Category: Uncategorized

This weekend was busy again… no surprises there really! On Friday evening I was stripping wallpaper in our bedroom, and managed to get it finished! On Saturday, it was a matter of painting for most of the day, but in the evening we were able to go down to Wivenhoe to meet Alex, Elisa, Steve and Karen for fish and chips. Afterwards Steve & Karen headed off, but we stopped off at the Rose and Crown for a drink, which was rather nice. All in all, a very enjoyable evening!

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then in the afternoon Paul and Nic came round. We all had lunch together, and then had a wander round town. We stopped off at a new milkshake place on Eld Lane and each had a milkshake. They were absolutely fantastic – you could get milkshakes of all sorts of things, including most popular chocolate bars! I had a Double Decker milkshake, Paul had a Creme Egg milkshake, and Phil had a Terry’s Chocolate Orange milkshake. They were all lovely – if you’re in Colchester any time, check them out! It’s down the St Botolph’s end of Eld Lane, unfortunately I can’t remember the name of the place right now but it’s very pink, you shouldn’t have trouble finding it…

In the evening we went to Sunday @ 7 to hear Andy Saville speaking on “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. I think I’ll post up separately about that, so for now I’ll just say that it was good.

Afterwards we came back home and watched Top Gear, which was very funny as always! I can’t believe they managed to cross the channel in an amphibious truck… what a bunch of nutters! Still, makes great TV.

Just a quick post to say that I have joined Colchester Linux User Group. I wasn’t aware there was one, but I gather that there wasn’t one until relatively recently. I’ve been wondering about a local LUG for a while, showing support to the free / open-source software community, so I’m glad there is one now which I can support (when possible!).

That’s all for now. As you were…

I’ve just noticed that Google Reader now has a new ‘trends’ page. This allows you to see trends about what blogs you’ve been reading, and when.

This is the summary from my trends page: “From your 32 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 261 items, starred 0 items, shared 0 items, and emailed 0 items.”

How on earth did I manage to get subscribed to 32 blogs? Gah, this blogging stuff is addictive!

Well, this weekend was fun. On Friday evening, the A12 near Colchester was closed because a lorry with gas canisters in it caught fire. Unfortunately, it also meant that they closed the railway line… although the line wasn’t closed between Ipswich and Colchester, it still affected my journey home! Last week was pretty bad for trains generally, certainly in the evenings at least – more trains were late than ran on time! At least on Friday it wasn’t really ‘One’ railways’ fault.

On Saturday, we did some decorating. We painted another wall of the main bedroom, and also I started stripping wallpaper (fortunately only one of the walls has wallpaper on it… unfortunately it’s the longest in the room!). The wall we painted was originally a sort of mushroom / beige kind of colour… we wanted to cover it with a creamy white. Here’s a little tip: if you want to cover another colour with white, be prepared to do quite a few coats! We had to do three on the wall, it was ridiculous. We used up almost a whole tin of paint! Still, it’s done now.

In the evening we watched ‘Groundhog Day’, as I hadn’t seen it before. It was a very enjoyable film 🙂

On Sunday we went to Fordham in the morning, and then stayed on for the harvest lunch. After that we came back home and I worked on the Fordham website for a bit. In the evening, Phil went round to Anne-Marie’s for a girly night there, so I invited Matthew and Dan to come round to watch Top Gear and have some pizza. That was a good evening, although I suspect we talked a lot less than the girls!

Anyway, that’s all for now…

My car insurance is currently with AA Insurance. AA as in, The AA – the Automobile Association. They sent me a letter through last week to tell me that my insurance is up for renewal, and that they’d found a cheaper quote for me (it looks like they use a variety of insurance companies). They also gave me the option of renewing my existing insurance, or going with this cheaper quote.

So, I thought I’d renew my insurance online (like I’ve done before). The AA have got a new website (or section of their website) for doing just that. Unfortunately it’s the kind of thing you have to register for, so I tried to register…. it’s rather confusing.

Apparently you have an account with them, and you can add different ‘items’ – i.e., different services the AA provide. So you can have an online account with your car insurance, home insurance, all registered to your one account. Unfortunately the site requires you to add an item before you actually register! This seems a little counter-intuitive to me… surely you should register your username etc first?

Anyway, the actual page to add an ‘item’ is confusing in itself. There’s a field there for your ‘reference number’ (which varies depending on what service you’re selecting – for car insurance it could either be your policy number or your quote reference number). You also have a drop down list for the type of item which you have to select, which contained both ‘MOTOR INSURANCE’ and ‘MOTOR INSURANCE QUOTE’. So, I tried registering my current policy number. No dice. I tried registering using my quote reference number. Nope, sorry. I tried just about every combination I could think — nope, couldn’t get the darn thing to recognise me!

It didn’t actually help that the quote reference number contained an ambiguous character which looked like a “|”. I’m sure it couldn’t have been – it was probably just an ‘I’ – but it’s still a bad typeface which doesn’t clearly distinguish letters, particularly if it’s all in upper-case!

I still haven’t managed to renew my insurance – I sent off an email to the AA, hopefully they will get back to me soon.

Sorry this wasn’t very much of a rant, I’m probably more annoyed than I sound here 😉

This weekend has been fairly productive: we made a start on some decorating! We painted one wall of our bedroom… that may not sound a lot, but it was more breaking the psychological barrier of actually starting. Now we’ve started, I think it will be easier to continue! And it’s all good experience as well.

So that’s what we were doing on Saturday afternoon. In the evening Philippa wasn’t feeling so good, so we stayed in and watched “Carry on up the Khyber”… it was quite funny in places, although to be honest the ‘Carry On’ films can be a bit hit and miss. Some of them are funnier than others.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning. In the afternoon we did various bits and pieces – I did some sorting out of the Fordham website (we’re currently in the process of transferring to a new host). In the evening we watched “The Flight of the Phoenix” (the 1965 version). I’d seen it before but it was the first time for Philippa… I’d forgotten just how good it was! If you haven’t seen it, I would highly recommend it. It does come on TV periodically, or you can get it on DVD – either way, you should see it. It’s an underrated classic. All of the actors turn in great performances, the tension between them is almost palpable!

Anyway, that’s all for now…

Edit: I completely forgot to mention this, but I really should… only Friday evening, we went to the pre-term party at the university, which was held in “Sub Zero” (formerly known as the Underground). The party itself wasn’t that remarkable (apart from, perhaps, the DJ… who wasn’t that fantastic). The remarkable thing was the Underground (I’m sorry, it just can’t be ‘Sub Zero’ to me…). They’ve completely changed it! It looks good – they’ve done it up like the SU Bar / Mondo / Level 2. They’ve ripped out about half of the old sound system as well, meaning it actually sounds a lot better. The DJ booth is … well, there’s now a DJ booth. There are places to sit! Basically it’s much better than the old underground, and actually I quite like it. The old Underground was, quite frankly, rubbish. It wasn’t like the old Level 2, which was kind of charming — the Underground was just a bit nasty… I’m glad it’s changed. But it’s still the Underground :p

I had a good idea recently. I thought I would describe it here to see what other people think.

I’m always moaning about the fact that I don’t go and see many gigs. The problem is partially down to the fact that I don’t know when they’re on: I could trawl the ticket-hunting websites, or the band’s individual websites, but to be honest I just can’t be bothered! This is “Web 2.0” after all… I want aggregation!

Anyway. My initial idea was a simple website where you could put in the bands you were interested in and the locations you were interested in seeing them in. You could then subscribe to a feed using RSS, and whenever a band you were interested in was doing a gig in the areas you were interested in, you’d get a notification. Simple, huh?

But then I realised – there’s a hell of a lot of potential with that idea. For example, you could also notify about CD releases (for example, you get notified when a band you like are releasing a new album a few weeks beforehand). You could also do the last.fm thing where you can search on bands with a similar kind of sound. There’s also a huge potential for tie-ins with various different websites, i.e. you could sign up for an exclusive deal with a CD retailer for people to buy the CDs. That ought to be worth some cash.

This site would have the potential to be absolutely huge!

The only problem with this idea is – where would the data come from? You’d have to have a fair amount of clout just to get the data necessary to run such a site. It could take a while to get off the ground.

The other thing is, of course, someone might already have had the same idea – probably have, in fact. But I don’t know where.

Still, if a site like that doesn’t already exist, it really needs to!

I’ve just upgraded to WordPress version 2.3. Unfortunately this has meant the site being down for a short while (an hour or so) — for some reason, my FTP server was timing out certain connections, meaning that not all of the files uploaded correctly.

I’ve resolved the issue now, and everything appears to be working correctly!

WordPress 2.3 looks pretty good – you can view the release notes here. If you’re running a WordPress blog, upgrading is recommended 🙂

Just a quick post tonight… I’ve been looking for a BitTorrent client on Ubuntu for a while now. Ubuntu does come with one, but unfortunately it’s not that great – it’s fine for basic downloading of one torrent at a time, but it’s not so great if you want to do advanced stuff, like download two things at a time (they might have changed that now though). Anyway. Azureus is a very popular BitTorrent client and is in the package tree, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work on my machine! I don’t know why — it’s written in Java so it shouldn’t have strange problems, but whenever I run it I just get a strange Java error which usually signals a problem with native code or something like that. Weird.

Anyway, yesterday I decided to have another look, and I came up with Deluge. It’s a native Linux app (not written in Java), it’s relatively new, and – importantly for me – it runs on my machine! It comes with packages for Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo and even Mac OS X! (Note: if you’re a Ubuntu user, try installing the package deluge-torrent…)

I tried it out yesterday and it seemed to work fine, although I was only able to try it with one .torrent. So, if you’re looking for a BitTorrent client on Linux, give Deluge a go 🙂

This weekend was fairly quiet. On Friday evening we went to Tesco, as we were having my parents round on Saturday so we needed to get some supplies. On Saturday my parents and my sister Alison came round, and we had a BBQ to celebrate their 25th anniversary. There are a few photos of this on Flickr. In the afternoon we all went for a walk around Highwoods, which was very nice, and then we had tea and they headed back home.

In the evening we were too tired to do very much so we just watched ‘Destry Rides Again’ – a classic western with James Stewart!

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then spent the afternoon reading. I was reading through a booklet a Jehovah’s Witness gave me, called “What does the Bible really teach?” (their emphasis). They’re going to come back sometime soon so I thought I’d probably better have a read through it! I always knew that the JW teachings did depart a bit from orthodox Christianity, but I didn’t realise quite the extent… I found a good website which has a lot of information on it, so hopefully next time they come back I’ll be able to have a good discussion with them.

In the evening we watched “Starter for 10”, which is a comedy about a student from a town in Essex who goes away to university and appears on University Challenge. It’s very good – quite funny, but also poignant, and definitely worth watching! A lot of the British films that I’ve watched recently have been of very high quality, it has to be said — certainly a lot more original than some of the dross that comes out of Hollywood. What they lack in big budget special effects they more than make up for in, well, just telling a good story.

Anyway. The only other thing to mention about this weekend is that we now have a Freeview HDD recorder. This means that we can watch Freeview now, although annoyingly we don’t have all the available channels (for example, Channel 4 is apparently not available on Freeview currently in Colchester). This also means we won’t have to keep downloading programs we miss, i.e. Heroes – we can just set the box to record. Having a Hard Disk based recorder is much more useful here – often, you want to record an episode, watch it once or twice, and then delete it. Removable media isn’t great for that — hard drives make it hassle free. Of course, if you want to actually keep something then you will eventually run out of space on the drive… still, if I wanted to keep something recorded off of the TV I could probably either download it or buy a DVD.

Anyway, once we’ve used it for a few weeks I might post up a little review just in case anyone else is interested in buying one!