Favourite Words
21 April 2004
Billy:
Phrase: "Oh be-bother-bootle" and "Oh be-bominating"
Translation: "Oh dear" or "Oh bother"
Annie:
Phrase: "Diddle-diddle-diddle Daddy Door"
Translation: "Daddy is through the door"
Phrase: "Diddle-diddle-diddle Daddy Stairs"
Translation: "Daddy is upstairs"
1st day at school
19 April 2004
Today was Billys first day at infant school.
I was working at home - and when he came back at lunchtime he was really excited. Apparently he did lots of paintings of bricks for a 3 little pigs brick house and thoroughly enjoyed himself.
My little boy is growing up.
Great Day Out
21 March 2004
We have just returned from a great day out at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. What a brilliant museum this is - and I didn't know it existed. It reminded me of the old Victorian museums you see at the beginning of movie versions of boys own adventures, you know the ones where a bunch of Oxford Dons meet up sipping whisky and discussing some adventure to a Lost World. It's stuffed full of complete dinosaur skeletons, including a full size cast of a particularly scary T-Rex, and was a dream come true for Billy. Annie took a fancy to cases of stuffed foxes - she was squealing with delight when she saw them.
In the same building is the Pitt Rivers Museum - named after Lt.-General Pitt Rivers who gave his unusual collection of archaeological and ethnographic items from around the World. We ran out of time by the time we got here - but managed to take a look at the giant Totem pole and a rather spooky looking Mummy.
We will definitely go back to finish our own exploration; and the best bit? It's free to get in.
Happy Birthday Doctor Seuss
03 March 2004
It's the 100th anniversary of Ted 'Seuss' Geisel - one of Billy favourite authors. Some titbits from Yahoo! News are:
"Seuss - his middle name and his mother’s maiden name - rhymes with “voice,” ... rather than “loose.”
He invented the word 'nerd'.
"Green Eggs and Ham" was written when he was bet $50 by Random House publisher Bennet Cerf that he couldn't write a book using only 50 words.
Pointless Blog
02 March 2004
I appear to have hit a blogging brick wall - and I haven't posted for ages. In an attempt to break this blog-block, I am forcing myself to blog anything.
Here goes...
We were in Barnsley at the weekend...
It snowed...
I promise my next entry will be better...
Muji Falling
27 January 2004
We were in Reading at the weekend and we popped into Muji to have a browse. In the window they had a fantastically intricate display consisting of several dozen perspex cubes each filled with green ping-pong balls.
Billy walked into it...
The display crashed to the floor. Ping-pong balls by the thousand rolled off in every direction. The noise was deafening. When everything was still, a friendly shop assistant in a brown apron came over to see if we were OK, and they were fine about it. Guilt forced us to buy several items, and we ended up being in there for about half an hour. As we left the door the shop assistant was still filling boxes - and from the look on her face she was going to be there some time.
Radiohead
28 November 2003
Just got back from seeing Radiohead at Earls Court. Bloody marvelous. Big thanks to James and Sue for the ticket.
Space...
20 November 2003
After spending an evening upgrading my SUSE linux distro from 8.2 to 9.0 (actually it was real easy), I started having a look at what else was on the DVD and discovered Celestia. It is an amazing open source 3d space simulation and has planet images created from the Voyager photos. You can fly around space looking stars, planets, moons and just about anything. Billy spent about an hour zooming in and out of Jupiter (his current favourite planet - knocking previous favourite Mars off top spot). The speed (on Linux anyway) is breathtaking, oh and there is a Windows version.
Here's a taster - a view of the Earth:
and Jupiter:
The most accurate clock in the World
18 November 2003
Over the last decades the scientists from the major Japanese universities
have joined their capacities and created the most exact clock in the world.
The result of their work can be found here.
New Gadgets
15 October 2003
I have recently acquired 2 new gadgets.
The first is a Philips Pronto. It's a cool touchscreen programmable remote control. It has a good editing suite that lets you design the layout and design macros for controlling ir devices (for instance - turn on the vcr - select channel 3 - start recording). I our front room we currently have 5 remote controls - TV,Digital Box,DVD,2 VCRS - and with kids this is a BAD idea as each evening we play hunt the remote. Now we have just 1 remote control - and no chance of the grandparents understanding it!
My other gadget was kindly contributed to me by a mate at work. It's called a Multitainer and was sold by Fujitsu a few years back as a multimedia centre. It's basically a PC in a DVD style case - has a 10gb disk, graphics, network card, sound card and a dvd player. It only runs '98 and the graphics cards aren't supported by anything later. It did come with a IR keyboard and remote - but these are missing. I plan to try to get a keyboard for it from ebay (make do with a USB one for now) and use my Pronto to replace the remote. I'm hoping to install a mini-linux distro on it and use it in the front room to do the following:
Be a front end to MythTv (A cool open source PVR) that I already have running on my server.
Be an mp3 player to my mp3's (on my server)
Run Mame to allow me to play all those long forgotten arcade games
Do anything else I can think of.
So much to do and so little time...
Derren Lives
06 October 2003
Last night Derren Brown performed a russian roulette illusion live (well almost live - I understand there was a time delay) on channel 4. He picked a member of the public from 12000 volunteers and the nervous guy put a bullet in a .45 - counted from 1 to 6 - and Derren correctly predicted that he had put it in chamber 1. Oh, and he did this by firing the gun repeatedly at his head until he got to the live one.
Apparently the police are now worried about copycats and said "we're possibly going to end up with some tragedies". Personally I'm hoping for David Copperfield.
Budget Time Travel
23 September 2003
Check out the Time Travel Fund who will offer you time travel for the princely sum of $10.
This is how they say it works:
"Current scientific theory states that Time Travel may be possible, however the technology is a long way off, perhaps hundreds of years in the future. Now, assume it does become possible in say, 500 years. As with any technology, Time Travel will get less expensive as time goes on. Just as the price of a VCR has dropped to less than $70 from the several hundred dollars it cost just ten years ago, Time Travel, once it becomes feasible, will initially be very expensive yet it will become more and more economical as time goes by."
"We establish a fund in current time. You make a small contribution to the fund, and in a few hundred years that small amount grows to a very large amount. From that fund, moneys will be taken and used to retrieve you, perhaps seconds after you join, perhaps even moments before your recorded death, perhaps some other point in your lifetime. Further, the fund may even pay to have you "rejuvenated" medically (assuming this is scientifically possible at that time,) and support you financially for a number of years. (Note: Retrieving you just before the moment of death is just one possible scenario, but one that would avoid any Star Trek(TM) type paradoxes. There are an unlimited number of other possibilities, and we do not know what they will do, we can only make reasonably informed guesses.)"
As always there are Disclaimers:
" There is no time limit to how long this fund may exist. It may take five hundred years, or it may take five thousand years or more for the technology to become viable. It also may be possible that the technology will never become viable, or that the human race will bomb itself back to the stone age. We don't know the answers, we can just hope for the best."
New Pierce
17 September 2003
Congratulations to Jill, Gareth and Tomos who now have a new arrival in the family.
Owen was born 12 September at 4.00am weighing 9lb 6oz.
P2P VOIP
12 September 2003
Me and John had some thoughts about a P2P VOIP solution...
We thought about it a lot...
We thought about it for too long...
The people who brought KaZaA have just released Skype, a true P2P VOIP solution that uses the same network structures as KaZaA and Gnutella. They've work hard to make it firewall and NAT friendly and it looks really good. As yet there are only versions for XP and 2000 - and I don't know if it runs under Wine on Linux. I must get it installed at the weekend and give it a go.
Sir William the Brave
05 September 2003
We had a brilliant day at Warwick Castle yesterday. The sun was out and they had a Mediaeval festival on - with displays of fighting knights and stories told by the Ratcatcher (one of Billys highlights).rn rnI haven't been since I was a kid myself and the dungeon is still as eerie as I remember it being. Due to the amounts of stairs and Annie being too little, myself and Paula had to take shifts walking Billy up to the top of towers. He insisted on climbing to the top of every tower with each of us and unsurprisingly fell asleep the instant we got back to the car. rnrnIt's a little bit pricey and they stopped serving food at 4.00pm which is a bit rubbish when you have kids and they are actually open until 6.00pm. Nevertheless we had a great day out - and we'll definitely be back.rnrnWe got Billy a suit of armour that he now wears constantly. He says he is a "bad Knight" and that he is going to wear his suit of armour everyday because unlike the Knights at the castle, he is "real".
Messenger woes
02 September 2003
If you use messenger you may have noticed that Microsoft have started sending out the following notification at startup: ".NET Messenger Service Staff: You are running a version of messenger that requires an immediate security update. Please visit http://messenger.msn.com/Help/Upgrades.aspx to complete the update."
If, like me, you don't use messenger (I use Trillian on Windows and KMess on Linux) this is bad news. On 15th October Microsoft will block all non-upgraded (i.e. non-Microsoft only) users leaving Linux users in the dark and Trillian users somewhat miffed. I'm sure patches will ultimately arrive - but until then we're a bit goosed.
Maybe it's time I switched to ICQ?
Rant over.
Yorkshire gets broadband
21 August 2003
Apparently Yorkshire is getting broadband. They'll be getting electricity next...
Hello. My name is Roy. I live in rural Oxfordshire.
This is my blog. I write about things that interest me, make me laugh or that I want to remember.