Monthly Archives: August 2006

General

Summertime, and the living is…. easy??

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Imagine the last week of school, things are crazy, but you think to yourself – ‘Next week, I’m on holidays. What am I going to do? I might be bored all summer!’

That thought, was, obviously, the kiss of death. I haven’t posted yet this summer because I have been in a state of manic activity for the last four weeks. Since school let out, I’ve had my parents to stay for a week (which was lovely – I was just a bit too tired to enjoy it properly!) and run a church service all by myself, we’ve cleaned the house up considerably, put it on the market, I’ve gone to see about 20 properties that might be suitable to buy, been to Stratford to see Patrick Stewart in The Tempest (set in 1950s Antarctica – very cool), and crocheted approximately 9 scarves, a wrap (here’s the photo of me in it…) and a shrug. Plus keeping the house incessantly tidy in case someone wants to come around a view it at 20 minutes notice.

And I’ve just noticed that I’ve lost the ability to type properly. Hope there’s not too many spelling mistakes here…

So, I decided to have a bit of a wander ’round the web this morning (no, I haven’t actually managed to get dressed yet…) because I’m feeling rather wiped out, but also because I’m looking for a blog that contains a crochet pattern that I found but failed miserably to bookmark two weeks ago… Anyway, I found another Quizilla quiz that looked appropriate for my current activities – What kind of yarn are you?

Can I mention at this point that although I have done many of these, I can usually see the point they are trying to make. I have never felt actually insulted by the result before. Until now. Because, I am:


What kind of yarn are you?


You are Dishcloth Cotton.You are a very hard worker, most at home when you’re at home. You are thrifty and seemingly born to clean. You are considered to be a Plain Jane, but you are too practical to notice.
Take this quiz!


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Dishcloth cotton?? Born to clean?? PLAIN JANE??

(Maybe I’m not taking this in the spirit in which it’s meant…)

Anyway…

Funny thing is, I’m actually looking for some dishcloth cotton – those of you who haven’t tried a crocheted dishcloth don’t know what you’re missing – absorbent and scrubby – but no one in the UK seems to sell colours other than white and off white. I want a red dishcloth! or pink! Green! Yellow! My purple ones are getting haggard-looking… How do I replace them??

OK, maybe the Quizilla thingy was right… 🙂

Calendar/Contact Syncing, Computers/Technology, PocketPC, Psion

Travelling with a Computer

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Over the past couple of weeks, life for the business traveller has got rather more difficult. Immediately following the major security alert ten days ago, everything including the precious laptops were being checked. Whilst bag thefts have gone up as a result, there is no details of how many laptops have not made it out the other end in one piece.

However things improved a bit with the new regulations. Laptops no longer have to be checked, but the restriction is to a single bag, that dimension wise is about the same as a small laptop. If your laptop is small enough, you can now carry it, but you won’t be able to carry much else.

This of course provoked a good deal of discussion as to what might happen in the longer term. There is evidence that more business travellers are turning to private jets. However for the majority of people who will have to use regular planes, people will have to find ways to reduce what they carry. Certainly I can see smaller laptops becoming more popular for example the Flybook, with maybe a place for the Ultra-mobile PC. However the discussion left me thinking that what you really need is something that is portable, but can cope with being chucked in the hold if the alert level is raised again at short notice. If the baggage handlers are going to fling your suitcase around, even with a solid case rather than the more common soft sided laptop bags, a hard drive is still going to be shocked and jarred around. So effectively you need something solid state.

This led me back to thinking about my Psion 5mx (and I’m not alone), that I replaced with a Dell Axim a while back, and it’s bigger brother, the Series 7 and netBook. Although Psion stopped producing most of the machines a number of years ago, they are still pretty popular in some circles, with machines changing hands for reasonable amounts of money on eBay, and a number of mainstream companies still selling the machines. Indeed in amongst the latest toys, Expansys will still sell you an apparently new netBook. The netBook is sub-laptop size, comes with word processing, spreadsheet, diary, e-mail, basically plenty to keep someone productive whilst travelling. It even has wireless support so it can hook up to a local hotspot whilst travelling. But the key advantage is it is solid state, so nothing fragile to get broken. Of course it’s not a new suggestion – I commented on an article proposing using the Series 7 a few months ago, and it’s pretty easy to find happy customers picking up second hand models online for example here and here. There are also people who still carry around a Psion 5mx despite also carrying more recent devices.

Evesham Laptop with Psion 5mx

Even my little Psion 5mx is a worthwhile option – I’ve certainly used it on planes before. The battery life is fantastic compared to modern PDA’s, and laptops, and although it is small it has a proper keyboard, so I can type documents on it, and then tidy them up on a PC later. Take a look at the picture to see it in comparison to my laptop – which one would you rather carry around?

The simple fact is that modern PDA’s are essentially PC companions. Whilst Psion maintained they were producing PDA’s, the Psion 3 was probably the best PDA they produced – indeed there are people still using them today almost ten years after their heyday, and fifteen years after the first one appeared. The Psion 5 was really too big, and although they tried to redress the balance with the Psion Revo the balance was swinging towards the Palm idea of a PDA, without a keyboard.

In some ways, Psion were aiming slightly differently, and were producing pocket sized personal computers – certainly all the time I used my Psion 5 and 5mx I wasn’t synchronising them with anything else. My Dell spends most of it’s time hooked up to a desktop PC, and working in tandem with Outlook. Although it can play games, browse the internet, read e-mail and so on, it is tedious to actually write even short e-mails on it – I certainly can’t write up documents in the same way as I could on a Psion. Even years after it went out of production, the Psion 5 is still king when it comes to entering data quickly, just take a look at this comparison that lists data entry speeds for the current crop of devices – then scroll down to the speed for the 5mx for the same test…

Anyway, all the talk about the effects of the new regulations inspired me to dig out my trusty old 5mx. The batteries were all dead, but a couple of new Duracells and a standard CR2032 Lithium battery, all of which I could get at the local Tesco rather than a specialist retailer, and it started up fine. The contents of the internal ‘drive’ had gone when the batteries had died, but the add on CF card still contained data. Having put PsiWin onto my PC it also synced my current calendar, contacts and e-mail straight on without problems – even including the notes I have attached to some of the calendar entries. Certainly it seemed just as robust and stable as always. Bear in mind that on the same day I had to reboot the Axim four times after it repeatedly locked up talking to ActiveSync. As I mentioned before, the only thing that is a pain is linking to a mobile phone (no Bluetooth, only line-of-sight infra-red), and no networking. If someone would produce an updated 5mx with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi it would be great. However the current owners of the platform are focusing on phones, and whilst it may be exactly what most people lugging laptops onto aircraft actually need, the commercial wisdom is that nobody wants a pocket sized computer.

Big Brother, Movies & TV

All Over for Another Year

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So last night Big Brother came to an end for another year. Davina McCall managed to make it through too, despite being due to give birth in three weeks.

Thanks to the Sky+ we probably saw a lot more of this series than in previous years, although like most people we were pretty sure from the first week that Pete was going to win.

There were significantly more housemates this year too, with a total of twenty-two appearing at some point. Interestingly only twenty of them actually appeared on the final show thanks to Sezer having been arrested on a rape charge, and Dawn having been ejected for breaking the rules and subsequently fallen out with the producers.

In some ways it got more entertaining in the final couple of weeks – whilst like many I wasn’t overly impressed with the idea of putting in returning housemates, it has to be said the problems Big Brother had keeping control once they’d done so was quite amusing. Despite the return of Nikki, the final week proved to be pretty enjoyable, with highlights being Pete’s private nightclub, and Glyn taking advantage of the Welsh speaking Big Brother to get Nikki to repeat something that didn’t quite match up with what she wanted to say.

I’m certainly of the opinion that there were rather too many twists this year, and definitely think that they maybe need to change things around a bit for next year.

Having said that, the final was good, with only really another cringing exit from the house by Nikki being a low spot – does anyone else think she seriously needs to see a psychiatrist? Having said that, the results were never really in much doubt, with Pete picking up over 61% of the final vote.

Certainly it will be interesting to see what happens to Pete now – although I’m sure we’ll see him and a few of the housemates around on TV for the next year or so – at least until the next lot of hopefuls enter the house in summer 2007 when it all starts again.

Movies & TV, Transport

Metro-Land on DVD

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There are a number of programmes that I remember fondly from growing up, but that I never really expected to see on DVD – and “Metro-Landâ€? is one of them. However at the end of last month, it was finally released to buy on DVD. Up to now the only time I’ve seen the programme is on an ageing video recording from one of the times it has been repeated. (Incidentally, it will also be shown on 28th August as part of the BBC Betjeman retrospective.)

So what’s it all about? My parents house in Rickmansworth is built on land that used to belong to the Metropolitan Railway company. Prior to the formation of London Underground in 1933, when the railway company was absorbed and the line became the Metropolitan Line, the company had grand plans. Unlike the other lines that went to form London Underground the Metropolitan Railway was running express services, and a goods service, far out into the depths of Buckinghamshire to Aylesbury and beyond. Ultimately reaching Verney Junction and the village of Brill near Oxford.

In the 1920’s, the marketing department of the railway coined the term Metroland in an effort to encourage passengers onto the line. The company even went so far as to help along the building of new houses in the suburbs – hence why the land on which my parents house is built belonged to the railway.

The “Metro-Land� DVD is a programme made by John Betjeman in 1973 where he explores some of the history of the railway, but more than that takes a snapshot of life in “Metro-Land� fifty years after the term was coined.

The programme starts at Baker Street, exploring the former hotel that the company built over the top of the station. From there the programme moves along the line through familiar places, eventually reaching the area where I grew up. There are a number of points in the programme that attract local interest – for example there are segments filmed in Croxley Green, and Moor Park – there is even a segment where John Betjeman visits a house just round the corner from my parents that I used to walk past almost every day. Finally the programme ends up out at the far reaches of the railway, where the houses were never built, and the track has long since been lifted, out where in Betjeman’s words the dream died.

On top of the original programme, the DVD includes some extra footage including pictures from the 1930’s of the opening of the branch to Stanmore – now operated as part of the Jubilee Line. It also includes the centenary parade in 1963 to celebrate 100 years since the Metropolitan Railway started, the last steam working on the line in 1971, and the more recent Steam on the Met events.

Not surprisingly I’ve ordered a copy of the DVD already, can’t wait to see it in it’s remastered glory!