. And pockets! It's got two inner zip pockets, about 6 outer zip pockets, and 2 inner pockets, a chest pocket, and a sleeve pocket in the lining as well. It's got a velcro covered main zip, so rain won't get in, and adjustable arms and sides and adjustable velcro closings on the neck It's even got a removable hood, also with an adjustable velcro closing on the neck. And it's a nice plain black/charcoal colour, so you can easily wear it almost as a normal jacket (the problem always is, when riding somewhere, what do you do with your jacket when you get there? but this one you can wear).

Umm, what else? Guess that's all I bought; this was all from Motoden, by the way, which is an excellent place. I impressed the hell out of the sales guy when I told him what I'm riding :D, and apparently they're quite happy to do services on grey imports, which is great. They're a bit far away, but they seem a lot more professional than the little bike places around here, and I trust them a lot more. So far, anyway :-)

Haven't bought a GPS unit yet - it's going to take a bit of getting used to riding the new bike, since it's a totally different riding position from the Hipster, so I don't really need the GPS unit yet. I want to get the TomTom Rider, since it's the only one I know of that's specifically designed for bikes, and it's got very good reviews. I shopped around for it a bit yesterday, and it seems like prices vary from £250 (but they don't actually have stock) up to £540 online. Most places seem to charge about £350.

Woohoo!

2006-09-09T00:23:00.000+03:00

Got my internet access set up! I ended up getting a Netgear DG834PN, which was really simple to set up and seems to work really well. Not that my flat is all that big, but it's split-level, and after the problems I had with signal at my last place, I really wanted to get a wireless router that wouldn't have a problem with walls and floors. The Netgear is a MIMO router, so it dynamically configures its 6 internal aerials to give the best signal - don't ask me how it does that, but it does, and so far it works well. Next step is to set up my camera and phone to use the new access point, and then all my gadgets can talk to my laptop whereever they are in the house :D (if only I could charge my laptop wirelessly, it would be perfect....)

Actually, it's the connection isn't 100% - it drops the connection for a second every now and then, but I assume that's just because it's still in the 10 day figure-out-the-best-speed period. And it's not terribly noticeable, except on msn, but it will get annoying if it carries on, I guess.

And also woohoo, I bought a bike yesterday! A beautiful Honda VFR400R NC24, in really good condition (at least, I think so, but for all that I've been riding for 8 years I still know nothing mechanical):

Haven't got it yet - the guy's going to bring it round Monday evening, since I'm really not comfortable riding it yet (very different riding style from what I'm used to), and I don't know the London roads at all. And I don't have a helmet... so tomorrow I'm going out shopping for a helmet, and a jacket, and I guess gloves as well, and a cover, since it's going into winter and I don't want the bike to get too rained on, and a lock, and a gps unit (TomTom Rider) so I can actually go places and know where I'm going.... it's an expensive business :-) Insurance was quite difficult - most quotes cost more than the bike did, and it was difficult to get anyone who'll insure a grey import. But I got it sorted, so everything's going well.

But for now, I'm off to bed - it's been a really exhausting week, and I'm soooo tired. But happy :D Out of the three 'b's, I have 'broadband', I have 'bike', and now I just need to work on 'boyfriend'... ;)

Stonehenge!

2006-08-30T23:43:00.000+03:00

Finally got connected via dial-up... here's the promised Stonehenge post.

It was really nice having the day off today - pity I have to go back to work tomorrow, though.

Since it was a 3 day weekend, I went off to Stonehenge yesterday (a 2 day weekend is really too short - Saturday you're too tired from working all week to do much, and then Sunday you don't want to do too much and tire yourself out for the coming week).

It was quite a cool trip, although Stonehenge itself was somewhat... unimpressive. I think it gets so built up in the media that you end up expecting something more than it actually is. The stones are big, but not all that big... but big enough when you consider where they came from and how they were dragged into position and all that, and considering the tools they had to work with. But the whole thing is just on a much smaller scale than I would have thought - the circles of stones are much closer together than I thought they would be, as well.

But I'll start from the beginning... I did the SouthWest Trains special, which was included the train tickets, and a guided bus tour of Salisbury and Stonehenge. The train trip was nice, I always enjoy travelling by train, and it was great to see lots of greenery and trees (although you don't get much of a view, since they seem to have screened off the railway lines with trees - which must be nice for the people living nearby, but not so exciting for the people on the train).
The bus tour of Salisbury was not so much a tour as having some of the main attractions pointed on the way out of the town to Stonehenge; the commentary was uninspired, especially considering how everyone always makes Stonehenge so mysterious, but I guess I did learn some things I didn't know before... We went past Old Sarum on the way, which was interesting too. We saw Salisbury Plain as well, of course, although it's the hilliest place I've seen in England yet. Oh, and they pointed out the abbey at Avebury where, supposedly, King Arthur exiled Queen Guinevere after finding out about her and Lancelot, which was kinda cool.

On to Stonehenge, then - lots of burial mounds in the area, which were interesting to see. I read a book about them once when I was at school (a very basic book, since it was one of those "for early reader" type books), and they've fascinated me ever since). And for those of you who've read Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books, it was cool to see that this was clearly Chalk country, and I even tried to take a photo of an area where the chalk is exposed, although it didn't come out very well :-) Stonehenge itself is very photogenic - you just can't help taking a photo every couple of steps round the circle, and they all come out really well, which means you end up having (and I'm not exaggerating) 50 photos of the stones. I've put some of the best below - my camera has a really cool "panorama assist" mode, where you take a photo, then it ghosts that on top of the viewfinder for the next photo, so you can get them all lined up nicely; then an app on your PC stitches them up nicely for you into a wide panorama shot.

The best part about Stonehenge was the contrast to London. Just wide open spaces, for as far as you can see... it was windy (haven't felt wind like that since Cape Town!) and the air was fresh. And there were sheep! I realised then that I haven't really seen any animals, barring a dog or two, since I came to London. So I took a bunch of photos of sheep as well :-) Just wandering around the grass in the quiet, peaceful, open air was the best part of the trip.

Then the tour bus went back to Salisbury; I wandered around a bit, saw the house where they filmed Sense & Sensiblity (although you have to pay to go in). I spent about 5 minutes wandering around Salisbury Cathedral; it's very impressive from the outside, but inside it's just kinda overwhelming. There are tons of tombs, which are interesting at first but after you've seen one medieval tomb you've seen them all... the stained glass windows were impressive, but too big to really appreciate (it sounds odd, but I can't describe it better). I had lunch in the refectory, which was really nice, since it opens onto a little garden (with yet more tombstones, of course). Then I wandered off the Salisbury museum, but didn't go in since by that time I was a bit bored of looking at ancient things (there's only so much you can take in in one day). What I found funny was how the Salisbury museum had signs all over the place, quoting Bill Bryson's Notes From a Small Island (which I just read last week) where he says "The Salisbury Museum is outstanding and I urge you to go there at once", but they don't quote any of the bits where he says how the cathedral is the most money-keen of English cathedrals, or wonders how long it will be till you are "whirred through the 'Salisbury Cathedral Experience' complete with animatronic stonemasons and monks like Friar Tuck" ;-) I wandered back through Salisbury to the train station, and it really is a nice place, with a real English village sort of feeling to it. Then I spent 45 minutes at the train station, since trains to Waterloo only run every hour :-(

So even though I was mildly disappointed by Stonehenge and spent a lot of time hanging around train stations (I got to Waterloo an hour early on the way there, too), it was a really great day and I thoroughly enjoyed myself!

I know this has been a really long post already, but just a couple of things:
- tiscali dial-up sucks, and is really unreliable (or maybe it's just me, or maybe they're having a problem this weekend - either way, it sucks and I really hope their broadband is more reliable). It connects, but nothing actually loads... very annoying.
- I went to see The Breakup today, and I really enjoyed it. Sure, it's one of those dumb comedies, but it was good fun
- in the continuing saga of things going wrong, two lightbulbs blew last night and tripped the light circuit, leaving me totally in the dark. I replace the bulbs today, but one of them still doesn't work, which means the light fitting itself has a problem and now I'll have to get of the landlady, and she'll have to send an electrician out, which means I'll have to be here, which means, again, either postponing my weekend plans (if they'll even come out on weekends), or taking time off work. Unless she can be here instead, which I hope, but doubt, she will. And she doesn't have email, which means I have to phone her... and I REALLY hate phoning people :-(

Can anyone recommend...

2006-08-29T16:27:00.000+03:00

... a good online computer shop?

I'm trying to buy my wireless router, but it's surprisingly difficult.
Most shops (like eBuyer) will only ship to your billing address, and
while I understand that makes sense from a fraud prevention point of
view, it doesn't make sense for someone who works all day. So many
companies in this country assume that you or someone in your family is
at home during the day... it's really odd, because I'm _sure_ most
people work (well, most people ordering expensive gadgets, anyway).

So it's a bit frustrating. I can either find an online store that
will ship to my work address and that is reasonably trustworthy, or I
have to find a physical store that has the router I want and that I
can get to fairly easily.

Any recommendations?

Dialup Issues

2006-08-28T22:15:00.000+03:00

I was going to post about my trip to Stonehenge, and I typed up the
whole post on my laptop, but my Tiscali dialup connection just sucks,
so effectively I'm limited to internet access via my mobile again.

Hopefully they're just having a problem this weekend, because it did
work okay the other day; if not, I'll just have to wait until I have
my broadband set up before I can post (it's got photos and all!).

And I really hope their broadband is better than their dialup and
their customer service.

The End. (Hopefully)

2006-08-26T23:48:00.000+03:00

So this is hopefully the last installment of the TV saga. I figured there was no way to get the TVs back to Argos other than to lug them all the way down the road (luckily it's only 10 minutes away), so I carried the one all the way there, and confused the guy working there - at least he agreed that the whole situation was totally ridiculous! Of course, they couldn't give me a refund until I brought the 2nd one back as well... But I went across to Currys.Digital, or whatever they're called, and bought a 20.1" Humax TV from them. Carried that all the way home, then took the 2nd broken one back to Argos. In total, if you're counting, 3 one way trips between my house and central Wimbledon.

So my arms have had a thorough workout today (who needs to go to gym!) and they ache from my shoulders all the way down to my wrists, but at least Argos have 2 broken TVs, and I have a refund from them and a working TV (although I didn't plug it in when I got home - I just didn't think I would be able to handle it if it didn't work, and I'd probably end up having a nervous breakdown - but I set it up about 10 minutes ago, and it seems to still be working. So far, anyway).

But honestly, the Humax (LEU-20A, if anyone's googling for that) is not as good as the Mikomi. Well, obviously it's better, because it switches on AND displays all 3 primary colours, but it's not as good as the first Mikomi during the first few days I had it. There's nothing wrong with it, as such, but it just doesn't seem as sharp and the colour isn't quite as good. I've tried fiddling around with the settings, but there isn't much you can set up yourself. At the moment it _feels_ like I'm watching TV on a PC monitor, which is somewhat disappointing. If I'd had this first, I'd probably just have thought that's what a LCD TV is like, but the Mikomi was better, if only briefly.

I'm trying to figure out if it's the TV itself, or the signal coming in - what with swapping TVs in and out, I have moved the aerial and I guess that could be having an effect on the signal. The program guide banner isn't very sharp at all, though, and I don't know if that would be affected by the signal. And I'm probably being overly cynical, but the scart lead came from Argos too, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's now not working 100% either (okay, I doubt that could be the problem, but I don't trust anything from Argos any more). What I'll do is wait until Friends comes on, because that's one program where I know what it normally looks like - how sharp, what the colours are like, etc. No point judging by, say, one of those old war movies, because those would look terrible on the best TV. And some adverts do look really sharp and good, so that would suggest that the TV is capable, and it's the signal or the broadcast that's at fault - the sound, at least, is perfectly fine.

Anyway, I'm sure everyone's sick and tired of hearing about my TV by now - I know I am, and I guess if I have a TV that switches on, displays R, G and B, has audio, and can actually display the broadcast, I'm doing pretty well and shouldn't complain. Tomorrow is Stonehenge, and so hopefully I'll be able to post a more upbeat account of my day tomorrow (including photos, if you ask nicely).

But wait! It gets worse!

2006-08-26T11:43:00.000+03:00

A quick recap for those who haven't been following the saga, or who came across this page while searching for something like "Mikomi LCD TV" or "Mikomi LCD2008" or "Argos" or even better, "Argos customer service sucks".

I bought a bunch of stuff from Argos, including a Mikomi 20" LCD TV, and a Sagem freeview box. The freeview box didn't work, and I had to take it back for new one (which amazingly, considering the rest of my story below and here, did work). After a week, though, the TV stopped working - the power switch just wouldn't switch the TV on. So I arranged with Argos to deliver a new one the next Saturday, since I work during the week, even though this would leave me without a TV for an entire week. Then on the Friday, I get a slip under my door saying that they couldn't collect the old TV, since I wasn't home (see my last post for more on just exactly how ridiculous this is). I phoned customer support, and got exactly nowhere. They will not collect over weekends or after hours. But I can't return a 13kg 20" TV to my local store, since I don't have a car. But they didn't care; they have my money, after all.

So today, the Saturday they're supposed to deliver the new TV, it actually arrives at 8:15 in the morning, which was a pleasant surprise. But after unpacking it (and getting yet more polystyrene all over everything in the process), I found that everything on TV is in yellow this morning. The only way to get rid of the yellow is to turn the colour saturation right down so it's practically black and white. Which isn't exactly what I paid for.

So I phoned customer support again. No apologies from them this time; I said I just want my money back. Okay, they said, we just have to collect the two (two! can you believe it!) broken TVs first, then they can organise a refund. But they won't collect during the weekend, I can't be home during the week, I can't return them to my local store... the whole saga all over again.

So now I have two broken TVs; 0 working TVs, and am out the price of 1 TV.

I'm definitely not buying from them again. Ever. No question about that.

But the question now is: do I just go buy a new TV from somewhere else, and then try to get my money back from Argos later? Or should I try to get my money back first? And if I buy a TV from somewhere else, I'll have to pay another delivery fee... and unless they deliver this afternoon, they'll have to deliver next Saturday, which means another week without a TV and another Saturday's plans ruined. And how the @#!@%#@ do I get TWO huge, heavy TVs back to Argos? I can't take a day off work, since I'm pretty busy at the moment; I can't take it to my local store; and, despite their very helpful but somewhat shortsighted suggestion, no, it wouldn't help if they could collect from my place of work since I'd then have to find a way to get two huge, heavy TVs to work. Really, it was bad enough when I had to try to get one back to them; now I've got to get two back to them!

Really, there are two issues here:
1) The Mikomi 20" LCD TV (LCD2008) from Argos sucks, since 2 out of 2 haven't worked;
2) Argos Customer Support sucks

I don't really believe in fate and destiny and all that; but even I'm starting to take a hint. I'd guess I'm not meant to have a TV, broadband, or a bike :'(

Yet more struggles...

2006-08-26T00:12:00.000+03:00

For those of who've been waiting with bated breath, here's the next installment of the Phone And Broadband Saga - as an additional extra, for subscribers only, at NO additional cost and only if you sign up today - an extra (and still not final!) chapter in the TV saga! And if you order in the next five minutes, you can get a free atom feed so that you won't miss a single installment of these exciting dramas...

Sorry, I'm feeling a bit facetious tonight. Actuallly, I want to apologise - I know I've been complaining a lot the last few posts, and the worst part is that it isn't just me being picky - a lot has been going wrong lately. But to put it in perspective (although I don't really _feel_ like being reasonable), it's not really all that major. I can live without broadband, and without tv, and it's not like I don't have water or electricity. But still, it's irritating, and blogging helps me get it out of my system. There will be some more upbeat posts coming - I'm going to Stonehenge on Sunday, and ZimFest and bike shopping next weekend, so I'll post a report on those (maybe even with photos! I'm sure you can't wait).

But now, on with the latest chapter in the phone saga. Last time I posted, the one socket upstairs was working, but the other one upstairs and the one downstairs were still giving me that "The number you have dialled has not been recognised" message. So, with no help from BT, but a lot of helpful from the useful people over at uk.telecom, I've managed to figure out that there are 2 lines coming into the flat. One comes into the one socket upstairs, and the other comes into the other socket which has the downstairs extension connected to it. Typically, it seems that BT activated one of the two lines - the one without the extension. (Why they didn't tell me there were two lines when I ordered, I don't know). And since I very much doubt that I could get BT to connect the other line instead - how would I specify which one I meant, and probably it would take another two weeks, plus the couple of days head start I've had on the broadband provisioning, and my number would change, and then they'd probably charge me for it and reconnect the same line again anyway - my options are rather limited. I'll have to put a splitter on the single working socket, and plug the phone into one side and leave the phone upstairs (not really a hardship, I guess, since no-one will ever phone on my landline anyway). Then I can run an RJ11 cable all the way downstairs, or I can spend yet another £70 and get a wireless router and hope that it works better than the one in my old flat, and that I'll actually be able to get a signal downstairs if the router lives upstairs. Not much of a choice, but better than no broadband at all.

Now, I'm not sure if I'm calm enough for this yet, but here's what's happening with the TV saga. Quick catch-up: after getting a standalone aerial since the flat aerial didn't work, and then getting a new freeview box because the original one didn't work, my TV's power button stopped working after a week (a Mikomi 20" LCD, model LCD2008, from Argos, in case anyone wants to avoid it - although to be fair, the picture quality and viewing angles were very good when it used to switch on). So I contacted Argos, they were very apologetic, and arranged for a new TV to be delivered on Saturday since I'm at work all day during the week.

So imagine my surprise when I came home only to discover a "we called to collect" note under my door (under my flat door, btw, which means they rang someone else's bell and disturbed them to be allowed into the house). So I phoned up the Argos helpline, and was told that their collection people only work during the week. And that my only options are to take it back to my local store myself, or have it collected at a different address. And that a manager would not be able to help me.

Now there are so many problems with this, I barely know where to start - but don't worry, start I will.

They didn't let me know they were coming today, or what time. Do they expect people to just be at home all day every day?

They didn't tell me, when I reported the problem, that they can only collect during the week.

When I told them that I had to have the new TV delivered on a Saturday, despite the fact that I would have to sit without a TV all week, it didn't occur to them that I therefore wouldn't be at home during the week.

Surely most people work during the week? When are working people supposed to have fault goods collected?

If I could get it to my local store, why would I have had it delivered in the first place?

If I can't get it to my local store, what are the odds that I can take it to another address to have it collected there?

It's their product that's faulty (and in fact, there were 2 faulty items in the one delivery) - why must I struggle to find a way to get it back to them? Especially when someone is coming here tomorrow any way to drop off the new TV.

Isn't it very inefficient and expensive to have someone come out on Friday to collect a TV, and then have someone else come out on Saturday to deliver a TV? Isn't there a slightly obvious optimisation there?

If they can't collect it, and I can't return it, what happens? (I believe the technical term is "impasse"). At the moment, it's my problem since they have my money and I don't have a working TV. Tomorrow, it's their problem, since I'll have a working TV and a broken TV, and they only have one set of money.

This is similar to the problem I'm having trying to dispose of the packaging from the other stuff I bought. The boxes are too big to fit in the dirtbins, even if I didn't mind hogging them all with my rubbish and not leaving any space for the other residents. The garbage collectors apparently won't collect anything not in a bin. The recycling people won't take packaging boxes. The nearest dump is miles away, and I don't have a car. So effectively there's no way for me to get rid of these boxes. As the Merton Council person I emailed pointed out, I can either cut the boxes up into pieces so that they do fit in the bin (which doesn't solve the hogging problem, and means that I might be rid of some of them by Christmas), I can pay the council £15 to come and collect them. Which seems a bit extreme. Maybe I could drape a throw or something over them and use them as a makeshift table...

And don't even mention Tiscali's customer support... that's a rant and a half on it's own.

(On the good side, at least I do have dialup. So I could type this up on a decent keyboard, and post it, and even maybe add in some links. So while a lot of things are really trying my patience, life's not all bad.)

Yay! I'm online again! (Kinda)

2006-08-23T23:18:00.000+03:00

So it's dialup (and I'd forgotten how slow that is), and it only works from the phone socket upstairs and not the one downstairs, but I'm online and typing on a big keyboard!

Turns out that the line was working - but there are 3 phone sockets in the flat, and the main one is upstairs and not the one I was trying downstairs. So not BT's fault.

Now I'm not sure how to get the downstairs socket working - that's the one that would be most useful to me. I'm still gettting that "the number you have dialled has not been recognised" message if I use that socket; I'm hoping that's just because I don't have anything plugged into the main socket. I don't have another phone cable to test with unfortunately, but tomorrow I'll get a cable (or it'll probably be just as cheap to get another phone), plug the phone into the upstairs socket and my laptop into the downstairs one, and see if it connects. Holding thumbs!

Break Stuff

2006-08-22T21:31:00.000+03:00

Never mind collapsing in a heap, this time I definitely want to break stuff...

I was going to post about how BT actually got my phone line up and
running without me having to be there, and how I ordered my broadband
today, and how I hope I did the right thing going with Tiscali, since
their customer service and website are both rubbish, and how even
though it will take another 2 or 3 weeks to get broadband, at least I
can now use dialup in the meantime... only to arrive home and find
that first point (and therefore the last point, too) is not, in fact,
true. Despite the fact that I ordered broadband on this line, I can't
dial out on it.

And my t-mobile allowance should have been reset today, but it hasn't
been. So I have no cheap way of contacting my family back in SA.

I'm trying really hard not to swear, here.

And as usual, things were picking up towards the end of the day -
lunchtime-ish onwards. I was actually happy walking home - didn't
even catch the bus. Only to be derailed, again.

I'm back to where I was when I moved in - no phone, no internet, no
tv; except that I don't have my mobile for cheap calls either. And to
think I _almost_ had all of them at the same time :( I wish the
universe/fate/deity of your choice would stop messing with me!

I just don't believe it

2006-08-20T16:51:00.000+03:00

And not in a good way...

My tv has just stopped working. After all the saga last weekend, I
just can't believe it. This time the problem seems to be with the tv
itself - it just won't switch on. (and yes, it is plugged in).

I just... I'm speechless. I don't know whether I want to throw
things at the damn tv, or just collapse in a heap and cry. Really,
out of the 3 elements needed for tv - aerial, tv, freeviw box - how
can all 3 be faulty?!!

Just my luck. And without decent internet, I can't really do much
troubleshooting or find out return policies, etc. And they'll need to
pick this one and send a replacement, which either means no tv for a
week or more time off work. Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!!!!

Wimbledon to The City

2006-08-14T10:15:00.000+03:00

I know the last few posts have been very self-centric, but then,
that's implied by the blog title anyway. I do plan to do a couple of
techie posts - one on async programming, at least - but that's tricky
to do with a phone keyboard/email combination, so it'll probably have
to wait until I get full internet access again.

So this is going to be another Wimbledon post, although one that might
be useful to other people who need to travel into the city every day
(ok, probably not). It's difficult not to slide into a 'why I hate
the tube' post, but I'll do my best.

Going from Wimbledon to work, I have 3 options:
- first capital connect train to blackfriars
- district line to blackfriars
- southwest train to waterloo, and a bus the rest of the way

Now it turns out that the best way to get to work is not the best way
to get home from work. Going to work, the blackfriars train is best,
since it's fast, but it only runs every 20 minutes or so. So if I
just miss that one, the district line is my best option. The waterloo
train seems good, and it's fast, but the benefit is lost by having to
wait for ages to get a bus at waterloo. Even the district line isn't
quite as simple as I thought it would be, since there are a couple of
different destinations and either you have to pick the right train or
change later. And since it's the beginning of the line, each train
isn't necessarily leaving right away - they sometimes sit for 10
minutes. At least with the info boards you should be able to tell
which one is leaving first.

Coming home from work is, as I say, a different story. The district
line is fine, although again there are like 3 different destinations,
so you need to pick the right train or change later. The blackfriars
train is tricky - there are a lot of trains leaving from the same
platform, and very few of them go to wimbledon. Those are not very
frequent, and it seems that you need to take the one that goes to
Sutton, and oddly enough not the one that goes to Wimbledon, which
goes the long way round the loop and takes absolute ages to get there.
Since it's easy to catch a bus _to_ waterloo, the waterloo train is
the best option, although while there are a lot of trains to
wimbledon, it's not easy to tell which is leaving soonest, so you
might sit around on the train for 10 minutes or so before leaving (but
the trains do get pretty full, so at least that way it's easy to get a
seat).

So that's my guide to travelling from wimbledon to the city :-) At
least a lot of it's overground, so I can do stuff on the net during
the trip!

yay! TV's working!

2006-08-13T20:57:00.000+03:00

Finally got my tv set up! Unbelievably, it turns out that the problem
was both with the aerial AND the freeview box. I bought an amplified
internal aerial, plugged it into the tv, and it picked up some
channels. Plugged it into the freeview box, and same as before: sagem
logo, but no welcome screen and no setup screen. So in desperation I
took the freeview box back to argos, and swapped it out for a new one;
plugged it in and yay! it worked :-)

So now I'm happy. Only about 85% unpacked still, but happy :-)

Frustrations

2006-08-12T22:47:00.000+03:00

Damn, this is so frustrating.

I meant to blog sometime during the week about how I'm settling and
feeling more at home in my new flat, but never got around to it. And
just to illustrate that someone's more likely to complain than say
nice things, this is another complaining post.

I _am_ settling in, and making it my house - I bought a bunch of stuff
(and then went to ikea today, and bought even more stuff), and it's
starting to feel more mine. But I'm having a problem with my
TV/Freeview. Before I get into that, though, I need to complain about
the floor in the lounge: there's a noticeable slope towards the
window! My laptop fan gets a bit finicky about being perfectly level,
and when it's on the table in the lounge it starts making its
help-I'm-skew noise. In some places, you actually feel like you're
leaning sideways (I'm sure I'm not, but probably there are almost
subliminal visual cues that amplify the effect). I want to get a
spirit level and actually test it. Not that it's anything that anyone
can do anything about, but I can see it becoming highly annoying. And
the floor creaks; and it shakes/reverberates slightly when big trucks
come past! It's a bit worrying... I still think that landlords should
have to live in a property first, before they rent it out - then they
would be aware of all the structural defects.

So, to the TV. The flat didn't come with one, which I thought was odd
because I regard a TV as essential, but it seems that it's quite
normal. So I ordered one from Argos, along with a freeview box (and a
microwave, and some other stuff). Since some of us have to work, I
could only have it delivered today, which means a whole week without
any TV (which, when you're living by yourself and don't have broadband
yet - and more on that later - can be a bit lonely). But it arrived
today, yay! except that the aerial cable in the flat doesn't fit the
connector on the TV. So I speak to the guy at Currys, speak to my
dad, and eventually decide that half the connector on the cable is
missing, so the best thing to do is actually cut it off and put a new
connector on. Which I've never done before, but I do my best. Plug
it into the TV, and yay! it sees that there's an aerial, and does a
program scan. Not so yay, it only finds one channel and that one's
really snowy. Plug the aerial cable into the freeview box, and plug
that into the TV (using the cables that I had to go out and buy, since
they aren't included), and the freeview box acts like there's no
aerial. At least, I think that's the reason - it's supposed to show a
welcome and setup screen, which it doesn't. And it behaves the same
if I unplug the aerial cable completely. So I still can't watch TV,
and don't know where the problem is. It could be:
- I didn't put the new connector on properly
- the flat aerial is screwed
- the freebox/tv is screwed
I'm going to try to check the connector, maybe do it over since now
I've done it once before, whereas last time I did it I had no
experience, but I have no idea if that will fix it. Probably not. I
could go out tomorrow (yet more time) and buy a stand-alone aerial
(yet more money) and I don't know if that will fix it either. I am in
a freeview area, but maybe the signal's just crap in this particular
spot. But I can't not have TV. I refuse.

And speaking of things I refuse to not have, I did get hold of BT, and
they have to send an engineer out to do something to the line. I
don't know what, since there is a line, it's not like they have to
install it, but apparently either they can do it at the local exchange
or they might have to come into the premises. Which means I have to
be here. Which means I have to take more time off work. And the
soonest appointment is only on the 22nd (although they did say that
they'd fit me in if there were any cancellations). Which means
another week and a bit (over 2, in total) with no phone line. And
then, apparently, it can take another 2 weeks to get broadband
enabled. So that's a month without broadband! I've kinda made peace
with it, a bit, otherwise I'd have gone insane, but I'm not very happy
about it. Luckily I have gprs on my mobile, so I'm not totally cut
off from the rest of the world, but it's really not good.

It's been hard, doing this all by myself - sure, I've been in London a
couple of months, but still I don't know all the right things to do
when moving. I've got it all sorted, and I've managed, but it's been
stressful and difficult doing it all by myself without anyone to help.

I'm almost done, and it's just so frustrating to still be struggling
without broadband and without TV. And if I had broadband, I could
look up things and see, why is my freeview box not giving me a welcome
screen - maybe I could rule out the freeview box being screwed. But
that kind of surfing is very difficult to do on a mobile. My parents
have been helpful - they scanned a page out of a DIY manual and
emailed it to me, but even there I had to download it on my phone,
save it to my phone, then sync it to my pc so that I could view it.
It works, and at least there is a way to do it, but it's frustrating.
And like, now I have a bunch of boxes and packaging that I need to
throw out - but it won't fit in the bins, and the garbage guys
apparently won't take anything that isn't in a bin. So what do I do?
How do I get rid of these boxes?

But not everything's bad. I guess. The flat's not so sweltering hot
now, which is good. And I love Wimbledon itself, it's a great place
to live. And the walls are thick enough so that I don't hear noise
from the neighbours, which is great. But in the mornings the
birds/squirrels/foxes/whatever sound like they're having a party on my
roof, which isn't great.

And ikea is great. I went to the one in Croydon today, and apart from
the fact that they have really cool stuff and mostly at very good
prices, they're really well organised. If I bought a new house, I'd
go there to redecorate, it's such fun. And they have such a range of
space-saving stuff, I wish that whoever built my flat had used their
cupboards and drawers and wardrobes and stuff. But the store itself
is cool - they have maps of the shop all over the place, and it's
designed so that there's one trail through all the sections so you
don't miss anything and can't get lost (and there are shortcuts, if
you want to particularly skip out a section). Since I did my thesis
on navigation, I've become very aware of this sort of thing, and ikea
does it really well. (Of course, it's to their benefit if you go
through every section - you're more likely to pick up something that
you wouldn't have thought of buying if you hadn't seen it - and this
worked very well on me today!). And they have little shoppings lists,
and pencils for you to use, and even paper measuring tapes! That is
just so organised, and so customer-friendly, it's amazing.
Unfortunately, it somewhat falls apart at the checkout - the queues
were incredibly long, even though a lot of tills were closed. Same
with the restaurant - good deals, looked like great food, but very
tables that were all taken. Still a cool shop though, and I think if
I go again I either have to be prepared that I'm going to come home
with bags of stuff that wasn't on my list, or leave my debit card at
home and go with a limited amount of cash ;-)

Okay, time to sync this with my phone so that I can then email it off
to blogger. Again, sorry for the gumph at the bottom, I'll try to
clean it up sometime. Oh, and did I mention that I can only sync
once? If I want to sync again, I need to reboot both my phone and
laptop. That is so ridiculous, and yet entirely typical right now.

moving in, continued

2006-08-08T09:40:00.000+03:00

It seems I don't have blogger set up to automatically publish posts
that I email in, so I'll have to try to login quicly from work to
change that and publish these two posts - won't have time to format
them, so again sorry about the poor formatting and sig at the end.

I'm kinda settling in to the new flat - got most of the accounts
chaned into my name; bought most of the household stuff that didn't
come with the flat (like a toaster, and an iron, and crockery and
cutlery), but I still have to get a microwave and tv and floor lamp.
I'll try to order those today and have them delivered on Saturday (no
way I'm even going to consider carrying all that home myself, even
though argos is just down the road).

I also need to find the best route to work - I can take the district
line, which is easy since there are no changes and no buses (unless I
catch the bus from my place to the station, which is minor). Or I can
take a SouthWest train to waterloo, and then catch a bus from there to
work. That'll be a lot quicker, but I need to find out which buses I
can take. So today I'm just taking the district line (and since most
of the first part is overland, I've already learned that the
west-facing side of the train is better, othrwise you have the sun in
your face, which is a bit bright for this time of the morning).

One of the most important things I need to sort out is the phone line
- BT said it would be working by 6 yesterday evening, but it wasn't.
They said that while 'the computer' said it would be, if it wasn't
they'd have to send out an engineer, which would only be on the 23rd!
And according to Tiscali it can take 15 days to get broadband set up
from when you apply! I can't go without internet for that long.
That'd be more than a month without decent internet access, and even
though I have my mobile's gprs connection, I just can't wait that
long. I can't! But I'm not going to panic (just keep saying that,
maybe it'll become true) - I'm going to phone bt this morning and find
out what the status is. Maybe someone just forgot to click OK or
something. Hopefully. Please.

Anyway, the flat's mostly nice, and it'll be better once I get
everything unpacked. There are a bunch of things I don't like, so in
my next post I'm going to list them all and maybe I'll see that most
of them either can be fixed or aren't that bad. Part of the problem
is that I'm comparing to my house back inj SA, rather than to the
shared flat I've just moved out of. No, it won't be perfect because
it's not mine; but it's better than where I was and while it's
slightly less temporary than that was, it's still not for ever. It's
not like I'm spending the rest of my life there!

Officially a Womble

2006-08-05T23:03:00.000+03:00

Yay, found the cable to connect my mobile to my PC - thought I'd have
to write this entire post on my vario, and while it does have a qwerty
keyboard it would have been rather painful. As it is, I apologise for
the sig and stuff at the bottom - I'm emailing this directly to
blogger, rather than going through the blogger site as normal.

And the reason for that is that I'm now mostly moved in to my new
flat! I still have one load of stuff to bring from the old place, but
I'll do that tomorrow. Everything's still in boxes, but luckily I
manged to find the cable.

I'm exhausted. I've been moving stuff all day, and now I'm tired.
And of course, when you're tired everything just seems so
depressing... the flat itself is nice, small but nice and bright, and
very safe. But there's a bunch of stuff that I would have thought
would come with a furnished flat, but obviously doesn't: like a TV, a
kettle, iron, toaster, hopefully a microwave; some crockery, cutlery,
and even just a phone handset. None of it's really an issue, I can go
buy it all without a problem, but it's another thing I've got to get
done. There seems to be a lot less cupboard space than in my old
place, so even though I'm essentially moving from a room to an entire
flat, I think I'm going to struggle to find places to put everything.

So I want to start unpacking - I hate things being unsettled, and I'm
worried about the things in boxes getting squished - but I don't know
where to put things, so in a way I don't even want to start. And
while I'm sure the previous person did clean before they left, there
are some things that I'd prefer to clean myself first. I guess I've
made some progress; I've bought cleaning stuff and packed that away.
Maybe making a list of the things I need to do will help. But... I
dunno. It's not that I'm lonely, exactly, because I'm used to being
by myself and it's really nice to have the entire flat to myself. But
I don't have a TV, I don't really have anything to read, and I don't
have internet access yet (luckily I do via my mobile, otherwise I'd go
insane. But it's not much use for general browsing). So I feel a bit
disconnected... not that anyone's online to talk to anyway, because
I'm signed in on my mobile and I can see that no-one's there either on
google talk or msn (yeah, some people actually have a life on a
Saturday night!). And I'm tired, so everything seems worse... hence
this post, just to feel like there's some connection between me and
the outside world. I'll probably end up going to bed really early,
because otherwise the longer I sit here by myself not doing anything
the more likely I am to work myself into a desperately lonely state
where I'm just desperate to talk to someone, except that there's
no-one to talk to, so I get more lonely... it's a bad cycle, and I
don't want to get into it. I'm playing MP3s, just so it's not so
quiet, but even there I need to be careful what I listen to otherwise
it can also trigger the cycle.

Okay. So lets make a list of what I need to do. Not in any
particular order, because the prioritization of the list is an issue
in itself :-(
- decide how to arrange the furniture in the lounge
- move the non-unpacked boxes and stuff from the lounge into the bedroom
- buy a tv
- read through the argos catalog to get some idea of prices for the
stuff I need to buy
- phone bt to get my phoneline sorted
- organise internet access once the phoneline's working
- phone the gas, electricity, water people to change the accounts into my name
- switch the council tax into my name and apply for a single-occupant
discount online (can do this at work on Tuesday)
- phone the landlady about the gas bill that arrived today
- vacuum the lounge
- wipe down the kitchen countertops
- decide what kitchen stuff can be thrown out
- figure out how to use the washing machine
- clean the oven
- figure out how to use the shower (it's more complicated than it sounds)
- buy all the stuff I need but don't have (leaving out the things that
I might need, but might never actually use, like a kettle)

Now the difficult part: the bedroom.
- move the vacuum cleaner, ironing board and folding chairs currently
in the wardrobe to somewhere less in the way
- wipe down the one shelf in the wardrobe
- somehow clean the canvas hanging shelves in the wardrobe
- vacuum the bedroom floor
- pack away the stuff I emptied out of my suitcase onto the bed to go
back for another load
- pick a box and unpack it (remembering that I can always move things
around later if I want)
- pick another box and unpack it (and repeat until all boxes/suitcases
are unpacked)
- empty at least one box for the last load tomorrow
- pack all the stuff I can't throw away but don't want into another box
- wipe down the bookcase, bedside cupboard and cd racks
- pack stuff I'm not going to use anytime soon (like sleeping bag and
suitcases) into suitcase and store suitcase under bed
- wash clothes for work on tuesday
- be glad that I'm taking monday off
- wash bedding, etc
- get some sleep
- take library books back to old library
- sign up at new library

There, that sounds almost reasonable. It's not quite that simple of
course, but maybe for now I can fool myself that it is :-) I just
wish that someone was signed in to chat to. But then I'd have to stop
talking to them at some point anyway, I guess. But still. But I know
everything will seem better tomorrow when I'm not so tired, and I
really am glad that I have my own place. But I need a TV, and I need
proper internet access.

Okay, now I'm just going to start repeating myself. Let me transfer
this to my mobile and post it off, and then make a start on the
bedroom. If only so that it's ready to start unpacking clothes into
tomorrow.

(Not) Buying a Bike

2006-08-03T23:13:00.000+03:00

I can't believe it's so difficult to buy a motorbike!

I really would love to get a Honda CBR600RR - but I tried one out at the British Motorshow (well, sat on it - they didn't have any available for test rides) and I could barely touch the ground. And looking at a photo of me on the bike, I look a bit silly. I'm just too small for it.

So I browsed around for bikes recommended for "vertically challenged" riders, and came up with three options: an Aprilia RS250, a Honda VFR400R, or a Kawasaki 250R Ninja. None of which are still made (or at least not imported into the UK), and none of which are for sale 2nd hand anywhere in London. It seems that very few manufacturers are making anything between a 125 and a 650, and while I have no objection to getting a 650 or an 800, they almost always have a much higher seat, and I just won't be able to handle them.

So unfortunately it seems as though there are 3 things I can do. Get a sportsbike 125cc replica, like the Honda CBR125, get a "delivery bike" like the Honda CBF500, or start looking around at cruisers. I've had a cruiser, it was cool, but I really don't want another one now. I thought the CBRs looked okay, but then I saw one outside work the other day, and it really did look like a delivery bike (although the delivery box mounted on the back might have had something to do with that impression). And while I look a bit silly on the CBR600RR, I suspect I'll look equally silly on the CBR125, just with the relative sizes reversed. (Note that not getting a bike is not listed as one of the options. I'm not even considering it. Just sitting on one again last week was great! But I just don't know what to get.)

I wanna cool sportsbike! :'(

Wombling in Wimbledon

2006-07-30T22:21:00.000+03:00

I know I haven't blogged much lately - not because I haven't had anything to say, as that I haven't cared enough to say it (been alternately busy and bored, and when I'm busy I don't have time to blog, and when I'm bored I don't feel like blogging).

So what have I been up to? Well, I went to Superman Returns at the IMAX, in 3D, which was pretty cool but not as much as I'd expected. The 3D was fun, but there were a lot of little kiddies (odd, considering the movie was rated 12A) and they were constantly explaining things to each other and talking and being a nuisance, in general. The movie itself was a bit disappointing as well (although maybe I was irritated by the kiddies and just didn't appreciate its finer points). I've gotten used to watching Smallville, and I kept expecting those actors... also, Superman in the movies is rather... simple. Clark Kent not only has no personality, he doesn't seem very intelligent either; and Superman isn't particularly complex either. Whereas in Smallville, Clark Kent is a real, complex person. They should rather have made a Smallville movie. But it was fun.

Then last week we went to the British Motor Show, which was great fun. We tried out all the bikes (although there weren't very many - and while Honda had car test drives, they didn't have any test bikes). Unfortunately it turns out that the CBR600RR is too high for me (my feet barely touch the ground, and there's no way I could take the weight of the bike even just on one foot). We went bike shopping afterwards, and I tried out a couple of Hondas but I'm just too short :-( Looks like the Aprilia RS250 or the Honda VFR400R are recommended for short riders, so I'm looking into getting one of those... problem is, it's a lot easier to buy a new bike because you can just go into the shop and ask for one; buying a 2nd bike is harder not only because you have to judge the state of the bike, but also because you need to find one in the first place! No luck so far...

And then, not so much something I've done, as something I'm going to be doing: I'm moving to Wimbledon next week, which I'm quite excited about. I've complained here before about sharing a flat with other people, and now I'm going to get a place of my own, and in Wimbledon to boot! It's small - kitchen and lounge combined, a tiny bathroom and a decent sized bedroom, all on different levels - but it'll be all mine. So next weekend I'll be moving - it'll be a schlepp to move all my stuff across, since I've managed to accumulate an amazing amount of stuff in the four or five months that I've been here, so it'll probably take me most of the weekend to do it. And I'll have to organise to change the gas and electricity and phone line and council tax into my name (still don't quite know how to go about that, or when), and I'll have to organise broadband as well, which might take a week or two. At least I'll be able to check my mail on my phone, but it'll be a bummer being without decent internet access. But, on the good side, it'll be great watching what I want on tv when I want, doing my washing when I want, getting up late if I want and not worrying about missing my shower slot, and, I can sing along to my iPod again :-) (very badly, of course... that goes without saying).

Oh, and two other things I've done: I've booked my flights home for a two week visit in November (and *that'll* be painful - no mobile and no internet and no internet on my mobile for two weeks!). And I've decided to go to Lapland for Christmas! It sounds really cool, and it's an interesting thing to do any time of the year - but over Christmas it'll just be that much better, and I won't have to sit at home by myself. I'm still trying to decide between the 2 night and 3 night tours (luckily Christmas is on a Monday this year, so it's 4 days off all in a row!).

So that's what I've been up to - and there's been work, of course, which there always is. And shopping, although I'm trying not to buy new stuff now just to have to cart it across to Wimbledon next week ;-)

Gates in SA

2006-07-14T23:23:00.000+03:00

So Bill Gates now wants to help the people of South Africa get computers and get connected to the net. A nice idea, in theory, but somewhat problematic in practice.

First, getiing everyone a computer and an internet connection is not going to solve their problems. Someone who lives in a tin shack, without water, electricity, healthcare or food is not going to benefit from having a computer, even if it was free and ran off sunlight. Sure, information and education is key but most of south africa hasn't got to that point yet - if you're illiterate, you're not going to be able to use a computer. The most that I can see being useful is
having a community centre, with a computer literate teacher and helper.

The idea is that people can buy computers with 'microsoft starter software' - I'll get back to that one in a minute - and pay them off over time. So people who have very little money can now get themselves deeper in debt. Good idea. A recent report showed that about half of all South Africans live on less than R20 per day - they're going to take a long, long, time to pay off even a cheap computer. Maybe he's not aiming at the really poor, the rural communities and informal settlements, though - the article mentioned targeting the lower-middle-to-middle-income market.

Another aim is to get cheap broadband - I'm all for that, but I wonder if he realises the extent of the problem, and how restrictive the legislation is? And while the article doesn't explicitly say so, I think the implication is that the cheap broadband comes as a package with the cheap starter computer. Which would eliminate all of us who have decent, high-spec pc's but can't afford thousands a month for broadband (because it's not just the really poor who can't afford it - it's anyone who isn't very well off or very dedicated to being connected). And it's mtn wireless broadband, at that, so they need to drastically improve their coverage areas if this is going to work.

Of course this is partly just a ploy to get MS software into every little nook and cranny of the world (another report, which I can't find now, showed the main reason people use MSOffice is because everyone else uses it! so it's in their interests to get many people using it as possible, even at a loss) The concept of this 'starter software' is particularly annoying, both in the sense of trying to lock new users into MS software (OpenOffice is free, why not provide that instead?), but also the restrictions that they're placing on the software, in theory to make it cheaper. The
problem with that is that the software is already there, in full working order, and it won't actually cost them anything more to provide this software - it'll cost more, actually, to pay developers to build in these ridiculous restrictions. And so the main of aim of providing cut down software can't be to make it more affordable, but to prevent lost income by making people who can afford the full version to want that instead of the cheap version. Which is fair enough, but then say so, don't bill it as being generous and helpful and worried about affordability in order to score brownie points. And if the one example they give is typical of the rest, the restrictions really are ridiculous: only allowing two windows open at a time! How on earth does that affect the affordability of the software?!

Maybe I'm just cynical, but I always feel that these 'help the poor old 3rd world countries' comes with with a touch of patronisation, a dollop of self-interest, and a catch.

Random Art

2006-07-14T11:34:00.000+03:00

Just a couple of arty things I've come across in the last few days and think are really cool:

TheAsian Field - 180000 lumpy clay figures by Antony Gormley. You have to go look at the pic. "The art is not there to be looked at; it is looking at you." Very cool.
I saw a poem on the underground today. It was one of those where I just got an instant visceral reaction (pretty good considering that I read it as I was travelling down an escalator). I thought it was part of the Poems on the Underground project (which I really like, by the way, and think they should do more of), but it's actually part of the Platform for Art project. It's by Ugo Rondinone:
It's awesome.

I've been seeing a couple of A4 posters on my way to work in the mornings - a little cartoon drawing, one of a mouse, one of man, with the slogan "Practise random kindness and senseless acts of beauty". It's a great idea, the slogan really gets in your head. I wish I had the guts to actually do something in that spirit.

The Lakehouse

2006-07-09T14:09:00.000+03:00

I was thinking of going to the Camden market today, but the weather looks pretty lousy so I think I'll just go to the library, do some shopping around here, and then read (the difficult bit is to not buy snacks to eat while I'm reading). But since the library only opens in an hour, and I don't have anything to do until then, I thought I'd write about the movie I saw yesterday, The Lakehouse.

It was really good, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I know a lot of people have criticized it for being unrealistic, but that's just silly - once you accept the basic premise, that the letterbox somehow causes their letters to travel through time, the rest is internally consistent which is what counts. (Although I did wonder if the rest of their post also ends up in the wrong year! :-) Having said that, though, there are a couple of things that bothered me (you might not want to read further if you haven't watched the movie yet).

Some of it's just the normal time-paradox stuff - if there wasn't a tree by her apartment, and then he planted one for her in the past, would it really just appear suddenly in the future? Wouldn't it then have been there all along? Like when he had that conversation with her on her birthday - that she remembered, and those memories didn't just suddenly come into being. And when she prevented him from crossing the road that Valentine's day - what had he then been doing for the last 2 years? Was the drawing of the lakehouse still on the wall? Did he suddenly spring into existence like the tree, and have to explain to his brother why he wasn't dead, or was he just not dead all along, like the memories of the conversation?

Not that any of that weakens the movie - any movie that has information travelling between the past and the future is going to paradoxes to deal with, and there is no logical way for it to work.

But there are two bits in the movie that I just don't get. How did she know that he'd be at the lakehouse to get her message about not coming to see her on Valentine's day? And isn't a pretty big coincidence that he was there? I guess that's just a case of a fortuitous coincidence, which tends to happen a lot in movies.

The thing with the book, though, I don't get at all. It seems as though there was more to it, which they then cut out and the bit that was left didn't make much sense. Obviously I get it that she left the book behind, he went to fetch it for her, and said he'd give it to her one day. So far so good. But how did she discover it under the floorboards? It looked as though she was stamping around trying to find a loose floorboard, but then she looked surprised when she found it and found the book. And how did the book even get there, anyway? I'm pretty sure that was supposed to be in her apartment, which wasn't built yet in his time... If she'd been looking around the lakehouse and found it, it would have made a bit more sense.

There are some more issues over at imdb - some of them are valid (how *did* the tree grow so big in 2 years? And actually yes, I wondered at the time where the attic was).

But it was a good movie, and I enjoyed it overall. Same as I picked Troy to bits, because it gets so many things wrong, but have watched it a bunch of times and enjoyed it every time (although that might have something to do with Brad Pitt, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom....). I plan to go watch Superman Returns, next Sunday - not only is it my birthday, they're showing it at the imax (with super 3D scenes! yay!). So hopefully that'll be good - the original Superman movies were fine at the time, but Superman was fairly 2 dimensional (and now he'll be 3D! although that's not quite what I meant ;); watching Smallville, Clark is really a complex, normal person, with real feelings and conflicts and all, and to watch a movie where he goes back to being simple would be quite disappointing. But it should be interesting regardless.

Why DRM is different to Physical Incompatibilty

2006-06-20T10:37:00.000+03:00

Imagine this.

You want to buy a water filter jug. You like the (say) Brita jug, because it's just the right shape to fit in that empty space in your fridge, but their replacment filter cartridges are more expensive than (say) the Kenwood filters. And the filters aren't compatible. So either you compromise on your choice of the main item for the sake of cheaper consumables, or you are locked in to expensive replacementsfor the sake of the initial investment.

Now go one step further. Imagine you want to buy a printer. The (say) Lexmark prints very well, but the cartridges are expensive. The (say) Canon has cheaper cartridges, but isn't as quiet. The cartridges are slightly different shapes, so you can't buy the Lexmark printer and
the Canon ink. Again, you have to base the initial, long term, investment on the the price of the consumables. After all, when your first ink cartridge runs out, you're more likely to buy more ink than another printer.

But lets take it another step. Say the physical ink cartridges are compatible, since it's a generic plastic casing. But the printer manufacturer has some code in the printer that interrogates the chip on the cartridge to find out if it's made by the right manufacturer, and won't let you print if it isn't.

A small step further: you buy a dvd player, but that restricts your choice of dvd providers because of the region encoding. And in this case you don't even have a choice - if I live in South Africa, the dvd player I buy there will be encoded for that region. If I then want to buy some dvds that aren't available there from Amazon, I can't becausethey're encoded for a different region.

Now think about music. Maybe you like the iPod, but music available on msn is cheaper, or there's a wider range. Again, you're locking down your choice of future suppliers by your choice of player, sinceDRM schemes are not inter-operable.

In the case of the water jugs, it wasn't so bad. The jugs are fairly cheap (compared to iPods, anyway) and unless you buy a couple of dozen filter cartridges in one go, you won't be losing much if you decide to switch your investment (the jug) to another supplier. So while it might be nice if all the filters were compatible, it's not something that would be worth mandating by law.

But with the dvd player (region encoding is just another form of DRM) or the mp3 players, it becomes an issue. The initial investment is high, but the bigger investment is the future purchase, the music and the dvds, since they aren't consumables. Switching supplier means
losing the entire investment, both the initial one and the investment on building up a library.

People arguing for DRM often use comparisons with physical objects to show that enforcing interoperability is ridiculous. Why shouldn't a car manufacturer specify that only their genuine, proprietary parts be used as replacements? The answer is that generally, in the physical case, the initiL purchase is the major investment, and any future purchases are consumables, meaning that the cost of switching is limited to the initial investment. Whereas with DRM, the cost of switching is both the initial investment plus the non-consumablefuture investments.

Update: Here's a further analogy, though, using the physical analogy the other way round this time. Suppose that water filter cartridge almost fitted in the other jug, except for one little piece of plastic that didn't contribute anything to the functioning of the cartridge, and was there purely to prevent it from fitting in any other jugs - that's DRM. Then imagine that there was a law to prevent you from filing off that piece of plastic to make it - that's the DMCA. Seems silly, doesn't it?

Resetting a StreamReader

2006-06-17T22:29:00.000+03:00

I've been doing a lot of personal posts lately, so here's a techie one for a change.

Firstly, an article on El Reg about why Bill Gates isn't quite the saint that everyone's currently making him out to be.

Secondly, though, a useful piece of code that I'll probably lose if I don't post it here. Sometimes it's necessary to reset a file pointer; you've read a bit of the file, but you need to go back to the beginning again. With most languages it's pretty straightforward, but with C# it depends on what kind of stream you're using. With most streams you can just seek to the beginning of the file, or set the position of the stream to 0. When using a StreamReader, though, you need to do both of those and discard the data that the stream has already read in and is holding in its cache:
fileReader.DiscardBufferedData();
fileReader.BaseStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
fileReader.BaseStream.Position = 0;

Still pretty simple to do, but it's easy to forget the cache, or just seek to the beginning and forget to set the position to 0.

Bon Jovi at Milton Keynes!

2006-06-12T21:40:00.000+03:00

So as I mentioned in earlier, I went to the Bon Jovi concert at Milton Keynes on Saturday, and it was such great fun that I keep wanting to talk about it!

Sure, it took longer to get there and back than we actually spent at the concert, but it was awesome. Sitting around in the sun on the grass talking to friends was great; Nickelback were great; Bon Jovi was just totally awesome. They played a lot from the new album, which I haven't heard yet, but they alternated one new and one old song, and they played most of the classics. Obviously there's a lot that they could have played but didn't have time for, like Bed of Roses and Always, and Blaze of Glory, but they had a good balance of old and new.

I can't remember all the songs they played, but here's a playlist based on what I do remember. They're only very roughly in order, so if you remember more or what order they were played, please leave a comment to let me know and I'll update the list. Luckily someone got a clip of when he took the English flag and wore it like a cape - the crowd went nuts, and the video's here. The quality of some isn't so good, but it's fun to watch.

Nickelback - I don't remember many of these, but they played, amongst others:

Photograph
Far Away
Savin' Me
This Is How You Remind Me

Bon Jovi - they generally played one new, one old, but I don't
remember most of the new ones since I don't know the new album. The time went pretty fast, but now that I look at the list they actually played a lot of songs:

In These Arms
Runaway
Radio Saved My Life Tonight
Born To Be My Baby
You Give Love A Bad Name
Bad Medicine
Living on a prayer
Sleep When I'm Dead
I'll Be There For You
The Boys Are Back In Town
Have a Nice Day
Bells of Freedom
Story of My Life
Dead or Alive
Who Says You Can't Go Home Again
It's My Life
Saturday Night
Keep the Faith

It was an awesome concert :-) Still can't get my vario to connect to my pc, but suddenly realised I could just email the photos to myself! So here they are:

Update: There are a bunch of photos of the Saturday night concert on the Milton Keynes National Bowl site.

And I finally found a set list, and it looks like I got most of them:

Last Man Standing / Rockin' All Over the World (John Fogerty cover) / You Give Love A Bad Name / Captain Crash & the Beauty Queen From Mars / I'd Die For You / Born To Be My Baby / Story of My Life / I'll Sleep When I'm Dead / Runaway / The Radio Saved My Life Tonight / In These Arms / Have A Nice Day / Who Says You Can't Go Home / It's My Life / I'll Be There For You (electric, Richie on vocals) / Complicated / Bad Medicine / Raise Your Hands / Livin' On A Prayer
Encore: Bells of Freedom / Wanted Dead Or Alive / Everyday / Keep the Faith

It definitely seemed like a lot more at the time! And I'm sure the second to last wasn't Everyday; it was one from Young Guns, although I'm trying to find which one. I think they did play Everyday, because it does sound familiar, but not then.

Update: Actually, looking at that list, it's definitely not complete. They did play The Boys are Back in Town, which is on my list but not that one; there's also a video of Living in Sin on YouTube, so they must have played that as well. And it looks like they played different songs on the 11th; there are videos of Always and These Days, which they definitely didn't play on the 10th. Here's a playlist of videos from the 10th - there are a million more on YouTube, but these are some of the best.

A Summer Evening in London

2006-06-11T23:09:00.000+03:00

Everyone I know back in South Africa has this picture of London as a grey, dismal place where it rains all the time, and even when it's not raining it's cloudy and miserable.

I knew that wasn't true, but the past couple of days have really proved it. It's been beautiful and sunny, and yesterday at the Bon Jovi concert it was really hot - it was so nice sitting on the grass in the sun with friends :-) And today it's been really hot, really sunny again; too hot, actually, but now it's about 9 in the evening and it's starting to get a bit cooler; the sun's going down, but it's still nice and light and it's just perfect for going a for an evening walk.

I just wish I had someone to walk with, or someone to walk to.

I was standing on the balcony of my flat, looking out over the houses, and it just looked so perfectly London - sometimes I still can't believe that I'm actually here.

Post New York

2006-06-10T13:50:00.000+03:00

I've been back from New York for a week now, and still haven't posted any pics. It's been a long week.

It was a great trip - didn't get to do too much during the week, since I was there for work, but the weekend was awesome. I went out to Coney Island, which is somewhere I've read a lot about (okay, read some stories set in) but never thought I'd get to see. Sure, it's past its heyday, and it's all a bit old and faded, but that's the charm of Coney Island. It's just what I pictured (but smaller):

I saw a lot of places in New York, although I didn't go to a lot of places - I did the touristy sightseeing bus tours, so like I saw Central Park, but didn't actually go to Central Park, if that makes sense. But I did go to FAO Schwartz on 5th Avenue, and saw their life size baby elephant plush toy; I went to the huge Toys R Us on Broadway, and saw their giant indoor Ferris Wheel and, even more awesome, their giant animatronic T-Rex (I have a video of it, but I'm not quite sure how to post it here. I'll look into it). I had cheesecake at Junior's, saw the Empire State Building lit up red, white and blue for Fleet Week (and saw the fleet sail in, and the fly-bys!). I saw the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and Governer's Island. I went out to Staten Island on the ferry, and saw South Street Seaport. I took the ferry to and from work (which was across the Hudson in Jersey City). I got caught in a thunderstorm, and bought touristy souveniers (including a NYPD t-shirt, NYPD sweat pants, and even NYPD socks). I tried to take a helicopter trip, but every time I booked it the day turned out too hazy to see anything. Basically I just had an awesome time :-) Oh, except that I didn't get to see Winnie the Pooh :-( I mailed the library to ask if they were open on Memorial Day, and they said they weren't - they neglected to mention that they weren't open the entire Memorial Day weekend. So the wandering around trying to find them was a bit of a waste of time.

Here are a couple of the best photos (I took hundreds, literally, and typically now I don't remember what half of them are of. That's the problem with the sightseeing tours - the guide says "there's the house where .... lives", or "that's where they filmed...."; you take a photo; you look at the photos later, going "why do I have a hundred photos of buildings?").

(I'm using Yahoo! Photos for photo storage, btw - it seemed pretty cool, but I can't figure out how to get a link to just a photo, rather than the album, so I'm still using Flickr for that. If you want to see all my photos, you can view the hi-res or low-res albums.

But now, I'm off to the Bon Jovi concert (with Nickelback!) at Milton Keynes. Pity it's not at Wembley (apart from the fact that it would be cooler, it would be so much easier to get home from afterwards), but I'm so excited, I'm sure it'll be great fun anyway! :D

Update: The concert was great! Sure, it took longer to get there and back than we actually spent at the concert, but it was awesome. Sitting around in the sun on the grass talking to friends was great; Nickelback were great (they played my 2 favourite songs of theirs, 'Savin' me' and 'How you remind me', and I heard some new great ones too, like 'Far Away'); Bon Jovi was just totally awesome. They played a lot from the new album, which I haven't heard yet, but they alternated one new and one old song, and they played all the classics - Keep the Faith (my new theme song), Living on a Prayer, and others that I can't remember right now but were really good. I'm so tired now, though - it was like a two hour aerobic class, jumping around and clapping and I had a really, really good time :-) If I can get my Vario to connect to my PC, I'll upload the two photos I took.

Thunderstorms in New York

2006-06-02T05:11:00.000+03:00

So I've been in New York for the past two weeks, and I just haven't had time to blog - I'll do a summary post once I'm back in London and have caught up on some sleep.

But I had the worst evening tonight, and since everyone I would talk to is asleep (given that there's a 5 to 6 hour time difference), I figured I'd use the blogging-as-catharsis approach and talk about it here.

Being my last full day in New York, I was trying to figure out what to spend the last of my money on and came across the iHome - basically an alarm clock that your iPod plugs into. Very cool, cost almost exactly the amount of money I had left, so I thought I'd get one after work.

Amazingly, I actually managed to find a Radio Shack fairly easily, they had them in stock, and I got one. Walked down the block to catch the bus home... wait .... wait... no bus. Then the thunder starts. And the lightning. And then the rain. Big, heavy, wet drops. So while I'm huddled in the bus shelter trying to keep my new iHome dry, I realise: the US uses 110V, while the UK is 220 to 240V. But hopefully the ac adaptor can handle the full range, like my laptop and mobile and camera ac adaptors can?

So while I'm worrying about this, the thunder is getting louder, the lightning more continuous, the rain harder, and the bus's absence more conspicuous. Can't catch a cab, since they only take cash and I spent the last of my cash on the iHome.

Still no buses.

Decide to walk to the next bus stop, in case the buses are making a detour around this block for some reason. Get totally soaked, but the bus pulls up just as I get there. So now I'm soaked, freezing, trying to keep my iHome dry, and hoping that I haven't just wasted my money on something that won't work in the UK.

Halfway back to the hotel, the bus driver announces that the next stop is the last one. And it's taken us 2 or 3 times as long as normal to get this far, since the traffic's hectic with the rain. So I've already panicked, then been relieved when a bus turned up, and now starting to panic again. Luckily, though, I wasn't the only one going further, so we got off and eventually another bus turned up and took us all the way to my stop. But by now I look like a drowned rat, and feel worse.

Get to my hotel room, open the box - nope, the ac adaptor only takes 120V. And I don't really have time to return it tomorrow, since I'm working in the morning and don't want to chance missing my plane.

Eventually, though, I did some research on the net (which, by the way, costs me 9.95 per 24 hours, even if I only use it for 5 minutes in those 24 hours). And after getting myself a bit confused over what the inputs and outputs were, it looks like I should be able to get a step-down transformer for about £12. So all is not lost, but it hasn't been quite the fun event that it should have been.

But now I have to go pack - it's been fun, but I'm glad to be going back home (although I'm not sure where home is anymore - is it London, or is it South Africa? And since I want to move out of my flat in London asap, is that still home? Aargh, I need to stop moving around and settle down for a bit!).

You've Got Mail

2006-05-14T00:56:00.000+03:00

I watched You've Got Mail shortly before leaving for London, and when I saw that it was on TV tonight I had to watch it again. Sometimes you find that something in a book or a movie just somehow resonates with you (like Neil Gaiman poem I keep plugging) and this movie has three of those. Plus, it's just a really romantic movie.

The one is where she decides to close her bookstore, and her friend says to her that it's the brave to do. "You're imaging that your life could be different", and that's what I'm trying to accomplish by having moved to London. Something that was totally unlike me to do, and I don't think anyone believed that I actually would, until I did.

The second is when she and her boyfriend realise that they don't love each other. He's interested in another woman, and he says to her, what about you? Is there someone else? And she thinks, and says, "No. No, but there's the dream of someone else".

The third, I forget the exact phrasing, but she says something like, people always say that change is good, but what they really mean is that something that you didn't want to happen has happened. I'm not big on change, but one thing I've learned is that change is only bad when everything's good. When things aren't good, change can only make things better. When things are good, change can only make them worse. The difficult bit is when some things are good, but some things could do with improvement; how do you restrict change to the bad bits and keep the good bits stable?

Winnie The Pooh in New York

2006-05-13T20:26:00.000+03:00

Some of you might know that I'm fairly into Winnie the Pooh - I've had my Pooh Quotes and Pooh's Poetry Corner sites up for about, oh, almost 10 years now!, and when I came to London in 2000 I made sure I went out to Pooh Country and played Pooh Sticks on the original bridge. And I'm planning to go back sometime soon, now that I'm actually living here in London.

But first, I'm going to New York next weekend. And something that I knew but had forgotten until I started looking for things to in New York over my one free weekend, is that the original toys are over there in the New York Public Library! So of course now my mission number 1 is to go and visit them and hopefully take some photos. Here's a photo of them from my Pooh Quotes page:
Even though I don't really maintain the sites any more, it'd be really nice to be able to put up my own photos of the toys. In fact, I could probably put up some photos of the Pooh Sticks bridge too, if I went and took some... hmmm :-)

I always thought it was a bit odd that the toys were in New York rather than Britain. Reading a bit on the net, I came up with some interesting things. From the wikipedia page (near the bottom), "Many people in Britain feel strongly that this crucial part of Britain's cultural heritage should be repatriated. There are strong comparisons between the toys and the Elgin Marbles and the matter was raised in Parliament as recently as 1998". I should think so! But the Americans don't seem to think so: "the response from the Big Apple to Mrs Dunwoody's request was: "Get stuffed!""

So that's my first mission in New York (apart from seeing the Statue of Liberty, and all that, but my hotel is right around there so I don't think I'll be able to miss it). My second mission is to somewhere that I barely realised was a real place, never mind in New York: Coney Island! I've read so many fantasy stories set there, that it'll be relally cool to see it in person. I imagine it as a run-down, seedy kind of amusement park, with bendy mirrors and giant clown faces, a big wheel, lots of candy floss and hotdogs, and freaky sideshows. Very much a past it's time, nostalgic for a different era sort of place. Hopefully it's maintained some of that character, and hasn't been remade into a slick disneyfied theme park. But I'm really excited about going. And even it isn't anything like I imagined, I'm way overdue for a rollercoaster ride! I went on a bunch of really cool rides in Florida (actually, Georgia - we went to Wild Adventures, and I went on the Double Shot and almost all the roller coasters, totally amazing myself), but I haven't been on any in the year and a half or so since, and I'm starting to go into withdrawal.

So it should be an awesome trip. I'll try to post some photos when I get back, but it's impossible to post them all, and very difficult to select just a few!

Four Second Fury

2006-05-13T17:20:00.000+03:00

I came across this really great game called Four Second Fury - it's made up of a bunch of little games, each of which lasts 4 seconds (which fits my attention span for games). Some are crazy - you have to smash 8 little people with a fly swatter; some are easy - you have to not press the arrow keys or space bar; but they're all fun. I've managed to get up to 98 seconds so far, which probably isn't much but I'm proud of it :-) And because each game only lasts 4 seconds, you spend an amazingly long time playing (the 'just one more!' effect really kicks in).

Personal Ramblings

2006-05-06T22:48:00.000+03:00

This is pretty much a content-free post - I'm having one of those days where I feel vaguely lonely, and feel like talking to people, but don't really have anything to say. So I'm basically going to ramble on here, talking to myself.

Actually, I have a 75% finished post on some apps that I want to write, which I started days ago and probably should finish off before I do another post, but I'm too lazy (that one actually requires some thought).

Went to watch MI: 3 with Dave and some of his friends last night - it's a really cool movie :-) And of course, any movie with Tom Cruise in it is worth watching... it was a good evening, got home about 1:30, which combined with an evening out for dinner on Thursday night, left me really tired today. Plus, I'm not really used to this whole concept of getting up early and going to work every single day :-(

Went to movies last Friday with Dave as well - we watched Scary Movie 4, which was actually quite funny, although in that really stupid way that you've come to expect from Scary Movie. Then last Saturday (or was it Sunday? I lose track of the days) I went wandering around London - did a loop from Charing Cross to Trafalgar Square, the Horse Guards Parade Ground, St James Park, Buckingham Palace, up to Picadilly, down Regent Street, Oxford Street, then down Charing Cross road to Leicester Square and back down to Charing Cross. It was a long walk, but it helped me to finally get some kind of idea of how all the bits fit together! That's the problem with travelling by tube - you know how to get places, but you have no idea where those places are in relation to each other (well, that's one of the problems - the others are worth a rant all of their own).

I think I've mentioned before that I like the song 'Bad Day' by Daniel Powter - well, I just saw the music video and I love it even more! It's really cool, and I'd love to download it except that iTunes music store doesn't seem to have it :-( (but I found somewhere you can watch it online). And while I'm talking about things I like, here's another gratuitous plug for my favourite poem 'The Day The Saucers Landed' by Neil Gaiman. Really, go read it. It's awesome.

Rambling back to movies, I'm about to watch 'How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days', since it's on TV and it's too early to go to bed. I expect it to be one of those silly yet enjoyable movies, something like My Best Friend's Wedding, and Win a Date with Tad Hamilton, and all of those.

My cooking skills have really degraded since I moved to London - not only do I never cook anything beyond taking something out of the freezer and putting it the oven or microwave, I manage to mess up even that. I just totally ruined a frozen pizza, and the other day I managed to make inedible microwaved lasagne. What can I say, it's a gift.

Hmm... what else is there to say that I can say on a public blog? (This is actually one of those days that I think I should have an anonymous blog as well - one that can't be traced back to me. Sometimes there are just things that I want to talk about, get out of my system, but don't really want the people involved to know that they're the ones I'm talking about, or that I'm the one doing the talking!). I'm afraid I'm running out of things to say, though, which is a pity. It's silly, really, but while I'm typing a post I feel somehow connected to the rest of the world. Same as watching tv, sometimes - you feel more connected than if you're watching a dvd. It doesn't make sense, but it's true nonetheless.

Well, the movie's about to start, so I guess I should switch off my laptop and watch it.