pikuorguk

I’ve installed Google Desktop for some useful and fun gadgets to fill my second monitor with. Currently the GMail gadget is indexing five years worth of email which is going to take ages. I had a look through my mail and found my first GMail ever, it was the welcome message, look

First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail. By now you probably know the key ways in which Gmail differs from traditional webmail services. Searching instead of filing. A free gigabyte of storage. Messages displayed in context as conversations.

A whole gigabyte of space for email! crazy! You know what? Five years and eighteen thousand emails later, I’ve only used 700MB. I now have seven gig of space, it’s going to take a long long time to fill that.

I’ve got one of those Google Wave accounts too, but it’s not that useful. I seem to recall mention of it having the ability to work in businesses, on their own servers. I like cloud computing, but I don’t trust other people with my data. I’d much prefer if I could run my own cloud on my machine here. Some sort of Google Docs server would be great, I’d use that all the time. Something where my server is the main store, but then Google’s system is a mirror, with edits and changes magically propagating throughout the whole system. Local data with remote access and off-site backup, all in one system without any extra steps required. That’d be a killer system.

Skulltag, it's Doom... but with real networking

During my time at school, before overclocking Celerons and wasting my life on the Internet became the “in” thing, I used to spend quite a lot of time playing Doom. It was, in fact the reason I spent 30 quid on a 10Base2 network card, length of coax cable and learnt all about this stuff called “IPX Networking“.

Me and a friend used to take it in turns to drag our entire PC setup – featuring ‘massive’ 15″ monitors and Cirrus Logic VLB graphics cards – around to the other’s house. Since neither of us could drive, this required a willing parent. And then we’d spend all night playing Doom, followed by Doom 2 when it came out. There was even one night where we clocked the frag counter, just to see what’d happen (it loops back round to zero).

All of that was back in 1994, and over the following years Doom has come out on pretty much everything from your toaster to digital camera. Well, maybe not the toaster, but I bet someone somewhere has tried, probably using an Arduino and Twitter account. I must have bought this damn game more times over the years than anything.

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I suppose there’s one benefit to having a knackered heating system – it requires lots of testing, to work out what’s wrong with it. It’s quite nice sitting in a roasting hot house during the day, under the guise of “testing” my heating system works.

Or in this case doesn’t. The water keeps trying to escape. The boiler man came yesterday, it’s the same bloke who does the gas inspections, and we had a bit of a play with it. Of course, since he was there things worked better than just me being there. We discovered that the boiler pressurises the system up to 4 bar quite happily, which is bad – it should only go to 2 bar. Above 3 the safety relief valve should open and send hot water outside through a little drain pipe. Sure enough, dribbling down the wall outside was some very hot water, and the pressure started to drop.

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Leaking boiler

What you’re looking at is the underside of my central heating boiler. The crusty white stuff on that pipe is limescale caused by the water in this area. The crusty white stuff shouldn’t be there, it means that pipe has a leak, and is probably partially responsible for my heating system having no water pressure.

I tried filling the radiators back up, but as soon as I started the boiler a fairly fast dripping noise came out the bottom of the boiler. A quick look with my torch showed not one, not two but four leaks on this boiler!

Here’s two of the leaks on the plumbing going to the rest of the house. And in this photo are two more leaks. One is on the pressure relief valve, the other is coming from the back, just above the copper pipe in the background.

Since this is a rented house I’ve just phoned the letting agency who are going to have a plumber call me back. Fortunately the boiler is in my kitchen with all the pipework exposed so I can see and hear this stuff happening. If it was locked away in a cupboard I’d probably never notice.

And no, this isn’t the first time I’ve run the boiler since last winter. I made the point of running it for a few hours each month and it was fine at the weekend when I used it.

I use Google Reader to follow quite a lot of websites, blogs and anything else interesting that squirts out an RSS feed. For the curious, here is a list of my favourites. I’m leaving out the well known things like XKCD, Dilbert, Hack-a-day and so on.

• http://uncertaintimes.tumblr.com/ I have no idea what this is about, but it never fails to display interesting and random images at least once a day.
• http://cargocollective.com/learnsomethingeveryday Learn something new, every day. Information presented in nice little cartoon drawings.
• http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/ It’s a sort of programming based blog, written by Landon Dyer who I believe used to work at Atari and Apple back in the day.
• http://www.bytecellar.com/ Interesting writings about old computer systems.
• http://digitaltools.node3000.com/ A tech blog that writes about various fun and often arty things, such as nice Flash games, strange bits of hardware and art installations.
• http://www.trafficengland.co.uk/index.aspx Totally not tech related at all, this site simply tells you all about the state of the UK’s road network. Grab the RSS feed and have your own instant travel update system. If only I could get this in my car and have the relevant reports displayed while I’m driving about.
• http://impossible-world.blogspot.com/ An art blog that shows Escher-style “impossible” drawings.
• http://fcd3.blogspot.com/ A programming blog detailing the creation of a Z-Machine interpreter for Infocom games.

I often find these kinds of sites while browsing around the comment fields of popular websites. It’s fun to click the random links in people’s signatures…

What are your favourite websites to visit? I’m always interested in new things to read.

It got a bit cold last night. So cold that I had to pile an extra three layers onto my bed to keep me warm. We also had the first frost last night so I made the decision to move my chilli plants indoors where it’s warmer. I’m pretty amazed that they’re continuing to produce peppers, and that they’re big, bright, shiny red peppers too. The last plants I grew produced loads of fruit, but then dropped dead. Perhaps I can keep these plants growing all year.

Hopefully bringing the plants indoors will also produce more spicy peppers.

Yes, the adverts on telly might have been saying that for the past two months (which is really irritating) but I went back today and had a wonderous child free day doing “personal admin” and attending various meetings of dubious point.

Got back into the office and discovered everything as I’d left it, my PC still takes an age to apply my personal settings, the online registration system thinks I have two tutor groups, and it seems you really can get screen burn on LCD monitors if you leave them at the Windows login prompt for a few weeks (nothing to do with me, they were all off when the IT staff left seven weeks ago).

This year we’re starting some new courses with our kids, and I get to meet my new tutor group tomorrow, which will be nice…

Tomorrow I even get to do some teaching! Marvellous!

I’ve finally made it home after spending the past six months in an aeroplane (or so it felt, really, I can’t quite put the memories together in a sensible way any more). My experiments into sleep deprivation ended after 30 hours when I fell asleep on my bed while trying to read a book.

After arriving in Frankfurt we walked most of the length of the airport, escaping many long lines of people actually trying to get into Germany and ended up in a line of our own. Once again I was security scanned and my stuff x-rayed just to make sure I’d not slipped anything naughty into my hand luggage between getting scanned in the US and sitting on a sealed plane for seven hours.

Then we went to the gate where I was once again security scanned to, once again make sure I’d not somehow constructed illegal fireworks from the contents of the duty free shops. This laptop has been X-rayed so many times I probably shouldn’t sit with it on my lap

The flight to Birmingham was quite easy with free food and an irritating child sat behind me. Curiously to enter the UK they didn’t want to security scan me again, and merely stared at me, stared at my passport, stared at me again, scanned my passport and let me back in.

The best bit was that despite being a day late, the carpark didn’t charge me any extra, so we got into the car and drove back to Rob (my cousin)’s house just outside Derby. After a break I then set off to get back home.

I arrived home (after stopping at a services due to me going cross-eyed and filling up on coke and sugar, and then making an emergency pit-stop at the local Sainsbury’s for a pee) and found everything as I left it, with the added bonus of all my plants still alive and no bad smells.

Got to use next week to get sorted for work the week after, but since tomorrow is a Bank Holiday, it can wait.

I’m sat on the plane to Frankfurt, which has been in the air about four hours. Due to fantastic luck, not only are we on a large, ‘real’ plane, but me and Rob have managed to score front row seats for our section. I have tons of leg room and the toilet is right in front of me. As far as air travel goes, this is pretty good. If I had the right shaped thing, I could also power my laptop from the seat, and if I was loaded I could use the plane’s sat phone to ring an ISP and get online.

The plane has in-flight entertainment in the seats, but predictably, it’s broken. It comes on for a bit, then it crashes and switches off. Last time I tried I was given a Microsoft OLE DB error that looked suspiciously like the type of error you get on a webserver. I think the plane has a Windows server in it somewhere that the in-seat entertainment units stream data from using some crap embedded version of Internet Explorer. I’m sure it works very well in the test labs, but on a plane it just doesn’t work. When it does work it’s so laggy and slow there’s no point in trying to do anything with it.

For entertainment I resorted to trying to phone people using the sat phone in my seat. It sort of almost worked, right up to the point where it went *clang* and disconnected me. I didn’t swipe my VISA card through it because I’m not insane, but it did also let me ring the number directly.

So, I am sat in Philly airport (gate A2 for the interested) waiting for my connecting flight to Frankfurt. Why Frankfurt? Because it’s the only flight going that way which has spare seats. Then we get a flight to Birmingham, and I pay more money for the extra day of parking.

Yes, about that extra day… Originally my flight from Philly to Birmingham direct was going to get in at 6:25am UK time. According to the new itinerary that someone invented for me, my Frankfurt to Birmingham flight would get me in at 9:20 on the same day. Despite me setting off a whole day later.

Last night I was sat in bed trying to work this out, and it made no sense. It made even less sense to the checkin desk people who found it quite amusing. The automated checkin machine printed to parts of my journey off and then shut down, evidently thinking I was insane. It seems that whoever invented my new flight schedule forgot the small fact that days are 24 hours long, and at some point you need to go onto the next one. So yeah, I would be flying to Philly at 6:45am US time, and five hours earlier at the same time I would be flying from Frankfurt to Birmingham. Then, later today I would catch another flight from Philly to Frankfurt.

I don’t think they managed to mess the space-time continuum up that badly in Star Trek.

Only pain in the arse is that I don’t have an European travel adaptor for my laptop, so when I arrive in Frankfurt I’ll have nothing to do. Maybe then would be a good time to go insane? I will get home at some point…

Well our bags are back. Now trying to contact the people we were staying with so we can go back… and break it to them that we need to be back here again for a 7am flight tomorrow.

Currently I am sat on the floor of Burlington Airport, waiting for the bag people to retrieve my luggage from the plane. The flight I was supposed to be catching has been “cancelled” (it hasn’t, but if we get it, we’re stuck in Philadelphia until tomorrow since we’ll miss the connecting flight). I’m sat next to the check in desk on the floor, behind a self-service check in machine, waiting. Hope they’ve not forgotten about us because we gave over our baggage claim tickets.

tomorrow we fly from here to Philly, then to Frankfurt and then to Birmingham. Isn’t this fun!

Montpelier, VT

Armed with my DSLR camera dangling from my neck, and a VISA card that has to be full by now, I and my cousin, aunt, uncle and two interesting family friends set out for some hardcore sight seeing. I needed to get my sister and mum a birthday present too, so I was trying to buy any interesting looking tourist tat I could find.

We first went out to the Cabot cheese place just up the road, which had lots of free samples to stuff your face taste. I decided the 50% fat and other lighter cheeses were quite tasteless, but once we got around to the aged cheddar and the one with the habanero chillis in the cheese became tasty and much more pleasant to eat.

After that we went to the Ben & Jerry’s factory down the road, which claims to be the first of their factories ever built, and where it all started. The tour was the usual corporate cattle-hearding, but it was cheap and the tour guide had a suitably sarcastic sense of humour – “I’ll leave you to watch this video. Sorry, it’s just corporate brainwashing, but you know, sit back and go woo”, “In this section you’re not allowed to take photos. No idea what’ll happen if you do, maybe you’ll go to Guantanamo or something”. The free sample at the end was nice and proved you can have a fairly nice free meal if cheese and ice cream are your thing.

Montpelier state house

After that we drove into Montpelier, the capital of Vermont (and pronounced in a totally different way to the French place of the same name). This is a nice traditional looking town, full of traditional American town buildings and streets. The capital building was interesting to walk around, and that in itself was surprising, that you could just open the door, wander in and so long as you stayed your side of the red velvet barrier, and didn’t open any doors, everything was fine. I don’t think you can wander about our government buildings so easily.

For dinner we had crepes, but not the French style ones, these were savoury and pretty good. I might try and make some when I go home.

On the way back from parading around Montpelier taking photos of everything we stopped off at Morse Farm maple sugarworks where I discovered I like the B-grade dark syrup more than the best quality stuff. According to some more tourist video we consumed, the B-grade stuff is mostly used for cooking, but there you go it takes 40 gallons of maple tree juice to make 1 gallon of maple syrup, which explained why the 1 gallon bottles of it cost over $60.

I can’t decide now whether to sit around and read, or to go and lie in the hot tub outside. It’s such a hard life being on holiday

Dan and Mira

Saturday was the wedding of Dan, my cousin and Mira. It was held at Mira’s parents’ house which is a massive place amongst the forest on the banks of the Waterbury reservoir, Waterbury, VT.

As the unofficial photographer I took many photos and also recorded a video of the ceremony. Later when I get home I’ll sort through the pictures, videos and create a video of the whole thing.

After the ceremony we all went to the local fish and game club for the reception. It was a large wedding, with around 150 people attending, being a mixture of family and friends. This part of the US is known for growing corn, and the wedding meal was a giant chicken and corn BBQ. The corn on the cob was so sweet and unlike anything available in the UK.

Dan outside the house

Sunday was spent tidying up and returning various guests to the local airport to catch their flights home. People had visited from all over the US plus my other aunt and uncle who had come from the UK.

On Monday Me, Rob and remaining friends went out to a local microbrewery for drinks and a meal. American microbreweries produce excellent beer, completely unlike the crap we buy in the UK. It’s every bit as good as our UK beer. We especially liked the porter.

Today me and Rob are going into Burlington to visit the shops, I need to buy some birthday presents for various people.

I’m sat in Philadelphia airport waiting for our final flight to Rochester. I’ve been up since 4am and feel surprisingly alert.

So far I’ve been security scanned twice, been asked lots of questions by US Immigration and have eaten a giant sandwich. Not keen on this country’s obsession with high fructose corn syrup though, it tastes wrong. I will later attempt to obtain a cup of tea.

This terminal is full of people staring at laptops, most of which are Macbooks. I’ts quite quiet and relaxed too which makes a change from the controlled chaos of airports usually. The PA system is broken though, they need to fix that.

The three important things you need on holiday

I’m off to the US to attend my cousin Dan’s wedding, and also to go for a bit of a holiday. I’ve got my tickets, found my passport, and even completed the daft “are you a terrorist?” questionnaire/visa waiver form.

The flight’s tomorrow morning at 8am, so like normal I’ll have to get there for 6am. Fortunately I’m not travelling alone, my other cousin, Rob is also going so at least I’ll have someone to talk to during the long flight. I’ve also got my iPod Touch charged and full of music and games.

Let’s hope tomorrow goes to plan, and that there’s something interesting to do in Philadelphia International Airport since we have a four hour stay there between flights. Maybe there’ll be a quiet corner to plug my laptop in.

Did quite a bit of cooking today. First I made a rather nice curry, and to go with it some hand-made chapatis and some paneer. While all that was cooking away I set some bread dough off in my bread maker.

The paneer was very easy to make and quite surprising. All you do is curdle hot milk in a pan using lemon juice. As soon as the lemon juice is added, that most horrendous cookery mistake happens – the milk curdles and separates into white lumps and yellow liquid – the curds (lumpy bits) and the whey (runny stuff). All that remains is to filter the lumps out and press it into a solid mass. It has a very smooth and clean flavour, not unlike mozzarella cheese.

For a bit of variety the bread I made was made from malted wholewheat flour, with a handful of sundried tomatoes added. I would have included some pictures, but I was too busy eating it all Making bread in a bread machine is a bit of an art, trusting the mix to the machine and hoping you end up with a loaf, and not a solid mass of hardened flour, or a sloppy mess. I like to watch the dough mixing to begin with, just to make sure everything is correct. Sometimes it sounds a bit too sticky, needing extra flour, other times it sounds too dry. Other times bits of half mixed flour will stick to the sides and not get incorporated correctly, needing a bit of help with a knife. Pay attention to your bread machine at the beginning, it prevents bad bread.

The aquarium is a part of the Ocean Expo Commemorative National Government Park located in Motobu, Okinawa. The main tank called the ‘Kuroshio Sea’ holds 7,500-cubic meters (1,981,290 gallons) of water and features the world’s second largest acrylic glass panel, measuring 8.2 meters by 22.5 meters with a thickness of 60 centimeters.

Imagine cleaning the glass on that! I think I need to sort my own aquarium out, it contains two fish and quite a lot of snails. The new filter seems to be running nicely, so I’ll pull out the old under-gravel filter out and restock it with fish again.

My local FreeCycle list occasionally contains some weird or highly specific items. Here’s the current crop…

• Offered – Magic Pants. I wonder what makes them so magic?
• Offered – Stair Lift, hardly used. A stairlift? The thing screwed to the side of stairs that makes it easy for people to get upstairs? Don’t they require professional installation and what if your stairs are the wrong size?
• Wanted – One piece of wood 6 to 8 inches wide by approx 8 foot 6 inches long. Err… is there something wrong with the wood in B&Q? This is FreeCycle, not some sort of mail-order company.

No requests for plasma TVs or XBox 360s this week though, and it’s been at least a month since someone offered a bag of coathangers. Speaking of which, does anyone want some? I have a few too many

Today the current year 9 students went to meet their new year 10 form tutors. In our school students have a form tutor in year 7, then they go into year 8 and have a new form tutor who they keep until year 9. Then for years 10 and 11 they stay with a different tutor.

There’s a bit of a change of mental gears required when the students enter year 10. Some of them are quite sensible, but others don’t understand the importance of the next two years. Several of the more challenging students have already been in their new head of year’s office, having the workings of life explained to them. This is upper school, we do not tolerate lower school silly behaviour.

I’m going to be “sharing” a tutor group with another teacher, so while he welcomed our new group I was covering for a new year 10 tutor who will be joining us in September. She’s got a nice tutor group with no real problem kids.

Welcome to year 10, the world as you know it is over, welcome to the new world order. Strap yourselves in, it’s going to be a rollercoaster and some of you will fall off.