The last two weeks have been pretty hectic. This time two weeks ago I was sitting on a flight to Houston. The night before, Louise and I were working a bar together, which was a lot more fun than I was expecting.
The flight to the US was for work. Two days in Houston, visiting our seriously hurricane-proof data centre, followed by two days in Washington at a CDISC conference. For an inexperienced traveller, that’s a pretty punishing schedule; I didn’t do much useful on the Friday when I got back.
Saturday evening saw us all braving the downpours to go to the Wokingham firework show. The numbers were down significantly on previous years. I’d say only about a third the normal turnout. This had the advantage that we could park relatively closely. We left before the finale, however, as the kids had become very wet and cold.
This last week saw me scrabbling to catch up at work while trying to sort out a broken toilet flush at home in the evenings. I almost sorted the toilet out entirely on my own (with Louise on parts shopping duty during the day) but had to call in my dad for the last stage of reconnecting the water. I’ll get there one day. It only twigged with me a year or so ago that dads aren’t born knowing how to do everything, they just have twenty plus years head start on you.
I’m really enjoying work at the moment. We’re working on a new project, which is allow us to start over. This is a rarity in the application development arena. So often you’re building off someone else’s work, which limits your choices. We’re taking this opportunity to adopt some best of breed technologies and design the code in a way that we can have extensive automated unit tests. I’m very hopeful that the benefits this will deliver will be measurable. I’m also really chuffed that my team has taken my directions and run with them.
Yesterday saw my third visit to the Woking Beer Festival. The highlight, as ever, was the Whurlitzer performance by Len Rawle. Several hundred beered-up folks singing along to the likes of Old Bull And Bush and Jerusalem is great fun.
I’ve not been following Jamie’s Ministry Of Food very closely but I’ll have to admit that his Chicken Korma recipe is really good. It might feel a little like cheating using a pre-prepared curry paste — I’ve been a From Scratch curry person since Mr Sutton pointed me in the direction of The Really Useful Indian Cook Book about 10 years ago — but when it tastes this good I don’t care. This one’s a keeper.
So, in the spirit of passing it on, follow the link and give it a try. Just don’t blame me if you eat too much.
The trailer does look good. My problem is with the name. I was going to complain that the plural of quantum is quanta but that’s the wrong way round. The real issue with Quantum of Solace is that it’s far too close to The Phantom Menace and we all know how that turned out.
So, I missed the H2G2 reference. Minus 5 Geek Points to me. I was only about 14 when I read it, so I’ll go with the “half a lifetime ago” excuse.
However, this has crystallised an idea that’s been floating around in my head for the last couple of weeks: I should go back and re-read some of the books I read when I was a teenager that sparked my interest in sci-fi and fantasy. Louise has recently read Neuromancer, which is where the idea started; pt’s rebuke settles the matter.
On the 23rd September I received a letter from Sainsbury’s in response to the letter I had written them asking about “local” fruit and veg.
In answer to my question of “does local fruit stay locally to be packed”, the answer is pretty much yes. And to quote “The majority of our UK farms also quality inspect, pack and label products in pack houses located on their farms or close to their fields. Smome smaller gorwers who do not have their own pack houses send their fruit to an approved neighbouring facility for labelling and dispatch.”
So pretty good. “Some of our suppliers are part of our direct to stores scheme. This is where they deliver direct from their own farms or pack houses to their local designated stores on the same day.”
Other farmers who are not part of this scheme use the Sainsbury’s distribution system. The fruit is taken to a regional depot, collated and then sent out to stores locally, with produce generally arriving the day after it has been harvested.
Sainsbury’s finished by saying that they do their best ” to ensure the distance our products travel is as little as possible.”
It appears that Sainsbury’s are genuinely trying to reduce food miles where possible, which is great. Still waiting to hear back from Tesco.
At some point last year I replaced the four 50W halogen lamps in our kitchen with four 1.5W LED driven lamps in a bid to save energy. 200W down to 6W — pretty cool, huh? On the upside they looked very cool and you didn’t feel the back of your neck was getting cooked by the lighting. On the downside, the light was a very cold blue colour. This was manageable but the real killer was that they just weren’t bright enough to work with.
Over the summer the late night dimness in the kitchen was workable but with the nights drawing in I figured it was time to write off the old LED lamps as a failed experiment and find something brighter. I toyed briefly with the idea of replacing the light fitting but then I stumbled across some “conventional” energy saving lamps squashed down to fit into a normal halogen GU10 fitting.
After an hour or so of research I ended up ordering — with a little trepidation — four 7W Megaman BR0707i lamps from Lamp Specs. My main concerns were whether they would get bright fast enough and would they fit, being 9mm longer than a standard GU10 lamp. Two days after ordering they arrived and I’m very pleased with the result. Firstly, they fit. Secondly, the colour matches really well with the other energy saving lamps in the house. Finally, while they start with an equivalent brightness to the old LED lamps, within 30 seconds they’re at a level almost as bright as the old 50W halogens. So, up to 28W from 6W but a long way off 200W — win!
Yesterday I finally achieved a goal I set myself over a year and a half ago — or was it two and a half years ago? — by running in excess of five kilometres. I ran just over four last weekend, so I was reasonably confident I could make it. In fact, the four was meant to be five but my poor route planning let me down.
Three and a half miles in around 38 minutes means my marathon time would be about four and a half hours… if I could maintain the pace. Don’t stay tuned. It was a boring run and the thought of going almost seven times longer fills me with dread.
Since my car radio broke a year ago I’ve seriously dropped out of the new music scene. While I have a music player, I only play my old stuff on it. Despite my enthusiasm for last.fm, if I can’t get at it when I’m out and about — when I’m most likely to be listening to music — it’s not much use to me. Roll on pervasive wi-fi. More recently, I’ve spent much more time listening to podcasts, especially when I’m running.
Tim W’s recent post on downloading new music sparked a conversation with Tim S a couple of weeks back. If you download music without paying, is that stealing? Tim The Latter’s point was that if the music in question is available legitimately by paid download or on some other medium then it is without doubt stealing. I put this to Tim The Former, who countered that if you can get it without paying then why not?
My position on the whole subject has moved over time. A few years back I used the excuse that by downloading I was helping spread an artist’s work to a wider audience. This is a pretty weak argument, though, because if everyone applies it equally, nobody pays.
Another justification is to say that it is a victimless crime — only the record label is losing money — but this argument is false too. Firstly, a small percentage of the money on sales does go to the artist. Secondly, artists generally have to sell a certain number of albums to comply with their contract with the label. By not buying you’re reducing the likelihood that their contract will be extended, meaning less new music from them.
A lot of people consider record label contracts to be unfair as the label keeps something like 90% of the profits. However, you have to realise that they operate like venture capitalists. Most bands signed do not become profitable and have tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds invested in them that the label does not see a return on. So each successful artist may be bankrolling ten loss-making artists. Is this is a fair system? I’ll get back to that later.
These days I try to work things out from a starting point of “don’t rip the artist off”, especially if I want them to produce more work. So, this means that I don’t (in general) download anything without paying and if I do then I go and buy the CD.
Another aside: I think the days of me buying CDs is drawing to a close. I recently ripped all our CDs and packed them up into the loft so we could reuse the shelf space. If that’s how I’m going to live, what’s the point in getting a CD in the first place? I know people say “but I like to have something physical and I like reading the sleeve notes” but be honest and tell me how often you do that in practice.
So, when would I consider downloading and not paying? Well, what if it’s a well established artist who clearly won’t be hard up in retirement and who is unlikely to produce much in the way of new work? For example, let’s say The Rolling Stones. In this case I think it’s more conscionable, particularly the older work that they’ve earnt from for 20, 30, 40 years already. What I try and bear in mind is the original intent of copyright: To promote the creation of new works by granting the author exclusive rights for a limited term, at which point the work passes into the public domain.
The standard copyright term has been extended over the recent decades under the influence of businesses who wish to extend their revenues on older works. Personally, I feel the balance has shifted too far. Music copyright already runs for 50 years but lobbying groups continue to push for further extensions.
Creative Commons provides an alternative: Some Rights Reserved. This gives people an easy way to share pretty much any type of work but retain selected rights such as being attributed as the author or to prevent commercial use. One way I use this is to license my photos on Flickr for use by others under the CC Attribution-Share Alike license.
As you might expect, there are music download sites such as Jamendo and Magnatune that allow you to freely download and share music. Because the music is licensed under a CC license you can do really cool things like include the music in not-for-profit productions (such as your own podcast) or plonk a music player right into your blog just like this:
How is this not ripping off the artists, though? With Magnatune you can stream the music for free but you pay anywhere between $5 and $18 — the exact amount is at your discretion — for a permanent, high quality, DRM free download. Better still, half the purchase price goes directly to the artist. Jamendo is even more liberal in that you can download immediately and then donate after the fact; an even higher percentage goes to the artist here. The interesting thing about this model is that an artist can sell considerably less “units” to make the same money as on a record label’s contract, meaning they can get by on smaller fan base. I like the egalitarian nature of this.
Apart from the occasional exception, you won’t find “regular” artists on these sites. Their regular record deals won’t allow them to CC license their music. It’s early days for me in the world of CC music, so I can’t vouch for the quality yet. I’ll let you know how I get on. I’m hoping this will give me a way into some new and diverse new music.
If you’ve been anywhere near the BBC news over the last month you probably know that the Large Hadron Collider is going to be powered up on Wednesday. Now, while this is a very cool (and very expensive) piece of scientific experimentation — that will not cause the end of the world by creating a black hole thankyouverymuch — I think the BBC has somewhat oversold the story. When they switch it on, the best we can hope for is some interesting squirly lines on a screen and a scientist saying, “Yep, that there’s your genuine Higgs boson, mate. Okay, job done, switch it off boys!” (You don’t see enough Australian scientists on television, if you ask me.)
So, I’ll be expecting some fairly dull reports tomorrow. Louise has just told me that “the results” won’t be out until 27th December… which leads me to think that I should put a Higgs boson on my birthday list.
