My Google search result update came into my mailbox today.
I usual get a couple of results for IPv6, postfix and Land Rover wiring, but I managed to make number 17 on searches for Lenar Davletshin.
This is great news. I am on the world stage for being an authority on whoever that is. So just to keep the search bots happy, I thought I had better actually have a mention of him on a page. I hope in doing so, those who get delivered to this page don’t feel that click was entirely wasted.
I dragged Martin and Ben along on the London to Cambridge ride today. We met Simon and his wife, Britney on the route as well. So it was a good team effort. Martin had been out the night before (naughty boy) and so his pace was a little below par at first. He finally cleared his head though and kept up a good pace with me as we maintained a rearguard about 20minutes or so behind the others.
The temperature was in the high 20’s and we felt it all the way through. We started at around 08:30 and finally finished around 14:00ish. It was slow going (13mph average) as we pretty much had to stop and take on fluids at every refreshment point along the way. I decided to try out the Nokia Sportstracker, knowing the battery would probably die along the way. The good news is that I captured the first 2 1/2 hours of the ride
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A good ride however. I enjoyed it.
It was about time we switched credit cards. Moving cards allows us to take advantage of zero interest for a while on an oustanding balance and also adds a level of security by effectively resetting our credit card number (so long as you cancel the old one).
The main reason for moving from Egg to the Post Office card was the fact that the Post Office card does not levy a foreign exchange fee on purchases from abroad (in person or online). Being fed up with being fleeced 2.75% on avergae, finding a card with a 0% foreign loading fee was a must. We found one.
The other thing I wanted was a card that I could manage online. Yep. The Post Office Credit Card does that too. You get sent a user id and a security number seperately in the post and have to call in to activate it.
That duly done, I try and log in. No joy. Maybe we typed it wrong? No. Definately correct. Do it really slowly this time… hang on. Out user id is seven digits long and the userid box is six digits long. Ah! It seems they have issued enough cards to exceed the maximum customer count of 999,999 customers. Obviously they are being very successful. They must have been signing customers up at quite a rate for nobody to notice the arbitrary “1 million” ceiling figure arriving and flashing past until customers like myself started to ring in.
It must have occured in the last few days too as when I called to activate my unnaturally high user id, the chap in the call centre did not batter an eyelid (not that I could see him – maybe he was batting away but being reserved in his conversation with me).
The lady I spoke to about my login problem was very apologetic and declared there was a “technical problem with some recently issued numbers”. From my user id, I’m reckoning about 20,000 of them. That’s 20,000 customers who cannot login to the online service. Quite a good feat – denying access to your own service.
So there you have it. Post Office credit card. Very successful. Lots of new customers every week. Shame their website developers have a very small abacus.
Our Sky+ box has gone “stuck in standby” which means it has a red light on the front and it won’t go green.
You can usually do a software reset by powering it down and then backup whilst holding the “Backup” button in on the unit. But it didn’t help this time and an engineer is on his way later this week.
So no T.V. in the living room. There is a solution though.
Martin’s slingbox is still connected to the Sky box upstairs. It is connected to a Netgear wireless game adapter (basically a one port wired-to-wireless bridge). With Slingplayer running on the living room PC and the settings tuned to LAN speeds, we get very watchable TV and can change channel remotely.
The living room PC is built for low noise so it is difficult to hear it until it has been on for a couple of hours or you’ve been running DirectX games on it. For watching TV it is almost silent.
But I can confirm that TV over slingplayer over wireless over game adapter over composite video over slingbox does actually work very very well.
It also shows just how much resiliency I have accidentally built into my home media setup. I am far too geeky sometimes.
It was pop T.V. when I was a kid. Ridiculous but easy enough to get embroiled into that you wanted to see how it would end each episode. We knew it wasn’t really a talking car and David Hasselhoff was never quite the action hero he thought he was but still we loved it. Knight Rider – one man can make a difference.
They tried to update it a few years back with a spin-off movie and T.V. series that didn’t win any fans. Back to the retro drawing board then and relaunch it again. I’m intrigued by the idea and will watch it when it comes out because I’m curious. If you want to know a bit more about it, read here.
My wife and I went to See The Police at Twickenham on Saturday. Great concert. Started well, slowed for a bit and then picked-up the pace again with a load of well-known tunes. They completed my wish-list during the encore so I left happy.
The weird thing though was the fact I met a long-lost friend and ex-neighbour, Mr Steve KB. I had gone back for a second look at the merchandise stall and he stopped me on the way back. The chances of meeting somebody you haven’t seen in a number of years amongst 50,000 people in a particular corner of the stadium during a narrow time window is so small that it was inevitable.
When one of my work colleagues walked past my row whilst going to her seat later on I took it all in my stride. Again, the chances of here ending-up a handful of rows behind me amongst the sheer number of seats (I’d say approx 1,000 to one to be generous and statistically approximate) are high enough that you wouldn’t want to put money on it. I just said a nonchalant “hi” and waved.
I next expect to meet an old school friend on the next flight I take and to share a cab with Julianne Regan from “All About Eve”. It is so unlikely that with my current luck it will be within the next month. Place your bets now.
I’m a keen reader of science/technology articles that really do introduce new concepts. Not quite “paradigm shifts” in teh classic sense but certainly ideas that make you think a bit. One of those concepts I read about a few years ago is “smart dust”. The idea was that you spread these literally dust-sized particles over a field and each one is clever enough to send back some simple sensor readings to its nearest neighbour.
Imagine that then. A plan flies over a field and drops a load of particles each capable of saying if they have a big metal object nearby. Collate that information from a remote location and you’ve just found the enemy tank advance.
Thankfully though, NASA has other ideas. In a recent BBC news item they predict how this stuff can be used to investigate otehr planets. The most interesting thing though is that they have modelled how this stuff can be made to “fly” through the air taking on different shapes. Various doomsayers have predicted that when nanotechnology takes off it will turn the world into grey goo. (Micaheal Crichton also wrote a novel on that theme called “Prey” but I haven’t read it). But to be honest, I’ll be more curious about the dust in the air around me.
Next time you empty the vacuum cleaner listen for the little voices of all that dust chattering with itself and deploring your taste in curtain material.
After posting my last entry it was inevitable that Jung’s favourite subject would raise its head. So I must have appeared like a madman to those drivers I passed them along the M11 this morning through the fog, grinning to myself.
I quite like the drive upto the Cambridge office and come up here once a week or so. This office is much more relaxed than the London ones and many more of the people here are from the old PSINet business so I’ve known them for a few years. Summertime is obviously the better time to be up here as the riverside lunches are far superior than smokey old London. I also get to avoid the trains and tube. The fun is spoilt somewhat by the snails-pace along the A14 on the way home unless you stay late and get a fairly free run back home.
But that is what in-car CD players were invented for I suppose.