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.

Planes, trains and spaghetti

I have travelled quite a lot, in Europe at least, but never have I had such a stressful nor disastrous trip as my most recent to Venice, Italy.

I don't know whether I am lucky to be finally waiting in the airport lounge for the return trip, or unlucky that I had such a hard time to get here. My glass is generally half-full so I'll go for the first option.

It should have been a nice week at Ada Europe, a small conference for people who care that software works correctly, in a beautiful city and lots of good food.

Instead, this trip involved manning a booth without a booth (at first at least), flooding (in Venice!), a projector that broke just before I gave a technical presentation (yes, I dictated source code and waved graphs with my arms), missing the last train of the day, being stranded on a motorway (on foot) three miles from the hotel at 1am and carrying a 30kg box from Venice to Mestre on a 30'C day.

However, the food was indeed good and apparently the presentation was actually quite memorable, there's certainly a novelty about an oral code review.

This trip also broke the jinx of the emergency exit...on Easyjet you get to choose your own seat.

The best pizza

Despite what the Italians say, the best pizza I have ever eaten was a Hoi-sin Duck pizza.

This pizza is basically your typical Chinese restaurant aromatic crispy duck (with hoi-sin sauce, spring onion on cucumber) on a pizza base (instead of the pancakes) with coriander and a light touch of cheese.

I had it at Felicini's Bakewell and thoroughly recommend it!

Bindweed

I didn't recognise this pretty flower quickly enough last year....now we have an infection of this invasive nuisance weed! Every 24 hours I am pulling up handfuls of new shoots.

Apparently, at best, I will be doing this for at least two more years (more drastic method such as digging out the soil to at least 5 metres deep might reduce this to one year).

On the other hand,  I might just introduce it to the back garden, see if I can kill of that horrible conifer hedge...

Emergency Exit

On an aeroplane I usually sit at the emergency exit seat. I really don't know why I do, it just seems to be that way. Today makes the 6th consecutive plane journey in the emergency exit seat.

I'm not tall, I don't need the leg room, and I much prefer to be able to keep my bag under the seat in front of me (which you can't do in the exit seat).

This trip, I double-checked at check-in that I wasn't in the exit seat. "No problem sir, you're in 9, the exit is 11". It turns out that 9 is the exit.

The last trip, they allocated me the exit seat, but I changed it at check-in. However, on boarding the plane the staff take me aside and ask if I will swap tickets with someone...so that I can operate the exit in an emergency.

Bovinophobia

When we moved in, at the bottom of our garden was:

1. 2 metre high wooden fence
2. Barbed wire
3. 2.5 metre high hawthorn hedge, about 1 metre deep
4. Holly hedge

What was this high security perimeter for? I can only assume that it was to stop the cows in the field behind us looking in the garden for greener pastures.

What were the previous occupants thinking? Should the cows manage to scale the fence (without getting caught on the barbed wire) and survive the vicious spikes in the hawthorn then the holly would put them off...

I have now removed most of the features from the bottom of the garden, reclaiming a good 8 square metres of garden and a pleasant view of a few friendly cows.

Railway Sleeper

When my neighbour offered to take one of the railway sleepers we happened to inherit when we bought our house, I did not imagine quite what he would be doing with it.

He did mention that it would be a nice training tool for his Tai Chi training, but while I was imagining him doing "Karate Chops" or perhaps wax-on/wax-off for a nice bench...

These things are heavy, especially the water-logged ones I had. I can barely move them.

Apparently the Tai Chi exercise he had in mind (and then demonstrated) was effectively letting it fall from the vertical onto one of his forearms and pushing it back up again.

Suddenly feeling rather insignificant, I silently vowed to do some weight-lifting.