4 boards for worse

My laptop has just received its fourth motherboard, in the 11th month of its waranty. While the reliability of this particular machine could be down to bad luck or other factors, you can barely fault the tech support.

Anyway, an engineer is coming again tomorrow to fix it. This time the speakers have broken apparently.

Express Morning Delivery

It all happened fast, relatively speaking anyway. In a blur of NHS organisation, I very nearly delivered the package myself.

Despite us being in the hospital for four hours, a midwife could not be persuaded that we were reaching the end of labour (or take the time to check). Still, a head appearing pretty much made the point and then Daniel was born, 2.87kg (6lb5 in old money). All are doing well, and the hard bit begins (for me anyway).

Speaking of NHS organisation, you'd think that there would be a procedure (or at least a checklist, even a well-oiled routine) for something as important and as frequent as childbirth. Either the procedure has radically changed in the last three years, or everyone just makes it up as they go along and somehow things seem to turn out generally OK.

I am determined that this site does not become yet another series of rants, so I'll end by saying that most of the midwives that we encountered were great!

We don't have any plans to come back though.

Go-faster resistors

I've always known that there is some magic required to get high frequency signals to go down a wire and actually appear at the other end, but for 31 years I have managed to get by by simply knowing that "there is some magic required to get high frequency signals to go down a wire and actually appear at the other end". Usually, a resistor here and there makes it work good enough (I am a software engineer afterall, we do not concern ourselves with such low-level issues...)

Finally, necessity dictated that I needed to actually understand what that magic is.

My thanks to the guys who wrote this site and taught me some transmission line theory.

It seems that what I wanted to do is quite impossible.

Perhaps I'll just stick a go-faster resistor across the terminals and see what happens anyway.

Outdoor activities

We spent today panting: boobs and pants.

Apparently.

It's about time Jonathan learned to pronounce the letter L.

ShamPoo

We near the end of potty training, so I have shampooed the carpet for the last time, again.

Nothing to add

I have just returned from a business trip to Sweden and yes of course I ended up in the emergency exit seats again.

Despite cutting the end off my finger, having the motherboard in my laptop die the middle of a presentation, I'm relieved that my family has not yet received a new addition.

Outwit

My two-year old can memorise the location of every card turned over in the "memory" game, flawlessly. He's far better than me!

... Fortunately, his attention span is still a lot shorter than mine, he loses interest before he wins, so I'm still in with a chance.

Boundary Conditions

Tesco is to change the wording at it's checkouts.

"10 items or less" becomes "Up to 10 items".

The reason is that one should say "10 items or fewer", but some people are not sure.

The nice thing about the old wording, from a software engineer's point of view, is that it provies a clear specification. It uses wording that (despite the English faux pas) has a well defined mathematical meaning.

Unfortunately, they are going from the frying pan into the fire with the ambiguous specification of "Up to 10". Does that mean the the maximum number of items is 9 or 10? Up to 10, or up to and including 10?

I don't think I've ever bought fewer than 11 items in a supermarket, and I don't foresee me generating test cases for the boundary condition.

What a waste

I overhead someone grumbling that they were 'fed up' with the two-weekly rubbish collection from the council; their bin, it seems, is always overflowing after one week, let alone two weeks (...)

Last week, being bank holiday, I completely forgot to put out our bin, so the chances are that after four weeks, it might almost be ready for collection.

With the recycling collections, how can anyone possibly fill a wheelie bin every week (or even every two)? What can they possibly find to throw away on that scale?

On a related note, now that Tesco have stopped giving out carrier bags, please will the recycling collection men stop taking our precious carrier bags that we put our recycling in for collection?

Discontinuities

I happened to notice the google maps view of the Humber Bridge, one part seems to have been photographed in the morning, the other in the evening: google maps.

At least they made a better job than Microsoft/Multimap where it looks like the bridge builders made a bit of a miscalculation.

More Rainwater

The Internet is rich with ideas for harvesting rainwater. How can I use the 100 litres of water that I seem to be catching daily?

Short of an expensive plumbing project, connecting water butts to toilet cisterns, I'm out of ideas.

On a scale of Green to not Green

Keen to reduce our water usage (during that hot, dry week a few weeks ago) I ordered a water butt to use for watering the garden. It seems a good idea to use rain, instead of tap water in the watering can.

I fitted it yesterday and within 24 hours of unspectacular British summer, I had 100 litres of fresh rainwater. It's all very exciting.

But what have I actually saved? It cost quite a lot (£70) including a downpipe so that I could put the water butt where I wanted.

I use about 5 watering cans (of 5 litres) to water the garden, that's 25 litres. If I do that 30 times per year (assuming that there is sufficient water in the butt) then 750 litres per year. It doesn't seem an awful lot.

To put things in perspective,

• Apparently, having a shower uses 35 litres, flushing the toilet uses 8 litres, so that puts me on about 22,000 litres per year, just from the bathroom.


• The average water consumption per person is about 140 litres per day, so 51,100 litres per year.


• A few weeks ago I reported to Yorkshire water that there was a water leak on a busy road in York. It had been leaking for about 6 months. Judging from the amount of water that was going upwards to the road this leak might have been far wetter than our dining room roof during drizzle. So guessing at 200 litres per day, that is 73,000 litres per year.
  

Ironically, I got stuck in the traffic jam on Sunday caused by the water company fixing the leak.

Pure Brilliant White

The problem with painting skirting boards is that when you finish one, there is always another one, or a door frame, or a stair rail. The job is never done.

After painting all evening, I'm worried that the probability of accidentally leaning/kicking touching one of them before they are dry is rapidly approaching 1.

I'm Swimming in the Rain

When it rains, the attendants at the outdoor swimming pool (that we can see from our office) call the people indoors.

We've joked about it being to stop them getting wet, but we now wonder if it's because the life-guards don't want to get wet (presumably not getting wet is not in the job-spec of a lifeguard!)

Jobs

I was once in the routine of doing one "DIY" job every day, perhaps only something small each day, but something. It was a good routine because it got things done and I didn't spend the whole evening in front of a laptop writing reports.

I don't know how I got out of the routine, perhaps one day there were no jobs to do(!)

There certainly are jobs now, however. I am hoping that by writing this down I'll stick to it this time.

Sunday: garage door frame undercoat.
Monday: garage door frame topcoat.
Tuesday: err. TBA

In case I "can't" think of anything one night, here are a few things to keep me going:

• fix that annoying bit of skirting board that keeps coming off


• paint the gloss in the dining room


• water butt


• paint that bit of polyfilla by the dining room window


• put some trellis by the compost


• floor of downstairs loo


• gloss paint in downstairs loo


• put up coving in living room


• paint coving


• fix loft hatch


• paint loft hatch


• move header tanks in loft (probably several evenings...)


• knock down the wall in our garden


• check the sealant around the sink


• write a new list

Buzz off!

There has been a great increase in flies in the last few days. Presumably due to the warmer weather. Living next to a cow field, you expect a fly or two. However, the number at the moment is just, just...just buzz off!

Gadget Shopping List

1. MoGo Mouse


2. Suitcase for handluggage: less than 56cm x 45cm x 25cm. Any suggestions?


3. Garden Shredder
   
   Why don't these seem very gadgety any more? Am I getting old...?

RSS

Like most new technologies, it took me a little while to discover RSS, but I've been using RSS for a couple of years now. It's such a useful little thing that I am always surprised other people don't.

In case you also don't know what RSS is...it's a way of getting automatic updates about websites, news, blogs, etc.

Most web browsers, email clients etc can read RSS; just click on the little icon in your browser that looks like this: .

However, one of the most useful ways to read RSS is using google. You can setup a web page with lots of RSS feeds on it so you can keep up to date when people post blog entries, with news updates etc.



I can really recommend this technology. If you have not tried it...why not have a go now?

The first computer

According to the Easyjet inflight magazine (which I happened to be reading today during a particularly boring flight to Madrid):

Manchester boasts that "The world’s first computer was built in Manchester in 1948. A working replica is housed in the city's Museum of Science and Industry."

A few pages later, Sofia, Bulgaria has a similar claim to fame: "The inventor of the first electronic computer John Vincent Atanasoff is of Bulgarian origin. He and Clifford Berry tackled this task at Iowa State University, between 1939 and 1942."

So which one is right? (And why didn't the same person proof-read the whole magazine?)

I'm sure that I remember something about the Z1 in 1936.

And exams aren't getting easier...

1 mark for spelling and 1 for an inspirational insight.