Nothing is impossible for an engineer
Jun. 26th, 2009
11:43 am - This morning on the Sky music channels
*click*
Michael Jackson
*click*
Michael Jackson
*click*
Michael Jackson
*click*
Michael Jackson
*click*
Michael Jackson
*click*
Michael Jackson
*click*
Guns N' Roses! Hurrah for the Kerrang! channel :-)
Apr. 1st, 2009
12:38 pm - Watch thoughts
You know what I want from a watch? I would really like one that displays:
1) The current datetime for UTC in ISO 8601 format: 2009-04-01 11:33:06 as I type.
2) The current local datetime in ISO 8601 format: 2009-04-01 12:33:06.
3) The current Unix timet: 1 238 585 633 as I type.
Come on Casio, build it for me! There are watches for pilots and divers. I want one for a speccy nerd like me! Working with 24 hour rolling news and data services I have to think in terms of UTC, and lots of the code I work with uses the Unix epoch time. What clocks on the wall say is for 'locals'.
Mar. 31st, 2009
10:38 pm - I aint dead...
although things have been mildly grim. Two weekends ago we all went off to Centerparcs (Sherwood Forest) with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
custancia and family. This was lots of fun. evie_petrol has thoroughly got over her fear of water and was thrashing around with Ellie lots. Ellie is a much better swimmer, but if Evie wore a buoyancy aid she could keep up with Ellie and the two of them thrashed around together in the pool nicely. Daddy went on some water slides for the first time in, er, decades and all was good. On Saturday night trash_petrol and custancia went out for a drink and Paul [WINOLJ] and I played several games of Memoir '44. I got to say such things as "achtung panzer!", "eat lead, Fritz", "take that, Ivan", etc, and eat lots of nachos.
Unfortunately, I awoke on Sunday morning feeling very ill. I wondered if I had eaten too many nachos. We took the sprogs out to rampage on the adventure playground, but I eventually had to admit defeat and take to my bed. Shortly afterwards I was very sick. Now, historically, I've often been ill at Centerparcs or after I've been swimming. We wondered if I have some curious sensitivity to chlorine or something? So we kinda decided this was why I was ill and didn't think much more of it. I did the best I could for the next couple of days, but I was quite out of it.
Then on Monday night evie_petrol was sick too. When she returned to school we discovered there was a sickness bug doing the rounds and 10 children were off in one class at her school. All became clear...amelia_petrol got it Wednesday night, and trash_petrol finally succumbed on Friday. Fortunately, by the time trash_petrol was laid out by it I had recovered, so there was always one responsible adult (stop sniggering) who could child-wrangle.
Finally, taking evie_petrol to ballet on Saturday morning custancia appeared without Paul and explained that he was at home being very sick. Oh dear.
We all seem to have recovered now, although the unexpected weight loss has been nice. I've had to tighten my belt a notch!
I've finished work today for a couple of weeks. I'm taking the Easter school holidays off then it's back to work fulltime. The next three days will be relaxing - just amelia_petrol at home. Next week Bonkers Girl will be at home and things will be, er, less peaceful...
Mar. 12th, 2009
04:02 pm - Watchmen
I went to see Watchmen last night [Hurrah for Orange Wednesdays]. I thought it was great, which was good, seeing as I've been waiting 20 years for that film! As Jonathan Ross noted in his review, it's not often you get to sit in a cinema and feel a warm fuzzy glow as you watch a film made just for you.
Y'see, I'm an old 80s comic fanboy. I dug out my copy of Watchmen for a re-read. Here's my copy:
A 12 issue limited series published 'monthly' by DC in 1986 to 1987. Although 'monthly' got rather stretched towards the end when the whole thing fell behind schedule.
Most were bought from the long defunct Zap Comics, somewhere in a grotty cellar behind the Silver Arcade in Leicester. It was "Non Distributed" in the UK, so all copies were air-freighted in, and you paid a premium price. I have a vague recollection that one issue's distribution was delayed, as the whole DC consignment for that month got stopped by Customs, due to some dodgy imagery in another comic possibly falling foul of UK obscenity laws at that time.
Obviously, I've got many of the other iconic DC comics of that era: Swamp Thing, Hellblazer, Sandman, V for Vendetta, etc. The only gaping gap in my collection is that I failed to be on-the-case with The Dark Knight Returns, and I don't have that in its original four issue form. I've also got most of the run of The Question that started in 1987. This was the Charlton character that Alan Moore was originally going to use in Watchmen, who eventually mutated into Rorschach. In issue 17 of The Question the title character actually reads the graphic novel of Watchmen and notes the similarity between himself and Rorscharch.
I never bought Marvel, and to this day I have a curious anti-Marvel affectation. I've not seen the X-Men, Spiderman or Fantastic Four films, as they're from "the rival company".
Mar. 11th, 2009
12:55 pm - Vague Update
I'm back at work for a short three-day-week at the moment, so today is my virtual Friday! I'm looking forward to being back at home with Amelia. Looking after Evie was always pretty hard work, but Amelia ambles around and gurgles. As long as she has plenty of toys to play with and the odd chunk of bread to munch on she's happy. So tomorrow Trash and I can sneak out shopping for a bit with Amelia in tow.
Coming back to work has been something of a tiring shock. I went to bed around 20:00 last night. I also had to contend with 15,865 emails waiting for me when I got back. Fortunately, most were error emails, which had been sorted into relevant folders by Outlook rules. Generally, unless you're actually there when a process is spewing out error emails, they have little historical value. Sadly, there were still 656 'real' emails waiting in my Inbox to be sifted through though.
My motorbike is back alive as well. After a couple of months with the clever Stuart Rafferty she's all fixed up and back on the road. The weather is a bit nicer to, so I've been riding her to work and back this week. It'll soon be spring. It ended up costing me almost exactly the insurance settlement. They gave me £2000, I bought the 'wreck' for £700, and it cost £1300 to be repaired. I couldn't see this in purely monetary terms though. That VFR is a beautiful example of the final itteration of the VFR 750 design, before Honda made a hash of things with the distinctly inferior VFR 800. It is the closest thing to perfection on two wheels I'll ever ride. It would have been a crime against motorcycling to send that bike to the scrapyard.
Mar. 5th, 2009
03:30 pm - Watch geeking
Mar. 4th, 2009
Mar. 3rd, 2009
Feb. 20th, 2009
09:17 pm - What on Earth is trash_petrol up to?
Cheerleading?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQWzd3Qb
*cackle*
Feb. 18th, 2009
10:01 pm - Pictures of Amelia Petrol
From our first meeting:
http://vinpetrol.fotopic.net/c1655800.ht
Feb. 12th, 2009
10:49 pm - Brief Update
Thanks everyone for best wishes about our current events. Everything is going well in Hull, although the journey back tonight was very grim (took 3.75 hours). It's very tiring going over there every day, and obviously I'm far from a computer to spod on.
( Child related stuff behind cut... )
02:09 pm - Snow post
I am actually in Hull, so can I just say "er ner it's sner!"
Feb. 9th, 2009
09:13 pm - Trash twirls a baton
Many years ago trash_petrol learnt how to twirl a baton as a tiny little majorette. She's just got involved with it again *mumble* years later. She needs to practice a lot, but we figured you might like to see a flash of her hidden past:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgn9z2nP
09:03 pm - Introductions - day one
All went well today. Met amelia_petrol for the very first time. She was a little timid at first but soon decided we were OK and she would interact with us. Some pictures:
http://pics.livejournal.com/vin_pet
Feb. 6th, 2009
12:23 pm - There Is Only One
Yesterday's ShortList magazine had a feature on expensive men's watches. I looked at it, but none of them interested me. Y'see, if I've not bored you already about this, only one expensive watch on this planet motivates me. If I can't have it, I'm quite happy to wear my Casio. Until I can afford the £1000 I'll need for one, all other watches are merely placeholders. More expensive and exclusive watches from other manufacturers have no interest for me.
It's the Omega Speedmaster Professional. If you don't know why this is, perhaps if I show you a picture of what's on the back of it all will become clear:
Clearly, the ultimate watch for an engineer. To quote the Wikipedia entry:
"The Speedmaster passed NASA's numerous tests, which included exposure to extreme temperatures, vacuum, intense humidity, corrosion, shock, acceleration, pressure, vibration and noise, whereas the Rolex, Breitling, Bulova, Longines and Heuer, notably, all failed."
This is the watch that Buzz Aldrin wore on the moon (Neil left his inside the LEM), and that Jim Lovell used to time the rocket burns on the crippled Apollo 13. No other watch has that kind of history. It's the only watch cleared for use in Extra Vehicular Activities, although (interestingly) a selection of quite cheap Casios are cleared for use in microgravity inside space vehicles.
*sigh* one day...
So does anyone else have any singular items that they lust after?
Feb. 2nd, 2009
11:14 am - Technology
When I was in London last weekend, I had a definite preference for travelling on the underground, especially the deep-bore tube lines (I got a curious thrill being able to travel on the deepest part of the network). This is partly because underground trains are a bit like monorails, in that they're forever associated with "the future" in my head, thanks to Gerry Anderson's Space:1999, which I watched at a formative age. I can easily travel on buses anywhere in the world. Look, this is what an underground train is like in my head:
Whereas these are clunky old low-tech buses:
*Obviously* tube trains are better!
[I picked that bit of footage of buses out last night, wandering around YouTube. It turns out this morning that modern London buses don't actually work when it's snowing! :-)]
Jan. 30th, 2009
04:44 pm - An unfortunate word
I see the World Rally Championships have started again. Years ago I wrote some code to process the results PA send to us and put them on the Orange WAP site. The data source I use for this is not designed for automated processing, so it sometimes goes wrong. We accept this risk, on a cost-benefits analysis: better to do this cheaply and have automated results that rarely go wrong, rather than pay an expensive human to get it right all the time.
To help me spot if it's gone wrong it emails the processed results set to myself and the support staff here, and it's been doing this happily for years. We can just glance at the email and tell if it's gone horribly wrong, and fix it if it does.
Last year we moved to a new, more corporate desktop PC and email system. Hold that thought...
Suddenly, one race weekend late last year, I stopped getting the Rally emails. "Oh no", thinks I, "my code is broken is utterly broken and failing without sending out any kind of error message or warning. What is wrong with it?" So I carefully single step the latest results file using the debugger, and realise that it did indeed work fine. It's just that the email didn't actually reach me. So I send myself a quick test email. That shows up fine, and anyway other systems are emailing me without problem. I copy and paste the results set into an email and it does NOT arrive. Eek! What on Earth in a set of Rally results can stop it being received as an email? So I look very carefully at the results set...
And then I see it. I can't receive emails concerning the World Rally Championships because there's a driver taking part in this competition called Federico Villagra! His surname trips the spam filter here and the emails are discarded. This is him:
http://www.wrc.com/jsp/index.jsp?lnk=50
It took several weeks journey through a typically byzantine corporate helpdesk system to get his name whitelisted so that I can receive emails that mention that name.
I wonder if he has email problems himself? Do you think he has an account and wonders why no one ever emails him?
Jan. 21st, 2009
10:59 pm - Everyone's doing it, and I've consumed too much caffeine today
My Political Views
I am a left social libertarian
Left: 4.57, Libertarian: 4.07
Political Spectrum Quiz
My Foreign Policy Views
Score: 1.01
Political Spectrum Quiz
My Culture War Stance
Score: -6.56
Political Spectrum Quiz
10:47 pm - Trash is selling some black size 7 FMBs on ebay
Sadly, due to the damage a Morton's neuroma did to the nerve endings in one of her feet, she can never wear high heels again :-(
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d
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