spanish grand prix

Spanish Grand Prix this last weekend.

Usually Spain is a bit boring.  A big part of this is because it's where they do the winter testing and it's also where they used to do some of the in-season testing back before they cut it out to help reduce costs.

In the past that has meant the teams and many of the drivers know the track intimately, but it also means they know each other's performance at the track very well too.  Obviously if you keep using the same track over and over then the final result come race day is likely to reflect what you saw when you were practicing too.

However, thanks to Pirelli even tracks like Spain have been given a new lease of life in terms of the quality of the races and this last weekend was no exception.  The race was a good one with lots of on (and off) track action.

Of particular note was obviously that Williams has managed to win a race for the first time in something like 10 years.  They've been going through quite a rough patch recently Williams and haven't really even been in contention for being a mid-field team for a while.  Last year was there worst ever season, but this year their fortunes seem to have turned through the full 180 degrees.

Also Sauber and Lotus both seem to have made some serious steps and are very much contention.  Indeed, it's such an open season that we've had five separate winners in each of the five races this year.

Another clear example is that Alonso is currently sitting at the top of the table, despite having not won any of the races and everyone saying the Ferrari car this year is terrible.

There were a couple of sour notes.  Having had the victory and celebrating Frank Williams's 70th Birthday there was a fire in their pits after the race and four people got injured.  Fire has always been one of the riskiest elements in Grand Prix and it's claimed more than a few lives over the years.

The other sour note was Lewis Hamilton who, having done a stunner of a lap in the final stages of qualifying was then told to turn off his car while out on the circuit as he was low on fuel.  The cars are required to give a sample of fuel from the tank following qualifying to make sure they're not adding in anything to improve performance.

This is actually quite a lot (1 litre) and if they can't give this then there are quite serious penalties.  It came about because of a similar incident involving Lewis a while back where he ran out of fuel on his in lap.  This time the team told him to stop so they would be able to give the sample.

Now I believe there is also a regulation that says you can't do this either - knowingly under fill your car (more fuel = more weight and makes you slower) and stop.  However, McLaren indicated it was an error, but the stewards didn't accept this and demoted him right to the back of the grid.

This seemed un-necessarily harsh, given that the weight reduction would only have given him 2 or 3 tenths (he was half a second quicker) and he'd already set a quick time that would have put him 6th.

And this after the last race in Bahrain where Rosberg tried to run Hamilton and Alonso off the road and Hamilton overtook off the track and yet nobody received any punishment at all.

One of the things that did amuse me about it was when Hamilton pulled up the booing of the crowd was epic.  Lewis isn't the most popular fellow in Spain given how fanatically they love Alonso and the year they spent as team mates at McLaren.

glowing orb of brightness

There was a rather sudden change in the weather last Friday.

Suddenly the sky went this weird colour that I heard people describing as "blue" and there was this bright yellow ball floating in sky that appeared to produce a curious warming sensation on exposed flesh.

Some people said that finally the weather was nice, but I knew the truth.  We have been plunged into a nightmare scenario designed by the cosmetics companies to get us all to spend our entire earnings on gloopy creams that protect us from this burning sky globe.

That's quite enough of that.  Yes, this weekend the weather gave us a brief respite from the constant drizzle, rain, torrential downpours and miserable, chilly grey dampness that has been the British climate for the last couple of months.

It's weird; the grey and wet weather has actually been getting to me the last few months.  It's not so much that we've had some it's that it's been continuous and incredibly repressive.  A bit of rain I don't mind at all, but when you get soaked to the bone every time you leave your house it gets to be a bit much after a while.

Actually the weather we had was just how I like sunny weather.  It was nice and bright, but it wasn't hot.  Even when you were out in the full glare of the mid-day sun it was still pleasant.  I don't like it when it gets really hot and it doesn't matter if you're in the shade or not, you just feel clammy and sweaty all the time.

Of course today it's clouded over.  It's not actually raining here yet, but I understand it's on its way.

I did actually have a few pictures I took that I wanted to upload about the weather while I was on holiday.  Unfortunately I've not downloaded them off my phone and while I'm sure I could e-mail them or something similar I can't be bothered to work out how to do that.  I'll therefore do it later and blog about it then.  Let's just say it was mildly moist.

shoes, shoes everywhere

Well, I'm back in the office.

I actually got back yesterday but didn't really have the time to write a blog post.

It was a good holiday I think, overall.  As I said beforehand I had a few days for doing stuff and then I was off gallivanting around the country.

The stuff at home my main aim was to get some new footwear - I needed some work shoes, walking shoes and some trainers.  My thoughts were that the easiest of these to get would be the work shoes, then the walking shoes, then the trainers.

The trainers would be most difficult because I won't wear anything except black trainers and I also like reeboks.  These, combined with my foot size (a 10 or 11 depending on the shoe fit) which is very popular tend to make it rather difficult to find them.

I figured walking shoes would be okay as there's a millets in Farnham and they sell karrimors, which are the brand I like and it would just be a case of finding the right fit and a design that looked sturdy.

The work shoes would be a piece of piss as there are usually lots of designs that are acceptable and there are loads of Clarks shoe shops around.

The reality was almost the exact reverse.  The first sports good shop I breezed into had Black reeboks in my size and I was out within 20 minutes.

The walking shoes proved to be problematic because the millets in Farnham has gone.  I then wasn't at all sure where another one was locally.  However, I knew there was a millets at the factory outlet place that's just up the road from my Dad's in Devon... only that had closed too!

I don't think millets have gone under and I've had a look online to find the shops.  I guess I could always order online, but shoes are one of those things you really need to try on to make sure they fit properly.

The work shoes was bizarre - I went into the Clarks in Aldershot and, as suspected, they had several designs that would have been suitable, but some of them were incredibly expensive (£70 for shoes for work!) and those that weren't they didn't seem to have any sizes that fit.  The ones I did try on were too small and they didn't have the next size up.

I then tried this cheap shoe place up the road, but they were awful - like walking on planks of wood.

There is a shoe shop in the town I work in so I'll try looking in there, or they could probably order them, but overall it was bizarre that I couldn't find any.

a week away

As previously mentioned I'm away on holiday next week.

I didn't initially have any plans for the holiday.  I was taking it mainly because otherwise it would be ages between holidays, since I didn't take any extra time at Easter.  It's also my birthday and I usually take some time off at my birthday, though not always a week.

Anyway, having not really had any plans I'm not off all over the place, going to see some friends on a couple of the days and then for the last weekend (the one with the bank holiday) I'm off to see my dad.

As with the holiday generally I'm seeing my dad as otherwise it would likely be months until I see him again.  It's not hugely convenient him living in the West Country as it means some very long drives to see him.  Some way off a "popping over" situation.  And the trains are useless and long-winded and expensive of course.

My other aim is to pull my finger out over the whole jobs thing.  I need to finish my CV and start actively applying for some of these jobs I've been looking at if I'm serious about this whole issue.

I've also got a fair few chores to do next week, like the shopping for shoes thing, so for a week I was just taking to have a break it's going to be quite busy.

Anyway, the point is this'll be the last blog for a bit more than a week.

drought that never dried

It's no wonder the British have such a strongly developed sense of irony.

A couple of weeks back the water company where I live (and several others in the South and South East) declared a hose pipe ban.  Their reason for doing so was that it has been very dry over the last few years and, indeed, we were officially in drought.

Since then, of course, it has rained every single day.  And I don't mean that as an exaggeration - every day for the last couple of weeks we've had some rain.

Now don't get me wrong - I know this relatively short spell of wet weather (April Showers have really been living up to their name) is not enough to completely negate what have been a reasonably dry few years.  However, it is quite ironic that as soon as a drought is declared and a hose pipe ban goes into effect it starts raining.

Of course there's also the issue of leaks.  The record of the water companies is generally appalling on the leaks front.  Any small saving you personally can make is dwarfed by the amount of water that gets pissed away in leaks every single hour.  Of course there's a cumulative effect of us all saving a bit, but still, even a small amount of Google searching will bring up some eye watering (heh) stats.

But for me the whole thing is much more fundamental than that.

Our water industry is privatised (as, indeed, are most all of our utilities).  Now obviously if it were nationalised we would still also pay for the water, but with it being nationalised, surely these companies are under a different type of obligation to us, because we're now customers.

If you went to a shop and tried to buy some clothes you wouldn't expect them to only sell you half a pair of trousers because you were only allowed a certain amount of cloth.  If they did that you'd go elsewhere.

But to me that's a ridiculous notion for the utilities - it still comes out of the same pipe or down the same wire.  There may be a different person you're paying, but it's still coming from the same place.  To use the shop analogy it'd be like going up to a different sales assistant and now they're going to sell you exactly the same thing, but they're going to charge you a different amount of money, or they're going to put slightly different restrictions on the length of the trousers you're going to buy or when you can wear them.

It's a ridiculous situation.

I've also never had much truck with this notion that private companies are more efficient simply by virtue of needing to turn a profit.  It's a ridiculous and patently untrue notion.

Companies being driven by profit can just as equally lead to fraud, deceit, cost-cutting (as in the worst kind - skimping on safety, for example)

the fast and the furious

What a terrible film.

It's weird.  I mentioned it in my review at the time, but I actually watched the fourth film in this franchise first and I thought that was much better than this.

I mean, I don't actually think the fourth one was a good film but it was sufficiently glossy and bombastic to be watchable.  This first film has a near identical plot (yes, it came first) but it somehow manages to be dull.

Perhaps there's some budgetary thing going on - the first was risky so there was a smaller budget, maybe?  After it was a success the sequels got more cash?  I dunno, it seems possible but generally sequels are done on smaller budgets.  I can't really be arsed to find out though, and you never really know with these budget numbers they give what and where that money was spent.

But my real issue was that the film just seemed like a bit of a mess.

While both films seemed like heavily planned action sequences strung together by not-very-much of any real interest, in this first one the problem seems to be that they don't really give a crap about the linking parts.  There seemed to be a lot of non-sequitors and bits that didn't actually make much sense, just in order to get to the next cool sequence.

But this is also a reflection of the cool sequences not really meshing together.  It shouldn't be necessary for the connecting bits to work quite as hard at joining the dots as the dots should really join themselves.

One of the particular bits that don't quite work is the supposed rival gang of Asians.  The real reason this doesn't work is that you end up with confused characters and motives.  I mean, the basic problem is that you effectively have two sets of bad guys and the hero is trying to infiltrate one.

The trouble is the team he's infiltrating we're also supposed to think "oh, they're not so bad - it's not like they kill anyone".  I mean, they're criminals, but it's the classic Hollywood bad-good people.  But because they have a properly bad set of guys you end up with this weird situation that he's trying to take down the good-bad guys and not the bad-bad guys.

It's all very weird and convoluted when it didn't have to be.

i have no toes

This last Saturday I managed to flay the skin off of my little toe on my right foot.

I think flay is the right word.  It wasn't deliberate, as such.  I mean, I didn't set out to remove the skin, but the thing that caused its removal was something I kinda thought may cause that to happen.

I'll stop being cryptic - basically, I put a plaster on the toe next to my little toe and the action of me walking has caused rubbing which has initially formed a blister, but that's then quickly burst and so the skin has scraped off.

I was kinda afraid this would happen, as I've had the same effect before where a plaster on a toe has rubbed and taken the skin off or otherwise injured another toe.  The irony of course is that I put the plaster on in order to protect the first toe from the effects of rubbing.

The reasons for both incidents of rubbing are somewhat complicated.

Essentially I need some new shoes.  In fact I actually need a complete set of new shoes.  I need some new work shoes as the soles are nearly worn through on my current pairs (I have two for stupid reasons not worth explaining).  I need some new trainers because my current ones are rubbish.  I need some new walking shoes because my current ones are worn out.

Luckily I'm on holiday next week so I'll take the opportunity to buy all my new shoes then.

The other cause is I have feet that are very wide but not very long.  I think if you measure the length of my feet I actually only have something like size 9.  However, because my feet are so wide I generally have to wear size 10 or 11.

And you know what they say about men with wide feet - difficulty finding shoes that fit properly.  I can occasionally get wide fittings, but generally only in work shoes for some reason.

Anyway, the wide foot thing means that my toes get squished together.  Now I don't know if it's a reflection of this squishing, but my smaller toes tend to curl under quite a lot and are very close together.  This means that the two combined - close toes and ill-fitting shoes tends to lead to le getting the rubbing effect that's cause my skin to flay off.

My toe is very much on the mend.  I've been strapping it up with plasters and that worked quite well.  I obviously didn't do any walking on Sunday or Monday and this rest has also helped.

I'm sure I'll be totally fixed by the weekend and I was already fine doing a very short walk this morning.

bahrain

So the race went ahead.

It would appear that there were quite a few protests, but nothing impacted on the race itself after the Force India people being caught up in it on Friday.

One of the things that was very apparent though was that there were virtually no spectators.  I mean a big part of the problem with a lot of these new events is that there are no spectators, but this weekend the place looked virtually empty.

I've noticed it at Bahrain before but there don't actually appear to be that many places to watch the race.  Usually you have two types of spectators - those seated in grandstands and those standing.  Well at Bahrain there never appear to be any standing spectators.

I don't know if this is a deliberately move and you can't get to the areas where there are no stands (this is the case in Monaco and a few of the other street circuits) but it really does make the place look empty.  What's odd about it is that it's not because there are loads of stands - there are big bits of the track where the cars just drive around a bit of the dessert and nobody except a few marshals and TV cameras can see them.

At some of the other races where there are few spectators there are stands but they're empty, but at Bahrain there only appear to be a couple of stands and they were still empty.  Whether this was a consequence of the unrest (people staying away or being kept away) or is simply a further reflection of the fact that the event attracts few people anyway I don't know.  Certainly you'd think that foreigners would be less keen to visit and the BBC showed some footage on the way to the circuit of loads of security people and APCs.

Anyway, the race itself was actually not all that bad.  I wouldn't rate it as a great race, as such, but for a Bahrain GP it wasn't bad.  There was some overtaking (even if quite a bit of it was the artificial DRS-on-the-straight kind) and certainly a few things of interest happened.

In particular McLaren seemed to have a bit of a shocker.  Having had problems with a wheel nut in Button's pit stop in China (cross-threading, apparently) the same thing happened to Lewis Hamilton... twice!

With him having started in second place he ended up down in eighth, although it wasn't really clear that it was entirely down to the problems in the stops.  Having seemed to do well in Qualifying, during the race the McLarens didn't really seem to be up to speed during the race.

Jenson's car (engine or drive train it seemed like) packed up on virtually the last lap, although some sort of puncture issue had actually taken him out of the points on the lap before.

The weirdest thing was Nico Rosberg, though, who seemed determined to drive Leis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso off the circuit.  Both incidents happened in the same place and both were quite clearly him going too far.  It clearly states (and sensibly so) that you can't go pushing other drivers off the circuit, but in both cases that's what he appeared to do.

The stewards didn't punish him at all, but instead made some statements about how the other drivers weren't alongside.  Now of course they have all the views and angles and information and stuff, but from the TV pictures it looked like they were alongside and it's difficult to see why they would be going that far over if they weren't alongside.

In particular if Rosberg did nothing wrong then why wasn't Lewis punished?  He overtook off the circuit, which isn't allowed, but surely he only did that because Rosberg left no room?

I'm sure if the circuit hadn't had such big run of areas Rosberg wouldn't have gone quite to far as he did, but surely that's not the point - you can't go shoving other drivers off the circuit, veering way across like he did.  And we're not talking any small move or instinctive reaction - the Bahrain circuit is extremely wide and he moved across the full width of it, so it was a clearly deliberate move to push them off.

I'm all for letting them battle and I often tend to think the stewards over-react, but here I think it's gone the other way.

to bahrain or not to bahrain

Well, as I type this now it currently looks like the Bahrain Grand Prix is going ahead.

Last year the event was cancelled by the organisers due to the protests and Arab spring type unrest.  This year the promoters apparently want to stage the race.

The FIA does have the power to call off the race and in theory the teams / drivers could boycott the event.

Already some people in force India have come into contact with unrest, having basically driven into an area where a protest was going on and people threw petrol bombs at them.  From the reports the implication is that the protestors were not specifically after the Force India people, they just got caught up in it.  However, if that's what happens when they're not specifically after the teams, I wonder what would happen if they were?

The opposition movement has, I believe, stated that they would not target the teams or anyone coming into the country to do with the race, but they have stated that the Grand Prix represents everything that's wrong with the country.  It was brought in by the ruler and that's who they're protesting against.

I guess one of the real fears I have are that the teams will get caught up in it - probably in a similar style to the Force India incident: not deliberately, but in a way that doesn't matter.

The other thing I'm afraid of is that the protestors will do something daft.  If they try to storm the track or in any way interfere there are all sorts of possibilities for things that could go horribly wrong.  While F1 cars can stop incredibly quickly, they're still having to do so from 200mph on some occasions.  And we know they crash into each other all the time - some protestor running on to the track could be a horrible tragedy.

Or they may protest and be cracked down on.  This would be horrible because it means the sport is part of the cause of people get hurt or killed or whatever.

It will also not exactly help the sport's reputation.  We're already known to many people for the vast sums of money that go sloshing around.  The idea we're staging a race basically because some Arab king wants to pay to stage it and the sport doesn't have the courage to not take his money will not be a good result.

Who knows, it may go without a hitch.  But I've a feeling that even if the race event goes smoothly F1 won't come out of the weekend well.

a warm front

So my landlord has had a new boiler installed.

I have discussed before in the blog that I now have a heater in my bedroom / living area that's connected to my landlord's heating.  It's proven quite useful and has saved me a considerable amount in terms of electricity cost.

It's not completely removed the need for me to use my own radiators, not least of all because obviously I have no control over it.  A good example of this is that I get up quite early (about 6:30 now but more like 6:00 when I was on contract) but my landlord doesn't, so he doesn't have any need for the heating to come on until about 7:00.  That therefore means I have to have my radiator on for about half an hour and then the landlord's is effective for the half hour before I set off for work at about 7:30.

Anyway, he's gotten a new boiler fitted because the old one is apparently not up to the job.  I'm not sure if my radiator made it more obvious, but apparently he said it's not been very good since it was installed.  He reckoned it took a lot of very careful fiddling with to get right and was very sensitive.

However, the problem form my point of view was that this was going to take the hot water out of action for a couple of days.  I'm not sure why it was a multiple day job, but it was, so he told me that Monday and Tuesday there would be no heating (I'm pretty sure he'd actually been hoping that by now the temperature would be enough not to have it on anyway) but also there's be no hot water.

My hot water is obviously supplied by the landlord's boiler too and in terms of things like hot water for washing up this was no great issue, but showering would be impossible.

Now to some degree I don't quite understand this as there is an immersion heating in the hot water tank, but my guess is that by taking the hot water out of the loop it meant they would need to drain all the systems, so there would be no water (hot or cold) in it to use.  Since my shower is a power shower without any sort of its own heating element, this certainly meant I couldn't have a hot shower, but probably meant I couldn't have one at all (no water).

His proposed solution for this was that he'd put a kettle in the corridor that joins me to his house and I could use that to boil water and "wipe down" instead.

This was not something I felt comfortable with (I sweat a lot during the night and my hair gets really greasy) so instead I took myself off to a travel lodge for the night.

It worked out okay.  I unfortunately forgot to take my earplugs with me so I woke up a couple of times in the night, but when I returned on Tuesday the boiler had been installed and was all up and running.  I also forgot my comb, but that was not such a problem.

switch it off and on again

No review today as I didn't really get the chance to do any last weekend as I was jibbering on about earlier in the week.

As such instead I thought I'd post about something that finally happened today - we went digital.  Which is to say they've now fully switched off the analogue TV signal where I am.

It seems to have taken absolutely bloody ages for it to happen.  And it seems that way because it has taken absolutely bloody ages for it to happen.

Switchover was meant to all be completed by now but there have been various delays that have meant it's only now that it's all switched over.  It didn't even happen all in one go.

They switched off one of the channels at the beginning of the month (the 4th I think it was) and today they've switched off the rest.  This has meant two lots of me having to retune my digital box, which is always a complete pain.

The problem is it takes ages and seems to be quite badly affected by atmospherics.  Which is to say that when the weather is bad like it has been just recently some of the channels can be subjected to quite a bit of noise / interference and the box tends to err on the side of caution.

Well, I say that, it's actually a really good decoder and is able to tune in to channels that other people's cant, but when it does the scanning and saving it seems to be quite conservative for some reason.  Certainly it occasionally seems to miss channels.

It did that this morning and I'll have to return it when I get back home.

The other issue I have is that the recording schedule gets wiped when it rescans.  This is sort of understandable as the channel numbers may change or, as I say, some channels may be lost; however the bit that I don't get is that, if you do the retune it scrubs everything before it does the retune.

So as soon as you hit the "scan" button it deletes all the old channels and the recording schedule.  So if you don't save the results of the scan you end up with 0 channels.  It's rather weird, though considering it's the only compliant I have of the box that's not too bad going.

One weird thing that did happen between the two switchovers was one Sunday morning it had really poor reception across all the channels - literally searching brought up only about 8 channels, all of them BBC.  This rectified itself by the afternoon (thankfully, as it was a Grand Prix day!) but then after that it seemed to be picking up additional channels from the next region over.  I therefore had two radio 4s and two BBC Parliament channels (the duplicates were more than a little random!).

Hopefully I'll be able to do a scan when I get back and it'll pick up the channels it missed and not give me the random extra ones.  Then it's just a case of setting up all the recordings again.

One thing I did notice this morning was that the signal strength had shot up for all the channels it did pick up.  This is something they said would happen after switchover, as the digital signal apparently would interfere with analogue.  I'm not sure if they'll "turn-up" all of the transmitters once the whole country is switched over, but certainly the signal was saying it was around 60% where it had been about 40% before (percentage of what I'm not sure!).

chinese grand prix

Last weekend it was the Chinese Grand Prix.

Usually China is quite a good one.  It's a Hermann Tilka designed circuit, but it's one of his better ones.  You normally get overtaking, particularly into the first corner.  As with many Tilka circuits there's a gigantic straight (the start/finish straight) and this has also become the DRS straight.

This has led to the slightly odd situation of people who would have had a go into the first corner instead using the DRS to do an easy overtake down the straight instead.  This wasn't so bad this year as it was last year, but it still clearly happened.

However, the race was a bit of an odd one.  As I say, usually China is good, but this year it only got good in the last third.  The first two thirds was actually weirdly boring.

I mean the opening couple of laps were good, but after that it seemed to settle into the weird sort of rhythm where everyone seemed to be doing their own thing.  However, at about two thirds of the way through these different things and a few incidences all seemed to converge such that (with the exception of Rosberg who was way out in front) everyone seemed to end up in the same stretch of track with either more or less grip on the tyres.

This led to some really exciting racing and over-taking and so I really enjoyed the end part.

In terms of the championship Lewis is on top.  This is a reflection of him having finished third in every race where everybody else has been all over the shop.  I believe he has stated that it was his intention to be consistent this year, though his expression after the first two races where he looked like he'd already lost the championship suggested he was thinking more along the lines of consistently winning.

It's too early to know if the Mercedes will now be a fly in Lewis's ointment.  For the first two races they qualified well but had a lot of trouble working the tyres in the race so tended to fall back.  In China you wouldn't have known they had any troubles as they performed very well throughout the race (Schumacher suffering with a wheel change problem that put him out).

Whether this means they've really cracked it or it just happened to work for the Chinese Grand Prix and the conditions (it was quite cold) it's difficult to know.  Certainly it looks like Red Bull have lost their edge.  The lack of changes to the rules this year mean that others have caught up and the one thing that did change (blown diffusers) seems to have been key to the Red Bull design.

burn, burn, burn

So this last weekend I had a few things on my to do list, one of which was burning and ripping some audio books.

I listen to audio books when I'm walking.  I find music difficult to walk to as you naturally want to fall in to step with it and of course each song has its own tempo.  Well, unless you listen to dance music I guess, as loads of songs are at exactly the same tempo.

I use audible, which is owned by amazon.  It's all done digitally - you download the audio books and they have their own player thing.  Their player is actually terrible, but I don't generally use it.

What I generally do is burn them to CD (I've discussed this before - you're only allowed to burn them once) and then rip the CD and stick those on a tiny MP3 player I have (a Sanso clip).  Ripping the CD means I have to deal with iplayer, since audible uses its own proprietary format.  It's a necessary evil and generally seems to work okay.

Anyway, the to do list only featured ripping and burning as one of the things I had planned.  It was a grand prix weekend, and one of the ones the beeb was showing in full, so that would obviously take up a big chunk of time, but I hadn't expected that doing the audio books would take quite as long as it did.

The problem was I'd stacked up more audio books that usual and also the books I'd purchased were mostly quite long.  So while burning each Cd only takes about 5-10 minutes, when you're doing 30 of the things you're talking 2.5 hours at the minimum.

Ripping the things is quicker, but it comes with a kind of admin burden.  The reason for this is I just use windows media player to do it and it doesn't really recognise the tracks.  That means you have to go through and re-name everything.

I don't do this to the extent I could - I just rename the files and folders, rather than editing the Meta data, but still, it's horribly tedious.  And it's horribly tedious on top of the whole ripping process, which is tedious too.

There are associated tasks too, like downloading the audio books, backing the files up, putting them on the MP3 player, etc, so all told I'd say I spent a total of around 7 hours doing all the stuff that I needed to just to rip the audio books.

When you consider that the total time for the Grand Prix adds up to 6 hours (1.5 + 1.5 + 1 + 2) it's not really surprising I didn't get much else done at the weekend!

review back-log

Last week I missed a post on Wednesday and I forgot why until I came to post today and realised I had a similar issue.

Essentially, on Wednesday every week I was posting up mini reviews for the DVDs and Blu-Rays I rented.  However, while I was on contract I was only posting once a week (if that) so I didn't even bother to write the reviews, let alone post them.

So last week when it came to the mid-week point and I was in my usual "I've run out of stuff to talk about again / I've not got the time to do a whole post" I didn't have the pre-written reviews to fall back on.  I also had the slightly tricky issue of not actually fully remembering what I felt about the earliest titles back from around Christmas time.

As mentioned I've sort of hit the same problem today - I've not a lot to really write off the top of my head today and I've not really got the time spare to generate a more in-depth post.

I should be able to spend some time to sit down and write a few reviews this weekend, and maybe pre-write a few entries, so hopefully the blog will start to really get back to normal soon.

It's weird - I've actually been struggling to find the time to do all the stuff I used to.  I think the whole contracting thing has spoiled me for time a bit (even with the huge commute).

I've no idea

One thing I did do over the Easter weekend as part of the tidying up and cleaning was look for my exam certificates.

I didn't find them.  In fact, in looking for them it helped to clarify in my mind where they would have been, what I was therefore looking for and what has probably happened to them.

Basically as part of my extensive stuff clearance / downsizing activities I remember discovering all my old school reports and similar bits and pieces.  Now I know this is the sort of thing people like to hold on to for sentimental value, and I had been doing similar, but you have to bear in mind that I have enormous amounts of stuff and very little space to store it all.

As such I do recall taking the decision to get rid of it, but I have to confess I don't specifically remember binning them.  My guess is they just went in to a sack and got chucked with a load of other stuff.

Now the thing with the exam certificates is I think I had them tucked inside this binder thing that my school gave me when I left.  The idea of the binder was that it was meant to log your continuous professional development (CPD).  I remember I got actual certificates for the GCSE & A-level exams I passed and I'm now pretty sure I tucked them inside that binder.

And it's that binder I realised I was looking for and couldn't find.  Again, it's not something I specifically recall throwing away, but I do recall t being amongst my school-era stuff.  Since I now can't find it I must have thrown it away and the certificates have gone with it.

This is annoying mainly because I do not recall which subjects I took at GCSE and even for the ones I do recall I don't remember all of the grades.  I remember the A-levels, but GCSE I'm not at all sure beyond the 'core' subjects.

So obviously I will have done the likes of English, Maths and Science, but I don't know if I did all the humanities to GCSE level, for example.  Now I can work around it for my CV - I can probably guess at the number and put something along the lines of "10 GCSE, including Maths, English" and whatever.  The problem comes when you've got an application form that asks for them.

Quite why you have to fill out application forms and put all your qualifications I'm not sure.  When you do a CV the general advice is to focus on your "highest" academic qualifications, which is to say if you have a degree that's what you say and you'd don't even mention anything below that.  The exception is qualifications or similar you've received following your entry into the world of work, but even then it's generally good practice to only mention those that are relevant to the type of job you're going for.

Now you can actually get the exam boards to send you new copies of your certificates, but these are actually quite expensive.  The other option is I can ask what they have on me via a freedom of information request.  This is a lot cheaper, but the problem is that the exam boards are constantly changing and I don't actually know which of the exam boards they used.

I could also ask my old school, in theory, but it's a very long time ago now and they may not have the records.

easter

Last Thursday I started on the following blog entry:

Happy bloke-nailed-to-a-cross day…?

No blog yesterday.  Usually I would have uploaded a review, but unfortunately I didn’t have one prepped.  While I’ve been on contract I’ve obviously still been getting my rental disks and watching them, but because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing much blogging I didn’t write any reviews.  That means I’m going to have to wrack my brains to remember what they were like.  I’ll sort something out, though.

It’s Easter weekend after today.  I can’t work out whether Easter is late or Early this year, which tends to suggest it’s neither.  It does, however, feel like it’s in a weird time.

I suspect that’s actually something to do with the weather more than the timing, as such.

It’s been bonkers the weather just recently.  We seem to have gone from a spectacularly hot end of March to a freezing April in no time flat.  I mean, Scotland had a record hot March day and then a week later they’re buried under 5 inches of snow.  Weird.

Whether this means we’ll have the same pattern of weather as in the last two years I’m not sure.  A part of me would quite like to have something of a warm summer, rather than the last couple of years where it’s been a bit nothing in particular.

Most of all I hope we get a mild winter next year.

---

Unfortunately I got rather distracted with work and wasn’t able to actually find the time to post it.

The Easter weekend was both glorious and rubbish.  And all for the exact same reason – I did almost nothing of any value.

The only thing I did do was that I gave the bedsit a spring clean.  This took all day Friday and a good couple of hours on Sunday and Monday too, and even then I didn’t really do everything I’d put on my list.

The problem was that there was too much on my list for 1 day, but really I didn’t want to spend more than a day doing it.

Anyway, apart from that I basically did nothing.  I mean, I could have done stuff – there’s certainly plenty to do, but all I did was watch lots of TV that I’d recorded and play Civ3.

This was good in that it was quite relaxing.  I’ve found the return to RED somewhat stressful, not least of all because I've been looking in to getting a new job.

But it was bad because there was loads of stuff I could have done, but instead did nothing.

I think part of the problem is that I know I've got a week's holiday coming up and it's a week where I'm not going away properly so I'm already in the mind-set of "I'll do it in my holiday".  I always do this and it's not always helpful, because I end up with so much to do in my holiday that it's impossible to fit it all in.

moon shine

I had a terrible night's sleep last night.

It didn't get off to a good start in that I was rather late going to bed, but this was made worse by the fact that the moon seemed to be incredibly bright.  I think it was due to a lack of clouds and an unfortunate coincidence of timing to when I went to sleep, but it was like having a spotlight on outside the window.

I'm kinda used to having "spotlights" out that particular window, as the neighbours are total fuckers for leaving really bright lights on or not closing their curtains (one lot don't even have any curtains).  My technique for cutting out the light is therefore quite developed and involves the use of black bin bags.

Well that worked okay, but the moon was so bright that its light was reflecting off of stuff in the front garden on the opposite side and making that really bright too.  I wasn't really prepared for that, so I improvised something together but it wasn't perfect.

It was also rather chilly, which meant I had to put the heating on and got the timings all wrong so that it was too hot when I went to bed (a reflection of going to bed too late as well, to be honest).

Once I did get away I slept pretty well, but then in the very early hours I was awoken by a desperate need to go to the toilet.  Now I 'm actually kinda used to this as nowadays my bladder struggles to go an entire night without me needing to get up to pee.

However, this was around the other side shall we say.

It was actually revenge from the weekend when I ate a load of fruit and high fibre stuff.  Las week was really bad in that I was basically hungry all the time and by the weekend I was kinda struggling not to eat crap so I ended up buying lots of fruit and cereals.

My diet was therefore rather high fibre and while my guts are generally pretty strong such an influx has consequences.  And last night those consequences hit (not wanting to dwell too much but my transit times have always been slow - most people it would have hit them a lot sooner).

Anyway, while I wouldn't classify it as diarrhoea or anything I did have to get up to go a couple of times.  I therefore was really awake by about 5AM and decided to just cut my losses and ended up watching some telly I'd recorded.

I'm therefore quite tired as I write this.  To be honest it hasn't helped things that I've been setting up my new computer.  I mean that's something I enjoy, but it's always weirdly stressful and tiring.  Well, it's quite intense anyway.

The new machine is quite good.  It's not a super powerful machine (especially compared to what I've got at home) but it's a lot quicker than my current machine and light years ahead of anything else in the office.

same old same old

Well, I'm back in the office.

Feels weird, but also feels the same.

There have been a couple of changes.  There's a new face in the office, for example.  We've also bought a couple of new PCs (a very rare event).  There are a few changes to processes and procedures.

Unfortunately not enough and not in a direction where I think we should be going.

I actually had a really long chat about it with my Dad over the weekend.  It was weird as I hadn't really articulated the situation to anybody else previously.  I mean, I've mentioned bits on the blog, but that's a different thing, and I found that in trying to explain it I actually got a better grip on why I'm feeling the way I am.

I actually started feeling this way because of the contracting position, but coming back has thrown into focus that really the issues are a bit deeper than that.

The real nub of the problem is that I think we should be doing certain things in certain ways.  However, in order for them to be done in that way I would need to have more responsibility.  I'd need to be in charge of this part of the company.

But we're a tiny company.  The only way I think I would get that control is, in essence, if the MD retired or I did a management buy out or something equally unlikely and/or scary.

If I was in a larger company there would be more scope for me to be in charge of this bit (or a subset of the bit) without needing to take over the entire company.  I think this is my basic thought process, though obviously it's a bit more subtle than that and there are other complicating issues.

The difficulty is I do like working for the company and I think I still like the types of stuff we do and I like most (I confess not all) of the people who work for the company.

As I say I think the ideal thing would be if there were changes to the company, but I just don't see that happening any time soon.

interwebs

A few weeks back I got BT infinity.

That makes it sound like I decided to get it, but actually it was more like they told me I was getting it.  It was weird, actually, as the sales call was pretty aggressive but the trouble was it's a faster service and it's cheaper so it's hard to decline.

But why would I want to decline?

Well it wasn't so much that I wanted to decline it was more that I knew that getting it would be more than a little inconvenient and I couldn't really be sure if it would genuinely have any huge benefit.  See the thing is they have to come and do stuff at your property.

What they mainly do is replace your prime phone socket with a different thing that has a splitter actually built in to it.  It's a slightly different spec and function as well, I believe, because they also give you a modem.

The window they gave for putting this thing in was between 1 & 6, which is a huge chunk of time.  And of course they can only do it Monday to Friday.  Luckily with the flexi I was able to work bonkers hours and not have to take any time off.  Well, I say lucky - I was absolutely shattered by the time Friday came.

Anyway, the other issue is that I rent, so I needed my landlord's permission to put it in.  He was okay with it, but there was a side issue that the way the phone is installed it actually goes into my landlord's place and then he's put a huge extension round to my place.

I believe that extension he's put in is a big part of why I've always gotten a crappy speed here.  Best I've ever had was about 1.5meg, I think, but normally it's more like 1mb on a good day.

So all those factors made it horribly complicated and meant I wasn't at all sure I'd get a huge boost.  Especially when, as previously mentioned, I have access to my landlords cable, which is 10mb.

Anyway, the bloke installed it and did some line testing and said he was getting 25mb, which seemed quite poor to him.  I explained about the line quality and he said that made sense then - apparently he normally expects about 50mb.

Still, 25mb seemed like it might have all been worthwhile.  In reality it's actually been all over the shop.  Part of the idea of super fast broadband like this is it lets you watch streamed HD stuff without caching.  The only times I've tried that it's not gone 100% well.  Generally it'll work for a bit, then flake out and I have to watch the rest in SD.

And we're only talking 1hr programs - not loads of films in a row or anything.  However, torrenting works a dream.  Indeed it works so well that generally on Monday morning when I used to set my machine going all day to dl my torrents and then some files would need to be carried over to the next day, with infinity all the files dl while I get ready for work (so across half an hour) and then the rest of the day I'm basically just seeding them.

We're talking dl'ing up to about 5gb of stuff in half an hour, so a staggering improvement.  My guess is the difference with the torrenting is because it's designed to squeeze out as much bandwidth as possible and I'm doing it super early in the morning where the streaming TV is more at the whim of any "fair usage" policy and I'm tending to do it in the early evening.

Still, overall I think it's a success - at worst it seems to go down to about 2.5mb and while that's rubbish by most people's standards for my line it's a healthy improvement.

Still, one thing I would day is it would be nice not to have so many bits of kit.  I'm not sure if I was doing something dumb but I don't seem to be able to plug in to the modem directly.  You have to plug the BT hub thing in to it and then plug in to there.

I wouldn't mind so much if you could switch the modem off - you have to keep it on all the time so that it's able to talk to the exchange or otherwise after a couple of days the line speed starts to dwindle away and eventually it would basically cut you off.

This is particularly problematic for me as the modem has loads of really bright LEDs on it and of course bright lights are terrible for me to get to sleep.  I have to tuck it away under my bed and even then if I don't angle it just right the light bounces around and bits of the room glow intensely.

In theory next week is my last week for the contracting.  I've actually no real idea if I'll be there all week or not.  I would anticipate a couple of days at the least.  It kinda depends on if they like the report I've done or not - if they want lots of changes I'll be there a while, otherwise it may just be a couple of days.

Or I'll do loads

Well that didn't quite go according to plan.

Because this week at work was not quite planned, I'd kinda thought I'd turn up and there'd basically be nothing for me to do.  In reality I turned up and there was way too much for me to do.

It's all very weird - the timing was such that on the Monday there was a new project starting and I was asked to contribute to it.  It was a bit of a mess - the specification we responded to was a bit non-sensical and I don't think the people who'd put it together had twigged.  I've put together some stuff and pointed out the non-sensical stuff and I think I've helped things out.

The shame of it in a sense is that I'm back to the contracting next week where really I should do a bit more on this other project to finish it off.

The other weird thing is there was a potential bid to do.  It's all a bit complicated so I won't explain the detail, but the person in question hasn't really been in the office so I was able to step in and sort it out.  It was actually a no bid, but it was another example of good timing.

But also this person needed a few other bits doing so I've been able to do those as well.

So this week has been all about the weirdly good timing.

The week back has also rather emphasised that I really would rather not go back to the contracting thing.  If the contract had split my effort across multiple projects as it was supposed to I might be a bit keener.  If I'd actually had my own desk, rather than having to hot desk I'd definitely have been keener.  If the commute had been much more reasonable I'd have been keen.

But those three things together mean I think I'd rather stay here than go there.

Trouble is if they offer an extension I'm going to feel I should go with it because it means more money coming in to the company.  Even if I were to do a similar short-ish length again I would have paid for my entire year's salary and then some!

Of course it will be a rather last minute offer if they do make the offer - next week is my last week and once it expires they can't extend it, as far as I understand it.

But as I say, I'm thinking that perhaps it will be better all round if the offer isn't made.

back to work... again

Well now, here's an unexpected thing - I'm going to be back to my normal place of work next week.

I wasn't really expecting to be back until April at the very earliest, but it's basically worked out that I've finished the report I was doing and it needs reviewing.  Well, that's part f the reason.  The other reason is that they've basically run out of money!

I'll be returning to my contracting place the week after.  In theory it should be for a week, but I dunno - I've a feeling it will either be longer or short.  Longer will require an extension and shorter is if the report is really great and they don't want anything doing (unlikely).

I'm not sure if I want an extension.  I haven't really being enjoying it down there if I'm honest, but it brings money in to the company and with the economic situation it's not exactly a bad idea to be seen to be earning money to cover my wage.

But if I'm really honest I think I want to get a new job.  I'm getting a bit bored with the current situation.

Trouble there is I don't really want to land the company in the lurch - I don't want to get some long extension and then after a few months say "actually, here's my resignation, I'm off!"

Of course there's a massive assumption that I could possibly find a new job!  Certainly I've been struggling to do my CV (I can't for the life of me remember what GCSEs and A-Levels I got and it's hard to squish everything else in to a couple of pages).

Anyway, I guess the upshot is that I might be posting stuff next week during the week, back t normal.  I say guess because I've no idea how busy I might be at work - I don't know if there'll be nothing for me to do or they'll give me too much to do.  Certainly they've given away my computer to someone else...

tiring, to say the least

So last week I mentioned I'd come down with yet another cold.

I seem to have suffered from a succession of colds in recent months.  This is essentially a reflection of being exposed to a greater variety of people and it being cold season, but it ends up feeling like some weird pattern when there have been this many - 4 by my reckoning across the last four months.

The weirdest thing about this last one was that it followed exactly the same disease pattern as the first one I had in the sequence, which makes it feel like even more of a pattern.

Basically it first made itself felt on Friday evening with a vague sense of it being there and then across Saturday I started to get proper symptoms.  Saturday night I felt properly unwell and the evening and night were spent alternately running hot and cold and I got very little sleep.

Sunday I felt absolutely awful, partly due to the cold and partly due to the lack of sleep.  Monday I woke up and felt much better, but the more traditional cold symptoms hit with a vengeance and my nose runs like it's a leaky tap all day.

Tuesday I felt better still, but the symptoms have moved on to a dry, tickly cough, though thankfully the nose is more bunged up than runny.  Wednesday the cough is basically all gone and I just feel a bit congested, rather than properly bunged up.

Thursday, apart from a slightly croaky throat you probably wouldn't know I'd had a cold at all.  Which, as I say, was exactly the same pattern as the first cold I got in this sequence.

One of the things I'm not sure of is does this represent an improvement in my constitution?  Now that I can do things like walk up a hill without my heart wanting to explode out of my chest has that meant I'm now better able to fight things like colds and so the symptoms follow the same basic pattern for all but the nastiest/luckiest of bugs?

Or is it more that I essentially caught the same strain of cold, and it had simply mutated enough that my immune system couldn't take care of it instantly?

What made it all worse was that I had a report to do for Wednesday, so really where I should have taken Monday at the least off, I felt I couldn't.  And because it took so long to do the report I've actually done 1.5 hours extra last week, and that's with only doing short days on Thursday and Friday.  It really wasn't much fun and I've been knackered this weekend as a result.

Still, at least that means I get to do 1.5 hours less this next week!  ... except I have a dental appointment and my car is in for a service and MOT, so I'm going to spend a small fortune :(.

Anyway, in other news, the Formula 1 season gets under way next weekend with the Australian Grand Prix.  It's also the first of the double headers, with the Malaysian Grand Prix following the very next weekend.  I'm hoping these double headers work out okay for me - I'm a bit worried that two weeks on a row will pox up my timings and schedulings.

I'm not sure on that front if the BBC only showing highlights will help or hinder me.  And by that I mean TV highlights - they actually appear to be doing more on Radio than they used to, so in a weird way there may be more for me to watch/listen to each weekend than last year!

One thing I have noticed is that the TV Programme Guide listing thing for my PVR doesn't have the race listed as being on Sky Sports 1 or 2.  I don't actually have them, but you can get them via top-up TV and I was umming and erring over whether I should give it a go and it looks like I made a wise decision not too.

It does leave me wondering how the hell the sky thing is going to work - I could understand practice not being on there but if the main race and practice aren't then where are they showing them?  Sky Sports 3 & 4?  That feels like they're really being relegated to nowhere land.

Or could you only get access by subscribing to this dedicated Formula 1 channel they're doing?  Is that an additional channel you can only have if you take out a full Sky Sports subscription as well?

I can see why Bernie approved - more ways to fleece the ordinary F1 fans (and everyone else) seems to fit right in with his modus operandi!

under the weather

So last week's post has proven to be unfortunately prophetic.

One of the reasons I dismissed for why I hadn't blogged was that I'd been ill.  Well, this week I am ill - hurrah and huzzah!

Actually, not either of those things, as I've felt bloody awful most of the weekend.  I think it's a cold.  I say think because I felt a lot worse than my symptoms match up with - I've only had a little bit of a runny nose and there's been no cough to speak of.  Instead I've felt really achy and tired and had a bit of a 'behind the eyes' headache.  Last night I was also boiling up and had to shed my duvet and then promptly felt freezing.

I've actually just started to feel a bit better as I type this.  I'm not sure if that means I'm over the hump of it or I'm simply about to move from this feeling awful phase in to more traditional symptoms.

But also, weirdly, the weather has been crap today.  It's basically drizzled and rained  all day, so I've been under the weather because of that too.  It actually snowed a little while back.  IT was obviously way to warm and wet for it to settle, but odd nonetheless.

It meant I couldn't have gone out for my walks today, even if I'd felt better than I do.

I'm not really surprised I've come down with something if I'm honest.  There's been a lot of people ill at work and they're great big open plan offices with loads of people crammed in.  That means that if anyone gets a cold and is coughing and sneezing it can easily infect loads of people who are close by.  It's also an air conditioned building, so that helps to spread germs too.

Plus I've had a hell of week.  I had to go to a meeting in London on Tuesday and it was horrendous.

The meeting was great, it was the rest of it that was crap.  They had me rent a car, which was quite stressful, because you're always a bit nervous when it comes to a new vehicle and of course I had to travel around the M25 in rush hour.

Which took the best part of two hours going there and two hours going back.  The worst bit was getting on to the M25 going there - it took bloody ages and I regretted taking the route I did.  Going back it took ages mainly because I hadn't had a chance to eat anything all day and so I had to go and get something to eat.  But that meant I was then driving home in the dark and I could not for the life of me work out how to switch on the headlights.

The vehicle was a Vauxhall Corsa and it had the usual storks behind the steering wheel that allowed you to turn the indicators on and do the windscreen wipers.  However, in every car I've ever driven the stork that does the indicators also does the headlights.  But not here.

It lets you put the lights on full beam, but not turn them on!

Eventually after everybody flashing and beeping me and me getting worried the police might pull me over I stopped and tried to work out how to do it.  Well it turns out that, in order to turn the lights on there's a rotary dial down by your right knee.  I mean, what the hell is it doing down there?

There were two controls on the indicator stalk that I'd been playing with thinking they were the headlights, but Christ knows what they did.

Plus I was desperately trying to get a report somewhere near finished by the end of the week, which I basically failed to do.

So yeah, it was a horribly stressful and tiring week, so it's no wonder I caught some bug.

On the upside, my concerted staying in bed has meant I've cleared a load of telly stuff that had gotten backlogged, which is always nice.

the blog that never blogged

So there's clearly been no blog for a couple of weeks.

There's not any particularly good reason for that - I've not been ill and the contracting position technically demands less hours from me per week that my normal position.  There is a reason for the non-bloggage, though... sort of.

Basically the difficulty I'm having is that my "interweb life" (if you will) was so well integrated into my normal day job that this move to the contracting position has almost expunged it.  What do I mean by that?  well, my normal job we have internet at desk and my desk isn't particularly overlooked, so I can basically surf the web at work.

That means that all my daily blog posts were pretty much written at work, I surfed the forums I visit at work, I did internet shopping at work, etc, etc.  Now don't get me wrong - we all did that, and part of the whole inflexibility of work hours where I usually work is made up for by this relatively relaxed attitude.

When you're on contract that's not really the case.  Even if it was possible to do all the surfing I used to (it isn't for a variety of reasons) it would hardly look appropriate to the customer if he watched me spend half an hour buying manga on amazon, even if in reality I was still doing the allotted number of hours of work I'm supposed to.

See, were I'm contracting they work flex and they're only paying for 37 hours of my time per week.  Well in my usual job it was more about being sat at your desk from 9 to 5:30 and in reality I would actually do more like 8:15 to 6:45.  However, as mentioned in my regular job I could spend time surfing the interweb, but can't in my contracting work.

Which is where the problem comes - if I'm doing 37 hours a week then that's a lot less time than 8:15 to 5:45.  Okay, it's a lot longer commute (it takes about 3 times as much time) but still, I should be time rich.  and I am.  Trouble is it's always been the case that, having spent all day working on a computer, when I come home I'm often rather loathe to spend time on it in the evening as well.

And even when I do, the tendency is to want to spend time doing fun stuff like gaming than going through all the e-mails and stuff that I would have ploughed through during my day at my usual work.

That tendency has also always extended to the weekend, where I tend to not spend a huge amount of time on the computer doing things like writing blog posts.  I'm generally doing other stuff or I'm wanting to do other stuff.

I mean, that's why I spent all morning today going through pages of e-mails and newsletters and articles I follow.  I literally spent about 5 hours doing it and still have half of them left.  It's actually quite an eye opener for how much time I must normally spend at work doing all this stuff!

And I've just heard that they might want to extend my contract for a bit.

To be totally frank I'm not massively enjoying what I'm doing.  I mean it's okay and it's something a bit different, but it's really not playing to my strengths and I kinda thought that it would do when I started.

game me away

This weekend I've spenty most of my free time playing games.

I did the same last weekend, but there's a key difference - this weekend it feels like I've bumbed the time away, not doing anything that's really productive.  And I still feel that, even though I spent half the time last weekend waiting for the game to install.

I mean, that's pretty much wasted time - I wasn't actually playing the game, but I couldn't really just leave it in case anything went wrong and it needed my attention.  But still, it's this weekend that I feel I've wasted the time.

So why the difference?  In both instances I was gaming, but last weekend I played a game I'd never played before - homefront- whereas this weekend I've been playing Civ 3.

Homefront was okay.  It was a first person shooter and has a very similar story to modern warfare, in that America is being invaded and you have to fight the invaders.  In homefront you're a resistance fighter, which actually makes it a bit more like a cross between half life 2 and modern warfare.

In homefront it was the Koreans invading, rather than the Russians.  However, it didn't make a huge difference, although the plot was different enough to make it interesting.  And it's not a bad plot - it's a bit cliché and a bit jingo-istic, but well enough executed to be enjoyable.

It was very short, though.  I was sort of expecting it would take me a couple of days to get through, especially with the huge time it took to load, but it only took about 6 hours of playing.  And that's bearing in mind I'm crap at games and there are no cheat codes to help me.

The load time really was long.  Part of the problem was that initially it tried to install from steam, despite having it on disk.  However, I recalled you can get it to install from disk and once I'd done that it was quite quick.

The bit that took ages was once it had been installed it then went and downloaded updates from steam.  Obviously there was nothing I could really do about that apart from let it do it, but the real problem was that the updates were around 4.5gb!

To put that into some sort of perspective, the game installed from disk was about 7.5gb.  That means the updates were more than half as much again. 

Obviously I was hooked up to the cable broadband, but 4.5 soon ate through the limits and the throttling kicked in, so it must have taken something like 3 hours to install all the updates!

Quite how they can release a game that then acquires 4.5gb of updates, I don't know.

Anyway, homefront was okay, if short, so that was fine.

Problem has been this week I've been listening tot eh civ5 podcasts when I've been walking.  I've had these for ages and figured I should finally listen to them.  And listening them gave me a strong hankering to play civ3.

I know 3 - 5 - eh?  Well, problem with 5 is I'd need to uninstall homefront and then steam then reinstall steam and re-install 5.  I played it very briefly when I first got 5 but it was so buggy I gave up almost immediately...which made me afraid I would have another 4 hour session downloading updates!

So Installed 3.  What I should have done is waited until Sunday, but I installed it early on Saturday and it's only really now on Sunday evening I'm thinking about putting it on hold for the rest of the day.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed playing it, but I should be doing something like playing another game I haven't played.  Not least of all because if it's not so good I could sell it on e-bay.

Not that e-bay's a hugely practical proposition at the moment, with the contracting.  However, I think I'm finally getting my head around the timings with the flexi-time.  I even went and did a bit of washing on Friday evening, which was good as it freed me up to go get a haircut on Saturday morning, rather than sit in the laundrette.

As I say, now that I'm getting used to it, hopefully I'll get some more time to do different bits in the evening.

It snowed last night, but it's been a little warmer today and there's been no additional snow and no indication on the forecast it will snow, so I don't think the place I'm working will be closed.  Hopefully this is the only bit of snow we have this year.  It's been quite mild this winter and I think we really needed one - the last few have just been a real drag.

two down, ten to go

So the second week on my contracting job has finished.

It was a bit better this week in some ways.  I got a better idea of what I'm meant to be doing, but it's not really my cup of tea.  I mean, it's interesting, but not really the sort of work I'd have brought me in for.

Part of the problem is I'm meant to be doing two projects, but one of them has basically evaporated.  In a way that's good as I don't know that what I've been given to do would really fit into the time unless I was able to work on it full time.

The commute is going to be a bit of a drag.  It's turning out to be just under an hour, but only if I do two things: set off before seven and push it on the A3.

This clearly has two issues - it means I have to get up at 6AM and it's costing me in fuel economy.  The first isn't too bad, as I'm a bit of an early riser, although I have to say 6AM is probably my breaking point.  6:30AM I've been doing for years, but 6AM has a bit too much of an impact on when I have to go to bed (I have to get 8 hours every night or I feel cranky all day).

Since it's only 3 months, I can probably cope with the time, but the fuel economy is more of a bugger.  See, the real issue is that the cost of petrol is so high and my company's fuel allowance is pretty crap.  That means I'm not really making much over and above what I'm spending.  Now, that's okay in the sense that at least I'm not out of pocket, except of course that the increased mileage means increased wear on tyres, more frequent services, etc, etc.  And those things are pretty expensive.

Again, 3 months will be okay, but I really wouldn't want to do this long term.

Well, I say that, as there are other options.

Firstly, I could not push it and just arrive when I arrive.  That means the journey will take a long time if I still set off early, because I'll start to hit traffic relating to kids going to school.

The other option is to go in later.  They work flexi where I'm contracting, and at the moment I'm going to work early so I can come home early.  I could alternatively try to go in later and come back later.

I'm not really sure about this, as I am a 'lark', rather than an 'owl' and my body clock is really locked in to doing early, rather than later.

Also, there are going to be days when I have early meetings, etc, anyway.

Part of me is still hopeful that I'll have a bit of a gain of time in the evenings, though.  Because I can do flexi, I can take short lunches and stuff, so once I'm properly used to it I will hopefully have a few extra hours in the evenings across the week.

My weight basically didn't change this week.  To some extent that was because I found work less stressful, I think, but also I had a poor week diet wise anyway, and then my landlord came back from holiday and gave me a gift of chocolates to say thanks for house-sitting... and I ate the lot in a few days :/

I think if I can avoid slipping up too badly with normal diet stuff then I should get back to weight loss next week.  The idea of going for a walk after work is an okay one.  It doesn't work quite as well as my former walking regime and I think it might be a case of picking days to do it on.  For example, some evenings I can get petrol or shopping or whatever and the other I can come back and go for a walk.

first week

So, my first weekend blog post.

My original plan was I would actually post on both Saturday and Sunday, but to be honest I pretty much forgot to do one yesterday.

Anyway, what have I been up to?

Well, obviously I started my new contracting job this week.  That doesn’t mean I lost my job or anything, but it does mean I’ve been working at a different location.  The best way to think about it is the (much maligned) consultants.  I mean, I’m not a consultant, but it’s the thing people know that’s similar.

The job was... okay.

When I did the interview there was lots of talk of the type of work that I enjoy.  I won’t really talk about the detail, but it was to be quite technical and number-crunchy - that sort of thing.

However, it’s become apparent that this part of the work has kinda ‘cooled’ a bit.  I’ve not had specific confirmation that it’s no longer needed, but there’s been some strong hints that the looming deadlines aren’t really that looming any more.

Now the last time this happened to me it was with the same group and what happened on that occasion was that I ended up playing about with something that didn’t really need doing.  In essence they had to make up something for me to do, and it was very apparent.

While I sort of enjoyed doing what I was doing it wasn’t really productive, so I felt a bit rubbish about it.  When I’m doing contracting I like to be working on something properly so that it feels like I’m giving value for money.

This time there’s not the same problem.  There were actually two projects that needed input and the second one hasn’t dried up.  It therefore doesn’t feel like I’m thumb-twiddling, so that’s good.

What’s not so good is that the work I’m doing really doesn’t play to my strengths at all.  In essences I’m having to do lots of phoning around and trying to get things from people.  This is the sort of thing I really don’t like.

What makes it worse is that I’m not really 100% sure what it is I’m asking for.  Again, I won’t give specifics, but there are two basic issues.  Firstly, I don’t really know much about what this group does and so I’ve been given a very steep learning curve.  Secondly, I’ve not had the clearest instruction and have basically been dropped in the deep end - I’m coming in after some work has been done, but not much, and I’ve also not yet gotten access to the background.

As such, I’m kinda calling people up going “Any chance I can have some x?” and they’re going “maybe - what sort of x do you need?  how much and what, specifically about?” and unfortunately my reply has tended to be “er... I’m not sure.”

Hopefully I should get better access to the background next week and find my feet more.

What also hasn’t helped is that I’ve had to do loads of “training” and induction stuff.  It’s good that it was all set up and ready to go (last time I worked there it was days before I even got a computer) but it  means it’s all been a massive info dump.  I’m also having to hot desk, which is rubbish.

The commute has also turned out to be a bit longer than expected.  Well, I can do it in the anticipated hour if I set off at seven, but if I set off much later than that, then it takes about an hour and a quarter.  That means I’m getting up at six.

The up side to it is that I should therefore be able to go home at four, but I’ve not really been able to take advantage of that yet.  This also means I struggled to do my idea of going for a short walk after work each day.  Although saying that I lost four pounds this week, but I think that could be due to diet re-adjustment and stress and lack of sleep and stuff, rather than effective diet and exercise activities.

Although to be fair I think part of this is because my landlord has been away, so I’ve been having to fart about sorting the lights out and stuff.

Well, until next week, I guess.

porky time

Well, this is the last blog of the week and I’m also pretty sure it’s going to be the last daily weekday blog for a while.

As mentioned before chrimbo I’m starting on contract and it will be impossible to update the blog at work from now on.  Since I’m probably not going to be keen to then spend time in the evening doing it (I’m pushed to do much more than watch TV) this will therefore become a weekend blog.

Quite how that will work I’m not sure, but I’ll see what I feel like.

The last thing I did want to mention was my dietary progress over the holiday.  Or rather the exact opposite.

Before the holiday I weighed in at 18 stone 10 pounds. When I weighed myself this last weekend I weighed 19 stone 4 pounds.  That’s a gain of 8 pounds, or just a smidge over half a stone.

I did actually gain  little more than that, as I weighed myself during the holiday and weighed 19 stone 6 pounds, but I actually had the same phenomenon that I had last year where I ate a lot and then it took a while for my digestive system to... “catch up” if you will.

Indeed, this year I actually had a few occasions where I had serous gut pain during the night.  It was the same as the pain I’ve had before when I've seriously over eaten.

Part of the problem is that I went a bit nuts before Chrimbo buying stuff “because I was going to treat myself” over the holiday.  But then my dad also loaded me up with loads of food to take back with me that he’d bought.  Quit why he’d bought so much when he knew we were both only going to be there for a little while I don’t know.

And yes, some of it I could have been sensible and left in the freezer or not opened, but then I’d have been faced with weird meals where you’re only having half of what you expect (so bangers and mash without the bangers, because they’ve been put in the freezer :/) and also after the holiday way over, what then?

Would I have to drip feed ‘bad stuff’ in?  Throw it away?  Or what?

So I essentially forced myself in to a situation of having to eat a lot.

I did still keep walking and did some good walks, although it wasn’t really part of the holiday plan to do walking like I do in autumn or whatever.  However, I think those helped me keep things in check a bit.

Anyway, I’ve now pretty much finished it all off, so it’ll be back to bread and water and lettuce next week.

Also, I think I've come up with a bit of a plan for what to do in terms of walking when I’m on contract.  Basically my problem is that it will be an hour commute each way, but I will have the advantage of working flexi time.  As such, my plan is that I will only take a minimal lunch and then I’ll do a single, reasonable length walk when I get back (literally when I arrive home I'll go for a walk).

Before I was doing three short-sharp walks in and around the estate where my offices are (when I got to work (I’m always super early), at lunch and then straight after work, before I got in my car).  I’m hoping these should be equivalent - especially since the walk I have in mind will involve some steep inclines, making it harder work.

the rest of the break

So when I returned from my Dads I obviously wasn't feeling great, as the second cold was still in full swing.

This cold wasn’t quite as intense as the first one, but it seems to have lasted longer - I’m still sniffling now a good couple of weeks later.  What this did mean is that the week between Chrimbo and the New Year wasn't as fun as it could have been.

I’d arranged to see a few chums and while I did do most of those I generally didn’t drink very much and tended to go home early and stuff.  Still, it was nice to see them.

New Years was actually relatively quite.  I still wasn’t fully recovered, and I have to confess I don’t find New Years to be that good of an experience anyway.

The problem is that everyone is out.  So if you go out with the intention of getting drunk it can be quite difficult getting any drinks as all the bars are swamped.  Alternatively you could go to some ticketed event, which can be okay, but can also be expensive.

Also I’ve never been much of one for enforced jollity.  It's part of why I’m not hugely ken on celebrating my birthday - it feels like an obligation, rather than something you’re doing for genuine fun, if you see what I mean.

Anyway, the week after New Years was when I entered that lovely bit where I am basically the only one on holiday.  That’s obviously not true at all, but where the week before most people are off, that first week is more like a proper break.

I like it particularly because it’s time entirely to myself.  It’s holiday I take most years when I can and is a great chance to get caught up on lots of the random stuff I put off or ignore or whatever.

So I gave my flat a really good clean, for example.  I also washed some of the more random clothing items, like my dressing gown and oven gloves.  And I got my suits dry cleaned.  I know - these aren’t glamorous things, but it’s a good time to do them.

Apparently, in Japan, they traditionally give the house and work and stuff a big clean up so that they can enter into the new year with a ‘clean start’.  I kinda try to do the same, I guess.

Of course I’d planned into the time way too much to do.  I’d created a big long list of stuff and I’d have needed to take six months off to do it all!  As such I pruned it down to the bear essentials and focused on a couple of things I thought I could achieve in the time.

I almost managed to get them finished and I reckon I’ll use this next weekend to knock them on the head.  They’re also things that should save me a little bit of money when I’m done, so that’s always nice.

white noise 2 - the light

I watched a few rental DVDs over the Christmas period, the first of which was white noise 2.

I seem to recall I quite liked the first white noise, mainly because the ending was somewhat unexpected.  It led up to something that, while I don't think I would really classify it as a twist, was quite an interesting ending.

The second film is less successful.

Mainly, I have to confess, because it seems to go in a direction that isn't really a proper follow-on to the first film.  In the first film the idea is that the souls of the dead are essentially captured in radio and television static - hence the white noise.

While it's bunkum in terms of spirits, this is a known phenomenon, where, if you record static occasionally bits of it - interference in particular - will sound a bit like someone speaking.  The human brain is particularly attuned to pattern finding, and these noises, with a bit of imagination, can seem to sound like words being spoken.

So the first film used this idea as if it really was spirits communicating, with the main character being recently bereaved.

In the second film it kinda tries to tie it in to the static idea, but takes it in a direction that is really similar to the Final Destination series.

In those films someone gets a premonition of their death as part of some big, tragic disaster and then manages to take themselves and some other people out of the line of fire.  However, death then 'pursues' them, essentially trying to bump them off in the order they should have died.

In this second white noise film, the main character acquires a similar sort of power - the static now seems to point out to him people who are about to die, giving him the opportunity to save their lives.

Now there is more of a traditional twist to this story (which I saw coming a mile off so that probably suggest it isn't a very good twist) but the problem is, because it feels like it's a cobbling together of the two films and doesn't really follow on from the effect used in the first, it feels a lot less original.

Also, where the first film was built on a known effect that anyone can encounter, this second film endows the main character with special powers.  And they're special powers that seem to give him a view of things that nobody else does.

I mean, it'd be okay if they worked it so that everyone sees the effect, but only he interprets it in that way or sees something extra, but no - only he sees it, and it's a definite thing and is never really cast doubt on.

I'm being quite harsh on the film - it's not really bad as such, it's just the first film worked a lot better.

back to work

First day back to work today.

It feels a bit weird, as I’ve had quite a long time off.  Well, actually it’s only just over two weeks, but it feels like it’s been a nice long break.

So I guess I should talk about Christmas and the new year and holiday.

Christmas I went to see my dad and my sister at my dad’s.  We had Turkey for Christmas lunch.  It’s a bit weird having Turkey as my Dad and sister have both said they aren’t hugely keen on it before, so I don’t tend to expect to have it.

However, we’ve had it for the last couple of years, where usually they like to have lamb or beef.  I think part of it is that my Dad has found a good butchers and buys what I think is called a Turkey crown.  Whatever it’s called it’s basically just a huge hunk of breast meat.

I’m assuming it’s from the one bird - that’s how he described it - but it must be a monster of a bird.  He’d basically chopped it up into three huge chunks and frozen two of them, sending me and my sister away with one each.  The third bit was what we cooked and it was a whacking great chunk of meat.

Unfortunately we got the timing a bit wrong.  We tried the thing where you skewer the meat and look for the colour of the juices, which was clear, but then when my Dad started cutting it up it clearly wasn’t quite done.

I mean, it wasn't a long way off, and we could probably have eaten it as is, but it’s always better to be safer rather than sorry with poultry.  As such my dad cut off enough for us to have then and we nuked those bits to finish them off (everything else was on the table, so we couldn’t really wait) and put the rest back in the oven while we ate.

In hindsight we should have cut it open when it came out the oven before resting it, just to make sure t was cooked and then we’d have known.

There’s normally one mistake for the chrimbo lunch, and otherwise it all went smoothly.

Unfortunately the rest of the time at my Dads was a little marred because I caught another cold!

My sister was riddled with cold when I arrived and was coughing and sneezing a lot and I could start to feel it come on within about 36 hours of arriving, so I think I caught it off of her.  Since she lives a fair way away that also would tie in with a different strain.

However, there are a couple of other possibilities.  Firstly it could have been my first cold making a comeback.  This is certainly possible, but y the time I wet away I was almost over it.

The second more likely possibility is that I caught it off someone else at work.  When I went on holiday almost everyone else in the office had a cold.  Now I had obviously assumed this was the cold that I had caught off of our “typhoid mary” (the introducer of the virus) that had then been past on, but apparently someone else’s partner had also got a cold and so there could have been another strain kicking around.

However, as I say, my belief is I caught it off my sister.

I’ll continue later in the week.

merry wishmsases

I hope you have a good Christmas and New Year period :)

I am away on holiday now until the 10th of January, so I thought I'd post my usual Chrimbalo message for over the festive season.

As I mentioned earlier this week I will actually be going on contract next year, so the blog will almost certainly switch to being a weekly one next year.  The contract doesn't actually start until a little after I'm back, so initially I'll be blogging as usual, so see you then.

saw vii

My basic feeling when I reviewed saw 6 was that it had kinda disappeared up its own fundament.

The saw films have always tried to have an approach where there's a twist to them, so when you get to the point of having 6 or 7 films, you've piled on so many twists that you probably don't know whether you're coming or going.  It also probably doesn't help that (as the commentaries indicate) none of it was really planned - they've just kinda gone with the flow.

I'm setting aside the fact that the twist in the first film isn't really a twist as such and was kinda irrelevant.  What's more important is that in the early films you could genuinely see that there was a reasonable chance most of the people would have a chance of doing what was required of them and surviving.

Yes, it would be brutal and nasty and the thing they'd have to do was traumatising and painful, but you felt there was a good chance of them making it.  In the later films - 7 especially - that seems to have gone away.

Indeed, in most traps they came to rely on other people having to do something and / or there was a death guaranteed.  In other words, one or more people had to make a decision that affected somebody else and often times that decision resulted in one person dying, rather than another.

This was kinda explained by what happened in the story that flowed through the narrative, but it also started to feel a lot like pandering to the audience.  An audience that was, by now, almost entirely consisting of gore hounds and more hardcore fans.

This of course was not helped by all the complicated back story - you couldn't watch most of the later films unless you'd seen the earlier ones.  There was no way you could 'dip in'.

In 7 you get more of the same.  Indeed, you get so much more of the same this feeling of pandering to the core audience becomes pretty overt.  I mean, they've set it up as the last one (both commentary tracks hint that actually maybe they'd do more in the future - you never could keep a good horror movie killer down) so they kinda had to do that, but still, there's so many deaths and so much gore that it just becomes a bit silly.

Especially at the end - the people who die have nothing to do with traps or what was meant to be the point of the film in the first place.  I mean, at the start, Jigsaw was very clear about how he never killed anybody - he just tested them to see if they could break through and survive.

At the end of 7 you've got exactly the opposite - all the traps are virtually un-winnable or some people are guaranteed to die and a lot of the deaths are just nasty killings, not even traps.

In other words, it kinda has become torture porn - that label the critics slapped on it but probably wasn't deserved at the start is really what the films now definitely are.

One last thing - the screaming in this film is ridiculous.  I mean, people always used to scream a bit, obviously, but mainly when they really had something to scream about.  Or you'd get bits where they tried to hold back the screaming or they couldn't scream.  Now the screaming becomes like an iron bar to beat you into submission with.  It's all just a bit too much, much like the film itself.

If they ever do re-start it, I hope they go for something a little less complicated, or go back to when it was Jigsaw proper and it was about proper (and significant) moral lessons and winnable traps.

ringing in the changes

Right then, a bit of an announcement.

The intention of this blog was always that I would post every weekday about things happening in my life or giving my opinions on things that were happening and to post up reviews of stuff.  Fairly mundane stuff, but at the least it kept me writing and it makes it more like a diary, which was kinda the idea.

Anyway, this was all pretty much based on my work situation, where I was based at the main offices of my company and would only be out of the office due to the occasional meeting or through holiday or illness.

Well that situation will be changing at the start of next year.

I don't tend to talk too much about what my company actually does, but one of the things we do is provide contractors.  Another, more precise name for this is "Manpower Substitution" and as this suggest we provide people to fill roles.

And that's what I'm going to be doing from next year.

It's initially a three month contract, running until the end of the financial year, but there's the possibility of an extension.  Financial year is obviously when budgets get re-worked out so they will see if there's money for me to continue.

Also it's obviously dependent on whether it goes well.  They may hate me or I may prove to be incompetent or the work may dry up - anything could happen - but what is certain is I will be there until March.

Now the weird thing is that actually while on contract I will be doing less hours than I do at my normal work.  The reason is that the contract is paid per hour and they effectively by a set number of hours a week, but at my work, although we have a working day, I actually work loads of (unpaid!) overtime in the sense that I get to work at least an hour early and often go home half an hour later.

However, the place I will be working at will be an extra hours drive on my commute (which may actually act as a bit more of an incentive for me to move) there and back, so although I'll be doing less working hours it'll still be about the same length of day.

Of course I get to claim expenses on the extra miles, so that'll be a nice little cash bonus (except of course the increased wear and tear on the vehicle does add up), but it does mean that I won't be able to post blogs on weekdays.

The reason is that where I'll be working I won't have any internet access, and I'm very unlikely to be bothered to do anything like write a blog post every evening when I get back.

I will keep the blog though, with the intention that it will become a weekend blog.  Whether that means I post on both Saturday and Sunday, I don't yet know, but it'll be some sort of weekend thing.

The reason I'm going on contract is that it's not been the best year for the company - expenditure has increased while revenue has decreased, so we need as much cash coming in as we can get.

it's actually back this time

Total Wipeout appears to be properly back this time.

It also appears to have started in a "Winter Wipeout" format.  Whether this is a temporary Christmas thing or the whole series will be Winter Wipeout I'm not sure.

It was again very quiet in the Laundrette.  Not sure why it was quiet, but I did therefore take the opportunity of not being worried about my machine ending without me there (not from a people may knick my stuff point of view, but due to politeness - not wanting to keep a machine occupied when it's not doing anything) to go and explore the Co-op.

I'm pretty sure I mentioned this before, but a new Co-op mini-supermarket / convenience store type of thing has opened up at the end of the road.  It's taken over an old electrical goods store that's been closed for years and is of a reasonable size.

I think there's quite a lot of the store been used for storage and back-room area, though, because I was actually a little surprised by the actual shop-floor space.  It's quite 'rammed in' to compensate.  Most of the aisles are very narrow - it would be a struggle to get past someone if they were down the row and you certainly couldn't get two trolleys past each other.

IT was obviously quite early so it wasn't exactly busy, but I could imagine it would seem quite full even if there were only 5 or 6 people in there as you'd all be getting in each others way.

Having said that, part of the reason for it being so full is that they've tried to get as much in as possible.  The range of stock is really quite good and you could easily do a reasonable shop in the one place.  I mean, it doesn't have as much as a big supermarket, obviously, but there's a good range of products.

The opening hours are also very long - it's open 7AM to 11PM according to the sign, and I've been past it quite early on my walks and going to the laundrette and it did genuinely appear to be open.

I didn't exactly buy a lot - just some mini-baguette things - but then it was more of a reconnaissance exercise than anything.

And speaking of my wanders, on this weekend's saunters I got to see some of the damage the reason storms caused.

It was obviously not as bad as they had up north, but there were a couple of trees down and where there were roads with lots of trees there was a lot of detritus of broken off bits of branches in the road.  It was obviously a lot windier than I'd appreciated at the time.