Scanning gives me lots of spare time, takes 20 seconds to preview a scan for three photo’s, then 30 seconds to select the three photo areas and then about 4 minutes for it to scan those pictures. I tend to scan about 15 or so, and then save them one at a time as PNG’s. So I have plenty of time while it scans to read the web.
Which means I run out of things to read in Google Reader really quickly.
Which means I’ll probably blog a lot during today while I’m waiting for the scanner to finish a run of three photo’s. Simes has just posted some amazing photo’s he took this morning with his sexy new camera, I’m jealous. Click the image to see the whole set.
As we drove to work on Thursday we passed the canal and really wished we had our camera. There was around a foot of mist rising from the water, it looked incredible. It’s no wonder people believed in spirits and another world when you see some of the things water vapour and light can do.
We’ve started keeping the camera within reach in the house since the cats have a tendancy to get into silly positions and then fall asleep. If we go too far for the camera we wake them up, so within reach means we can preserve their crazyness for ever.
Made it through to Friday, pretty tired today generally. Lovely weather outside, bright sunshine, crisp. Bubbles is out there somewhere baking herself in what are probably the last few days of warm enough sunshine. She’s got conjunctivitis the poor bugger. We’ve got some ointment to put on twice a day, she’s been pretty good about it despite the whinging.
Watched Fright Night last night after recording it on Sky+. Classic movie, how on earth did we find those special effects ((special in the loose sense)) scary? Not even sure why it’s an 18, I guess some of the more fleshy scenes are the cause of that. Evan watching stuff like that the experienced is improved with the surround sound, we’re still really pleased with it.
I got sick of paying for a Sky Movies subscription and not watching anything. It’s because we don’t sit in front of the TV these days unless we’re doing so to watch something we recorded, so I went through the entire week ahead and set 4 movies to record (Clerks II, Fright Night, Deja Vu, American Gangster) and I’m going to try and do that every few days and record anything I’ve not seen or not seen for a while. Pan’s Labyrinth was on a week or so ago too, so recorded that and not watched it yet, and Hairspray was on Sky Anytime so I’ve ‘recorded’ that for Grete.
Still pleased with the 5.7% HbA1c result. Found this nice little chart in case you wanted to know more about the test,
HbA1c
Normal/abnormal
Average blood glucose
4-6.5%
Normal for those without diabetes
3-8mmol/L
6.5-7.5%
Target range for those with diabetes
8-10mmol/L
8-9.5%
High
11-14mmol/L
Greater than 9.5%
Very high
15 and above
I bought a Marathon bar ((yes, yes I know, but I like living in the 80’s)) on Wednesday to eat after I got the results, either as a celebration or a commiseration depending on how the results went. Celebration was a good option. I never ate a lot of chocolate or sweet stuff before being diagnosed, but I did enjoy a Snickers bar every now and then. Almost amusingly, they don’t have a totally terrible effect on my blood sugar because of the high fat content, but as you can imagine I’ve had about three since I was diagnosed.
Roleplaying tonight, 4th edition D&D, first time we’ve played (rolled characters up last week), so should be interesting. Always takes a while to get ‘into’ any campaign, never mind one with a new ruleset so I’m expecting tonight to be pretty slow.
My good friend Simes blogged about some TV he’s been watching. It certainly feels like the TV schedule has picked up, mostly stuffed with American TV. The Fringe pilot was cool, the Burn Notice pilot was also interesting and we’ll be watching that to see where it goes. We’ve got quite a wait for the new series of Criminal Minds sadly, but Bones is back on and is as good as ever (I think).
Around a mile from home we got stuck in traffic today. Long queue, moving very slowly in fits and starts, along a main road off which the road we live is directly connected. It took us about 20 minutes to travel that mile, maybe longer.
I jokingly said to Grete I’d get the laptop out, find an open wireless network and blog about the traffic to pass the time. I didn’t quite go that far, but I did get the laptop out and click refresh regularly on the ‘find wireless network’ option. It’s fun to see what people call their wireless networks. Some people give their own names away, some people continue to give away the name of their kit (both of these provide room for abuse if you can work out which house the kit is in), and the majority of networks in the area near to where I live are secured. But not all of them.
I can’t believe how many people still run unsecured wireless networks. We were probably 20-30 feet from the houses we were passing, and I was getting signal strengths of around 15% to 65% from inside a car, with the laptop running on battery on my knee. In the rain (not raining inside the car, obviously). Do people not think, or do they think it won’t happen to them? The best bits were where we passed side streets, and we’d go from 2 or 3 networks in range to 10. There’s a massive amount of wireless traffic hanging around our streets. Most of them are BT Home Hub or Sky devices (and identify themselves as such). Here’s a selection of our favourites.
Clearly someone with a sense of humour.
This person needs to secure their legs more carefully.
Random unsecured network (and default name)
Don’t be Nosy! More polite than the first one.
Another default open connection not far from where I live.
That’s the view from my driveway. That’s not my wireless network.
The one I didn’t get a screenshot of, but wish I had was the one with ~70% strength, called ‘default’ which was unsecured. I’m guessing it’s unconfigured as well, and hence if you got connected you could probably also connect to the router in question and reconfigure it.
Friends don’t let friends run unsecured Wireless network devices.
I think one of the greatest changes the ‘net has brought about, or maybe faster and more global communication has brought about, and which the ‘net is at the forefront of is immediate product / action feedback.
The feedback is so immediate that it starts well before the product even hits the shelves.
In the past, maybe a small core of fans and people ‘in the know’ would start talking about a new movie or a new game or a new book long before it came to light, and there would be a bunch of people who knew about it but the vast majority would not. Even those who did know might not have any way of sharing their concerns or joys with the people producing their product.
If we look at computer games in the mid-80’s, there were plenty of monthly magazines which talked about possible games, and reviewed existing ones. They had some letters pages, people wrote in, but the market was small and the hype about games was still confined to small groups of people. People making the games may have read the magazines, but what impact could three or four fans have?
Sure there was Fidonet and bulletin boards, and I’m sure there was chatter in those locations about stuff coming up. But the big change I think is when not only fans but producers of products started using the same medium for talking. I’m not sure when it happened and I’m too lazy to go and do a load of reading around the subject, but if you skip to today you can see the vast difference.
Now, months before a product is even seen people are claiming it is rubbish or the best thing since Jet Set Willy. Fans claim products have ruined their lives long before those products ever turn up. Movies, music, games, technology and everything else you can imagine, lampooned, praised and analysed months before they arrive.
Once the product is actually in the market, the feedback is immediate and abundent (if not always entirely objective). Prospective buyers can trawl Google for a thousand comments on a product that’s been out for a few weeks, companies get to see the impact of their product almost in real time.
It’s a big change.
I was thinking about this in relation to 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons. Long before it turned up, when Wizards were leaking/revealing details, people were worried and claimed it would ruin the legacy of D&D. Some people said it would be fine. Within days of it being released the ‘net was covered in feedback. I wonder how that differs from the release of the Master edition of D&D or even the first release of 2nd edition AD&D? I wonder how companies handle that information, if they do anything with it during the production phase ((which clearly the company who made Snakes on a Plane did)) and the post-release period.
I’ve reduced the number of blog categories down to 9 (Fiction, Games, Health, Internet, Life, Movies, News, Politics, Reviews, Science and Technology), although there’s still a 10th category (Uncategorized) as a hang-over from the blogspot import. I may shrink that down further if I find the Fiction, Politics and Science ones don’t get used much, and I may add a ‘humour’ one.
Alongside that, I’ve tagged posts which had other categories with new tags, based on the category names. For new posts they’ll probably get a lot more tags, but it’s a start anyway. I’ve tried to configure the tag cloud in a useful way without having the text be too big, but I run a pretty small font in browsers usually so it’s not always easy for me to tell how it looks for you guys.
I’ve removed the Twitter sidebar, as expected (self-fulfilling?) I’m not really updating Twitter and not finding myself drawn to read it, so having 8 lines of dead text on the right isn’t useful space.
It’s nineteen days since I moved away from Blogspot and onto a self-hosted WordPress install, and I’ve not missed Blogspot one bit. The move was pretty smooth thanks to the built-in WordPress migration tool thingy. The hardest part was finding a template I liked which was up-to-date, modern and had all the features I wanted, and I really struck gold with Mandigo. The old site is slowly falling off google’s index and the new site is starting to show up, so my enlightened wisdom shall soon be available to all to search for.
Now I’m struggling with maybe the greatest dilema of all blogging-kind. Tags vs Categories.
I found this pretty impressive. Spotted the link on Mightygodking (not always safe for work) and tracked the original down on TED. Embedded here for your viewing pleasure, you will need 20 minutes to watch it and sound is required.
