Lakes at Gowerton

With the weather warming up (well, it will soon once this snow passes through) I went for a wander around a small coarse fishing lake, just around the corner from my house. It's next to the road, so it's not very quiet, it's small, weedy and clear. There are some double-figure carp in there though apparently, and there's a cafe serving all day breakfasts :)

In the gutter again

People suck.

I had a short cycle on the road today, on my way home from work. Just 200m or so from the gates at work to the cycle path. Believe it or not, that was almost enough to get me knocked off my bike. Impressive, eh?

In that short distance on a dual carriageway with a 40mph speed limit only 4 cars overtook me, but 1 of them decided that as a cyclist I shouldn't be there, I should be on the cycle path. Unfortunately he wasn't psychic, otherwise he would have known that was my target, but on that stretch of road a steep bank of grass separates the road from the path. Instead he was moronic, and overtook me as close as he dared, even though he had all the room in the world, forcing me into the gutter and my arms into the air in an exasperated, "What the f&*k are you doing, dickhead?" He saw my display and pointed to his left, but I wasn't sure if he was suggesting that I should be in the gutter or just pointing out the lovely sea view.

I know you guys think that you are far better drivers than the average Jo, and seriously believe that you could give Coulthard a run for his money, but that's just not high quality driving. If a copper sees you he's going to pull you over. Worse, if you do clip that cyclist (we're often wobbly if the surface is poor) he's going to end up in hospital with at least some broken bones and you're going to end up in court shelling out a lot of cash with a very red face. What sort of argument is, "It's not my fault, he should have been on the path"? A good driver will anticipate cyclists and adjust to overtake well in advance. We're really not holding you up as much as you think we are - several seconds at most (count them next time). The road is usually faster and has a smoother surface, and don't forget we pay road tax too.

Tolerance. A little bit does a lot for humanity.

What do you think about

What do you think about this scenario?

lostcamera.blogspot.com/2006/02/camera-unlost-but-not-quite-found.html

(A lady lost her camera in Hawaii, and was told that a Canadian family had found it. She spoke to them, but they will not return it to her because they don't want to take it away from their son and they bought a charger for it. I recommend reading the full story.)

Personally I think it's a crazy situation, and just goes to prove how even when people are doing something blatantly wrong they can still justify it to themselves. Nutty rating 4/5.

Biscuit City

www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com/theWife/biscuitcity/

Sorry, I'm struggling to sum up a comment to go with this link. Not even "how very British" feels right. Nuts rating: 4/5.

The Cream of Manchester

For Molly (if you're reading this).

4 8 15 16 23 42

Warning, Lost spoilers below!

This is probably old news to most of you, but I've been getting into the TV series Lost recently. If you've watched it you'll know that it's not just a series about people stranded on a desert island, but that it's about a bunch of people stranded on a very, very weird island. Therein lies the interest: the viewer is slowly fed tidbits to pique their interest and hold it (I often wonder if it isn't all just a MacGuffin but I feel the writers have taken it too far for that). We really weren't given much information in the first series other than some very strange and inexplicable hidden events, puzzles and drawn out mysteries (like why is there a sealed metal hatch on a remote, uninhabited (?) desert island). Given all that it's very entertaining. The characters and their interrelationships are developed very well, and we usually feel that we're just about to find out something important. It's probably much more enjoyable to watch on DVD than it was weekly on TV, and you can expect some late nights.

Anyway. So I just had to watch the first few episodes of the 2nd series because the end of the first series was such a cliffhanger, as expected. I had some of those episodes on my home theatre PC so we sat down to watch. It crashed. No bother, I restarted it because it had been doing a bit of that recently. It restarted, we watched some more, it crashed again. Needless to say we got to the point where it crashed after a few minutes of video. My solution was to stream the video to another PC and watch it on the monitor, and we get through an episode. It appears that a computer that becomes damaged is a central part of the start of this series. Coincidentally the motherboard on my home theatre PC dies. Hmmm. I set up another PC to the TV to watch the next couple of episodes of Lost. The radiator in the water cooling system drips a drop of water onto the graphics card and that PC goes down. Oh crap. I seem to be jinxed here. If you know about the numbers in Lost, you might be able to imagine a source for that jinx. One of the character believes he is jinxed by the numbers (and most of the effects of that jinx seem to be wrought via electrical or metal objects BTW) and all sorts of bad things happen to him after using the numbers to win the lottery.

All of my computer woes happened during episodes where the all important computer on the island was discovered and became damaged. Once I pulled a bunch of parts together to construct one working PC myself to watch the rest of it on, I watched the characters fix their computer. Too freaky for words. Talk about getting involved in what you're watching.

It couldn't be the numbers, could it? Now, I'm willing to bet you that they started out as a MacGuffin, even though they may not end up as such!

Women prefer Barry White

This is a great study published in Hormones & Behaviour: when looking for a mate, women are more likely to go for deep, gravelly voiced men like Barry White. But we all new Barry White was the man, right? Deep, masculine, dominant voices have long been thought linked to high levels of testosterone, higher reproductive success and long-term health. What's novel about this study is that it appears that for many women their preference for deeper voices was strongest during their fertile phase, which ties in with previous observations that many women prefer men with more masculine faces during the same period.

BBC article.

Phil's Hungry

Time to get to the pub for lunch then.

NABAZTAG Communicating Rabbit

I'd be tempted if it wasn't £65... This gizmo sits there, hooked into your WiFi network. He (she?) will do weird things like waggle his ears, flash different colours, talk to you or play you music. The really fun thing, however, is that your friends can send the rabbit SMS messages or emails and take control of the thing. Ace. Nabaztag will tell you the weather, tell you that your email has arrived, and earn his keep as a stock market ticker. Freaky little bugger.

Go and visit Nabaztag.

3 Cliffs Bay

Mum and Dad popped down today, so we went to Three Cliffs Bay for a stroll (Jack getting very wet as usual, but doing lots of walking). More photos, but a boring grey sky today.

Beach photos

I took some snaps at the beach today:

Jack on a bench on the Gower coastal path.

Ele on the sand.

Hot Dust

My main PC was crashing an hour or so into some CPU intensive tasks (i.e. DivX), so I cracked open the case to check out the cooling. Eurgh, I've got a dead hamster in my radiator (water-cooled).

Hoover....

Aha, the CPU's now running 15C cooler. And no hamsters. I can happily encode stuff to DivX overnight now.

My Own Personal Experiment

I'm always using myself as my own personal experiment. It's hard not to if you're at all interested in anatomy, physiology or biology in general.

So recently I've had a bit of a cold. It's my second in about 2-3 weeks (like buses you don't see one for ages and then two come along at once) and both came from Jack. Interestingly, he wasn't affected much by either of them, other than becoming snotty and a bit tired. I was the same for the first, but this second has been horrible. I had an elevated temperature for about 4 days (which made interviewing prospective medical students rather interesting) and only yesterday started to feel a little more alive. I'd still much rather sit quietly than move around. The other cold quietly came and went in just a few days.

This second time, the cold hit at the end of a tough week, where I probably hadn't been getting as much sleep as normal, the levels of stress were reasonably high and a fairly large amount of work was required of me. So I was run down. Although this in no way applies the method (n=1) it felt like an interesting observation at the time.

If you take part in endurance exercise or lift weights you do it all the time: you see your physique change, with fat deposition and muscle tone altering in only 6 weeks most of the time, your resting pulse rate drops, and you usually feel different, but that's much harder to measure. Likewise the effects of stress have been interesting, and although I'm very comfortable with long term high levels of stress my body isn't and has been irreversibly damaged (that's a bit melodramatic, but seems to be true). Climbing hard has left me with a few very interesting injuries - not from falls but from either muscles getting stronger in strange places and unbalancing antagonists, or from various bits of connective tissue getting torn trying to hold finger tendons in place. Other sports have also developed funny injuries which physiotherapists have had to explain to me. All in all, I'm a very interesting experiment for myself. Much of the time it's fun trying to fix these injuries, and follow the progress. Unfortunately my motivation is very low these days - I've probably gone too long without endorphins.

So next time you get a cut or a graze in your skin, take time out to watch it heal. If you think about the clotting mechanisms that start the whole process off, and then imagine those cells migrating across the wound to repair the skin and throw out collagen fibres to hold the whole thing together (scar), it all becomes very interesting. Take some digital photos, and make a montage from fresh wound to fresh new skin.

Battlefield 2 patch

Hey, the new Battlefield 2 patch is out! If you're a player you'd better get it. It fixes the thing that pisses me off the most: people jumping around like tits and shooting me in the head. Now if they'll just stop people firing anti-tank weapons into my chest from 3 feet away like we're playing Quake then I might become a happy man. But I doubt it - my gaming PC is well overdue for an upgrade. This is what comes of buying new houses. And that's also one of my excuses for my poor stats.

358MB download. Ha! Just for a patch!

eagames.co.uk

Valentine's Day

I hate Valentine's Day (sorry Kim). Actually, that's not totally true, I'm just very, very annoyed by Valentine's Day. It all feels so false, contrived, cheap and tacky.

I guess when you're single it can be fun (or can drive you to suicide or a killing rampage or both), but I don't really remember that. (Being single that is, not the killing sprees.) Kim knows I love her, and I occasionally do something that will remind her of that. But a card on Valentine's Day? What the hell does that mean anymore? Usually it means, "I bought you this card because if I didn't your feelings would be hurt", which isn't really what you meant to say at all, was it? Dinner and flowers? The cost of those two doubles or triples because of the date. Shouldn't you do things throughout the year to show your partner that they're special? I doubt any of you disagree with me, so tell me, what is St. Valentine's day for? Is it just a reminder to blokes, giving them a chance to redeem themselves after the crap Christmas presents they gave to their partners?

And is it correct that we're really celebrating his death, like most saints? And how on earth did sexual love become linked to a martyred priest or bishop? Answers in the comments, please.

Is it for the ladies? Kim certainly genuinely enjoys the card I give her. But even the ladies seem sceptical these days.

ReadyWhenUR Kettle

Now this is my kind of a pointless gadget. A kettle that you can switch on by texting it "switch on" from your mobile phone. Completely pointless, and I want one.

This kettle was inspired by Wallace and Gromit, and developed by Orange and PG Tips. It would go nicely with my red-nosed-when-hot Gromit mugs.

New photos

I haven't blogged much this week, mostly because I've been busy. When I'm busy, I'm often boring. To make up for this I've added a new batch of photos to the photos page.

One geeky thing I did this week was buy a new external Lacie hard disk for my photos and video editing work. I now have about a terabyte of storage in the house :) I can see this increasing over the next 6 months too.

Climbing Jack

At a friend's party Jack went for several climbs up the gym bars. No fear. Kim's just there for our reassurance, not his. His down-climbing is good too.

Read yesterday's Dilbert cartoon. It's

Read yesterday's Dilbert cartoon. It's Friday night, and I've taken 2 tech support calls from friends tonight so far.

Repaint

Over the last couple of days the interior of my house has been getting its third paint. You may remember that they rushed the job to get us moved in on time, and then had to repaint the whole house from top to bottom to bring it up to standard, because the previous painters had done such a shoddy job. They had completely forgotten to paint the back of the bathroom door at all, for example. So they re-glossed, re-emulsioned, re-painted all the ceilings, and did a very good job.

Now cracks have started appearing, which are not due to the house settling or drying, but seem to be appearing because the paint is crap. The impressions of tacks are starting to appear in the ceilings, and the tape used in the corners of walls and ceilings is moving to show the seams. So they've been re-skimming these areas to smooth out the surfaces, and now they're painting it all again. I think they're using a different paint this time. So the house is dusty and smells of paint, and Kim has been cleaning up the dust each day. Annoying. And it's all magnolia again. We can't paint the walls in the colours we want until the house has properly dried out in a year or so's time. I guess I had better get some of my photos printed up so we can frame them and put them up on the walls. Maybe this one? (Click for a larger version.)