Paddington Station

I took a trip in to Paddington today to collect my mother-in-law and her friend Tina. They had just arrived from the United States that very morning, although not by train. The vast majority of their journey was conducted under the auspices of North West and took place within a shapely aircraft produced by those wonderful people at Boeing. Specifically a Boeing 767 which, confusingly for many, is considerably smaller than a Boeing 747, a true jumbo jet if ever there was one.

My own travel was almost as easy as being flown. At least it was after I discovered that my mobile phone, a Sony Ericsson C903, includes an efficient route finding programme called, easily enough, Navigator. It was that discovery that brings me to my topic for today. Satellite Navigation systems or Sat Nav’s.

Photography in London

At a friends daughter’s birthday party I was introduced to Andrei Razumov. For a while I thought he was just another parent but when the usual preliminaries were out of the way he produced one of those nondescript black bags which always contains a gem of a camera or some other technological marvel. I hadn’t realised before, but the practised ease with which a professional handles their camera and equipment is readily apparent. I didn’t need to be told that Andrei was good at his craft. As soon as he started looking for angles and backgrounds I realised that this man clearly had the photographers eye for colour and composition too.

Microsoft Access 2003

I may have mentioned that my job revolves, in part, around producing queries in Access. There are all sorts of terms that get applied to what I do. Monitoring, Reporting, Data Management, Database Administration, Information Systems, Management Information. Many of these terms mean different things depending on who you are speaking with. So I wouldn’t worry about them.

I love to ride my bicycle

I cycled to work today. I guess that’s a pretty unremarkable thing really. It’s not so far for me to go, it’s not especially steep anywhere. There are even enough people who cycle along parts of the route to make a little social. For me, today, it felt assertive, manly. It was cold and it was the first time I had ridden to work since New Years. (Yes, that resolution isn’t going so well…) What’s that? You want to see my route? Well what about privacy and things like that?

Have you ever watched 24?

It’s an experience I can tell you that.

Season one was something else. Within our circle of friends it was remarkable. We got together and watched the episodes in small groups of three or four. I can’t remember if we split the cost of the boxed set or if one of us had already purchased it. Without the regular advertisements episodes are about 43 to 45 minutes long and they are awesome. Pure awesomeness.

Abominable Snowman Sighting

This is just a quickie really. I made this teeny tiny abominable snowman video and wanted to share it with you all. Enjoy.

How Long Would It Be?

Warning folks, this post is a little morbid. My wife, an occasional reader of the Evening Standard, noticed an unattributed article about the late Casey Johnson. I’ve never heard of her before. Apparently that says a lot about me. If you think it does say a lot about me then you read gossip magazines and/or blogs and or sites and hold socialites in high and, perhaps, envious regard. I pass no judgement.

Kodak Zi8

This year my I got my wife a Kodak Zi8 as a combined Christmas and birthday present. As ever I did a fair amount of research before picking anything up and I have not been disappointed! This type of device has been brought into the mainstream by Flip who produced a remarkably cheap and simple video camera for everyday use. These devices are a little larger than a mobile phone. Which is a good thing really as the Iphone 3Gs represents the most serious competition out there. You certainly can’t take a call on a Kodak Zi8!

What to do when your internet access goes crazy.

My Symptoms: Is this happening to you?

Wired internet and network access becomes very slow.
Wireless internet access remained at normal speed.
Multiple PCs/Mac experience same issues.

When I say slow, I mean ten times slower than dial-up!

The short answer: Replace the modem/router box.

The Ethernet ports in my router had failed. I replaced the router and was back to snappy internet and network performance in ten minutes. If your symptoms match mine, this could well be your problem. Because it might not be I would suggest that you read some more about what happened to me. Oh go on!

Because I run a vista machine at the moment I naturally made mistake number one. I googled for ‘vista very slow internet’. Don’t do that, whatever you do. If you do, and I did, then you will learn all about something called autotuning. Along the way you will learn to do things like run elevated command prompts, use the netsh command. You will read endless pages about TCP/IP protocols and then you will work out that there is in fact nothing wrong with your Vista after all.

Word of the day: truculent
–adjective
1. fierce; cruel; savagely brutal.
2. brutally harsh; vitriolic; scathing: his truculent criticism of her work.
3. aggressively hostile; belligerent.

Happy New Year

Wow, 010110.

Sounds like something in binary huh?

I have had an interesting couple of days and was about to wander off on a reasonably lengthy rant about it all when I realised that I should probably just wish everyone a happy new year and have done with it.

Ok, resolutions.

1 – blog every day
2 – write 52,000 words of a book
3 – fit back into my old jeans
4 – read 52 works of literature
5 – learn a new word each day

There, I think those are all achievable and realistic. Anyone else have resolutions they want to share?

The first! Word of the Day: Bellicose
–adjective
inclined or eager to fight; aggressively hostile; belligerent; pugnacious.