David’s Blog

Yes, it’s a week later, and I STILL have this stupid cold! It’s nowhere as near as bad, but I’m still a bit bunged up. This is the perils of working in an environment where you are around people who are from all over the country (world in fact). The dreaded ‘Fresher’s Flu’. Nobody can escape it - even people who have worked at the uni for years are coming down with colds.

Oddly, I’m feeling very festive of late. I’m not entirely sure why though. I suppose having a cold is a vague connection to the Christmas season, and the weather has dropped a bit, but otherwise, I’m not sure quite why. Oddly, considering how cool it now is outside, I’m still sitting here boiling hot. It was 26 degrees in here earlier!

I’ve had one hell of a cold this last week. First week of Freshers at work, and I get a cold! Well, I think it’s going away now, as it’s all clearing up now. Still a bit stuffy, and I’m into the cough stage, but it’s better than having to blow my nose constantly!

I think we’re into Autumn now though. Most the week I’ve had the windows open, and had some nice fresh air blowing in. I’ve even had the door open, which created a nice through-draught. I started off with the windows open this morning, but had to close them this afternoon as I started to feel cold! It’s strange, because this summer didn’t really come to much. Besides a few weeks of it being hot, the heat tailed off and didn’t do much after that. It’s a little odd to suddenly actually feel cold.

I still reckon this Winter will be a harsh one. I don’t know why, I just think it will be.

Well, I saw this today:

Not something you expect to see every day! Well, today I did, as it was related to a carnival being held in a field nearby, they’d arranged for the Battle of Britain memorial Flight to pass over.

My mother and myself stood on the hill behind our house, cameras poised. We heard the rumble of engines, then the three of them just appeared over the big tree in front of us, a LOT lower than I had anticipated, so I was zoomed all the way in and got some pretty rubbish shots to start with. Luckily, they came around again for a second pass, and I got some slight better shots. They’re not great, but they’re up on Flickr.

Quite amazing though.

Full set of photos on Flickr.

I bought myself one of the new iPod classics. My older iPod (a third-generation model) has served me well, but it has had a few problems. The battery went through a period of only holding a low charge, which has since righted itself, and the disk inside it has developed bad sectors, so some songs would skip randomly. On the whole, it has been good though, and proven itself quite reliable. It’s fairly bulky, heavy, and I’ve nearly filled it.

I bought a black 160Gb model, which is four times bigger than my old one, plus it has colour, and video/photo support. It has quite a few niceties, like video playback, a much bigger screen, better battery life, and a search facility.

My first impressions are good. The interface is a little sluggish sometimes though, although it seems to sort itself out as it caches data.  I bought some replacement Sennheiser MX51 headphones, for two reasons. Firstly, the Apple headphones are usually pretty rubbish, and second, they’re incredibly obvious and have ‘mug me, I have an iPod’ written all over them. The Sennheisers are quite bland by comparison, but have fairly good sound.

I need to get a new dock stand for it, as it doesn’t quite fit in my old stand, but otherwise, it works well, and I’m quite pleased with it.

Or it would. I thought I’d have a whack at recording some stuff today. Having tidied my desk up, I now had the room to put my mixer back up, and plug things in. So after much fiddling, I found that I didn’t have the cable I needed to plug it into my Mac! Even after much digging about through all my boxes of cables and other things (which led to me tidying up those things too) I still didn’t get it working.

So tomorrow I’ll go for a wander round town and see if I can find the cable I need. I have a feeling I won’t find it though. I know I can get it from CPC, but the P&P will cost as much as the item itself, so if I can find it locally, I’d at least try to. Since the likes of Tandy is no longer available, that leaves me with Currys (no point even looking) and normal AV stores, but I doubt they’ll have it too. Music shops might carry the cable, but it’d be a long shot.

Come tomorrow afternoon, I’ll be placing an order from CPC I think.

I had one of those mad moments this morning. I got up, and sat and stared at some stuff under the desk and thought, “I’m going to tidy this stuff up today”. After breakfast, I still felt like doing it, so embarked on a mission to move a load of stuff about. The end result was a slightly more organised chaos than I already had. My books are now (mostly) in one place, and some stuff that was buried under the desk in the corner is now up on shelves and accessible.

I also tidied my desk off a bit, as I was slowly losing things (like my keyboard) under piles of paper and the like. In doing so, I found various odd things

• A plethora of screws
• Various mountings for my CD/DVD racks
• Multiple keyrings
• Guitar picks
• More pens than I know what to do with, mostly freebies from Infosec
• A minidisc – I’ve not used my minidisc in YEARS
• A stack of CDs and other disks, most unlabelled

I also found enough fluff and crumbs to make me feel a little bit disgusted that it had gotten so bad. It’s odd though – if you aren’t really paying attention, you can accumulate all sorts of rubbish without really doing much. I could tidy as I go, but… eh, effort.

In unrelated news, I’m attempting to post this blog entry from within Word 2007. I saw it demoed at a Microsoft event I went to this week, so I thought I’d try it.

Personal Video Recorders are wonderful things. You bung stuff into the programme guide, and it goes off and records things for you. Next thing you know, there’s a ton of things to watch.

The trouble I’m having, is that at the moment there’s plenty of new series starting up, which I’m recording, but in the three hours or so I have in the evening between dinner and going to bed, I just don’t seem to manage to watch them all! So my weekends are taken up with trying to watch things to catch up. I’m not complaining though - I’d rather have a load of stuff worth watching, than all those channels having nothing on.

The real killer is films. I record a few of those, and there’s a good day’s worth of TV watching to do. Keeps me occupied though!