David's Blog

I’d been looking for a good universal remote, and I’d not found many I liked the look of, until I found the Logitech Harmony 785. It’s very powerful, and able to control all my devices, even my no-name HDMI switcher box. It amazed me how comprehensive the remote database is, as it worked with pretty much everything straight off the bat. I had to learn the commands for the HDMI switch, but that was pretty easy to do.

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Last night, I was watching The Mask of Zorro. I’d never seen it before, so I thought I’d watch it (it cropped up on Sky Movies).

I was sitting watching, and during the opening scenes, some stuff happens (no spoilers, if you hadn’t seen it). The scene ends with a fade to black. A good method to end an act of a film, and very often used for just such a reason.

As it faded out, the thought popped into my head ‘20 years later’. The picture fades back in, and what does the subtitle say:

“20 Years later”

I nearly fell off my chair with that one; it was just so damned obvious! OK, so it was probably more fluke that I was right, but it still made me think about how obvious some of these things are. It’s a nice kind of obvious though. Sometimes we like to see where the story is going, the same way we like to know where the bends are in the road. I’ve seen films where pretty much the whole storyline is telegraphed out to you before the opening credits have finished popping up.

Good film though.

Well, maybe.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN’s facility in Switzerland/France is to be switched on next week. The job of the LHC is to basically fire two beams of particles (protons, if you care), at speeds approaching the speed of light; the particles will circle the whole 27Km route 11,000 times per second.

These two beams, which are operating in opposite directions, will be brought into alignment, so that their paths cross. At the intersection, the two streams of particles will collide, the ultimate result being to recreate the first few moments of the existence of the universe, right after the Big Bang.

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Oh Cisco, bless your cotton socks.

I added a load of phones to CallManager today, and used the Bulk Administration Tool (BAT) for the first time. The phones imported happily, but I realised I’d managed to miss out some fields, like the caller line text; the phones will display the caller’s number and their name, assuming I set it. The BAT hadn’t added those fields (or rather, I hadn’t), so they weren’t present.

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