Archive for August, 2006

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About speaking to ducks

Wednesday, August 30th, 2006

Flying ducks

I know you’ve been waiting for it.

Here is the promised wee talk about ducks. It’s been sitting in my blog drafts for a couple of days waiting for a moment to finish it.

“What do you do when you see a duck?” I asked Jane, as I came in from work the other day. “You know, you’re walking alongside a stream and you spot a duck. What do you do?”

“QUACK!!” said the lovely Jane, quacking at me.

“What about a sheep?”

“BAAAAAA!!” bleated Jane accomodatingly.

“And a cow?”

“MOOOOO!!” obliged Jane.

You see, I do the same. Or at least I did until about a week ago when I realised that … I quack at ducks.

In St Andrews I park down by the Kinness Burn, a wee stream (or in Scots ‘burn’) that effectively runs the length of the town, and near the small footbridge that crosses the Kinness Burn live around 50 or so ducks. Yes, I counted them. I counted them a couple of days ago when I was on my way home and came across a scene from that unmade Hitchcock film “The Ducks”.

So you can see that on my way to work and on my way home from work I have more than your average office worker’s opportunity for meeting ducks. And just the other week I realised that whenever I see one of the ducks I always quack at the first one that I see.

But why?! What is it about animals that makes us want to communicate with them? It’s not as though they try to communicate with us. It’s not like when ducks approach us you hear them say things like “Awright!” or “How do you do?” So why do we try to communicate with them?

And, as Jane so ably demonstrated, it’s not just with ducks. We moo at cows, baa at sheep, meow at cats, and bark at dogs. I say “we”, I asked a couple of people at the weekend what they do when they see a duck.

I think to myself, Oh look there’s a duck!

was disappointingly the most common answer. Of the three people I asked.

Last week, as I was walking home, I realised that I’d stopped quacking at the ducks. Instead I was saying things like “Hello Mr Duck”.

Like that was a less mad thing to do!? So I’ve begun quacking at them again. I think it’s just the way things are meant to be.

Posted in Family, Friends, General, Humour | 5 Comments »

Google PageRank of Google

Sunday, August 27th, 2006

Screenshot of Google's PageRank of Google UK

Is there something wrong with my Google Toolbar for Firefox or does Google really not think much of itself?

As you can see from the screenshot Google’s PageRank “is Google’s measure of the importance of [a Web] page”, and Google UK this morning it scored exactly 0/10.

During the last couple of days I’ve noticed it score between 0/10 and 9/10. Maybe like the rest of us Google just gets tired of itself every now and again and needs a break. Go on Google, we all think you’re great!

(Techy fact: If anyone is wondering how I managed to take a screenshot that included the cursor, I used Corel Paint Shop Pro X’s File > Import > Screen Capture function.)

Posted in Computer, Humour | No Comments »

The book is finished!

Sunday, August 27th, 2006

Finished book manuscript awaiting posting.

At last, I’m done — and I’m fairly done in too! — the book manuscript is finished and awaiting posting.

For those of you who may not know, since May I’ve been working on writing an update to the Hodder Education book Teach Yourself Mahjong. The original author, Mr David Pritchard, sadly died at the end of last year, and Hodder approached me in the Spring to work on the proposed 3rd edition.

Having read through the last edition, and thoroughly absorbed Mr Pritchard’s wishes for the revised edition, I set about compiling a list of all the updates and edits that I felt needed to be made. In the end my list contained 77 required edits, which meant anything from simple requests like “change the words ‘Chapter 11′ to ‘Chaper 12′” to “that illustration is upside down, please turn it the right way round” to writing completely new chapters.

I’ve written two new chapters: one on the new (as of 1998, which is fairly new in the context of a game that is around 130 years old) Chinese Official International Rules and mahjong on computers and the internet.

And all I need to do now is post the lot (all 1.7 Kg) to the publisher. As well as the original manuscript, which I’ve marked-up, there are also print-outs of the two new chapters, plus a print-out of the new manuscript (edits and all) as well as a CD-ROM with the whole shebang in electronic format.

And then I wait to see if what I wrote was good enough / will be included / isn’t littered with errors* (*delete as applicable). In the meantime, can I have my life back now please…?

Posted in General, Mah Jong, Writing | 3 Comments »

A kreative day

Thursday, August 24th, 2006

Kreator cover image, shows a tree with a person to the right.

The last few days have seen me listening to a lot of thrash metal, death metal and generally rather extreme style music. Check out my Last.fm account and you’ll see what I mean: Slayer, Morbid Angel, Stone Sour, that sort of thing. But most of my listening has been in the car and next door while writing — tracks that don’t get registered on Last.fm.

This morning I drove into St Andrews listening to Kreator, a German thrash band who are still recording and touring. Their debut album had the morally-dubious title of Pleasure To Kill, but as I read through the CD sleeve notes I was impressed by the names of the four musicians.

Back in the mid-80s when thrash metal, and later death metal, were growing out of the NWOBHM/punk fusion a number of bands arrived on the scene with some wonderful names, and their members with even more obscure monikers.

Canadians Voivod, for example. Their name was taken from a military-type gentleman referenced in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, had four members: Blacky, Snake, Piggy and Away. They — probably rightly — assumed that non-French speakers would have trouble pronouncing Jean-Yves Thériault, Denis Belanger, Denis D’Amour and Michel Langevin.

And how about Floridian death metal band Morbid Angel whose founding guitarist goes by the name of Trey Azagthoth? Surely that’s not his real name! No, his real name is George Emmanuel III. That doesn’t quite sound like the name of a dark metal lord of death, now does it? No wonder he changed his name.

So there I was this morning, looking at the Kreator CD cover wondering how they went about choosing their names…

Mille: So, fellow members of seminal German thrash metal band Kreator – with a ‘K’ – have you chosen your stage names yet?

Band: We have, O mighty purveyor of all things extreme. And metal.

Mille: Good, then I shall begin — for this is my band, and by 2006 I’ll probably be the only one of us still in it. I have chosen “Mille” as my name. It means in Latin (something like) a thousand. For my guitar makes the sound of a thousand rods of metal striking the earth, and we shall command thousands of metalheads under our flag of hate.

Jürgen: I shall be called Ventor. For with my powerful drum kit I shall be a vent for the frustrations of a generation. They shall fall before my percussive pounding and worship at the feet of extreme music.

Michael: I have taken the name Wulf — spelt the German way, naturally — for like the wolf I am a creature of the night, and with the howl of my guitar I shall sound the dark call of REAL METAL.

Rob: And I shall be known as … Rob.

Mille: [In slight disbelief] What?!

Rob: Rob! I shall be known as Rob.

Ventor: Rob?!

Rob: Yes. Rob. It’s short for Robin. Or Robert. Or in my case Roberto.

Wulf: But that’s rubbish! That’s just your name, shortened.

Rob: Shut up! I was up all night thinking of that. With an English dictionary and everything.

That’s how I imagine it happened. I could be completely wrong, however.

Still, regardless of how they named themselves they have managed to release quite a tasty catalogue of particularly rhythmic, distortion-laden tunes. Good effort chaps — keep up the good work.

And tomorrow I want to talk to you all about ducks.

Posted in General, Humour, Music | 4 Comments »

The write place

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006

Laptop, mug and papers sitting on a kitchen table.

God is good. I know that I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably get a load of comments claiming that God is good anyway regardless of the lovely things he does for Jane and I, and I quite agree … BUT, I’ll say it again: God is good. And this is why:

Way back in 2004 when we were looking for a house to buy Jane managed to convince me that it was a good idea to invest in a house with these words: “it could be somewhere that you could go to write”.

That was it: done. That was all it took to convince me, and a few months later we collected the keys to our wee holiday cottage, which we later named Kadesh, and sadly I’ve actually done very little writing there to be honest. I’ve done a lot of drilling, and a lot of painting, but very little writing. Until this week.

Last Friday we were expecting a family from Italy to come and stay the following day; they were booked up and everythingâ„¢. And then with only 24 hours notice we received a telephone call from Interhome, our European holiday cottage booking agency, to say that they had cancelled. One member of the party had sadly been rushed into hospital. (I’m not sure if they were ‘rushed’ but it certainly made that last sentence sound more dramatic, didn’t it.)

So, while we may have been £1,000 the poorer this past fortnight, I have had somewhere in which to ensconce myself to finally finish my mahjong book. Like an estranged couple Jane has spent her evenings in the Toft Terrace house, while I’ve been holed up in George Street (next door) with no landline, no mobile phone reception, and no WiFi internet connection to distract me. As Dave Gorman so insightfully put it: the internet contains everything in the world ever, and I don’t know about you but I find everything in the world ever somewhat distracting. I quite agree.

And it has worked! This week I’ve been the most productive I’ve been on this project. I’ve suddenly found my rhythm, the words have been flowing, and all of a sudden my head is clear: I know what I should be writing and how I should write it. It is all coming together nicely. It’s amazing what a holiday and rest and the right environment does for you! I think that was part of the trouble: I was just exhausted, not having had break since February.

And at last I’m writing in my Writing House. “Kadesh” is a Hebrew word that means a holy place, a place set apart. That’s exactly what it’s been for me this week. It has been an oasis, a safe place, a sanctuary.

So what have I learned this week? That God is good. God has blessed us so much with the provision of our wee house. That God gives us space when we need it. Even if it means that random Italian strangers have to fall ill to provide that space*.

(* I’m not entirely sure about that last bit!!)

Posted in Computer, General, Mah Jong, Pray for, Writing | 3 Comments »

Bill Bailey – Steampunk

Monday, August 21st, 2006

Programme cover for Bill Bailey's Steampunk show - Bill stands in front of a machine playing guitar.

On Saturday night Jane and I got last-minute tickets (from a friend-of-a-friend) to Bill Bailey’s Edinburgh Fringe show Steampunk.

Sadly, it being the Fringe, the show only lasted for a few minutes over sixty before we were ushered out so that EICC staff could make ready the theatre for Jimmy Carr’s sixty-minutes performance. But not before we had heartily laughed our metaphorical socks off.

The highlight of the show for me, besides his musical gags, was a short piece about postmodernity which ended with him demonstrating Wittgenstein’s critique of the postmodern attempt to discover one’s true identity by first rejecting all previous attempts at defining one’s identity, in terms of a hobbit wedding:

“With this ring, I thee … where’s she gone?!”

The show ended with Bailey’s tribute to German band Kraftwerk: a Kraftwerk-style rendition of “the Hokey Kokey”, entitled “Das Hokey Kokey”. You could see it coming, right from the start of the show, as the lyrics are printed on the back page of the programme. But that didn’t distract from its comic genius.

On the way into Edinburgh I read in Saturday’s The Scotsman an interview with Bill Bailey in which he talked about a recent 10-week stint in New York. His experience of working in a country where he is less well known, he said, changed the way that he approached performing.

Anyone who’s seen him live before, or on telly, will know that he tends to start his stand-up shows fairly slowly. He’ll wander on and mutter and mummble for a bit…

“Yes… hello!… isn’t it? Oooph! … Hmmm…”

…before suddenly launching into some completely left-field topic and off he goes; Eddie Izzard does something similar. But New York, it seems, taught him the need to come out and hit the ground running.

But what I liked most about the article was Bailey’s comment on what comedy is about, and about language play, and the beauty of language, and how language can be used efficiently and simply to encapsulate an idea.

While he was [in New York], Bailey got slightly homesick and bought Elvis Costello’s When I Was Cruel, along with a Beth Orton CD.

“I think what I craved was Britishness. I bought those albums for a bit of British moaning. It’s comforting.”

A big fan of Costello myself, I’ve noticed he’s popular among Bailey’s peers, notably Phill Jupitus and Jo Brand. Is the appeal his extraordinary use of language?

“Language is a big part of it,” Bailey agrees, ‘because it seems like poetry set to music and I think that’s what most stand-ups aspire to, to use the language in a way that’s condensed or twisted or personalised in a way that it’s elevated above speech. It’s what you aim for. And that unique voice It’s also the way he manages to crystallise an idea-in a song, which is what a joke aims to do, to sum up a whole subject That’s the duty of a comic, to do that, and you should try to apply that to all subjects.”

(Source: The Scotsman, Festival supplement, p.11 – Saturday 19 August 2006)

I just thought I’d share that with you.

Posted in General, Humour | 1 Comment »

Review: Lenovo 3000 C100

Sunday, August 20th, 2006

Lenovo 3000 C100 laptop computer

A couple of months ago I realised that I had the Scottish Episcopal Church youth camp approaching, for which I was requiring a PC to work on the daily ‘newspaper’. With various other web-based projects on the go and looming I thought it about time that I invested in a laptop or notebook computer.

So, last month, while Jane was enjoying the wonders of Canada, I bought a new laptop from Dabs.com. Two important considerations when buying new hardware:

  1. ensure that your wife is out of the country
  2. have them deliver it to your workplace

Buy what you need

When I told people that I’d bought a new laptop quite a few said “Wow! Well if you bought it then it must have a really impressive spec.” Which was quite flattering, really, but totally wrong. Because I believe in buying hardware that is appropriate for the job.

My first question is always: what do I want it to do? If all I want is something that will allow me to do basic office tasks, some Web browsing and maybe a little graphics manipulation and Web development (which is what I wanted it to do) then I certainly wouldn’t buy the latest shiny desktop-replacement laptop with full DirectX 9.0c 3D graphics and a dual-core, 64bit CPU with enough processing power to take half the human race to the moon and back.

What I would buy, however, is something that will allow me to do basic office tasks, some Web browsing and maybe a little graphics manipulation and Web development. It’s the same reason that I still use a Psion PDA and haven’t ‘upgraded’ to a Windows Pocket machine. That and the politics involved, and the GUI, and the Geek Factor!

Lenovo 3000 C100

So after much deliberation, research, asking friends for their recommendations, and some good old fashioned bargain hunting I finally settled for the Lenovo 3000 C100 for a very reasonable £359.99 inc VAT.

Lenovo is the largest PC manufacturer in the People’s Republic of China, and the third largest in the world following its buy-out of IBM’s PC division. They currently have two ranges of notebook: the ThinkPad range (essentially a rebranded IBM ThinkPad) and the 3000 range, of which this is the most basic model.

Specification

This model really has a surprising number of features for a laptop of this price.

Operating System: Windows XP Home
CPU: Intel® Celeron® M Processor 370 1.50GHz (FSB 400MHz)
Screen: 15″ (4:3 ratio)
Graphics: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 XGA 1024×768 pixels
Memory: 256MB (which I upgraded to 512MB)
Hard Drive: 40GB (PATA)
Optical Drive: CD-RW/DVD-ROM Combo (EIDE)
Audio: 2 x integrated speakers (1W)
Communications Devices: 56K V.92 fax modem (RJ-11), 10/100 Ethernet (RJ-45), 802.11a/b/g WiFi, Bluetooth
Expansion Connections: 4 x USB 2.0, IEEE1394 (FireWire), SD/MMC/MS, PCMCIA (PC Card), S-Video, VGA-out

Tour of the machine

Case

The case is plastic, but pretty strudy. The lid is an attractive silver colour — which fooled me into thinking that it was metal for a couple of weeks until a more careful inspection proved otherwise. The rest of the machine is a dark brown colour, which looks black in certain a light (night-time!). Access to battery, memory and hard disk is from beneath using nothing more than an appropriately-sized Philips screwdriver. It took me seconds to install a second 256MB SDRAM memory module.

Front

The front edge of the Lenovo 3000 C100 is very simple, housing only the DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive and three light indicators: power, battery and WiFi. The location of the DVD/CD drive is often a matter of personal taste. Some prefer it at the side, others prefer it at the front. Personally I’m not bothered by it, except for those few occasions when I accidentally hit the bright orange eject button with my thumb when moving the machine.

Left

The left-edge sports the following connections (from rear to front): modem, power input, USB #1, headphones, microphone, WiFi on/off switch, left speaker.

Rear

Looking at the machine from the rear, from left to right: IEEE1394 (FireWire), LAN 10/100 Ethernet, USB #2 and #3, VGA-out, S-Video out, USB #4, fan.

Right

The right-hand side of this laptop houses only the PCMCIA (PC Card) slot and beneath it the 3-in-1 card reader, supporting Secure Digital (SD), MultiMedia Card (MMC), and MemoryStick (MS).

Keyboard

The keyboard is first-class. I usually struggle with laptop keyboards but this one is really comfortable to use. My only niggle is the location of the Fn key, which sits to the left of the Ctrl, as I keep accidentally hitting Function instead of Control — I would have much preferred Ctrl – Win – Alt – Fn.

As well as the usual 85-key laptop keyboard the keyboard area is kept simple with the inclusion of only three more keys: Power (on/off), Lenovo Care and Mute. The Lenovo Care button is used during a boot-up to access the System Restore utility, and during normal Windows use to access laptop-specific help. To the right of these extra keys are five LEDs: hard drive use, SD/MMC/MS card, Caps Lock, Num Lock and Bluetooth usage.

One complaint I frequently met while researching this latop was the quality of its touchpad and associated buttons. The main criticism was that the touchpad buttons didn’t have enough travel, but to be honest I’ve found both to be perfectly usable and comfortable to use, with plenty of space in front of the keyboard to rest your palms.

It took me a while to work out that that by dragging down the right-hand side of the touchpad and along the bottom of it I can control page scrolling. While some laptops have this area marked to aid users, I had to find this out by myself after my mouse-pointer kept suddenly changing to what looked like a scroll-bar with a mouse. Some heads-up about this in the accompanying documentation wouldn’t have gone amiss.

That said, for prolonged use I plug in a USB mouse. I tried using a mini laptop mouse, but I found that more uncomfortable than using the touchpad, so I’ve reverted to a full-size desktop mouse instead.

Screen

The screen quality is very good, and is remarkably bright. To save battery I usually turn the screen contrast down, which still makes it usable indoors.

The default maximum resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels is usable, although I do miss my usual resolution of 1280 x 1024. According to the Lenovo site this laptop will support a maximum resolution of 2048 x 1536 “with max video RAM”, although I’ve yet to discover how to do this.

Audio

Like most budget laptops the onboard sound quality is not great. The built-in speakers are located on the left and right sides of the case towards the front of the machine.

It is usable, it is adequate, but if you want to listen to music or watch a DVD for a prolonged period then I thoroughly recommend external speakers or headphones.

Headphone and microphone sockets are located to the left of the keyboard and while clearly labelled colour coding them (green for headphones, pink for microphone) would have made them much easier to distinguish.

Battery life

Having mostly used Psion PDAs I’ve been spoiled when it comes to battery life. The 3mx and 5mx last about a month (about 40 hours of use) on a pair of AA batteries, the Series 7/netBook lasts around 8 hours. Lenovo claim around 4 hours on a single charge, and so far I have been fairly close to that.

BIOS

Thie BIOS is accessed at boot-up time by pressing the F1 key. This laptop has a very simple BIOS (Insyde Software SCU) with very few user-adjustable options. There are only five categories: Main, Advanced, Security, Boot and Exit, but it does give up some useful information such as model numbers for the hard drive and DVD/CD, and serial numbers for the model, system and motherboard.

General usage

Like all PCs when I first get my hands on them I disable most of the automated tasks and ‘useful’ applications that the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) install on them to ‘help’ me, and then install my applications of choice. I’ve now got it pretty much the way that I want it. Windows XP Home edition is happily connecting to my wireless network, communicating well with my desktop PC on the local network workgroup and connecting to my printers via the desktop PC. (I really need to get these moved to Ethernet print servers at some point.)

In terms of speed and my general impressions of the machine, I am impressed. I’ve had it most doing fairly basic office tasks, the most demanding of which was coping with graphics-heavy publications in Microsoft Publisher. The only thing that it struggled with was playing MP3s while downloading 5.1 megapixel images from an xD card via the PCMCIA slot. The audio was very stuttery during such a heavy data transfer; so much so that I simply paused iTunes until the files had been copied to the laptop. Other than that it has coped very well with whatever I’ve thrown at it, including running the XAMPP (Apache, MySQL and PHP) server.

Watching DVDs has been very good, using the pre-installed InterVideo WinDVD 5. Playback was smooth, the picture was clear and with external speakers or headphones the audio was clear. Ripping to MP3 is done simply and without a fuss, and I’ve even managed some basic video editing using Windows Movie Maker 2.

Switching WiFi networks can be managed easily with the built-in Broadcom Wireless Utility which is a nice feature.

Conclusion

The inclusion of built-in WiFi, Bluetooth and 4 USB ports make this a very attractive laptop computer for the price. A larger screen resolution, more hard drive space, 1GB of memory and a DVD-rewriter would have been great but for this price you still get more than what you pay for.

If you can put up with a few niggles, such as the location of the CD/DVD drive and the Fn key, this is a very good, sturdy laptop with the most comfortable laptop keyboard that I’ve ever used. All in all I can’t complain: it does what I need it to do, and you can’t ask for more than that.

Posted in Computer, General, Reviews | 14 Comments »

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