Monday 26 July 2010

The case of the missing E111s

I've found our E111s. Eeek. They've been lost for years. Literally years.

We recently had to get some replacements, but I found the originals. As we're going on holiday soon, I have started to get one or two things ready. Today I printed out the travel documents which arrived electronically as a backup. But I needed to put them somewhere safe so I had a hunt around.

I tend to keep important travel documents together in a special wallet during the trip. Its handy because you can hide the lot away for security, yet all the documents are together and easy to find in a hurry. I have a few different ones; some big some smaller. I located one of these document wallets in an old drawer. It was still full of the stuff from our trip to St Aygulf in August 2008.

Memories came flooding back as I emptied the contents. I sat on the bed reminiscing. One of the pieces of paper was much stiffer and thicker than it should have been. I turned it over, and there stuck to the back were the missing E111 cards. They had some kind of gel like glue on them which had kept them attached to this piece of paper and hence hidden from sight when we had previously looked for them.

Mystery solved. But now we've got double the number of cards!

Today I managed to get my PIC circuit working. I made a little traffic light from a bunch of LEDs and a simple program. Sweet! I want to make a propeller clock. Need something to spin around first. I blew my 16F627 up with a faulty crystal oscillator circuit (I got my micros and picos mixed up) so now I am using a 16F84A.

Had a good day at work. We got a letter of thanks from a customer. It seldom happens, but when it does, it makes it all worthwhile. We also managed to bring a bunch of other things to a close (well, mostly). I cycled there and back today. That was hard work I have to say and this morning my gears started playing up. Need to sort that out tomorrow with a bit of magic lubricant.

Cherie is out with the Buddhists tonight. Have fun chanting.

Something odd happened today. Weird by my standards. It was certainly outside of the realm of what you would consider the normal, physical world. If you've got time, I'll tell you about it.

It's about a dream. A few years ago, I had a very vivid dream about going on holiday. I was driving in a car full of children with my wife. It was the outbound journey and we were generally very happy and excited about the trip. We were in the area of  South-Western France towards Spain. It was twilight.

We came across this huge bridge. When we were on it, it almost felt like we were flying over the clouds. It was somehow futuristic like a space bridge from the Jetsons. It was like nothing I'd seen before.

As I mentioned, we are off on our holidays soon. We will be staying near to Carcasonne in the south of France. This is, of course, in the south west, quite near Spain. I showed someone a map of the area at work today. He told me we will be near 'that bridge; you know, the longest one in the world'. I looked it up, and it's true. In Millau, there is a huge bridge. It's the longest in the world and it is very high above the surrounding countryside. There's even a photo on the internet of the bridge looming out of a sea clouds below it.

I used Google street view and looked at the road over the bridge. I can tell you, it is the one from my dream, the only difference is that we would only be driving over it on the way back, not the way there.

It was very strange. I'm looking forward to travelling over it now.

I'm off to bed then. It was good to talk to you. G'night.

Saturday 24 July 2010

Saturday

Had a hair cut. He's given me a 'dog whisperer'. My head looks like a fat Ceasar Milian. (Not sure if that's his name). Anyhoo, it's Sarurday. Went into the car park with the roof box on. Again! When will I learn.

Think we need to get some shopping today. So there next.

Weekends are awesome, and today we have nice weather too!

Gonna get them feet up. Might buy some electronic components today to make some home grown pic recipes.

Life is good. Fingers crossed it stays that way.

Hope you all have a great Saturday. Bye!


- Posted from my iPhone

Location:A674,Darwen,United Kingdom


Friday 23 July 2010

Inception. Watch it!

Went to the movies last night to see Inception. As promised, here's a review. Sorry it's slightly delayed.

It's awesome. A truly great film. I have not seen such an original scifi in ages. But it is so much more. Psychological, artistic. Amazing zero G fight scenes. The trailers are good, but they really don't do it justice. Mesmerising. You can tell Nolan takes inspiration from Hitchcock; there are the longest suspense sequences you'll ever see!

Hang on... There's a floating spider. No really. It's getting closer. Not in the movie! God, pay attention! No, here, right now as I type this blog. I need to go get the little Hoover thing. I'm in the hot tub you see.

Got him.

Just having a quick dip whilst downloading an amine movie to watch later. Also, IT Crowd later. Series 4. So far, so not as good as series 3. Think it's getting stale.

Still, one or two classic Moss moments.

Another show I've unexpectedly found I like is BBC3's Mongrels. When I saw the adverts and trailers I thought, comedy puppets for adults, looks dross. It's not. It's really funny and it goes slightly further over the edge than other shows because the main characters are animals paralleling humans in controversial situations. It tackles subjects which are almost but not quite the same as things we would consider taboo. Making them dogs and pigeons means they can get away with it. Genius.

I've had a good day today. Worked bloody hard. From home. Omg how much more work did I get done than I would have had if I'd been in the office.

Managed to plan, prepare, document, respond to emails, deal with CRM issues, do expenses and do some remote debugging by proxy.

I would never have managed all that had I not had undisturbed peace and quiet.

And when work was over (4ish), I cleaned the hot tub, made tea and played Blur with Nat.

He he he. I'm just giggling. It sounds bubbly when you fart in the tub. He he he.

Well, I imagine my movie has downloaded by now. 'Ghost in the Shell'. Never seen it and it's meant to be good.

I'll just finish my wine and then go and watch it.

- Posted from my iPhone

Location:Orchard Dr,Accrington,United Kingdom


Wednesday 21 July 2010

Brillsville

Today's been a great day. Super, smashing, great! Good news and good times!

Wanna share? Listen up...

Awake bright and early and completely headache free. A nice bit of brekkie including a warm, fresh Tesco croissant and a cuppa (usually already off to work by this time). Set off and arrived in plenty of time. Checked up on the stuff from that awful demo yesterday; confirmed that the PC was at fault. We managed to get it all working first time on another PC. Did some debugging (successfully). The team worked hard to take us a step closer to finishing our Silverlight database dashboard; I wrote a killer LINQ procedure which was cracking. We solved customer issues, training issues and site installation issues.

We were on fire!

But the really great news came in a text at about 11am. My wonderful wife had sent a text to inform me that her job which had been in the balance due to budget cuts was now safe and guaranteed for three years! Brilliant! We'd been a bit worried about that.

I bought some Reims champagne for her to take into work for everyone, but she wants to have it at home with me. I'm not arguing; it's Mumm.

So a terrific day. I'm really pleased!

She's hosting a Buddhist meeting downstairs right now, so I'm relegated to the bedroom with my PC until it's over. I think the central tenets of Buddhism are truly the way we should all live our lives, but I can't be doing with all the chanting. I'm a firm atheist and as Buddhism is more of a philosophy than a religion it fits in with my beliefs. The two complement each other; mostly. You do get the odd person who likes to believe in the more esoteric, spiritual and mystical aspects of a new or exotic religion, and this too makes me run a mile when there's a meeting due. However, most of the people I have met since Cherie has become a Buddhist have been honestly great folk. I am honoured they are under my roof tonight.

I like to show how honoured I am by buggering off into the bedroom by myself. That sounded sarcastic but I mean it. I just let them get on with it without going in and arguing with everyone.

So I'm going to wait now until they are all done. And then she can pop the cork and we'll have some bubbly.

A good day. Maybe there's something in this Buddhism.

Tuesday 20 July 2010

Aren't demonstrations brilliant

No. No they are not. Not when they don't go as expected.

Let me tell you about the one that didn't go as expected today. In fact, it came right back and bit me on the ass. It was a demonstration to train others how to set up a web based system. There were two of us showing it to about 5 others. I had done the software and configuration and the other guy had sorted the IT infrastructure and hardware. We had tested all elements of it beforehand successfully. I sat back and watched the first part of the session and took over half way through.

Literally, the second half failed on the first click. Any application that I started crashed immediately. I got more and more red faced with each failure dialog box. What could be wrong? We gave up at about 4pm and I looked into the issue.

Hours later, at 7:15pm to be precise, I found that the problem was not with the software at all. It was the PC that we were running it on which had somehow developed a problem with the .Net 2.0 runtime. I located a patch from a Microsoft post for that exact specific error code. When I installed it, Windows refused to install it.

Ah, good times.

Monday 19 July 2010

Time dilation effect

Is it still Monday? It seems like today has been some kind of temporal torture device. It just doesn’t end. But paradoxically, there’s also not enough time. I went to work this morning with a plan for all the things I was going to get done, and I managed to finish the day with more stuff to do than when I started. Go figure!

We didn’t end up going to the cinema tonight, primarily because my head still feels like there is a washing machine inside of it. At least I don’t feel like throwing up anymore. That little surprise crept up on me around about eleven o’clock this morning. I was going to leave work at midday to go home to hide my head in the folds of the duvet, but I stuck it out. I ended up debugging someone else’s flaky code (shouts “Junior!” and shakes fist like an angry stooge from a 1970s sitcom). The debugging went well I’m pleased to say (thanks, Tezza).

So rather than do the movie thing, I have been trying out C++ for a PIC. Yes, I know it’s sad. But this is what you have to do when you are managing a team of multi-skilled professionals. BTW, if you’re considering C++ for a PIC, I’d think again unless you have bags of code and memory space. The compiler eats bytes like I eat Tangfastics.

Mmmmm….Tangfastics….

It was fun though, once I figured out the slightly non-standard syntax. And my program worked first time once I got it to build, which is often the case with well structured C++.

Remember the word thing from yesterday? Making 'Blogger's Block' an 'iPhenom'? Well get a load of this! I've seen the term used on someone else's blog today. No, really! Yes, way! It won't be long now and we'll all be saying it. And you can blame me. Mwah ha-ha ha-ha!

Ouch. Note to self: doing an evil laugh with a headache makes you feel like you've been belted on the temple with a hammer. Must remember that for when I execute my plan for world domination. Or keep some pain killers close at hand.

Anyway, it's off to bed soon. I'll take some paracetamol first. That should take the brain pain down a few notches from the level of napalm attack on a Vietnamese jungle to that of a rather slow hamster running in a squeaky wheel.

The Boomtown Rats were right

I hate Mondays too. Especially when I have a headache; and its a killer one. I can't drain too much of my brain this morning, I'm afraid. It would hurt us both.

As I promised, I'm going to start the tour of the ashbrain today, but it'll have to be quick due to the banging agony. So its more of a brain drain pain.

And it's raining again. In summer! Sorry, not summer, the monsoon season. Enough moans, let's look on the bright side.

Cherie's back from London. Oh, did I not mention? Yes, my lovely wife was visiting her friend Nancy and her daughter Maya this weekend. She brought back a chameleon.

Like you do.

 I think we may go to the cinema tonight to watch Inception. I'll let you know my opinion tomorrow. On the subject of cinema, Nat and I saw Predators on Saturday. I think it rates a big fat 'Meh'.

Anyway, enough of my Monday morning moaning. We'll talk later when I'm smiling.

Sunday 18 July 2010

You have to start somewhere

OMG a blank page. First blog, what to write. Panic. Writer's block. Blogger's block. I think I've just invented a new term; 'Blogger's Block'. Do you think it'll catch on?

Well let's find out. Everyone who reads this has to use it at least twice a day in general conversation. No, three times, I'm indecisive. Pass it on as a meme; a zeitgeist. Who knows, it could become an internet phenomenon. An 'iPhenom'. See there goes another one! iPhenom. Kind of like an anagram of iPhone. With an extra letter. That's me, always thinking ;-)

Looking back over what I've just written, I don't suppose it's the best way to begin a new life of daily regular diary-like blog entries. But this is my brain drain and I suppose it does what it says on the tin. Yes, I know, my brain's a scary place at first and you probably need to get used to all the places you'll find there. Over the course of this blog, I intend to take you on a guided tour of all of the ashbrain's nooks and crannies; the winding paths and staircases that make up the complex landscape of my thoughts.

Today is Sunday and it's very peaceful. In fact, rather lazily, I'm still in bed. In my defence, I did get up, have breakfast, sort the dog, feed the cats and make an all important espresso. But it's such a miserable day (grey, overcast and likely to rain oppressively) that I thought I'd spurn physical reality and retreat into the virtual, electronic one which is building itself around us and entwining its networked roots of modems, firewalls, screens and keyboards through our daily lives to feed off the raw ones and zeroes of our digitised thoughts. See, that could be another iPhenom.

Hence this blog.

Yesterday, I did a lot. Today I plan not to. I do have to take Nat to his girlfriend's for 2pm. But nothing else. I might do some programming work on my new PIC experiment board which I finally got working yesterday. Yes, that's right! Between dodging patchy rain so that I could mow the lawn, shopping (left the roof box on the car and went into the muli-storey car park - again), paying bills, tidying up, researching programming tips & tricks, explaining to an eager teen what I understand about modern ideas of gravitation in super-symmetric, string theory based quantum and cosmological theoretical models, eating take-out, going to the movies and doing the washing I managed to find the fault on my circuit board, fix it, research the C libraries for that model of microprocessor and create a little firmware program that lights LEDs when you press little switches! Whoa! And you know what, now that I've written that, it does not sound anything like as awesome as it felt at the time. That might not end up being an iPhenom. But it seemed so at that time.

Anyway, I think I'd better stop wittering on now, I'm sure you've seen enough of the ashbrain for one day. But before I go, don't forget about the word thing. You know, mention 'Blogger's Block' at least twice, no three times, a day for the next week or so. And throw in 'iPhenom' too for larks. I'm getting all excited about the potential that sometime in the future there'll be someone on TV using these terms.

That would be awesome.