Category: fun stuff

Saturday Snapshot (24-May-2014)

Post author By Kory Kessel
Post date Monday, 26 May, 2014
4 Comments on Saturday Snapshot (24-May-2014)

Another Normandy weekend found La Famille Kessel welcoming a newbie to our oh-so-humble abode in Blangy-le-Château, which of course meant hitting the road. Though perhaps ‘hitting’ is too strong a term, as the rental car we have this time around is a Suzuki Celerio, a strange tiny beast of a vehicle that huffs-and-puffs at the slightest incline. Maybe ‘patting the road’ is more accurate. Also, it offers the strangest version of an automatic transmission I have yet encountered, with a three-stop gearshift that one pushes forward (into ‘R’) to go backwards and backward (into ‘D’) to go forwards. Neutral (‘N’), I am glad to say, is rationally located in the middle, which is just as it should be.

Also, if the driver prefers they can manually shift the gears by tapping the gearshift slightly to the left from A, and then tapping it up (into ‘M+’) to move to the next highest gear and down (into ‘M-‘) to downshift.

An automatic Standard? A non-standard Automatic? I have no idea what to call this new breed of auto (though a quick spin around the Internet just now seems to indicate it is “automated manual transmission”), but regardless of drive type moniker it is one awful ride. Setting that aside, the Celerio did perform its function, though with no élan whatsoever.

But enough about the car already.

On Saturday afternoon following lunch and a rainstorm (or two rainstorms…three?…this time of year the weather shifts so fast in Normandy it is a fool’s errand to try to delineate such) our band of four piled into the Celerio and headed for Honfleur, the remarkably picturesque port town that bumps up along where the Seine meets La Manche (that’s “English Channel” to all of you good mother-tongue English speakers out there). A regular visit we make with first-time visitors, I have to say that My Missus and The Boy and I really do enjoy making the 25-minute drive from Blangy to Honfleur a few times each year. Honfleur is beautiful, quaint and extremely charming and as expected this serves to make the place a little too touristy. Still, it is the perfect size for an afternoon walkabout and offers plenty of high-end shopping for the well-heeled, including a good amount of art galleries whose wares (and probably owners) are in some form of constant shift as well as some be-careful-what-you-touch antique shops. There are a number of interesting churches to walk through, a museum dedicated to the life and artwork of Honfleur favorite son Eugène Boudin (who had much to do with Monet becoming…well, Monet), and all manner of historical this-n-that surrounding the oh-so-postcardy harbor. Finally, Honfleur offers some truly marvelous grub to be had…great seafood restaurants, a few very nice creperies, and — of course — Alexandre Bourdas’s matchless Sa.Qa.Na).

I parked the Celerio — pushing the gearshift forward to back into my spot in front of Saint-Leonard — and shoehorned my group out of the car and onto the sidewalk. Recompressed, we began easing into Honfleur, and as always the town didn’t disappoint. Boats in the harbor, crushes of people packed into the cafés and restaurants lining the northern end of the port (all tourist traps that should be avoided at all costs, but which aren’t), and a truly awful rock group playing badly under a tent at the port’s southeastern corner next to the ubiquitous carrousel. All good.

We wandered over the drawbridge at the mouth of the harbor and walked up into the north end of town. Honfleur is one of those places where you just can’t help but repeatedly snap your shutter, even if you have a comprehensive souvenir album and have also already taken every picture there is to take (and many times over, at that).

“The way the clouds layer the blue sky over such-n-such church…wow.” “What a remarkable boat! And the flags!” “Isn’t that cute?”

At one point My Missus headed into the Musée Eugène Boudin with my visiting friend, and The Boy and I shot over to La Belle-Iloise to grab up some quality canned mackerel products. Soon we would all reconnect at the Celerio, and…well, just in case we got stuck inside the darn thing I wanted to be prepared!

Related posts:

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Campaign for 3 day weekends – sign the petition

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 26 May, 2014
11 Comments on Campaign for 3 day weekends – sign the petition

Campaign to make 3 day weekends permanent – petition

Another bank holiday yay with another chill out day in prospect. May have a bit of a potter this morning, game of golf this afternoon and finish off with a bbq. You might have something different in mind but by and large it’s all about enjoying yourself (the one exception being if you join the traffic jam to the coast).

It occurs to me that from around the end of April every weekend should officially be a 3 day weekend. Makes a lot of sense for the following reasons:

It’s a good idea – people prefer holidays to working.
A 4 day working week has the benefit that 4 is an even number. People working half days could have the option to work two full days instead of every morning or afternoon.
It would make your annual leave allowance stretch further – have more opportunities to only have to use 4 days up to get 9 days off.
It’s nicer to have time off in the summer.
Transport networks get really clogged as people set off for a weekend away on a bank holiday. By effectively making every weekend a bank holiday people would not feel obliged to rush off and join a traffic jam as their weekends away would probably be more spread out.
It would stimulate the economy be generating more bbq and misc gardening equipment associated sales.
Ice cream vendors would also do well out of it creating even more jobs in this sector.
We would avoid the risk of the few Bank Holiday weekends we do have of becoming a washout as there would be more of them thereby increasing the chance of nice weather.

Simples really. I may have missed one or two key points in my reasoning but feel free to add to the list by leaving a comment which in this instance is also how you sign the petition. Once we have 100,000 comments we will hand it to the prime minister for action. After all we are only a year away from a general election and he will be in a mood to do popular stuff.

We the undersigned call on the Prime Minister, Mr David Cameron, to make every weekend a Bank Holiday weekend starting from the last weekend in April and ending at the end of September when the weather starts to turn. You can do it Dave – you know you want to.

Most popular weather forecasts

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Sunday, 25 May, 2014
No Comments on Most popular weather forecasts

Couldn’t help but notice the most popular places for weather forecasts on the Met Office site and it struck me that Birmingham was missing from the list. Wossgoinon I thought. Are the good burghers of Brum not interested in the weather? Isn’t the place the third most populous metropolitan area in the United Kingdom?

Perhaps they don’t get any! Surely they must. Weather doesn’t just pass them by in Birmingham. Does it? It must get a mention on the TV weather forecast. You don’t notice when you look at the forecast because you are only interested in your own location or where you are going.

Maybe people don’t voluntarily go to Birmingham. I’ve been there three times in recent years. Once taking Kid2 for a looksee at their University and twice to August LINX meetings. LINX like to get out of London in the summer where it can get unbearably hot. So they go to Birmingham!

Stop right there. This isn’t a bash Birmingham post. I’m sure there must be lots of good things in Birmingham – I’ve already mentioned the University which took me by surprise and impressed even though Kid2 chose Durham in the end. This is an analysis of the most popular places for weather forecasts.

Taking it from the top down the most searched for weather forecast is for London. This is completely understandable. The population of the metropolitan area of London, according to Wikipedia and the 2011 census is 11,699,601. Well it was when they did the census, not counting illegal immigrants and the homeless.

Most people that live in London have to commute to work and need to know whether to take an umbrella or sunglasses. London is also a very popular tourist destination and folk want to know what to pack before they turn up. Used the service meself for that very reason. V handy and generally reasonably accurate these days. You should know that I lost my Cisco brolly last time I was in London. Was there for an ITSPA workshop. Got the brolly when attending a corporate jolly with Cisco at the Olympics. It was a v handy compact number. Suspect it was nicked but hey…

Next up is Manchester, the second most populous metropolitan area. On the one hand one might ask why the residents of Manchester bother looking up the weather forecast because allegedly it rains most of the time. This might be totally unfair (or it might not). Maybe they keep looking to see if there is a gap coming in the weather front so that they can get their washing out to dry. Forget it love. Buy a tumble dryer.

At this stage of the discussion it is worth noting that in the table of population sizes by metropolitan area, distilled from a more extensive list on Wikipedia, Manchester appears more than once. In fact several cities appear several times in the Wikipedia source because they split out subdivisions. Where possible I tried to merge the subdivisions to provide more compact reading. This was complicated by the fact that Liverpool and Manchester, both major metropolitan areas in their own right also appeared more than once as Manchester/Liverpool.

Drilling in to this showed that such areas contained reasonable sized towns in between the two major cities. I figured this was easily remedied by giving these reasonable sized towns their own identities in the table but after doing so for Warrington decided I couldn’t be bothered to do it for the others so gave up. What you have here is a mix of data of my own concoction:)

The population table below is therefore filled with dual populations who might prefer to be listed apart. Newcastle and Sunderland, Cardiff and Newport and Derby and Nottingham are particularly spring to mind. Tough taters.

Other notes are necessary. Reading is listed as the 8th most viewed weather forecast but doesn’t appear separately for its population. It is unfortunately subsumed by London. Why on earth Reading ranks for weather forecasts is as mysterious as why Birmingham doesn’t. Since I began this post I’ve added the most popular tourist destinations by rank (ref tripadvisor) to the table. At least Birmingham ~~(for some peculiar reason)~~ is on the list (must be the cricket) but Reading sure as heck ain’t. Notable omissions from the weather forecast rankings btw are Torquay and Llandudno who are both right up there as top ten tourist destinations.

Lowestoft ranks fourth for weather forecasts but appears neither in the population leagues nor the tourist top ten. Perhaps nobody actually lives in Lowestoft and it is merely a transit point for people catching ferries. And fishermen. I dunno.

Not worth dwelling on the rest of the data except to wonder whether Leeds and Cardiff shouldn’t be up there with Manchester for people wondering when the sun is going to come out. I leave the rest to your own interpretation.

Table below compiled for your reference. Make what you will of it. Please feel free to replicate quoting Wikipedia, Met Office, tripadvisor and trefor.net. No rights reserved on my part.

Rank	Metropolitan Area	Population	Rank by interest in the weather	tripadvisor top holiday destinations
1	London	11,699,601	1	1
2	Manchester	2,553,379	2
3	Birmingham	2,440,986		10
4	Leeds-Bradford	1,777,934	9	9
5	Glasgow	1,381,535	6
6	Liverpool	1,189,386		4
7	Sheffield	1,179,847
8	Nottingham-Derby	1,172,403
9	Newcastle-Sunderland	1,110,306
10	Southampton-Portsmouth	855,569
11	Cardiff-Newport	754,131	12
12	Bristol	617,280		7
13	Edinburgh	511,705	3	2
14	Leicester	508,916
15	Brighton	474,485	10
16	Bournemouth/Poole	466,266	11
17	Blackburn-Burnley	421,002
18	Middlesbrough	376,633
19	Stoke-on-Trent	372,775
20	West Midlands	359,262
21	Hull	314,018
22	Preston	313,322
23	Swansea/Neath/Port Talbot	300,352
24	Gloucester-Cheltenham	266,500
25	Plymouth	260,203
26	Blackpool	239,409
27	Milton Keynes	229,941
28	Northampton	215,963
29	Norwich	213,166
30	Aberdeen	197,328
31	Swindon	185,609
32	Ipswich	178,835
33	Manchester/Liverpool	175,405
34	Oxford	171,380
35	Warrington	165,456
36	Peterborough	163,379
37	Cambridge	158,434
38	Dundee	154,674
39	York	153,717	7	6
40	Telford	147,980
41	Grimsby	134,160
42	Hastings	133,422
43	Thanet	125,370
44	Burton-upon-Trent	122,199
45	Colchester	121,859
46	Eastbourne	118,219
47	Exeter	117,763	5
48	Torbay	115,410
49	Lincoln	114,879
50	Basingstoke	107,642
51	Bedford	106,940
52	Worcester	101,659
53	Falkirk	91,402
54	Ayr	61,365

Rainfall measurement technique #2 the bbq method

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Saturday, 24 May, 2014
No Comments on Rainfall measurement technique #2 the bbq method

Latest in the trefor.net series on rainfall measurement techniques involves the use of a bbq to collect rain water.

The beauty of this method is that very little effort is involved. You leave a bbq out uncovered, accidentally or otherwise, and after it has rained go out and see how much water is in it.

This is a pretty rough and ready method and certainly not as accurate as or finely gauged as our first rainfall measurement technique using spectacles as described here. Typical problems are highlighted here:

The surface area of a bbq is typically quite large with most having a diameter of a good eighteen inches to a couple of feet. It is better to have a small diameter to height ratio (d/h) for improved accuracy (is there science to back this up? not sure – could just be a popular myth and if so I’m surprised I fell for it).
The ratio of diameter to depth is also going to vary especially with bowl shaped bbqs as many tend to be. Identifying the average depth of water can in these circumstances require a degree in mathematics. I’m not aware of an app that does this.
One also has to lookout for leakage caused by open, or slightly open vents that exist in some bbqs (often these are in the lid though – if this is the case with your own bbq then you can ignore this bullet point – note leaving the lid on the bbq makes it useless for rainfall measurement).
A bbq tends to be fairly easy to move. Make sure you don’t leave it under a tree by mistake. This can totally muck up your results as a tree will prevent the rain directly hitting the bbq, or Rainfall Collection Surface (RCS) as described by the Worshipful Company of Rainfall Measurement Professionals (WCRMP) (sorry no link available – they haven’t caught up with the times yet hence the lack of an app). The after drip of a tree is not uniform and can not in any way be considered representative of the preceding level of rainfall.

The technique itself is ~~fairly~~ simple. You just leave the bbq out in an uncovered area (see bullet above re trees) and after a suitable amount of time go and see how much rain is in it.

In an ideal world the WCRMP would have recommended standard bbq sizes for the job so that a measure of consistency can be applied (to the job of measurement – no pun intended). They have not done this (quelle surprise). In their defence this is partly out of a recognition that there are many different makes and shapes of bbq out there and they didn’t want to be seen favouring any one manufacturer.

In my mind this was a mistake and one that has meant that this method of measuring rainfall has yet to be widely adopted. You certainly don’t hear weather forecasters on the BBC (other services are available – it’s your choice) mention the bbq technique. Usually they only say whether it is going to be bbq weather or not. With the right equipment all weather is bbq weather.

Often at times like this I am asked whether I can recommend a particular make of bbq for the job. Ordinarily when recommending a bbq I’d say a Weber but in this case when the specific feature requirement of rainfall measurement I’d say that Weber wasn’t right. Webers usually come with the aforementioned vents in the base and have bowl shapes that are particularly difficult to measure. Also Webers are expensive and you wouldn’t want to reduce its lifespan by introducing the problem of rust.

You would be wrong to think I was therefore suggesting a cheap bbq where it didn’t matter if you had to throw it away after a year or two. Cheap bbqs tend to have millions (yes millions) of screws and nuts and bolts and take hours, days¹ even to assemble. I can only offer our own solution which is a stainless steel bbq/firepit that can happily be left out all year round (though we don’t).

Our firepit has a flat bottom and regular if sloping sides that would make it easy to measure the overall d/h number fwiw. The pictures below show our bbq in action for rainfall measuring. The first shows the level of water obtained in one wet night earlier this week. The second photo shows a pretty much full bbq, a level reached by the end of the afternoon after that first pic.

This was one wet day. Now despite having taken the time to describe the bbq method for rainfall measurement I have to confess that I’ve not gone as far as calibrating our bbq for this purpose. All I can say is that it looked as if we had roughly one inch of rain overnight and maybe another couple of inches during the day. It would have been a simple matter to use a plastic ruler taken from a kid’s pencil case but I didn’t.

It is recommended that you don’t risk annoying a kid by doing this and go out and buy a ruler (6 inch clear plastic should do the job) that can be used specifically for the purpose, perhaps keeping it in a convenient spot together with your other bbq cooking utensils. By using the same ruler every time you maintain consistency and remember that the kid’s pencil case is not always readily to hand during term time.

The day of the photo shoot was in fact and as is plain to see a very wet day. Very wet days like this tend to cause traffic chaos in Lincoln and this one was no exception. There was an accident downtown (maybe a mile and a half away) and the traffic tailed back past our house. It was quicker for me to walk to the Morning Star for a swift un (Anne is away) than it would have been to drive.

It might in theory be possible to derive a measurement for rainfall based on the length of traffic tailbacks but this would be unreliable and be very difficult to calibrate. The traffic tailback method would undoubtedly be of interest to BBC weather forecasters as it would allow them to engage with the traffic and travel department. Cross departmental relations are encouraged within the Beeb as it is seen as providing better value to the taxpayer by maximising the efficient use of existing resources. Also they at the Beeb like having their cross departmental team building nights out – self funded no doubt as such evenings if taxpayer funded would mitigate the benefits of the aforementioned efficiencies.

To conclude, this post has described a very good, easy to implement if inaccurate method for measuring rainfall using a bbq. The bbq is not currently in rainfall collection mode. I have it stood up on its side as I didn’t want to go to the effort of emptying it later. It’s all about choosing your moments and I don’t actually care whether I know how much rain has fallen anyway. Don’t let me stop you though…

pic1 – overnight level

pic2 – level by the end of the day

¹ When we first moved in to our house towards the end of the afternoon I nipped out to buy a bbq – it was a lovely sunny day and we figured it was the right thing to do. In the end it looked like it would take so long to put it together (millions of screws) that I had to go to Tesco and buy a couple of those disposable bbq trays that sort of do the job but are usually quite crappy. Ended up finishing the job the following weekend.

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Is this the ugliest telephone?

Post author By Rob Lister
Post date Wednesday, 21 May, 2014
No Comments on Is this the ugliest telephone?

Rob Lister is the all singing all dancing network engineer cum sys admin for LONAP, the London Access Point Internet Exchange.

And the award for the “Ugliest telephone of the year” goes to…

This was on a shelf with some pretty ugly telephones, this one stood out as the clear winner.

“No, let’s have the buttons represent a dial arrangement, that nobody has needed for the last 30 years… ”

“Kids won’t know what this means… Do they even use land lines? Let’s focus on the older users…”

“Okay. But it must have an answering machine crammed in there”

“Now we need another “dial” for the buttons that won’t fit on the first “dial…”

“Hmm. Then it needs a display. Let’s shove it awkwardly in the middle of that dial.”

“But it has to be cheap to manufacture. Hmm. We can’t have a nice ergonomic handset, just a basic plastic thing.”

“Yeah. So that’s all good. Lunch anyone?”

Other really interesting telephone posts include:

The all new waterproof handset
I have seen the light
The birth of a handset

Engineer fun stuff internet peering

Dress to impress – LINX 20th birthday bash photos by @andyd #LINX85

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 20 May, 2014
No Comments on Dress to impress – LINX 20th birthday bash photos by @andyd #LINX85

Dressed to impress – terrific images courtesy of Andy Davidson from the LINX 20th birthday bash at the Cumberland Hotel in London. We are all v sophis.

Andy is a keen amateur photographer and is a member of a club – they have regular get-togethers to shoot a variety of artistic subjects.Ask to see more of his stuff. He has a career beyond the internet. He even appears in some of his own photos – very long armed selfies.

All work and no play eh?…

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Spot the difference – Brandon Butterworth, LINX award winner

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 20 May, 2014
No Comments on Spot the difference – Brandon Butterworth, LINX award winner

Meet Brandon Butterworth, BBC Chief Scientist, supporter of LINX, LONAP and other internet engineering not for profit entities and all round good guy. Last night at the LINX 20th birthday bash Brandon was presented with an award. Can’t for the life of me remember what it was for but he deserves it whatever it is.

The two photos below are of Brandon proudly displaying his award. There are subtle differences – can you spot them. After I took one photo I noticed that Brandon had is serious look on so I insisted on a second with him smiling. Much nicer I’m sure you will agree. Can you spot which one it is, children? 🙂

Engineer fun stuff internet peering

The night before the morning after @routerfixer #LINX85

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 20 May, 2014
No Comments on The night before the morning after @routerfixer #LINX85

photo booth at LINX85 - 20th birthday celebration

Photo booth pic from the LINX 20th birthday celebrations at the Cumberland Hotel. A great time was had by all. Slight oddity, considering the internetty nature of the event, that the photo booth would only print out “polaroid” style pictures rather than being able to email me an electronic copy (cf the image of my eyeball by the opticians last week). This photo is a photo of a photo.

The two serious looking guys are Clive Stone and Steve Lalonde.

It’s funny to think that the last 20 years, the life of LINX, represent a substantial part of the total lifespan of the internet. ARPANET dates back to 1969. So if you were born before 1969 you pre-date the internet. You will be able to tell because when you first sign up to Facebook and need to choose your date of birth, any year prior to 1969 on the sign up page will involve scrolling down to get to the right number. They make it easy for those born in the “internet age” – their birth dates are displayed on the initial screen.

While I’m in a historical perspective mood and looking for milestones in my timeline it occurs to me that in In 1995, one year after the founding of LINX, I bought the Bill Gates book “The Road Ahead”. At the time this was a visionary work by one of the world’s most successful high tech entrepreneurs. We would have to be patient as the “information superhighway” was still some time in the future.

This is no longer the case. We have been streaming down the information superhighway for some time now, a fact reflected in the success and growth of LINX as an Internet Exchange Point.

I will be 72 years of age on LINX 40th birthday. I won’t be in the internet game although I trust I will till be an user (:). It’s going to be an exciting next 20 years. We no longer need Bill Gates to provide the vision. The vision is whatever your imagination can come up with (teleporting aside).

In the meantime Happy Birthday LINX, and all who sail in her (!?)

End User fun stuff

Breaking news – the shed is finished

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Sunday, 18 May, 2014
1 Comment on Breaking news – the shed is finished

Breaking news – the shed is finished, or as finished as its going to get. Still a few bits of side panel need patching but it ain’t gonna happen.

The two images below represent the state of the shed first thing this morning, covered by a tarpaulin because it had no felt on it followed by the finished job.

Note Joseph who is sat on on top of the shed is modelling a LINX tshirt. Very appropriate for the job especially seeing as the next LINX meeting is this coming Monday/Tuesday. Big thanks to Joe whose B in GCSE woodwork is really starting to pay dividends. Made a lot more sense for me to send Joe up to do the dangerous bits. After all had I done it and fallen off I might have been badly hurt.

Joe’s hammering technique is top notch and worthy of an A grade. Examiner must have had a bad hair day or something.

In the interest of continuing with the mundane aspect of this “breaking news” I am pleased to announce that I didn’t need that second roll of felt after all and will be taking it back to Wickes straight after lunch. Hey £21 is £21. Jobs for this afternoon include taking Kid4 to the cricket nets followed by lighting the barbecue.

If you liked this shed post you will definitely want to read our other terrific shed related content:

Partial shed
The shed disassembly
The online garden shed – the answer to privacy issues

events fun stuff travel

A day at Newmarket Races

First time at Newmarket Races yesterday. We had tickets courtesy of Adnams Brewery and met at 9.30 am at the West End Tap for a glass of champagne before setting off. It was a glorious sunny day and prospects were good.

I had bought a copy of the Racing Post in order to study the form in the (air-conditioned) charabanc that had been hired to carry us to the meet. Two pounds forty it was! The hidden cost of day out at the races!

In the end I didn’t bother with form. It’s all too complicated, especially once you’ve had your first glass of champagne. For some races I picked the favourite, or one of the fancied horses, and for others I went for an outsider each way.

Needless to say only one came in. Reality is you only need one decent winner to offset all your other losses and the family will be pleased to know that in all I was only down £18 on the day. Not bad value for a whole day out at the races.

This doesn’t count the cost of the Racing Post plus a few other incidentals such as the Veuve Cliquot but it matter not – these things have to be done properly, innit.

Yesterday’s meet was flat racing. My first time at the flat, not that I’m a regular racegoer – Racing Post would have to drop its prices for that to happen. It did feel a bit strange that each race was just a out and out straight sprint. The horses would start as vague dots in the distance and gradually grow until you could see them properly and begin to get excited.

The only way to really get excited at the races btw is to have a bet. Otherwise it’s just one horse ~~running~~ trotting along against seemingly other identical horses and not in any way that is particularly interesting. Could just as well be donkeys or camels.

Most of the time the excitement is short lived. Even when you win the effect dies off pretty soon after collecting your winnings. It should be possible to measure the rate of decay of excitement:

dE^r/dt= -λ^r E^r

where λ^r is the Racing Excitement exponential decay constant and E^r is Racing Excitement.

Note racing excitement is different to other forms of excitements which can have different shaped decay curves and sometimes even exhibit growth.

Also λ^r should not be confused with Racing Certainty (RC) which whilst often sought is totally mythological.

During the conceptualisation of this post the idea of researching the existence of λ^r did spring to mind. Might even be able to get a grant to do it! However the notion of spending lots of time measuring the process of decaying “happiness” or the appearance of happiness somehow didn’t seem conducive to one’s own happiness especially when considering how much champagne would have to be drunk. λ^r will probably remain theoretical and unproven.

In the meantime there is a shed roof to felt and it’s looking like another beautiful spring day in the shire. A finished off shed = happiness with a very slow rate of decay λ^shed ^→∞ 🙂

My thanks to Nige and Lewis @Lewi_D84 from the West End Tap @WestTap in Lincoln for the invite and their hospitality – try their beers.

This ‘orse didn’t win although I’m sure it tried its best.
Sign outside the West End Tap. It’s all in the small print:)

eye – the inside story

Visit to the opticians last week and this picture caught my eye, so to speak. It does have a partner but I thought one image would be enough. I was just sat there having satisfactorily read GHUTDF¹ in very small font when Annabelle the optician popped this up on the screen giving me a clean bill of health.

“Oo can I have a copy of that please”. One click (per pic/eye) and it was on its way to me. Pretty amazing what is “connected” these days.

It’s a good job my prescription hasn’t changed. My eye sight is so bad the lenses cost a fortune for them to be not the thickness of jam jar bases, especially since I had to have varifocals!!! I had always thought that my short sightedness would begin to correct itself as I got older and my near vision deteriorated as it inevitably seems to do with age. I was wrong.

Never mind. Worse things happen at sea. For example ships can be enveloped in the tentacles of a giant octopus and dragged down to the inky depths. Alternatively the ship² could be lost inside the Bermuda triangle, disappearing without trace leaving no clue as to its fate. Both those are a lot worse than wearing varifocals. You have to agree. Bit random mind you.

Also a bit random is that today looks like being a good day to put the roofing felt on the shed. Many of you will have followed the progress of the shed in previous posts. Well today it should get finished and be ready to accept the garden furniture, its designated fate. Fotos will inevitably phollow.

Ciao Amigos…

¹ I don’t remember the actual letters. These are random examples of what the letters might have been. It was an eye test not a memory test, which I would have failed 🙂
² Highly unlikely to be the same ship. Would have been very lucky to have been rescued from that octopus, unless the octopus happened to be the cause of the disappearance within the Bermuda triangle which is possible, I suppose.

End User food and drink fun stuff gadgets H/W piracy

(Part of) A Day in the Life

Post author By Kory Kessel
Post date Friday, 16 May, 2014
1 Comment on (Part of) A Day in the Life

	08h14	Woke up (to a sweet small kiss from My Missus…thanks, honey). Got out of bed.
	08h19	Open Chrome tab to eztv.it. Locate torrent for and click its Magnet link.
	08h19	Confirm torrent download on Transmission.
	08h15	Check Notifications on iPhoneKory (within arm’s reach at bedside, of course), to get up-to-speed with what happened during sleep time. Emails, text messages, instant messages, downloads completed, Facebook notifications, Twitter notifications, whether the Cubs beat the Cards.
	08h18	Drag self from bed to desk chair and lay hands on keyboard and mouse.

When I took keys in hand this morning I thought I would capture a typical day from wake up to lie down. Not only did I think I could do that, but I thought I could make it compelling reading too, something able to easily transport my legion of readers (crowd? pack? coven?) to that special place where the words flow like wine. Belly-button gazing of the highest order and noblest cause, right?

	08h20	Go back to eztv.it. Locate torrent for and click its Magnet link.
	08h20	Confirm torrent download on Transmission.
	08h21	Leave chair.
	08h22	08h22 Get dressed, put on shoes, help make bed.

No. It just cannot be done. If getting a typical day down is already boring me into submission there can be little doubt that anyone who is not me is by this point scrambling madly for their own mouse and keyboard in a desperate attempt to avoid subtle but sure brain death. Or they are reaching for a noose or sharp razor.

Multi-tasking. All of us who these days spend any significant amount of time in front of a computer or tablet speak of it. In fact, nowadays the term rolls off our tongues so easily, one has to wonder just how many of the children born today are working on first-wording it for the delight and/or horror of their parents. I can do this while I am doing that and at the same time I have this going on and that will finish at right about the time this is just getting started and by the end of the day I will have done enough work (and played enough) for three people.

Alt+Tab, Alt+Tab, Alt+Tab, Alt+Tab, Alt+Tab (OSX users, substitute ⌘ for Alt)

So later that same morning I found myself working on this post for trefor.net, checking Facebook, finishing up an article edit and pushing it back across to the client, checking Facebook, writing a bit more into my post, integrating Kat Edmonson’s “Way Down Low” into my music library, direct messaging a friend on Twitter to set plans for meeting up in London next week, using Lightroom to touch up a few photos I took last weekend in my wife’s fantastic Normandy garden, configuring my just-arrived Ricoh Theta (more on that soon enough), slicing-and-dicing my way around airbnb.com in search of a one-night stay in Chartres for a visiting friend, tweaking my post a little more, tagging myself in a Facebook photo, chasing a an alert for a Rolleiflex 2.8F that recently came up for sale on eBay, and googling (via Bing.com) reviews on a new Egyptian restaurant in the neighborhood (a boy’s gotta eat).

Anyone out there want to hear about my afternoon?

Related posts:

fun stuff

State of the art retail tech at new Lincoln Tesco – exclusive preview

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 15 May, 2014
6 Comments on State of the art retail tech at new Lincoln Tesco – exclusive preview

Went along to the preview evening of the new Tesco in Lincoln, a store jam packed with the latest in retail tech. This post takes a look at some of it including mobile point of sale technology and new high speed checkouts.

I wouldn’t ordinarily get excited about the opening of a new shop – witness my amazement at the queues outside a new Joules in downtown Lincoln when I was walking to work one day. I live down the road from Tesco in Lincoln and they’ve been building a new one since forever. A few weeks ago I was carrying my shopping and negotiating the building site and happened to stop to chat with one of their managers to ask when the new gaff was opening.

The manager, Les I believe his name was, waxed lyrically, nay excitedly about the forcoming changes. “Got state of the art tech and one of the company’s best young managers in David Walrdon”. I hooked up with Dave on LinkedIn and got myself invited to the above referenced preview.

I was after tech stuff. Operating systems, frequencies, percentage cost savings, efficiencies, bandwidth. Interesting things like that. Unfortunately all I got was 80Mbps broadband and approximately 20 wifi hotspots and I could always talk to their IT guy once the flurry of activity over the opening of the new store had died down.

With hindsight that is fair enough. If your business is running a shop you outsource the details like how IT works under the hood. In fact you outsource everything. When a store needs a new petrol station they just order a “petrol station” and one turns up and is installed, just like that. Same goes for whole Tesco Express stores – just like they do at McDonalds.

The preview evening was really an opportunity for Tesco to show some VIPs (in this case me and 150 close friends) around and to beta test some departments. In our case the bakery which insisted that we walked away with carrier bags full of cakes and bread and then ushered us to the ~~cafe~~ restaurant (called Decks) where a full roast dinner was imposed upon us. Good job I hadn’t eaten too many pancakes and Krispy Kreme doughnuts on my way around.

There is tech to talk about. The electrical department has some really cool stuff on show. There are screens everywhere and staff can swipe their Hudls to move the content onto these screens. Good oh. A lot easier to see things in 100 inch Technicolour HD than 7inch Hudl.

There were big XBox and Playstation displays and the former came with a sound shower whereby you could only really her the sound if you stood under the “shower”. This was still being installed so I couldn’t try it out – I’m not in to games anyway. Tesco are also pushing BlinkBox heavily as a “better” alternative to Netflix. I asked the manager whether they were having any Net Neutrality issues but he didn’t know 🙂

The mobile demos were v cool. When you picked up a phone the display in front of you came up with info on that phone. Pick up two or more phones and you got side by side comparisons of those phones. Note there is a limit to how many phones you can pick up… What struck me was that it would be very useful if they could have displayed Apple and Samsung products next to each other so that you could make the comparisons. The Apple marketing Gestapo do not allow this and actively police the policy. They don’t want you to like ’em – they just want your money, whatever it takes.

Tesco naturally want you to hang around this area. They have a tablet play area for little kids and free teas and coffee for the grown ups. They are after PC World and Currys’ business. I have been buying stuff from PC World and the experience isn’t great. Takes ages to process you at the checkout, at least if you want a business VAT receipt. Their systems are archaic. Last weekend I bought a (gulp) cheap ASUS laptop. I needed one for a few legacy apps at home. It was only £250 so getting down to the Chromebook level. Build standard was not nearly as good though and no Solid State Hard Drive. What’s more it had no CD drive which I didn’t find out about until a few days later. The same laptop but inc CD drive was on sale at Tesco for the same £250 price. The guy at PC World didn’t feel it worth mentioning that there was no build in CD drive. Either that or he didn’t know. Next time I’ll get it from Tesco (hopefully there won’t be a next time for a legacy PC).

The other bit of tech on show was at the checkout. The staff were a little cagey when I asked if you could repeat their demo so that I could video it. This checkout was supposedly going to give Tesco a competitive advantage. Other superstores were looking at it. I didn’t mentio nthat I’d already taken loads of pics and one partial vid. The store opens today anyway so I don’t think it matters.

The checkout looked like something out of a hospital – a smaller version of a full body scanner. You just chucked your shopping onto a high speed belt and what seemed like 10 or more scanners scanned it from all angles as it went through. V impressive. Any unscanned items just got picked up by an attentive member of staff and manually scanned. Dunno how they knew which ones to pick up. Should have asked but I was too busy videoing.

The store is full of lots of interesting tech for running the business. Inventory management and ordering for example. Unfortunately this is going to have to wait until I’ve seen their IT guy which I may get around to. Writing about retail does seem to come with benefits. In the case of Tesco it was free bread and a meal. Wandering around Retail Expo with my mate Umar from Murco Petroleum it was the free cocktails that seemed to be dispensed from practically every booth. Hic

There is only so much column space you can allocate to retail. Next up another exclusive update on the Lincoln Eleanor Cross project. You heard it first on trefor.net…

Another good read:

Retail Expo – observations on mobile devices

Update 28th June – they have stopped using the multiscanner checkouts in the way I’ve described here – machine kept missing items and they had to be retrieved by a member of staff for individual scanning.

Engineer fun stuff

Breaking strain of a KitKat – official definition

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 15 May, 2014
3 Comments on Breaking strain of a KitKat – official definition

The question of the day is what is the breaking strain of a KitKat? This came up in conversation in the Strugglers last Friday “early doors”. I don’t recall the context, it was in the pub. In the pub these things have to be written down, or immediately forgotten.

The act of writing things you hear in pubs used to be done on the back of beer mats. Nowadays it’s rattled off in an email addressed to oneself which is what I did in this case. Saves a fortune in beer mats. Extends their useful life. People will no doubt still vandalise beermats, primarily in the execution of the “who threw that beermat” joke whereby a couple of tears are made in one side of the mat which is then affixed to the nostrils. The person stands up and utters “who threw that beermat”. Always gets a laugh. Ish. The how many beermats can you flip game is not described here as it is not destructive to the beermat. I digress.

Continuing with the digression one has to ask oneself how many good jokes heard in pubs have been forgotten because they weren’t immediately written down. How many great ideas have foundered on the beer washed rocks of the tavern, inn or public house?

Lots. When I was a student in Bangor I used to occasionally hitch-hike the length of Wales to visit my grandmother who lived in Cefneithin, a small mining community between Llanelli and Caerfyrddin. She had a traditional Welsh approach to meals. A cooked breakfast would be followed by elevenses, lunch at 12, afternoon tea at four and then dinner at 6pm at which point, after a respectable interval I would be kicked out to the pub and return home to a plate of ham sandwiches waiting for me in the kitchen.

On one such occasion I went to the pub and woke up the next day to find a beermat with the words “parrot” and “coal” written on the back. They were the key points to a great joke I’d heard the night before. Only problem was I couldn’t for the life of me remember the rest of the joke. Ah well.

This doesn’t get us any nearer to answering the question of the day. Before we can answer we have to agree on the unit of measure used to define the breaking strain. If you look up “breaking strain” on Wikipedia you find yourself redirected to a page about Deformation mechanics. I had hoped to come up with a post here that illustrated an intellectual grasp of the necessary physics associated with KitKat breaking strains described in an easily understood way that further showed me as a true man of the people.

Unfortunately having stared at the Wikipedia page for some time my brain began to hurt. I pulled back before the activity got too dangerous. My brain too, like the humble KitKat, has a breaking strain. The units for the breaking strain of my brain are likely to be different to that of the breaking strain of a KitKat. I am unable to describe either for the reasons mentioned above.

In the interest of finishing off this post to our mutual satisfaction it is still necessary to somehow define the breaking strain of said KitKat. A sensible way to do this might be to describe it in terms of thumb pressure. This however brings with it problems.

Experience tells us that a four finger KitKat will be easier to break than a two finger job, assuming that you’re trying to break it along the vertical central line¹. This is because the additional width of four fingers over two fingers brings with it twice as much amplification of force due to leverage from the sides of the KitKat.

The breaking strain will therefore vary dependent on the size of the KitKat. We don’t need to worry about that here but in the table below the differences are examined. Laboratory testing (in the pub) has shown that there are distinct grades of thumb pressure:

Thumb pressure	Practical use
Very light	No effect on a KitKat. Only occasionally applied when a gentle nose scratch is required
Quite light	No effect on a KitKat. Used when attempting to turn over a page in a paper or novel, sometimes requiring the application of moisture to the thumb
Lightish	Feels as if it should have an effect on four fingers of KitKat but in practice does not. Usually the pressure required to scratch a bit of crud off your phone screen.
Moderately medium	This will always break a four finger KitKat and is the standard pressure for such a task. Also works on spaghetti when you are trying to get it all in the pan. Not good enough for two fingers.
Medium	Also used in breaking four fingers although borderline overkill for many people. Could work for two fingers in the right environmental conditions. Is usable on Breakaways but why would you?
Strong medium	The standard application for two fingers. Not really suitable for four fingers as can cause finger strain when the KitKat breaks unexpectedly easily.
Medium strong	As with four fingers in the Medium category this is almost overkill for two fingers. This amount of pressure is almost enough to break a thick slab of Cadbury’s chocolate although we all know this often takes a bit of a smack on the corner of a table to get it going. Also useful for breaking pork scratchings into smaller more manageable pieces.
Strong	Overkill for all types of KitKat and should only be used with caution on anything as thumb strain is a real danger. Will definitely work on thick slabs of chocolate. Not many people can exert this amount of thumb pressure. A recognised component of “plumber’s grip”
Uber strong	Only reached after completing 7 years plumbing apprenticeship. Very rare.

That’s it as far as KitKats and breaking strains go. Hope this has been of some use. Look out for future posts on quantification of willpower when offered another beer.

Images courtesy of @TomAndThat – follow him.

¹ For the purpose of this exercise we assume that the KitKat is to be broken into two equal halves along the central line. Breaking off one finger with three remaining requires totally different physics. We also assume that the KitKat is not being broken across the middle of all fingers. Ironically to do this for four fingers takes more effort than for two which is the total opposite to the scenario first described.

Kitchen of things – the connected juicer #IPv6 #internetofthings

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 14 May, 2014
No Comments on Kitchen of things – the connected juicer #IPv6 #internetofthings

The connected kitchen, made possible by IPv6 and the internet of things is something oft discussed. Fridges that remind you when you need more milk or when the milk is about to go off is one “useful” and habitually touted suggestion that springs to mind.

I was recently chatting to my mam and dad about the coal fired range that used to be in my Welsh grandmother’s stone floored kitchen. The tone of the conversation was how technology has moved on. It came as a total surprise to hear that the range was a step on from my mam’s childhood in Ireland where all they had was an open fire with some bricks around it to prop up the saucepans.

We now fill our kitchens with more gadgets than we really have room for. At our house we have a food mixer, handheld liquidiser, pasta maker, slow cooker, George Foreman Grill, orange juice squeezer (hand held lever job) orange juice squeezer (electric), garlic press, two fondues, a tandoori oven (clay pot), scales (electric and with counter weights) as well as the usual microwave, kettle toaster, dishwasher, fridge and rangemaster double width cooker. I’m sure there must be more. Just can’t think of any and Mrs Davies ain’t around to ask. The (cheapo) bread maker was rubbish and was thrown out years ago. It’s been replaced by the fair hands of Mrs Davies who kneads an excellent loaf.

Imagine if all these gadgets were “connected”. For one thing we would need a very robust Wireless LAN. What sort of data would they provide?

The orange juicer would be able to let me know how many oranges I’d squeezed in its lifetime, average number of oranges squeezed per day, volume of orange juice provided etc etc. I could probably associate a google account with juicer username – multiple usernames of course to accommodate profiles for the whole family.

This would enable google to sell my data, anonymously of course, so that I could benefit from great deals on fresh oranges, spare juicer parts (these metal squeezing bits don’t last forever you know) and even juicer servicing contracts where the bloke turns up to fix your juicer just before it is about to go kaput (or whatever juicers do at the end of their life).

We would need the juicer to automatically recognise users – logging in would be a faff. This would generate a hugely lucrative new wave of internet enabled juicer sales. This isn’t the kind of thing that can be retrofitted.

And then there’s the app. Downloadable from the Play Store, App Store, Marketplace or whatever your phone or tablet uses. It’s all good stuff for an economy emerging from the worst recession since the bubonic plague.

I’ve only mentioned juicers so far. Yer juicer would be integrated with the fridge to coordinate stock level of oranges. You would have to keep the oranges in the fridge even if you don’t do that now. It’s the only way of keeping track of stock levels. Whoever heard of an internet connected fruit bowl! Doh!

And don’t forget to let your fridge know when you are off on holiday. Last thing you want is the Tesco van turning up to deliver automatically ordered oranges and you not being in. Think of the growing pile of increasingly rotting oranges on your doorstep. What a waste. What a pong!

I’ve only really mentioned the juicer but each gadget would have its own unique set of data. The GFG would tell you how much fat it had extracted from your diet, the breadmaker, should you have one could tell you how much fat you had put back in to your diet. The GFG could obviously hook up with the breadmaker to tell it to go easy on the portion size. The toaster would also connect with the breadmaker to tell it that more supplies were needed. This is all such useful stuff. Innit. Reality is that we probably would find uses for a connected kitchen but won’t know what they are until we’ve tried a few of the connected apps and gadgets. Just like some apps on our phones strike a chord¹ and some don’t and are discarded contemptuously or just clog up your screen never to be used.

Me old gran would be turning in her grave. Suspect a connected griddle wouldn’t have made her Welsh Cakes come out any better. Lovely they were:)

In the meantime I’ll just have to stick to asking the butler whether cook has finished making the bread for the day. Lovely smells wafting up from the kitchen to the East Wing.

¹ I have the guitar tuner app, actually

Engineer fun stuff H/W voip voip hardware

Snom Audio Lab

Dusan Aleksic is the Head of Hardware Development for Snom Technology AG

In the end of nineties Serbia was under UN sanctions and as a young electro engineer I was a part of the small team tasked with maintaining the gas masks in stock. I had an open issue before me: the carbon microphone was out of date and needed to be replaced. Unfortunately, the microphone in question was originally produced in another part of the former Yugoslavia and it could no longer be had. Also, copying it didn’t work as our punch tool machine was unable to make such complicated rounded holes with the strange patterns, and simply making holes on the microphone’s surface and trying to talk through them produced terrible results. We quickly realized that we would need to create a new design and establish a correlation between hole-shapes and design patterns of the microphone and its audio performance. In our audio lab we had a single B&K audio measurement system, which was a bit old hat but still in good shape and still in calibration range, and after some time the job was complete.

I moved on and became a part of the new growing network convergence world that first developed digital terminals and after that VoIP and wireless devices. In the beginning of the 2000s, VoIP’s early stages, the acoustical audio measurements become unimportant. People believed that the “mighty” DSP could solve any problem, and the knowledge on terminal devices and acoustic design had been pushed to the second plane: in most cases speech transmission quality judgment excluded electroacoustic components.

How It All Started

At snom technology AG we were aware of the complexity of VoIP terminal devices from the early beginning. We improved audio quality over the years by combining our acoustic experience with the latest DSP algorithms and our VoIP signaling know-how. Specifically, we solved various issues inherent in VoIP technology, including processing delay, network delay, network packet loss, need for VAD and CNG, countless types of noise, etc. And, of course, we addressed the main issue, that being synchronization, as by its very nature VoIP is an asynchronous connection, and sometimes audio packets are dropped simply because the sender and receiver are not using the same clock.

VoIP Audio Measurement equipment evolves in sync with VoIP technology, and as a VoIP pioneer snom has helped it to quickly reach a mature state which, improving overall overall audio quality through the use of various narrow and wide band codes.

Snom Audio Lab at a Glance

For modern telecommunications, old audio standards such as TIA-810B (Narrow band) and TIA-920 (Wide Band) fail to match requirements. These standards are focused on half duplex connection. Important aspects of the audio quality are not exposed, and many typical problems remain unresolved.

TIA-based audio optimized devices are unable to match customer expectations for perfect audio quality, and for that reason two years ago the snom development team began following the latest audio requirements for wide-band audio based on ETSI 202 739 and ETSI 202 740.

With ETSI, all requirements from the TIA standard are covered, but it doesn’t stop there. ETSI extends the requirements in frequency response domain and in loudness ratings, which requires high quality electroacoustic converters. ETSI also includes double talk behavior measurements and speech quality in presence of network impairments (packet loss, jitter) and, at the end, speech quality in presence of the background noise.

Today the snom audio lab uses Head Acoustic software and equipment, and I believe we have the best-in-the-market tool to create the non-compromise audio quality. We can fully cover all ETSI measurements, and we can do additional various HQS-IP items, such as TOSQA and PESQ, or spectral echo attenuation vs. time, or test our mockup designs to fix all over-limits distortions in the very early phase of the ID development.

Snom has put all of these tools and software to design the 7xx phone family, and with this product we deliver the best quality to our customers, this according to the latest requirements of modern telecommunication. Snom7xx, for example, has been built to pass the frequency response requirement based on ETSI 202-379 at every handset-to-ear pressure. The handset uses a specially designed high leak receiver that allows for the best sound quality at every handset. We use the most realistic artificial ear type during tests, too, which makes the receive curve extremely difficult to surpass.

On another front, high quality jitter buffer and packet loss concealment software in snom 7xx have been improved via the Head Acoustic network simulator in very bad network conditions. The speakerphone has excellent double talk performance, and algorithms such as background noise cancellation and adaptive gain control provide for voice clarity in every condition.
snom5

In the end, I am glad to appease the machine haters out there by saying that subjective tests are as important as objective tests, and I can remember many cases where the good objectively-tuned phone just provides bad audio. At snom, well-tuned audio devices mean a lot of objective tuning followed by subjective sessions, until the job has is finished.

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End User fun stuff

The passport photo is here – all nationalities

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 12 May, 2014
1 Comment on The passport photo is here – all nationalities

Roll up, roll up. Come and see the passport photo. It has arrived. It is well and truly here. The day you thought would never come. Disbelievers every man jack of you.

What is more, all nationalities are welcome. No parochial “you’re not from round here” short sighted UKIP voting bigotry in our gaff. No siree (Bob). Everybody is welcome.

Bring the kids. Bring your mother in law. Bring a bottle and bring one along for me.

Passport Photo’s Here! All Nationalities.

End User fun stuff voip

When You Look Behind You There’s No Open Door

Post author By Marcos Campos
Post date Monday, 12 May, 2014
No Comments on When You Look Behind You There’s No Open Door

Someone asked me, “What is the future of VoIP?”

I can’t even predict my future living situation, let alone the fate of the Internet.

I went to dinner last night with an out-of-town friend. We met some other friends down in a part of south Austin that not long ago was a dinky mostly-Hispanic neighborhood, complete with dinky houses and dinky Mexican restaurants. On this occasion, though – and I understand this is pretty much the norm now – we waited over an hour for a table at a restaurant called El Chile. On a Monday night.

Once again: ATX WTF?

What’s going on? Is there some festival in town nobody told me about? All of us are baffled. And more than merely baffled we all lament our missed opportunities, having not bought more real estate in Austin in the 90s.

Back in 1992 I lived in a little cabin off of West Mary Street in south Austin, close enough to the railroad tracks to high-five train engineers as they passed by my window. And when I say “little”, I mean that place was small, with a ceiling low enough that any person of average height could extend their arms overhead and press against it. I was reading a lot of existential literature back then. The guys who lived in the other half of the cabin dropped a lot of acid, and I had a standing invitation.

I realized one day that I had to make a life change, when while reading one of Henry Miller’s diatribes on the value of excrement I found myself saying, “This guy makes a lot of sense.” That was too much. I couldn’t go down that path. I laid down the Miller, and the Sartre, and the Nietzsche. I cleaned up. I sobered up. I resurrected my forsaken programming skills, and I went to work, launching a career in software development.

Computer science was not a profession on the radar when I was a kid. Instead, it was called Data Processing. A bunch of guys huddled in the basements of tall buildings who wore pocket protectors, button-down white shirts, and who carried slide rules. And I am not talking caricature. I met these guys, being friends with various adults who worked near the data processing department, and that is how it truly was. The image from the 70s of the stereotypical weakling engineer getting corporate sand kicked in his face? Based on fact. Those programmers were not among society’s movers and shakers.

Things change.

Nowadays, it’s like those old E.F. Hutton commercials. (I know, you’re too young. Google it.) These days in a post-9/11 world, where the dot-com bust has faded in memory, the guy who launches the latest greatest IPO has the ear of the tech world. When programmer geek-nerd talks, people listen.

And who is that? Who has everyone’s ear these days? Is there anyone who can really track where technology is going to be in 5 years? In 2 years? Next year?

I’m sitting at dinner with my friends – instead of waiting an hour behind a line of hipsters we walk across the street to another restaurant called Bouldin Creek Coffeehouse that offers a Slacker Buffet: rice and beans. Perfect – and we start talking about missed opportunities. I tell my out-of-town friend that the little cabin I occupied in 1992 is probably selling for $500k these days, and he — correctly — winces in disbelief.

Another friend at the table worked at Microsoft for a time, and he tells us of one project manager who got in early and cashed out with $20 million. This person then created a startup with that money and sold a grand total of 13 units of her product, 5 of which she bought herself. $19.8 million burned through. Riches to rags.

Some people who end up in the right place at the right time come to the (wrong) conclusion that they are geniuses. Others realize the nature of luck and don’t ascribe their success to their personal abilities. And still others have to fail and succeed several times before their true abilities shine through. Time reveals the truth.

People who work hard and who are smart tend to do well in a meritocracy, which often leads to the incorrect assumption that someone who is in a position of power or success must have greater abilities than someone who is not. This is one of the pitfalls of living in a meritocracy.

Who came out on the winning side of last year’s technology? Is that going to be the winning horse in the next race?

I worked with a woman who left PCs Limited in 1988, just before that company changed its name to Dell Computer Corporation. She kicks herself to this day. How could she have known? I kick myself sometimes for not re-investing in Apple in 2008. I kick myself sometimes for not investing in Netflix. I try not to dwell in regrets or on those blind spots of the past, though, opting instead to derive what lessons there are to learn from it all.

The fact is that there may yet be some value in the words of Henry Miller, who wrote:

“This is the greatest damn thing about the universe. That we can know so much, recognize so much, dissect, do everything, and we can’t grasp it.”

Over this past week I spent time trying to grasp the future of data and voice over the Internet. It’s just an area of focus. There is no end point. There will never be a point where it’s all understood.

I am reminded of something the wise old Tallulah Bankhead said:

“If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.”

So I guess this is it. It is the time. Get on with it.

agricultural broken gear food and drink fun stuff Weekend

Saturday Snapshot (10-May-2014)

Post author By Kory Kessel
Post date Monday, 12 May, 2014
No Comments on Saturday Snapshot (10-May-2014)

Corner anyone in France and ask them what the first thing is that comes to mind when they think of Normandy. Will they answer “The cream/butter/cheese/crepes/Calvados!”? Maybe. Will they answer “D-Day!” or “French liberation!” Uh…probably not. “Le Mont St. Michel”? I’d be shocked. No, the first word that typically comes to the lips of any self-respecting French person in association with Normandy is “rain”.

Of course, for the purpose of this website and its primary intended audience, all French person enunciations are translated into English. Glad to get that out in front here. OK, continuing…

Yes, Normandy is notorious for being one extremely rainy place, and not without good reason. I cannot offer any statistics (and it isn’t as if anyone reading my words here would really want to trudge through them, anyway), but after nearly 8 years of part-time residency in Pays d’Auge — Normandy’s finest area, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise — I can say with authority that anyone coming to the region unprepared to deal with the wet stuff has their head in the clouds.

Oh, don’t be afraid to laugh. Sure, that crack was a little on-the-nose, but that doesn’t mean it is undeserving of your smile. Really, is it wrong that so much of why I enjoy writing is the opportunities it presents for entertaining myself?

My Missus and I planned to head over to the regular Saturday farmer’s market in Lisieux, and no grey skies or drizzly misty rain or unseasonal May temps (for non-Normandy France places, anyway) was going to keep us from doing so. There were Orbecs to be had — reason enough to throw on a slicker — and other delectables as well. Fresh-pressed apple juice..cream so magical it should come with its own fairy tale..a tub of those remarkable slow-cooked potatoes with lardon that make me want to do handstands, somersaults, cartwheels, and other gymnastic acts I no longer have any hope of completing. We would not be daunted.

Arriving in Lisieux, My Missus headed to a parking lot in which we usually have success, and slipped our tiny rental car into the last visible spot, skirting just ahead of some noodnik who was just a little too interested in his phone at just the wrong moment. Survival of the fittest, baby. (Of course, it didn’t hurt that our rental was an itty-bitty Fiat Panda on this day, a “car” that wouldn’t survive collision with a good-sized rodent let alone any vehicle on the road.) So soon enough we were walking — singing? — in the rain, the market in our sights.

Overcast skies and dark clouds are lousy conditions under which to take photos (color photos, anyway), so at first I figured I wouldn’t be adding to my collection of market photos. Still, I had our Olympus TG-1 in tow (a “tough” camera, a possession of my father-in-law’s that My Missus came to when he passed on about a year ago) and megapixels are really cheap, so I resolved to snap, just to see where my eye fell on such a day. Tentative at first — no matter how alive and colorful a bunch of radishes seems, there would be better Saturdays for that kind of image — I shortly found myself firing at every marginally interesting umbrella that fell within view.

Only once before can I recall spending more than a minute-and-a-half considering umbrellas, that being back in the first semester of my first year of university (1983, nosy reader) when I wrote a one-page essay for an Introduction to Creative Writing class on the necessity of having one on a rainy night walking around midtown Manhattan (lest one fall victim to those in the hands of others). I have owned umbrellas, of course (though I don’t think I’ve actually ever paid for one), and I have never had a bone to pick with one (though I never think to grab one when leaving my dwelling on a rainy day), but other than that long-ago-lost five-paragraph throw-down I have never paid them much mind. Perhaps, then, this is why all of a sudden on a rainy Saturday Normandy morning I was finding umbrellas to be so devastatingly curious.

At first I just waited for the umbrellas to come my way, content with serendipity’s role. Before much time at all had passed, though, I was on the hunt, leaving My Missus to take care of our market needs.

“That one is boring so I won’t bother.” “That one must’ve come from some trade show or other.” “Wow! that is one big-ass umbrella!” “Strange the high percentage of mostly-broken umbrellas people seem content to continue putting to (hardly good) use.” “I wonder, is the fact that her umbrella matches her purse and shoes intended or a just happy accident of fate?” “Funny how I don’t know what My Missus’s umbrella looks like…I wonder if she is wondering where I am?”

The mind, once focused, can be a powerful, dangerous, slippery place, indeed, and there are puddles everywhere!

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Partial shed

There follows herein two partial shed images. The first image is more partial than the second for reasons that are obvious when you compare the two.

Way back when I worked at Marconi there was a guy called Steve Meats who was a comedian and who as part of his act wore a partial trousers. This was a pair of trousers with the legs cut off at approximately knee height and which were sewn back on with some sort of suspenders. They were funny. The partial trousers have no relation to the partial shed.

The partial shed is still partial at the time of writing because the heavens have verily opened upon the space where the shed stands and ~~health and safety~~ common sense has dictated a withdrawal to the shelter of the whole house and a refreshing cup of tea.

I say whole house but the intention is not to leave the reader with the impression that I am in every room in our not insubstantial dwelling but that the house itself is not partial. This is good because partial houses can be very damp, especially in the prevailing meteorological conditions and dampness can lead to discomfort and wet socks. As a point of information I am not wearing socks at the moment. Summer is almost upon us and socks are not always needed at this time of year.

In revealing that the house is not partial I am of course not saying that it is impartial. This play with words would be a misleading use of an alternate definition for the word partial.

The partial shed requires the fitting of a roof for it to no longer be partial. Fitting the roof is going to require the use of step ladders and is better done in dry conditions. I am not optimistic that suitable conditions will be in play before Tuesday which is the next dry day according to the Met Office website.

The Met Office is reasonably accurate these days and I am happy that no further shed erecting will take place before then. This will be reviewed in the light of conditions on the ground, just as umpires will assess whether play can restart after rain has stopped play in a cricket match. The shed will not have had the benefit of ground staff running out to protect it with covers. The head groundsman at our house, ie me, has adjudged that little harm will come to it in the meantime.

It must be said that the process of erecting a (partial) shed is quite satisfying. A man easily rediscovers diy skills long considered lost, or at least vestigial. Instinct comes in to play. This should be seen as especially useful once the reader is armed with the knowledge that the shed is around fifteen years old and was originally a play house. Its disassembly and reassembly on its new site is the completion of its reincarnation as a shed/garden furniture store, a process that will also save the Davies household several hundred pounds by obviating the need to buy a new metal shed which is what I had my eye on.

Because the shed is old the construction process is not exact and the insertion of additional screws here and there has been necessary to get the job done. This has been made effortless by the use of the new Makita cordless drill/screwdriver which every man should have.

At this point I am going to call literary proceedings to a halt. The rain has stopped, we are into a sunny spell and I am off out to inspect the wicket. We may get this shed finished before Tuesday after all 🙂

A short while later… the rain did hold off long enough to get the roof on, with the help of Robert from the allotment over the back (thx Rob). Still need to get some new roofing felt on but the three pictures below otherwise show the whole process.

And finally the view from the inside of the shed looking out. Wahey…

Engineer fun stuff mobile apps Weekend

Warp drive & a forecast date for technology of teleporting

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 9 May, 2014
2 Comments on Warp drive & a forecast date for technology of teleporting

I was discussing my experiences of being without a phone for ten days concluding that the phone was something I’d rather have than not have despite the fact that to some extent the damn gadget takes over your life. It isn’t really a phone any more anyway. The percentage of its time spent making phone calls is tiny compared with all the other intergalactic communicating computer functions.

What is missing it seems to me is a Teleporting app. It just seems a natural evolution of the capability of the ~~hand held computer~~ personal computing device (it isn’t going to be hand held for very much longer). Who wouldn’t want to be able to just say “beam me up Scotty” and reappear in the pub saloon bar¹.

Yes this is all dreamland stuff but it is Friday afternoon and the weekend beckons. Clearly the problem is the lack of any technology available to make this happen. It would be easy enough to put together an App, integrate it with Google Maps for setting coordinates and provide a button with the words “beam” or “beam me up” (or even one with user-programmable text – let’s push the boat out). Of course it wouldn’t work but might look good.

The App could just be waiting for the back end tech to catch up and don’t worry, this it very much will do. We would also need more maps data than just for planet Earth

The question is when. When you think about it the answer to this is really obvious. Teleporting technology will become available at around the same time as dilithium crystal powered warp drives. Stands to reason, innit. This won’t be for a while yet but it will come.

I won’t be around to see it but that doesn’t matter. It’s the same principle as planting oak trees. You don’t do it for yourself. You do it for the enjoyment of later generations. The savvy amongst you (that’s pretty much everyone who reads this blog:) ) will have spotted that I’ve omitted to put a date against this. I don’t have an Alpha date let alone Beta or General Release. That’s cos I’ve been around the block. It can be fatal to put a date down that you are doomed to miss. Better to keep it vague.

This does make it harder to put a business case around it but lets face it. Business cases are often based on sales figures plucked out of thin air anyway. Either that or an analyst report that someone has paid a lot of money for so it must be right. Right?

The vagueness of the schedule also points to budget overruns. Whoever owns the project should factor in some additional capital up front. Lots of additional capital. Probably more capital than the Gross Domestic Product of the world. Totally buggers up the ROI numbers but well worth it. After all it is a Friday and the more time we have available to spend in the pub the better which is what Teleporting will do for us.

In considering the business case we shouldn’t forget ongoing operational costs. By buying additional drinking time it is going to mean we will be spending more money on beer. This is a difficult one to cost in because everyone drinks at a different pace although there must be an ONS report somewhere with an average number of pints drunk in a given time period. The average time saved by Teleporting would also need to be calculated and this will in all probability require some extensive primary research involving visiting many Public Houses ~~around the country~~ globally.

Finally we would need to forecast the cost of a pint at the time the tech becomes available. Hopefully the government won’t have upped the tax on beer too much by then².

So there you go. A take on the timeline for Teleporting. It will arrive at the same time as Warp drive…

¹ Mine’s a pint of Timothy Taylor’s Landlord bitter.
² I did say this was a dream.

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Vastly Objectionable Ignominious Phrase

Post author By Kory Kessel
Post date Wednesday, 7 May, 2014
3 Comments on Vastly Objectionable Ignominious Phrase

What the lone acronym in “VoIP Week” does NOT represent.

As a longtime fan of Marvel’s super hero comic books — 40 years and happily counting — I find myself quite satisfied with the persisting Hollywood trend of putting these Fantastic! Incredible! Amazing! Uncanny! Mighty! characters on the Silver Surfer…er, silver screen. And almost as much fun as seeing these wonders brought to life is the narrative means used to tie them all together, that being the oh-so-shadowy government agency S.H.I.E.L.D., which as acronyms go is one heckuva Marvel-ous mouthful (originally “Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division”, then changed in 1991 to “Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate”…both way-cool).

S.H.I.E.L.D.

So what does all of this have to do with VoIP? Well, as great acronyms go absolutely nothing, as S.H.I.E.L.D. is way-cool while V-o-I-P is decidedly not. In fact, though the meaning behind V-o-I-P — Voice over Internet Protocol — is a cause célèbre, worthy of consideration, contemplation, conjecture, and cockeyed optimism, the “word” verbalized evokes images of a thick liquid dripping onto a badly-tuned piece of tin poised alongside a carnival microphone.

Say it with me. Or better yet, don’t.

As awful an acronym as V-o-I-P is, one has to wonder how it came to stick as the most common reference term for the technology it represents. Could it be that as bad as it is, V-o-I-P is actually the best of a really bad bunch? Let’s see…

		IPT (IP Telephony)? Difficult double-consonant at the end, and perhaps too easy to rhyme with “gypped”…
		IT (Internet Telephony)? Taken.
		VoBB (Voice over Broadband? Again, like IPT, too easy to set a negative rhyme to.
		BT (Broadband Telephony)? Taken.
		BPS (Broadband Phone Service)? Proves that an ugly-sounding acronym is better than one with absolutely nothing going for it.

OK, so maybe I am no longer wondering how V-o-I-P took hold in the tech-y lexicon. After all, nature abhors a vacuum and all that (Horror vacui!). Also, sadly, nothing better was in the ether (evidenced above), and it isn’t as if the average man-on-the-street is going to say “Voice over Internet Protocol” every time they need to refer to the concept (of course, there is no way said average man-on-the-street is ever going to comfortably use the acronymic word “VoIP” either, but let’s not get bogged down in reality’s messy details). Still, it sure would be nice to be able to lay blame for V-o-I-P at someone’s keyboard, but unlike the massive majority of Internet-based whatever-and-whatsis there is absolutely nobody out there laying claim to originating — starting? envisioning? founding? — the term. Even if we could force somebody to take responsibility for this *four-letter-word* of a four-letter acronym, though, a proper punishment could never be levied as any attempt to do so would likely raise the ire of the Kids from C.A.P.E.R.^*

At this point the Marvel-literate among you might be gasping (Gasp!) for me to return to espousing on and praising the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe, for those of you not in-the-know who have hung on this far). It is “VoIP Week” at trefor.net, however, and other than their diametrically opposed acronym quality no other useful correlation can be made between S.H.I.E.L.D. and V-o-I-P (other than the fact, that is, that S.H.I.E.L.D. agents likely make extensive and heretofore unknown — and way-cool — use of VoIP technology). Still, you can’t beat a good opening.

^*The Civilian Authority for the Protection of Everybody, Regardless

VoIP Week Posts:

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TVs, lost remotes and fish tank screensavers

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 6 May, 2014
4 Comments on TVs, lost remotes and fish tank screensavers

Our TV remote control is lost. It is almost certainly down the side of the settee or one of the armchairs. I did look. It must have been a fairly cursory glance because that bit of plastic was not found. Didn’t jump up at me saying “here I am Tref”.

Not that it knows my name. At least it never got it from me. Might have heard it while we were watching the snooker, I suppose.

The fact is that the TV remote being lost hasn’t really affected me. I discovered the manual buttons down the right hand side of the screen. They allowed me to switch on the snooker. Fortunately the faff of switching channels was unnecessary. It was already tuned to the snooker.

Since then TV has played no part in our lives. It is there flat against the wall. Red LED indicating it is powered up but on standby.

I could I suppose find an app on the droid that serves as a TV remote. Not bothered. I quite like the idea of a screensaver showing fish in a tank. Tropical job. I’d like a fish tank although I don’t want the hassle of looking after the fish.

Friend of mine from University, Rhys, had an undergraduate project to observe the behavioural patterns of goldfish. He was supposed to feed them at the same time of day in the same part of the fish tank to see if they would congregate there in hungry anticipation.

The problem was we would shoot off somewhere for the weekend so on Friday Rhys would give them enough food to last until Monday morning. Totally messed up the experiment. The fish began to die and by the end of the spring term 39 out of 40 of them had died. Kicked the aquatic bucket. Rhys had to totally fabricate his experimental results:)

My other university “fish tank” story related to one of the lads who declined to come out with “the boys” one sunday night because he had a date. In those days Bangor was dry on a Sunday. The only source of alcohol was through a private club such as the British Legion or the Students Union or at a restaurant. We frequented the Taj Mahal, sadly now defunct.

On this occasion we hit the cinema and ended up in the Taj for a chicken biryani (meat vindaloo, onion bhaji, pilau rice, plain naan etc) and a few pints of lager.

Upon arrival we were sat next to the fish tank, always a favourite place to sit. Very relaxing when combined with Bollywood’s Greatest Hits. Just a few minutes later our pal was ushered, girl in tow, to the table the other side of the tank. I have no idea whether he had noticed us but we could definitely see him. He was out to impress big time and ordered a bottle of Blue Nun, in those days the height of sophistication. You have to believe he had the mickey taken out of him big time when we got back to the hall of residence. Blue Nun!

Hey. He had the night out with the girl and we didn’t 🙂

In those days I didn’t watch the TV. In fact Kid1 was thirteen years old before we had our first TV. We have one now, as you know, although we don’t watch it because the remote is lost. Feels just like the good old days:) There’s always iPlayer and tinterweb anyway and we didn’t have that in the good old days!

PS pic is totally arbitrary – fancied sticking it up

food and drink fun stuff Weekend

Saturday Snapshot (3-May-2014)

Post author By Kory Kessel
Post date Monday, 5 May, 2014
1 Comment on Saturday Snapshot (3-May-2014)

Lest regular readership get the mistaken impression that every La Famille Kessel Saturday is filled full-up with memorable diversion, today I will not report on a Normandy beachside kite festival competition or a world-class photo exhibit attended or any such specialness. Instead, dear and generous reader, I will gladly bring you along on a short walk I took around my corner of Paris’s 18th Arrondissement in search of photographs and dinner party nibbles.

First, to set the pin on the map, the part of 18eme in which La Famille Kessel has made home since 2001 is on the arrondissement’s northern edge, and not the storied and well-trodden Montmartre (though it isn’t far removed, and we do have a view of Sacre Coeur, provided someone is holding the back of your pants when you lean out the window and look sharply to the right). It is an immigrant neighborhood in the strongest sense of the word, with over 160 nationalities represented (the most diverse such area in all of Europe, in fact…or so we have so often been told). The heterogeneousness, in fact, seeps into and around everything…streetlife, the shops, the wide disparity in the quality and condition of the vehicles…and for a person with a photography bent and a halfway decent camera, every blue-sky sunny day reeks of opportunity.

American friends living in Holland were in town over the weekend with four kids in tow, and Saturday evening we would welcome them for eats and drinks. I had the main course set and prepared — three tartes a la tomates (recipe some other time), an herb-infested green salad with pistachio and a garlic-tomato-balsamic vinaigrette — but we were were sorely lacking for food-before-the-food, so out the door I went, bang into what from my fourth floor window looked like one of the Top 10 Best days of the year.

Happily, my window didn’t lie, and from the moment my shoes hit the sidewalk I felt a bounce in my step. The day was glorious. A crisp light wind, temperature right around 18ºC (64ºF for the U.S.-bound), white puffy clouds, a screaming blue sky, and a pervasive airy mood that seemed infused into all. I could hear the buzz of easy conversation, comfortable laughter, the sounds of bicycle bells…I wasn’t sure what direction I would go in or what I would pick up along the way, but I was not the least bit concerned. I had an hour, a camera around my neck, and just enough purpose to ensure I wouldn’t wander too far.

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I bought a drill – Makita #shed #disassembly

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 5 May, 2014
1 Comment on I bought a drill – Makita #shed #disassembly

I bought a drill. No it’s not it’s a screwdriver. Actually it’s both. It’s a Makita cordless job. My old Black & Decker cordless screwdriver I’ve had for years won’t charge and therefore won’t drive screws. I only used the B&D a few times. Ah well.

I needed it because the playhouse is being moved, if it is the will of a superior being, from it’s current position astride the basketball court to the compost heap which is now no longer a compost heap.

The basketball court isn’t currently a basketball court. It’s a patio base for the playhouse but it will be perfectly good as a basketball court. It has been pointed out to me that some branches from the pear tree in the corner overhang the “court” and “can we chop them off?” We shall have to wait and see. You don’t go lopping branches off a pear tree just like that, though it’s never been much good as a pear tree and every year the leaves develop brown spots. There is a fix for this involving some sort of insect repelling bands around the trunk but I’ve never bothered implementing it. The pears were never any good anyway and there’s a Tesco just down the road.

In fact Tesco are opening a new whizz bang all singing all dancing superstore in a couple of weeks and I’ve been invited to the preview night. It’s supposed to be packed with the latest retail tech which I’m hoping will make for some good blog content.

I’m drifting off the subject here which is meant to be my new cordless drill/screwdriver.

Kid3, who with a B at GCSE in Resistant Materials (woodwork) came with me to B&Q as my qualified advisor. He was supposed to be revising for his AS levels but the lure of the tool over rode the exam pressure. A bloke called Reg helped me out. He wasn’t called Reg really but I can’t remember his real name and Reg sounds appropriate for a highly experienced assistant in the tools section. Good job he was there really because he was able to explain the different types of screwdriver bits available. I didn’t realise that there was such a thing as a posidrive. It’s similar to the phillips cross head but different. Good job he was there because it turns out that all the screws in our playhouse are posidrive and not just simple cross heads. It would have taken me hours to get the job done.

We chose the best tool in stock or so I was advised by Reg. The Makita. It has to be said that the Makita does feel good in your hand. Chunky. Blokey. Solid stuff. It has a 1.5Ah Li-Ion Battery (gives me around 1 ½ hours of constant use says Reg), 2-Speed Variable & Reverse drive and employs a 13mm Keyless Chuck.

The Makita is something that every bloke should have. Even if screwing¹ is something you don’t do that often. It just feels good in the hand.

On this occasion the playhouse would have zero chance of a new life as the garden furniture store were it not for the power of the cordless screwdriver. There must have been forty screws to remove, many of which were long, deeply inserted and difficult to extract.

My mind drifts back to the silent movie~~s of my childhood~~² era where Buster Keaton would be dismantling a barn (for some reason) only to find it collapses around him whilst the Keystone Cops drive chaotically around the wreckage.

I had to abandon the dismantling yesterday in favour of a family trip to Pizza Express (good old Tesco vouchers). Progress had very much slowed as whoever assembled the darn playhouse in the first place had used heavy nails at the base and I’m worried about wrecking the wood which is quite soft cheap rubbish really.

Anyway the roof is off and one of the side walls removed. The job will get finished today. At least the dismantling will. We will have to see how the reassembly goes not least because I probably need to do some more leveling work on the base. Don’t want to rush these things.

Photos are courtesy of Anne’s iPhone because I haven’t got my SGS4 back from the menders yet.

The Weekend section of this blog feels as if it could do with a DIY section. Only prob is I don’t want to do anything that encourages me to do more DIY, even though I do now have a spanking new cordless screwdriver 🙂

Other posts relating to the bottom of the garden:

See the site that the shed is moving to here with video coverage of the wood store
Playhouse viewed from upstairs landing window
Fire fire – woodstore the sequel

Also if I were to check buy a new drill again I would probably check out some guides like the ones from Healthy Handyman first. Definitely gives some insight into the drill buying world.

¹ fnaa fnaa

² I’m not that old

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Band Camp Coincidences

Google Glass. Telephony. Synchronicity

At my age, you would think that I would be long past adolescent self-consciousness; that I wouldn’t feel awkward with the geeky way of thinking. A girl that I had a crush on back in the 2nd Grade said to me, “You talk funny. You talk like a scientist.”, referring to my vocabulary. At that age this wasn’t a compliment, nor was it really a criticism. It did not, though, bode well for any potential romantic entanglements.

On the way to the conference I find myself sitting next to two attractive, well dressed middle-age women, three abreast in the aisle seat. We start the long first leg of the flight with a little small talk. We are flying together from Dallas to Albuquerque, where they will leave the plane prior to its flying on to Seattle (my destination).

“What’s in Seattle?” they both ask.

I feel like I’m on my way to band camp. What do I say to them? I tell the truth.

“I’m going to speak at a conference on Content Management – a technology conference.”, I say.

“Oh. Technology stuff.”, from which they return to conversing among themselves for the remainder of the flight. It’s fine. I wanted time to think, anyway, to be quiet on the plane so that I could figure out what I am going to talk about at the conference. I booked the conference before deciding to leave my last corporate job. I opted to keep my commitment, though, and now I need to put my presentation in my own voice.

The plane is landing in Albuquerque. The small talk starts again, and it turns out that the two women also live in Austin. I hear them say something about two local radio hosts known as JB and Sandy. I ask a question regarding Sandy. They fill me in. It’s friendly, partly because we’re parting way in five minutes.

Nobody sits next to me on the Seattle leg of my flight, and I have time and space to think, to figure out a theme for my talk. I’m basically speaking on the lessons learned over the last year as a software team trying to buy the next generation of the solution instead of building the next generation of solution.

“Choosing a system is like a plane trip…”

“Choosing a system is like traveling through Mexico…”

Ugh.

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School cricket match

I’m just off to watch a school cricket match. The weather is looking a bit dodgy but at the moment it isn’t raining so play should definitely happen.

The school cricket match is the epitome of low technology. Aside from all the expensive gear they have these days (pads, helmet, designer pants in which to fit box etc) there is absolutely no tech involved. There isn’t even a decent mobile signal at school thus rendering impotent any attempted use by spectators of imported tech (ie phones).

So all a parent can do is stand on the touchline and focus on the match. I say stand because it is too cold to sit with any degree of comfort.

A school cricket match is a nervous time for a parent. Will the kid get a chance to bat. Or bowl. Will he be out in the first over or will he settle in and provide as fluent a display of batting that ever graced the sports field thus allowing me to casually mention to the stranger stood nearby, “that’s my boy”.

Don’t worry. All will be well, as long as the rain keeps off. You’ll have to wait to hear the result, if I decide to mention it, because as you know there is no signal at school.

I wonder if they will provide cups of tea. I doubt it.

Play…

…………white noise representing no signal…………

video of rain on car>

Two Hours and 55 Minutes

I have 39 versions of the song “April in Paris” in my digital music library. The earliest recording is an Artie Shaw track from 1940 and the most recent is by Wynton Marsalis from his 1987 “Standards, Volume One” release, with many seminal versions threading in-between, delivered by a staggering array of artists that range from Frank Sinatra to Ella Fitzgerald to Nirvana (OK, that isn’t true…just checking wakefulness out there)…er, Blossom Dearie. Of course, considering “April in Paris”‘s status as a 20th Century classic and the size of my jazz collection, I shouldn’t be surprised that I have 39 versions of the song, and yet seeing them all before me on my monitor (the result of an iTunes search) is really just a couple of steps shy of astonishing.

If 14+ years ago someone had asked me when I first moved to Paris in 1999 (August — not April) “How many versions of “April in Paris” do you have in your music collection?”, I could not have answered the question with any kind of accuracy or authority. Not without taking hours to thumb through my 2000+ CDs with a notepad and pen at hand, anyway.

		I never knew the charm of spring I never met it face to face I never new my heart could sing I never missed a warm embrace

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Saturday Snapshot (26-April-2014)

Post author By Kory Kessel
Post date Monday, 28 April, 2014
No Comments on Saturday Snapshot (26-April-2014)

“Honey, turn the car around! You have to see that!”

My Missus, who for a few weeks has been doing most of the driving due to some new out-of-the-blue concern over insurance coverage (I drive on a valid Texas driver’s license, not the Permis de Conduire I should have by this point, some 14+ years in-country), shoots me a hard questioning look, to which I respond with “I saw an amazing falcon, perched on a fence post by the side fo the road. You have to see it. Go back.”

No argument. At the roundabout coming up My Missus takes the full turn and heads back the way we just came. Soon enough, all four of us (The Boy has a friend visiting) catch the profile of the remarkable animal, still proudly perched on the same fence post. Maybe two minutes have passed since my initial sighting. Three tops.

A hushed “Wow.” and other such murmurs run through the car, which My Missus has pulled over to the side of the road opposite the bird of prey, but mostly we are all just holding our collective breath in awe. The falcon is truly magnificent, and his regal quality…palpable. We wait, we watch, and just as I am starting to think “Hey, isn’t that a camera on that strap around my neck…?”…he takes wing. A wildlife documentary all our own. And then time starts again, and we continue making our way to Houlgate for an afternoon of watching other things taking to the sky…kites!

End User fun stuff

Weekend financial advice – how to get a mortgage

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Sunday, 27 April, 2014
3 Comments on Weekend financial advice – how to get a mortgage

When Anne and I shacked up together we moved up from London to Lincoln. Dahn sarf we had grown accustomed to the notion of having to stretch to a 4 x joint salary mortgage to be able to afford a small flat. In Lincoln it wasn’t going to need anything like that. In fact we could have easily bought a house on 3 x one salary.

We found a suitable gaff/love nest and off I trotted to the Halifax Building Society to sort the mortgage out. The manager gave me a grilling: did I know that buying a house was an expensive game, solicitors fees, furniture, deposit etc. We would need a fair bit of cash to get going.

I told him I didn’t have any savings but didn’t they do 100% mortgages? After all that’s what I did on my previous house. Ah thought the manager, what happened to the profit on that first house. It went on wine, women and male voice choirs I replied.

Realising that the interview wasn’t going too well I said that the only reason I was giving Halifax first refusal was because my fiancee had a savings account with them. Ahah said the manager. How much money does she have? Well every month she puts £20 in and every other month she takes £40 out I said:)

We left the meeting with him wanting to arrange to see both of us before making a decision. Sod you I thought. Who’d want to do business with someone stupid enough to not just give me the money straight away.

I went next door to the Alliance & Leicester Building Society. Told the manger I had all the cash for the deposit/solicitors fees/furniture etc saved up and that either of us could afford the mortgage payments on one salary. He offered me a mortgage on the spot and gave me the paperwork to take home and complete.

When I got home I rang Lloyds Bank to ask for a £5k loan to cover the house deposit. Where was I getting the mortgage from said the manager? A&L. Why don’t you get it from us said he? Do you do 100% mortgages then? No he said but I’ll lend you the other 5% as well!!!

That was over 25 years ago and we’ve been with Lloyds Bank ever since.

That’s how you go about getting a mortgage:)

Look out for further helpful financial hints from trefor.net at the weekend – coming soon how to with the lottery and other pie in the sky hopeless aspirations.