Yearly Archives: 2004

Going To The Dogs

You realise Christmas is on its way don’t you? I should be very aware of this fact. Last weekend I spent time with my Mum as she won’t be in the UK for Christmas. But it’s creeping up on me no matter what they say. Today, PY and I were going to host a pre-Christmas party for some friends: mulled wine, beer and a trip to the greyhound races. Somehow, however, it got here and we didn’t invite anybody. Plus, I had a guilty feeling about going to the dogs because a good friend of ours rescues them. Nonetheless, I will feel slightly awkward when four of us head to Wimbledon dog track. I am not sure I will stop feeling guilty so it might make me part with some money to somebody who looks after the dogs.

On this day…

No other posts on this day.

A Pointless Rant About Trains

Today’s illogical rant follows in a moment. Do not be alarmed. An emergency exit is located here and here.

Virgin Trains have made a big deal about the investment in new trains. And the trains were very nice – the airline style at-seat audio was a nice touch. But the service was still below par. On the way north last weekend (to see my mum) the train had been changed and so seat reservations were no longer valid (yet our seat numbers were still there). They seems to have removed the at-seat buffet (which is handy on a full-train so you don’t lose your seat) and the train terminated early.

I am not shocked at the mediocre service. I am not shocked that the staff on board couldn’t care about the confused passengers (are you in my seat or not?). What amazes me is that I took two trains and for the majority of both journeys the trains were full. And by full I mean people were sitting in the parts between the carriages, on the floor in the cold, draughty bits (as an aside, how come it can be so draughty and ventilated and the toilets still smell?). Every train I ever take is full. To work in the morning. Home in the evening. North to visit my parents. South to visit PY’s parents. So why do we always hear about the lack of money in the railway system?

On this day…

No other posts on this day.

What’s Your Pointless Obsession?

What’s your pointless obsession? It’s got to be pointless and yet take up lots of time that really you would be better spent working in a soup kitchen or raking the leaves.

Mine is Personal Information Management. Somebody invented the concept of PIM and they set in motion a train that would mean I would spend hours searching for ways to the same thing over (and over) again. The goal is, as always, a reasonable one: to synchronise calendar & address information between the office and home (including my Treo) using different calendars. It should, in theory, be easy but it’s not. I’ve moved the criteria recently to search for an online WAP-accessible calendar which means I could have a smaller, cheaper ‘phone than the Treo for times when it’s not really appropriate (or practical) to take it with me.

The plan was to use Yahoo Calendar as the gateway between home and the office – synchronising all – but it doesn’t quite work. I find the Yahoo-Outlook synchronisation causes too many errors when synchronising (although it’s fine to overwrite). Yahoo won’t synchronise my Palm Desktop at home (although it will sync with the Treo). I can export my Palm address book via a file upload to Y Calendar but the date book option fails every time. Yahoo Calendar’s WAP implementation works so it would satisfy that criteria if it would hook into everything else properly. I wonder if anybody really does use it or if it’s just a nice ‘we have’ gimmick?

Now, I’ve spoken about all this before. It’s pointless and really very unnecessary. I really can’t see my address book and/or calendar options are any more demanding than anybody else on the planet: I might be trying to be a little sophisticated with my use of them but I don’t think my uses are different – I’m just trying not to have multiple out-of-date copies of things. Of course, it’s a geeky thing to want and it’s frustrating that nothing out there does what I want.

But (in my best Points of View voice), why-oh-why do I choose this as my time consuming obsession? Am I alone?

On this day…

No other posts on this day.

Weekend Away

I’ve spent the weekend with my mum at my parent’s house. PY was there for some of the time but he came home yesterday while I stayed for most of today. My dad is working away and she is off to join him for Christmas later this week so, in effect, this was Christmas for us. I did eat Christmas pudding at the restaurant yesterday afternoon but that’s about as far as I went (although the amount of food I have eaten means gym buddy will be very unhappy with me this week).

It’s been a very enjoyable weekend. When I sat down to write something I was going to say much more. I was going to write, for example, about how I feel closer to my family now than I have done in the years since I moved south; how it felt like a proper adult weekend with no flashbacks to being a teenager again or, simply, how much fun the whole thing was. Instead, I think I want to relax in the joy of it all.

UPDATE 14 December: My mum was worried about traveling alone for the first time in a few years. And, of course, everything was OK apart from the fact her luggage remained in London. Whenever either of my parents have taken connecting flights in recent years one piece of their luggage is always left behind. I wonder if that says more about them or the airlines?

On this day…

No other posts on this day.

The Da Vinci Code

Cover of the Da Vinci Code

You may recall that I love my pulp fiction and, on the train, I finished the latest and greatest thriller, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. I picked it up in a sale in a bookstore in one of those three-for-two offers. Amazingly, I had missed all the buzz about it and it was only after I had started to read it that I looked around to see half of the people on the train reading the same book. It’s certainly grabbed the attention of London commuters. Anyway, time to review it for Amazon as I haven’t been keeping those up and my ranking has started to slip!

It’s very easy to get sucked into the world of Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code. It’s a thriller from start to finish and one of those books that can have you hooked in just a few pages – you will be stealing yourself away to read the next chapter before you know it. Maybe you can see the blockbuster film or see the Ludlum or Grisham parallels but what makes this novel stand out from others is enormous amount of plot detail. Regardless of your opinion of Les Dossiers Secrets (or any of the premise behind the tale) the description of the artworks, relics and rituals in the novel is fascinating. Most importantly, however, the detail enhances the story rather than detracting from it. You may imagine that such vivid descriptions of paintings, churches or cryptology would slow the story-telling but the opposite is true: the finer points of this work add to the pace. It’s probably a novel you should re-read to see if you can decipher the codes when you know the answers and it’s certainly a novel that makes you want to delve into the history behind it. All in all, it’s a great suspense story that makes religious symbology entertaining. 

my review at Amazon

On this day…

2005: Disturbing half-naked men in the doors of Abercrombie…
2005: Flickr Christmas: Santa’s gathering in Liverpool 4
2005: Civil Partnership: It’s In The News Today

Oh the fun I’m having…

Interesting to note that Tom has left his tax return until this point in time. I don’t know him or anything about him – other than what he writes on his site – but I know what he must be feeling right now: where on earth did I put that certificate of tax deduction from my bank. Why do I leave it until so late in the day to do my taxes!!

On this day…

2006: Our Masks
2005: All Change At Capital
2005: Civil Partnership: Update From Scotland
2004: Gary Lucy’s Birthday
2003: Pop TV
2003: Linguistic Sensitivity

Gary Lucy’s Birthday

happy birthday gary lucyReally, I should know better. The other day I spoke of the Man of the Moment project for the first time in a long time and the only request I have ever had to enter a male into Musak’s Man of the Moment project is to include Gary Lucy. Sadly, I haven’t got round to that yet (despite the fact he has been Musak’s calendar boy of 2004) but, I noticed yesterday was Gary’s birthday (I think he was 23) and so I dedicate today’s entry to the star of Hollyoaks, Footballers’ Wives and, recently, the ITV drama, She’s Gone.

Related from Listen To Musak’s Archives:

Perhaps I will make Gary Lucy Man of the Moment one day.

On this day…

2006: Our Masks
2005: All Change At Capital
2005: Civil Partnership: Update From Scotland
2004: Oh the fun I’m having…
2003: Pop TV
2003: Linguistic Sensitivity

I Found Some Of Your Life

Alright, it might be months old but I never mentioned it!

I Found Some Of Your Life: In my possession is one memory card from a digital camera. This memory card was found in a taxi in New York City. I have no idea who the owner of the camera is.

Fascinating and slightly scary, don’t you think but interesting nonetheless. One of the more interesting possibilities resulting from the rise of digital photographs [via Photo Matt].

Maybe Hewlett-Packard’s “privacy protection system” for cameras would have been useful [via Tom].

On this day…

2005: Civil Partnership: Westminster City Council Survey
2003: Snow is Oslo?
2003: Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving 2004

I trust all my American friends and colleagues enjoyed their Thanksgiving. In previous years I have looked at what Thanksgiving really is all about (see here) but this year I thought I would look how you were all celebrating by checking the Flickr tags. All the tags representing Thanksgiving seem to be about food or family – which I think seems like a pretty good notion to me.

On this day…

2005: Civil Partnership: Elton To Marry
2004: Does Remote Storage Work
2003: At A Newsagent Near You

Does Remote Storage Work

Like many people I signed up for all the free web-based email accounts (RocketMail – now Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Hotmail etc.) but I never really used them. Over time I let most of the lapse and only really use Yahoo and – now – Gmail but I do not use any of them as my main mail account. I didn’t use them primarily because I didn’t want to pay to be connected to the web to read my mail (my POP accounts were better) and I wanted to maintain addresses at my own domain and – at the time – none of those interfaces allowed you to be seen as another mail address. Yahoo, of course, also provides photo storage, address books and calendars.

My web hosting company allows me to use my space as a virtual hard-drive (if I work out how to configure it) and – as I have noted – Flickr is becoming my personal choice for photographs (even though I could try and manage it myself on my own servers) while I use Bloglines for feed aggregation. So, the question is, can I now run my life using storage space away from my own computer?

Here are some of my considerations:

  • Outside of work (which I am not proposing to move) I have precious few documents so I don’t need masses of file space for them (I suspect my Yahoo account would happily cope).
  • Photos: I can’t get away from the lack of storage (even at Flickr) for them but I suspect it will cope with all the photographs I care about (the rest would only be archived to CD anyway).
  • Music: This is the difficult one as I upload music to my Treo’s mp3 player so I am not carrying it all around with me all the time (in a iPod style). Perhaps it is time to re-address that issue.
  • Mail: I have archives of mail in Mozilla Mail format. What I think I need is Mozilla’s roaming profiles but I have no idea how they work.
  • Bookmarks: Ditto (but in the mean time Yahoo Companion bar and Yahoo Bookmarks should work).

Do you have any tips for me? Will it work? If it works I only need a reasonable internet connection to have my whole life on tap. What I really need is a proper method for synchronisation – but I’ve ranted about that before.

On this day…

2005: Civil Partnership: Elton To Marry
2004: Thanksgiving 2004
2003: At A Newsagent Near You