Benefits in Kind

I have decided to get more involved with the Peterbrough Climbing Wall, and so last night volunteered my time to act as a door supervisor. Its not a real job, but it does require commitment and effort on my part, and in return I get significantly cheaper climbing….

The perk to me will be a vastly reduced season ticket. I am buying a season ticket to try and convince me to spend more time at the wall, as I will have the ticket so might as well use it… thats the plan anyway. Generally I am climbing every tueday at the moment (although IEE related stuff also happens on tuesdays, which is inconvenient to say the least)

Filling the Albert Hall with Peas

Maybe there was a devious reason for the EU missing Wales off a map that formed the cover of one of their publications. In Europe we are meant to use the metric system fo measurements. This includes things like length, volume, weight, all those things. But us humans cannot truely appreciate large numbers. Think of this, if you had an orange in front of you, you know there is one. If you had six on your desk in front of you, that is fair enough. but could you picture 100,000 oranges?

A chap called Simon Kelk (I found it via the letters pages of El Reg) has a website that allows yu to appreciate the use of Wales as a unit of measure. At SizeOfWales.co.uk you can convert areas into units of the size of wales. There is also the ability to use other common units of measurement, such as the Double Decker Bus and the African Elephant. Doing search on google for "the size of wales" prooves the point, although of course some of the results returned are due to the above mentioned website….

And the Royal Albert Hall? well that can take the number of dried peas equivilent to the number of galaxies in the universe apparently.

Drifting Along

From a film of a book I have read:-

"I find the key is to think of a day as units of time, each unit consisting of no more than thirty minutes. Full hours can be a little bit intimidating and most activities take about half an hour. Taking a bath: one unit, watching countdown: one unit, web-based research: two units, exercising: three units, having my hair carefully disheveled: four units. It’s amazing how the day fills up, and I often wonder, to be absolutely honest, if I’d ever have time for a job; how do people cram them in?"

So, where has all my time been going? Evenings seem to slip on by. Before i know it it is approaching midnight. Again. And I cannot help but feel at the moment that maybe I should try and get more sleep. Or maybe its just a matter of actually doing more. I never have got my head around the two, and worked out which one actually works….

The knack is not just to kill time. The knack in my case is to get the stuff done that I need to do, and the stuff I want to do, but at the same time to not have too much time remaining beyond that. Trickery than it seems really.

Naming computing hardware

We used to have an IBM PC at home. I mean a PC actually made by IBM. I think it was a PS/2

Now IBM started PCs. It made the IBM PC and then allowed everyone to make something compatible, the IBM PC Compatible thier business case was to allow anyone to make compatible PCs, but for theirs to continue to be the best. They succeeded in the first case, but then failed horribly in the second. On the bright side we the consumers now have the ability to have a fairly generic computor. Even if most people then run windoze.

Recently IBM sold its PC business so are we going to stop calling the PC and IBM PC compatible? Certainly I think we should stop saying that the machines are "IBM PC or compatible" when specifying them

Things to do with Saturday Mornings

Inplace of my "What I did this weekend" post whihc seems to have been started an not finished, here instead is a "What I did this saturday morning" post instead.

I started with getting up. Nothing unusual here, I cannot differentitate between weekday and weekendday as it is, so i never manage to wake up in the afternoon. The problem was that I woke up at 0530, having gone to sleep at after 0230. Ouch. It hurt, but thats what happens when you abuse your body. I managed to gather my things, pack into my rucksac and leave Ant’s house, only to realise that I didnt have the map of where I was going. Damn. So Ant got woken up (again) to bring it down to the street. Thanks bro….

The tube journey was alright, although slow with a lot more waiting time than i had expected. almost 15 minutes between trains at victoria. At victoria I did however manage to get a bottle of coke, and so the twin needs of liquid and sugar could start to be attended to. I felt somewhat better by the time I reached Tottenham Hale, despite the fact tht I missed the train I wanted by 1 minute or so.

As a reward for missing my train, the coffee shop at Tottenham hale then opened up. Mmmmmm Coffee. Generally I hate it, but on this occasion three major food groups were satisfied, liquid, sugar, and caffine. I felt almost human by the time that I had alighted from the train at Brimsdown, and wandered the few hundred yards to my destination. Continuing in the ups and downs of the morning, I proceeded to get straight past security, for once i signed in, and he let me onto site, without the usual language barrier, and confusion on his part. Not the normal guard I end up meeting….

My work actually went quite well (with the exception of my not having with me some of the pin outs that I needed for hooking up one item to another, resulting in a quick spot of redesign on my part.) I had to use lan b) when it came to getting two cables through a solid piece of metal, but i think we tried plan a) for long enough, and b) was not that much more hassel. AT least next week we know exactly what we are doign now.

The only failiure currently is that I guessed a sensitivity setting wrongly on one sensor, so I get a week of garbage readings. I will be able to hang around next week until the machine goes into production to do a spot of calibration however….. lucky me.

Overall, this is the kind of reason why I do this stuff. A sense of achievement. Oh, and the point of the title of this post? well, I was shaken by the lack of sleep, the shocking was for similar reasons to gary….