A shameless plug

I've been busy on one of my other blogs (makes a change I know).

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The aporkalypse

Swine flu is apparently the new media darling. The Daily Mail is excited enough to proclaim there will be inflatable mortuaries, 750,000 deaths, mass graves and crematoriums working 24/7. WHO officials are giving out tantalising soundbites and upping their risk level higher and higher. THERE. IS. A. PANIC.

But its less potent than bird flu, nobody who isn't Mexican has died (the death in America was a Mexican child being treated across the border) and nobody wants to report the actual confirmed deaths, they're more interested in the larger number which is the unconfirmed cases. The BBC has even done some illustration to show how a virus spreads. With arrows!

We had someone in our London office back from her honeymoon in Mexico last week. And she's had some gyp I can tell you.

Mad woman

We used to have a mad woman working for us. On the face of it she wasn't bonkers- she was well presented and confident. But it soon became obvious she was a stark staring loon. Her idea of making a fellow new starter feel at home was to photocopy a tax journal so they'd have something to read.

Anyway, at lunchtimes she used to take her (empty) work bag and mobile phone out with her and wander around the town pretending to make "important business phone calls" for an hour or so.

She didn't make it past her probationary period because as well as being somewhat derranged, she was also absolutely crap at her job and talked incessantly. And what she talked incessantly about was bollocks to boot.

I saw her wandering around the town at lunchtime on Friday, the old modus operandi in place. It's good (and also a bit sad) to know that some people never change.

The strange world of mummy blogging

I got roped in to writing a review of Cyberpatrol for my wifes blog recently. And it introduced me to a whole new world. Mummy blogging is much more of a community thing that bloke blogging, so I had to be careful not to say "fuck" at all.

Pointless Maths

I read an article the other day on the Register that mentioned in passing the PS3 uses 5 times more electricity to play a Blu Ray Disc film than a stand alone player would.

This sounded scandalous and I was indeed scandalised that people would unwittingly be paying so much more money for simply watching a film. So I decided to do some sums to see how many films you'd have to watch for the power saving to cover the cost of buying a BR player.

The PS3 uses an not inconsiderable 186watts to play a hidef film. A fifth of this would mean a stand alone player would use 40watts (rounded up from 37.2, because I'm sure they were being generous when they said a 5th).

Since all modern films are bloated over long indulgent twaddle, I'm going to say that each film is on average two hours long. Gives you a chance to watch some of the extras if not. My utility supplier charges 9.59p per kilowatt hour, which basically means the PS3 will cost 3.56748p per 2 hour film and the stand alone player a meagre 0.76720p for the same film.

Before you go jumping for joy, the best value stand alone player currently costs around £150, which means at just under a 3p saving per film, you'd need to watch almost 5 and a half thousand films to recoup the cost.

Alternatively, you can view that as a year and 93 days of watching films constantly on your stand alone player, to justify having paid for it out of the electrical savings you'd have made over using a PS3.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this in the slightest to be honest, but some part of me rebels at the train of thought that says the PS3 is a great games console because you can also play hidef films on it. I have all 3 of the other Sony consoles but have held of buying a PS3 because its far too expensive and has a poor range of poor Xbox 360 ports for the most part. I don't see why it makes sense to pay a £100 premium over the cost of a stand alone player to get the option to play some decidedly average games.

A Bit of a Frank Spencer Moment

I'll gladly admit I haven't always been the awesome DIY guru I am now. Before Claire and I bought a house together I'd never so much as used a power drill. Now days I'm happy drilling, screwing, wrenching, hammering, building, knocking down and setting fire to though.

Which is why I was happy to attempt to fix the toy garage with a bit of super glue on Friday night. I know what you're thinking, the silly sod glued his fingers together didn't he? Well yes I did. But I did so much more than gluing three fingers on my left hand together. I also glued a small lump of plastic to my finger tip, welded by wedding ring onto my ring finger and even managed to stick the lid of the tube of super glue to the tip of my tongue. (In my defence, I didn't want to put the lid on the sofa in case it stuck to the material. This turned out to have been a wise decision, because if it stuck to my tongue, it definitely would have stuck to the sofa).

I wouldn't have particularly chosen to fix the toy in the manner that I did, I was following a helpful suggestion, so I can't entirely take responsibility for my own crass stupidity but in the end it was my own stupid fault.

So if you talk to me this week and I have a bit of a lisp, its because I am missing a large chunk of the tip of my tongue.

Curse of the Techie Book Reading Chap

I've always been an avid book reader, our library is testimony to that. It has its fair share of paperbacks but most of my book purchases became hardback in around 1991 as I grew too impatient with the wait. (I think the cut off was around Pratchett's Guards!Guards!, that was certainly the last book of his I got in paperback at any rate).  

When I started travelling on the train up to London more this became a problem as a hefty 700 page hard back was a bit cumbersome to lug around. There was also the "final 100 page problem" too, where you know you'll finish the book on the way into work so have to take another equally huge tome for your return journey, only to find theres no room in your bag for your laptop. 

That's when I got a Sony Clie. Even at the time this PDA was a bit out of date, everyone else had gone colour and multimedia and there I was buying a hi res black and white jobbie. But it did have a couple of ebook readers for it and I was soon able to carry around 500 books with me in something the same size as a pack of cards. Which was handy.

Some people don't take to reading on a small screen but I've never had a problem with it to be honest and whilst the price of ebooks isn't as cheap as they should be, I tend to approach it from another angle. I still buy my hardback but acquire a scanned copy of the book for my reader off the internet. This isn't legally murky, it is illegal but I'm buggered if I'm paying twice for a book, and in a lot of instances I can't anyway as the range available is pretty crap.

Which leads me to my curse. I tend now days to use my clie to read books in bed when the missus has gone to sleep. It's back lit so I don't need to have a light on and its just easier than fiddling around with a clip on reading light. Last night I got a battery warning but soldiered on as I was nearing the end of the chapter. What I didn't realise was after the battery warning the clie disabled access to the memory card to save what little battery it had left. This meant that I was endlessly looped into the dozen pages it had in memory at the time. It took a few minutes to suss this out and I initially thought the whole book was buggered.

Don't get that reading "proper" books do you?