Archive for May, 2007

Friday Drinks in London

Monday, May 28th, 2007

I’m heading home to the UK for a week of visiting and I’ve got a couple of free Friday evenings.

Friday 1st: Free-for-all. I expect we’ll drink beer, eat chinese food and end up in a champaign bar.
Details to be finalised…

Friday 8th: The work gang. Meet is being organised by Bridge.

Anti-social networking

Monday, May 28th, 2007

So…. despite my better judgement, and following some lobbying from Sian, ‘It’s like MySpace, but the grownups got their first’.. I joined Facebook.

Can I find anyone? No. Their search interface sucks. Following links from the ‘Please add me as a friend’ people have emailed me, forces me to log out of the site, and then the login in takes me to the home page, so I can’t click the ‘Add this person’ link.

MySpace for adults my arse. What a steaming pile of poo.

If you are on facebook, (God help you) send me an email and tell me how to find you. At this rate, I’m just gonna jack the whole thing in and remove my account.

Humpf.

(Gets off soap box and goes back to work)

Edit: Yay! Barny has found me.. so now I have one official friend.

Update: My Profile

Could we have a third challenger?

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

A snip from TIME:

Al Gore on his workload with the Inconvenient Truth:

“I’m working harder than I ever have in my life,” he says. “The other day a friend said, ‘Why don’t you just take a break, Al, and run for President?’”

Killing me softly

Thursday, May 17th, 2007

Killing Time
Replace 2 with 6 and you’re getting closer to reality :-)

How deep the rabbit hole goes?

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

So whilst talking with David about his new N95 with built in GPS I commented on an applicaiton I had played with about a year ago. You have your mobile with GPRS enabled, and attach a GPS unit and have some software monitor your position and report your lat and long back to a central server. It was aimed at fleet managers who wanted to know the location of their vehicles.

David did some hunting to see and found RaccoonOnMap. It’s a mash-up of the Raccoon (a webserver that you can install on series 60 phones), GPS and google maps. You can see other people’s location in realtime as the move about. There’s a lot of people in Helsinki (home to nokia, so not that surprising), with one user ‘Follow the white rabbit’ who always seems to be online and on the move. Taxi driver? Delivery Truck?

But wait! Constant speed? No stops? Doesn’t sound like someone navigating early morning traffic to me. It sounds like a conspiracy to me!

So I turn on the trace facility and watch where he goes for a few minutes. Then I get distracted with work and don’t pay any attention to it for a few hours. But look! He’s doing laps, repeating the same route over and over again!
Clearly it’s not a realtime trace, but a replay of a previous one.
following the rabbit high.png

wrabbit.gifHmmm…. Follow the white rabbit is the advice given to Neo in the Matrix - he follows the girl with the tattoo to a club where Trinity makes contact. On the DVD for The Matrix, there are hidden extras that you can access when the white rabbit appears on the screen.

Lets take a closer look at the trace.
following the rabbit detail.png

Some shading and rotating later… and we have a result! Kinda. Hmmm not that conculsive, but a good way to fill a few hours when I should be working.
finding_the_rabbit.png

You can just call me Neo from now on.
matrix07.jpg

… Or Adam. That will still work :-)

I own this number: 3E F0 F5 A8 0E 92 DC BF F3 6A 29 56 57 E9 DB E8

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

This is my number.

3E F0 F5 A8 0E 92 DC BF F3 6A 29 56 57 E9 DB E8

Use it and feel the wrath of the DMCA. You have been warned.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about… here’s some background: 1, 2, 3

Want your own? via FtT and BB

Good, but scary advice.

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

via BS:

Advice when you are trapped on campus with a shooter:

If they do start shooting people, you need to make a choice, (at this point it is
your choice) stay still and hope they don’t shoot you, run for an exit while zigzaging,
or even attack the shooter. This is very dangerous, but certainly no more
then doing nothing and dying in place. A moving target is much harder to hit than
a stationary one and the last thing that the shooter will expect is to be attacked by
an unarmed person. Any option chosen may still result in a negative consequence.

Whoa! I don’t remember needing to receive this type of advice when I was at Uni in the UK.

12 Beer Challenge

Monday, May 7th, 2007

Rules:

  1. Drink 12 bottles of chilled San Miguel as quickly as you can
  2. No drinking aids
  3. No vomiting

Tips for success:

  1. Drink Quickly
  2. Don’t be sick

Beers

Go!

Getting messy

Macca, the winner
Macca, The Winner - managed it in just over an hour. I was disqualified after during my tenth beer for eating crisps that someone had left on the table. Apparently they qualify as a drinking aid :-(

Update: Correction. The time was just UNDER an hour - 51m32s according to the offical results spreadsheet (Yes, there was an official results spreadsheet :-) )

More photos in the FlickrStream

Singapore Slingshot

Friday, May 4th, 2007

Quick dash to Singapore for the weekend - beers with friends on Saturday night. Recovering and catching up with the work backlog on Sunday. Meetings on Monday and back to KL for Tuesday.

Thats the plan anyway.

It’s a girl!

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

Congratulations to Dawny & Barny - a baby girl weighing in at 8lb 9oz.

I think that this means that Dawny wins the bet :-)

Update:
Olive Christien-Relph, Born 1/5/2005 at 1.15 in the afternoon.
olive.jpg