Last post on the holiday, I promise.
My other goal was doing lots of walking, and this I most definitely achieved. I had set the goal of hitting 10,000 steps for every day and I managed this by both doing short walks early in the morning and also going for some really long walks later in the day.
Generally, these walks were around the environs of a small town called Tiverton. I had thought about walking along the toe path of the Grand Western Canal, which runs through Tiverton, but I wasn't sure how much the car park was and instead I also walked along Woolacombe bay beach.
The weather for this part of the holiday was perfect - lovely blue skies and a warm sun, but not too hot and with some nice breezes. The walk along Woolacombe Bay was particularly enjoyable, although about half way back I realised I had probably bitten of a bit much for a single walk and struggled a bit.
Perhaps if I'd had a proper rest half way it would have been better. Still, I got some photos I quite like.
Anyway, this was the good part.
But it's unfortunately counter-balanced by a bad part.
The bad part was that at the end of the week I slipped somewhat in terms of my diet. I don't actually think I went totally bonkers, but I did eat several junk food meals - burgers and fries, etc. Now to be fair I was doing this and still basically not eating like I used to, but I was pretty sure that I'd managed to cancel out any real good I'd done in terms of walking.
What I think didn't help was that I'd pre-ordered these breakfast packs they do and these turned out to be too big, but also not appropriate to do half-and-half with lunch. As I discovered with my diet, part of the secret for me is to have a big, sandwich based lunch. This basically allows me to have 1 reasonable meal and then a very light, snacky dinner.
But the problem was I couldn't divide the breakfast up in a satisfactory way to achieve this, which meant I had to buy other stuff to make lunch into a proper meal and once that seal of temptation had broken it escalated into proper bad eating. Although if I'm honest I had actually promised myself 1 junk meal at the very end of the holiday if I did do a lot of walking and I think I did the classic "well, let's have it today instead" and then kept having it instead of just having one, if you see what I mean.
Anyway, despite my fears, when I got back I weighed myself and it actually turned out that, across the two weeks I had a net loss of 1 pound. Which is good, but when you consider I ate poorly at my dads and then slipped a bit at the end of the week, it leaves me a little disappointed as to how much I could have lost if I'd not been so weak willed.
Still, now that I'm back there don't appear to be any lingering cravings for junk, and I've been back to the same diet.
Friday, 15 October 2010
the hurt locker
I had the chance to watch hurt locker before I went on holiday.
I must say I was quite impressed. In case you don't know, Hurt Locker won the best film Oscar and I'm afraid I'm one of those people who tends to automatically look for the negative when I watch a film that has such an accolade.
And if I'm honest there are some negatives here, mainly in the accuracy stakes. Basically, the film follows a bomb disposal squad during their rotation in the most recent Iraqi conflict. It isn't entirely clear what the time is in relation to the declared 'victory', but the impression I got was that it was after, but not long after.
So, in other words the film is after what would be the toppling of Saddam and into the early part of the occupation by US forces. The idea then is because the film follows a bomb disposal squad, they're incredibly busy, because the insurgents are at their maximum and so they're planting lots of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices or roadside bombs).
A problem then is that the activities of the city's occupants don't really reflect that freshness of conflict. The people don't seem like they're worried about the imminent threat of conflict where the soldiers seem much more twitchy. So, for example, the markets are thriving and people seem content to generally hang out and go about their daily business, which tends to suggest it's a long time after the conflict proper.
Another problem is the way the bomb disposal team operates. Firstly, they seem very poorly manned - there's only three of them - and they also seemed to operate in rather unsecured situations.
By that I mean that civilians weren't being properly kept away and any other army support seemed to be either stand-offish or actively unhelpful. For example, there's one point where they're sent in to undertake a sort of forensic examination of a bomb attack, but the thing is the bomb seems to have literally gone off minutes before.
First off, I'm not sure they'd be required to do that sort of examination anyway, but I would be amazed if they'd do it so soon after the explosion. Especially since it's the middle of the night and there doesn't appear to be any other soldiers about. What if there was a sniper or a secondary bomb?
And yet despite those things, the film really does work.
I think the reason is that it's not trying to be accurate, but is instead trying to convey things like mood and the affects combat has on soldiers.
One area where it particularly succeeds is in showing you how confusing and haphazard the relationships between the occupiers and the occupied is. You really feel of isolation and culture clashes.
The effects on the soldiers is slightly less successful, because of the focus on a bomb squad. Now if you think about it, the dangerous, maverick actions of the squad leader would be picked up very quickly and result in him being removed or taken away. Maybe this sort of stuff wouldn't be picked up if he were an ordinary grunt, but in the bombsquad, he would be identified and weeded out before he even got that far.
But as I say, if you ignore the idea of accuracy and simply take the specifics as a convenient way of portraying some more general points then the film works very well.
I must say I was quite impressed. In case you don't know, Hurt Locker won the best film Oscar and I'm afraid I'm one of those people who tends to automatically look for the negative when I watch a film that has such an accolade.
And if I'm honest there are some negatives here, mainly in the accuracy stakes. Basically, the film follows a bomb disposal squad during their rotation in the most recent Iraqi conflict. It isn't entirely clear what the time is in relation to the declared 'victory', but the impression I got was that it was after, but not long after.
So, in other words the film is after what would be the toppling of Saddam and into the early part of the occupation by US forces. The idea then is because the film follows a bomb disposal squad, they're incredibly busy, because the insurgents are at their maximum and so they're planting lots of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices or roadside bombs).
A problem then is that the activities of the city's occupants don't really reflect that freshness of conflict. The people don't seem like they're worried about the imminent threat of conflict where the soldiers seem much more twitchy. So, for example, the markets are thriving and people seem content to generally hang out and go about their daily business, which tends to suggest it's a long time after the conflict proper.
Another problem is the way the bomb disposal team operates. Firstly, they seem very poorly manned - there's only three of them - and they also seemed to operate in rather unsecured situations.
By that I mean that civilians weren't being properly kept away and any other army support seemed to be either stand-offish or actively unhelpful. For example, there's one point where they're sent in to undertake a sort of forensic examination of a bomb attack, but the thing is the bomb seems to have literally gone off minutes before.
First off, I'm not sure they'd be required to do that sort of examination anyway, but I would be amazed if they'd do it so soon after the explosion. Especially since it's the middle of the night and there doesn't appear to be any other soldiers about. What if there was a sniper or a secondary bomb?
And yet despite those things, the film really does work.
I think the reason is that it's not trying to be accurate, but is instead trying to convey things like mood and the affects combat has on soldiers.
One area where it particularly succeeds is in showing you how confusing and haphazard the relationships between the occupiers and the occupied is. You really feel of isolation and culture clashes.
The effects on the soldiers is slightly less successful, because of the focus on a bomb squad. Now if you think about it, the dangerous, maverick actions of the squad leader would be picked up very quickly and result in him being removed or taken away. Maybe this sort of stuff wouldn't be picked up if he were an ordinary grunt, but in the bombsquad, he would be identified and weeded out before he even got that far.
But as I say, if you ignore the idea of accuracy and simply take the specifics as a convenient way of portraying some more general points then the film works very well.
Wednesday, 13 October 2010
more about my hols
So yesterday I talked about my computing woes at my dad's, what about the rest of it?
Well, mixed bag, really.
I mentioned a while back about my diet that I was hoping my dad would notice I'd lost weight. Well, he didn't spontaneously mention it, but on the Sunday we went out to give the dog a quick walk (if the computer stuff hadn't been so horrible I'd hoped we would go out on a proper walk) and I basically asked him directly if he'd noticed.
His reply was yes, but not in an instantaneous way, more that he'd been left wondering if I had. For example, he said it was fairly noticeable "from behind" (whatever that means) and in my face (which is one of the places I've noticed myself). Also, he'd noticed I was eating smaller meals and avoiding deserts.
One of the big things that annoys me about my dad is that he is really crap at empathy. By that I mean, if he wants to discuss something with you he'll approach it in much the same way the bull of legend might interact with a china shop. Which is to say he's about as subtle as a house brick through a plate glass window.
And of course, my weight is one of the things he occasionally tries to "talk to me" ("at me" would probably be more accurate) about. And yet whenever I visit him he feeds me these giant meals that have enough calories in to feed a small nation.
And of course I instantly regretted mentioning anything because he saw that as the ideal opportunity to start "advising" (that is, trying to force stuff on) me. So, for example, he tried saying something about snacks and lettuce. I cut both of these off quite abruptly, but they really get tot eh heart of what annoys me about him.
I mean, I've lost something in the order of one and a half stone across a couple f months and haven't collapsed or made myself ill or anything, so I clearly know what I'm doing and yet he feels the need (nay, the right) to start telling me what and how I should be doing what I've already been doing quite successfully, thank you very much.
Sorry, got a bit carried away there.
For the second part of the holiday I stayed in a Travelodge and, as discussed beforehand, I had two basic aims:
Well there's an old adage that no plan survives contact with the enemy, and that proved very true here.
Number 1 failed because I'd made a critical error before my holiday. Basically, a while back the sound stopped working on my laptop and I only remembered this literally the night before I left.
The laptop had vista on it and has proven to be something of a problem child. Only now I've got copies Windows 7, so I decided to install that and it totally cured the sound problem (yet another huge tick in Windows 7's good books). However, the majority of anime I was taking is region 1 and I generally use a program called DVD Region Free to get around this.
However, the old version I had didn't seem to work with windows 7 (it really is very old) and so I installed a newer trial version. This works fine, but it turns out that being a trial version it will only let you watch 15 minutes before closing what you're watching down and prompting you to buy it.
Watching stuff in 15 minute chunks proved to be beyond annoying, so I abandoned the anime in favour of watching some regular TV box sets I'd also taken with me (I will by the program, but it didn't seem safe using the free wifi to do it). I got through 3 sets:
All of which I'm sure I'll review or talk about later, but still, it meant no anime, but I did still do a good chunk of watching stuff.
And that's a big post again, so more later.
Well, mixed bag, really.
I mentioned a while back about my diet that I was hoping my dad would notice I'd lost weight. Well, he didn't spontaneously mention it, but on the Sunday we went out to give the dog a quick walk (if the computer stuff hadn't been so horrible I'd hoped we would go out on a proper walk) and I basically asked him directly if he'd noticed.
His reply was yes, but not in an instantaneous way, more that he'd been left wondering if I had. For example, he said it was fairly noticeable "from behind" (whatever that means) and in my face (which is one of the places I've noticed myself). Also, he'd noticed I was eating smaller meals and avoiding deserts.
One of the big things that annoys me about my dad is that he is really crap at empathy. By that I mean, if he wants to discuss something with you he'll approach it in much the same way the bull of legend might interact with a china shop. Which is to say he's about as subtle as a house brick through a plate glass window.
And of course, my weight is one of the things he occasionally tries to "talk to me" ("at me" would probably be more accurate) about. And yet whenever I visit him he feeds me these giant meals that have enough calories in to feed a small nation.
And of course I instantly regretted mentioning anything because he saw that as the ideal opportunity to start "advising" (that is, trying to force stuff on) me. So, for example, he tried saying something about snacks and lettuce. I cut both of these off quite abruptly, but they really get tot eh heart of what annoys me about him.
I mean, I've lost something in the order of one and a half stone across a couple f months and haven't collapsed or made myself ill or anything, so I clearly know what I'm doing and yet he feels the need (nay, the right) to start telling me what and how I should be doing what I've already been doing quite successfully, thank you very much.
Sorry, got a bit carried away there.
For the second part of the holiday I stayed in a Travelodge and, as discussed beforehand, I had two basic aims:
- Watch loads of anime; and
- Do lots of walking.
Well there's an old adage that no plan survives contact with the enemy, and that proved very true here.
Number 1 failed because I'd made a critical error before my holiday. Basically, a while back the sound stopped working on my laptop and I only remembered this literally the night before I left.
The laptop had vista on it and has proven to be something of a problem child. Only now I've got copies Windows 7, so I decided to install that and it totally cured the sound problem (yet another huge tick in Windows 7's good books). However, the majority of anime I was taking is region 1 and I generally use a program called DVD Region Free to get around this.
However, the old version I had didn't seem to work with windows 7 (it really is very old) and so I installed a newer trial version. This works fine, but it turns out that being a trial version it will only let you watch 15 minutes before closing what you're watching down and prompting you to buy it.
Watching stuff in 15 minute chunks proved to be beyond annoying, so I abandoned the anime in favour of watching some regular TV box sets I'd also taken with me (I will by the program, but it didn't seem safe using the free wifi to do it). I got through 3 sets:
- The final season of Lost;
- Season 3 of 30Rockp;
- Season 1 of Breaking Bad.
All of which I'm sure I'll review or talk about later, but still, it meant no anime, but I did still do a good chunk of watching stuff.
And that's a big post again, so more later.
Tuesday, 12 October 2010
the return
So I'm back from my holiday.
It was a really good break and I have to confess I wish it had been longer. I also really wish I'd been able to take it all as a holiday, rather than have all the bollocks associated with my room being (partially) redecorated and the shed-based antics.
The holiday itself started with a weekend trip to my Dad's. I'd bought a new monitor for him and so stuff for him to do backups and in theory those are two very simple things, but in practice they turned out to be horrible.
First off, the monitor resolution wasn't available in the graphics card drivers thing, which was bizarre. I therefore decided to download a new set of drivers and install them. That worked okay, except I tried to be too clever. This too-cleverness took the form of trying to uninstall the old drivers first, and unfortunately I uninstalled the LAN and audio drivers by accident.
How I did this I don't know - all I can think is because they were both made by ATI, I clicked on the wrong thing in the list, but I was sure I clicked on the graphics drivers. Anyway, no panic, right? I could just reinstall them from disk.
Except it didn't work - the LAN drivers seemed to install, but the machine couldn't connect to the internet. This took ages with me faffing around, even to the extent of me getting my laptop out the car and testing the connection (it was fine) and downloading a new set of drivers. Those didn't work either.
Anyway, overnight I actually remembered that I'd had the same problem before with this machine and when I uninstalled the drivers and manually installed them, rather than relying on the automatic thing, it worked fine. I guess the automatic installer must put them in the wrong place or something?
Anyway, all that faffing took hours, which did nothing to help my Dad's PC-phobia, but eventually the monitor was installed.
The next task was the back-up and we ran into even more problems. Basically, I'd bought him an external hard drive and a new DVD-burner. The idea was that he can use both to make absolutely sure he doesn't accidentally delete stuff.
Only he'd managed to pre-empt my caution by fucking up massively and deleting almost all of the photos from his trip to the Canadian Grand Prix earlier in the year. He'd even removed them from his camera's memory card, even though he had plenty of room left on it.
Well done that man.
Anyway, there were some left, so I thought I'd show him the quick and easy process of using the HDD to back-up. Only it kept failing. Some of the photos wouldn't transfer across and what's more it was totally random - it wasn't the biggest ones or all the ones from one folder or anything like that.
So that took even more hours of head scratching and searching the web to try and diagnose the problem.
In the end I got so frustrated I switched from my Dad's account to my own and tried to transfer the files. Guess what - absolutely no problems and they all transferred over in about 5 minutes.
So basically he's probably installed something that's causing the problem, but what it is I don't know.
And then there was the DVD burner. We had to buy some burner software at PC world, so I also took the opportunity to show him file recovery software and also card readers as he's indicated he wants to buy separate cards for trips and I had to try and explain how different cameras take different cards.
Anyway, that's when he dropped a bit of a bombshell that it's probably a bit inappropriate for me to discuss here. The basic upshot was that me running the file recovery software wasn't going to be an option, so I left it with him. To be frank, my experience of these things is that they take ages anyway, so I'm not sure I would have wanted to do it anyway.
So yeah, what should have been some nice simple jobs took bloody age and weren't much fun.
And I've gone on a hell of a long time already, so more later.
It was a really good break and I have to confess I wish it had been longer. I also really wish I'd been able to take it all as a holiday, rather than have all the bollocks associated with my room being (partially) redecorated and the shed-based antics.
The holiday itself started with a weekend trip to my Dad's. I'd bought a new monitor for him and so stuff for him to do backups and in theory those are two very simple things, but in practice they turned out to be horrible.
First off, the monitor resolution wasn't available in the graphics card drivers thing, which was bizarre. I therefore decided to download a new set of drivers and install them. That worked okay, except I tried to be too clever. This too-cleverness took the form of trying to uninstall the old drivers first, and unfortunately I uninstalled the LAN and audio drivers by accident.
How I did this I don't know - all I can think is because they were both made by ATI, I clicked on the wrong thing in the list, but I was sure I clicked on the graphics drivers. Anyway, no panic, right? I could just reinstall them from disk.
Except it didn't work - the LAN drivers seemed to install, but the machine couldn't connect to the internet. This took ages with me faffing around, even to the extent of me getting my laptop out the car and testing the connection (it was fine) and downloading a new set of drivers. Those didn't work either.
Anyway, overnight I actually remembered that I'd had the same problem before with this machine and when I uninstalled the drivers and manually installed them, rather than relying on the automatic thing, it worked fine. I guess the automatic installer must put them in the wrong place or something?
Anyway, all that faffing took hours, which did nothing to help my Dad's PC-phobia, but eventually the monitor was installed.
The next task was the back-up and we ran into even more problems. Basically, I'd bought him an external hard drive and a new DVD-burner. The idea was that he can use both to make absolutely sure he doesn't accidentally delete stuff.
Only he'd managed to pre-empt my caution by fucking up massively and deleting almost all of the photos from his trip to the Canadian Grand Prix earlier in the year. He'd even removed them from his camera's memory card, even though he had plenty of room left on it.
Well done that man.
Anyway, there were some left, so I thought I'd show him the quick and easy process of using the HDD to back-up. Only it kept failing. Some of the photos wouldn't transfer across and what's more it was totally random - it wasn't the biggest ones or all the ones from one folder or anything like that.
So that took even more hours of head scratching and searching the web to try and diagnose the problem.
In the end I got so frustrated I switched from my Dad's account to my own and tried to transfer the files. Guess what - absolutely no problems and they all transferred over in about 5 minutes.
So basically he's probably installed something that's causing the problem, but what it is I don't know.
And then there was the DVD burner. We had to buy some burner software at PC world, so I also took the opportunity to show him file recovery software and also card readers as he's indicated he wants to buy separate cards for trips and I had to try and explain how different cameras take different cards.
Anyway, that's when he dropped a bit of a bombshell that it's probably a bit inappropriate for me to discuss here. The basic upshot was that me running the file recovery software wasn't going to be an option, so I left it with him. To be frank, my experience of these things is that they take ages anyway, so I'm not sure I would have wanted to do it anyway.
So yeah, what should have been some nice simple jobs took bloody age and weren't much fun.
And I've gone on a hell of a long time already, so more later.
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