Monthly Archives: March 2008

Family Tree

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We got the Family tree back from the picture framers. It’s a huge sheet of paper, probably twice as big as the flip charts used in meetings. My dad started creating it years ago and it has been revised and added to as he has made new finds. The earliest date is 1750 and the latest date is 1994 – the year following P’s birth. It’s fairly extensive and ends up with an australian branch and an american branch. Included in there are Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Cumming Dewar who served in India in the 1800′s, Edward Hindle who brought golden hamsters to the UK and R J Mitchell who designed the Spitfire and one of the UK’s top Chemists Harry Lister Riley. (I’m not related to RJM but I am the others). So it’s a big picture and one the girls have found interesting. D’s first action was to get the names of all the people at the bottom of the tree – who are around her age – and plug them into Facebook. Somewhere people are reading “Hi, were you born in xxxx and is your dad called x and your mum called y?”
Odd looking at these things – reduces you to just a few letters on a piece of paper and also how surprising families spread.

crash mac crash

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These have crashed several times in the last 3 days: Firefox (the beta), Thunderbird, X-chat, Camino, Safari, Adium.
Recently installed programs: None.
Recently installed updates: Couldn’t possibly be them.
I have no idea why but it is extremely irritating that anything crashes more than once, but having the whole system lock up to the point that the power has to be removed is getting stupid. And in case someone says what OS? It’s Leopard.

Reporting to the law

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A week or so ago I rang the police to report a guy behaving oddly in our street. Walking down drives and looking in windows is odd and standing staring at me when he happens to notice me looking out from upstairs didn’t help his case. Nothing actually happened, but if you want to look in my front window, go back to the road, come back and examine the front door, then look around the side of the house then look at another door then I’m the one passing on your registration number. And description.

Just after that, I’m out waling the dog and P is with me. We see a powerful beam of light sweeping across a field. It’s a field next to one I walk the dog in so I know it’s layout and buildings in it. The two people there move around and across the field. As it happens where we exit to the road to return, they have walked themselves into a dead end bounded by hedges. I know they are there, the dog certainly does and they can probably see us but no noises pass between us. We pass a parked van on the lane. I tell P I think they were lamping and describe it. When we get back I make no mention and go back to work. P tells Jacq though and Jacq rings the RSPCA. The following night we do the same route. No lights in the field but as we walk back along the lane the same van pulls up, parks and two people get out – they are about 50 yds ahead. They cross the lane, climb over a fence and enter the same field. No dogs, but I see what looks like a shouldered shotgun. Brief mention was made when we got home.
Tonight I get a call from the Police about this. As it had gone to the RSPCA for a while the details were a little fuzzy so he wanted me to sharpen them up, which I did. I mentioned the gun first and yes, the licensed keeper of the van has a shotgun license. But he’s not apparently allowed to wander around fields with a bright lantern trying to blow rabbit’s heads off. Or kill foxes or kill anything in fact. So the Police are going to drop by and have a word because doing that will cause loss of that license.

I’m turning into quite the responsible middle-aged guy.
I’ll not dwell on the fact that if the first man is ever questioned about our street then he’ll guess it’s probably me. I’ll also not wonder about the second guy thinking about who reported him. After all, I can’t be the only person with a huge Great Dane that walks around there can I?

Heather Mills: An anagram

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A money grabbing, gold digging, big-mouthed, paranoid lying sniping bitch.
Okay, so strictly speaking that isn’t an anagram but then strictly speaking she should have shut up today. I really do hope we don’t have to hear much more of that whining “Oh help me I am SO poor!” woman.

A DVD trio

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Monster: It was okay. I was familiar with the backstory so it held no surprises. The thing that stopped me really getting into it was the forced downturn of the mouth in Theron’s character. It seemed false throughout. Watch again? No.

blow. I liked Depp in this one (though he was superb as Willy Wonka) and the overall film was good. Similar to Scarface in some ways. What really annoyed me was the last few minutes. We get an imagined meeting with his daughter, we get a line about the fact that he (George Jung) will not be up for release before 2015 and then we get the heart-tugging line that his daughter has never visited him. Who the hell cares? The man was a drug dealer on an epic scale, he ruined countless lives, his actions will have killed many and yet the film-maker wants us to feel sorry for him. It could be taken as just a fact and the daughter’s stance on the actions of her father but in that case it could have been written differently. As it stands it was a film about a really nasty guy and there is selfish sorrow at the end. Who.the.hell.gives.a.damn. Watch again? Possible – I was working at the time.

A Scanner Darkly. Loved it. The film technique was superb, really liked that presentation and the way the film used it. Plot was good and still has me thinking about it and the subplot remains as relevant now as when written. First film I’ve seen with Keanu when I did not think of Bill & Ted. The Downey Jr. character reminded me of Ben Elton many times. Very good film and one to watch – and absorb – again.

And I just today bought “It’s all gone Pete Tong“. I have the right box, the DVD has the right information on but the wrong film has been pressed – I have “Down to the Bone” which might be good – and the lead actress looks attractive and reminds me of someone I would love to see again but probably never will – but it was not the film I wanted. So that goes back tomorrow. In the meantime and because I have work I want to get through, Independence Day is the viewing pleasure. Great film.

Rescuetime? Wastetime [edited]

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Yesterday I had a query about a piece of software called Rescuetime. From within the dashboard on their site (I was logged into my profile) I clicked the Help link. The next page suggested using the forum but gave a direct contact form too. I thought the forum was the best place to start so I clicked the link.

RescueTime Forum – We tend to be most responsive to support requests posted at our shiny new forum.

A search found no answer but there was a large inviting box telling me I could ask a question. So I wrote what I needed to, re-read and re-edited. The next box invited me to use some tags as the program was saying tags would help me. So I tagged. It invited me to add a smiley. Quite why someone would add an actual :) to a question is beyond me so I skipped that. A quick recap:
- I login at rescuetime to see help
- I click Help
- I click to the indicated forum
- I do a search, write a question, add a tag or two and ignore the smiley.
I now scroll down a bit further and click Publish.
Up pops a floating box telling me I had not registered and that I needed to do that or login. Maybe it wanted my Rescuetime login? so I try that – it does not recognise me. Does it say I must not use the Rescuetime login? No. I complete the signup details but find the actual signup box is just below the visible view, so I scroll down. And the little floaty window disappears. I scroll down as far as I can go and retry the signup by filling in all the details again – and again the window is just that bit too small and again the floaty box goes. I max the browser window and try again – success! It sends me the verification email. I click that then come back to the forum and my new profile page. I look for my question but it has completely disappeared. Gone.

They do not tell me that their forum is completely disconnected to their own, they allow a question to be written, for tags and smileys to be added and then – only then – do they prompt for any sort of login and if it’s a new account they do not say your question will be tossed. And that stupid “OMG this is SOO clever” floaty window is just really bloody annoying.

The query I had? Doesn’t matter – how can you work with software produced by a company that can’t even get that most basic of workflows right? But I know for a fact that they do spend all their time in that most shiny of forums because they haven’t answered the email I sent about this yesterday.

[Post edited 13 March]
I shot the wrong app and probably shouldn’t have shot anything anyway.
I assumed that the forums were run by the same people and that my login would work there. Assumptions are never good and to be fair – to me – at no point was I made to think different. To this end I do think Rescuetime should add a line to the Help part of their site and maybe even a direct link to signup. That at least lets me expect to wait before asking.
And the signup at Getsatisfaction does still need to change. Maybe that hadn’t been tested / experienced before though and it looks fairly new so I should have thought a bit more before getting annoyed. Not my strongest of points though.

Thing is, I want and actually will use Rescuetime. On a daily basis I have another program – Active Timer – that tracks my browser use but I want longer stats as work varies not only by day but by week and only after say 3 months do I think I can accurately work my time out. I use browsers – Camino for one part of the job, Safari for another with Thunderbird / Firefox adding a few minutes here and there. So I don’t need urls (which is good because today alone I’ve visited easily 150+ blogs if not more so while *.wordpress.com would be useful any subdomain tracking is not and from a forum post wildcards would seem to be planned). And the Getsatisfaction forums do look good – I’m registered now anyway so I don’t have to do that again.

So was I right to post what I did? Yes because there were flaws in what should have been smooth
Was I right to take it out on Rescuetime? No. I was wrong there.
And was it good of both guys to comment? Yes, definitely.

In praise of Shovebox

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Shovebox is a wonderful thing. I deal with lots of urls and I want to go back and work from the information they contain. I can find several of these a day. I also have – like most people – random thoughts which can improve another area I am working in and I want to remember them. For lots of screen catching I use cmd-shift-3/4 or Skitch but sometimes I want it kept a little differently. I want to search the urls I’ve grabbed because from a new discovery an old url becomes more important to look at. So I want several things. But what I do not want is some program glaring at me from the dock. I do not want a 20mb download which can do all manner of things but cannot do what I want well enough or neatly enough. I also do not want a dozen text files scattered across the desktop with imaginative names like “untitled” “untitled2″. I cannot abide stickies. I was despairing of ever finding anything decent until I came across Shovebox.
It does everything I want – and more. But it does it perfectly. Drag urls, organise them, create archives, make notes and send them into shovebox. And it sits quietly in the menubar waiting patiently. It doesn’t hog the startup – it doesn’t hog anything. It really is one of the best $25 I have spent on a program. Excellent, really excellent.

About Zoe

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I said a week ago that I ‘really enjoyed’ The Wind That Shakes The Barley. I changed my mind. I would now say it’s ‘okay’. Partly this is a result of reflection, and partly because I watched Killing Zoe. Now this I really did enjoy. Great fun from start to finish. It’s not a deep film but it really does keep going. It hasn’t the same stand-offs that are seen in other Tarantino films (Reservoir Dogs and True Romance spring to mind) but it is a very entertaining film. Music is good too. One to watch again.

Diagnosis: Quality TV

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Jacq just bought me the complete first series of Diagnosis Murder. Quality TV drama at it’s finest. I have 19 classy episodes of the Van Dyke family to watch in awe as they solve multiple cases in times that are only slightly slower than CSI (which let’s face it is pretty unrealistic anyway). Dr Mark Sloan – medical hero. Steve “Square-jawed’ Sloan – a credit to the force, and the funny little guy as well :)

In case you are wondering what awesome TV you have missed: DM @ wikipedia, diagnosismurder.co.uk, diagnosis-murder.com

(They are Region 1 so now to hunt hard to find if a mac mini can be made multi-region. I very much doubt it but the PS3 should be okay and the DVD player can do it)

Moving music into iTunes

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iTunes. Music. Folders.
This post is so I do not rant later. All the music is now fairly sorted and ready to be copied back to the mini. A lot is tagged, a lot has incomplete tags, and a lot has no tags, just a title. So I have 2 options:
- copy the whole lot into the Music directory and Add to Library
- point iTunes at the existing directory and – with the right options set – let it do it’s thing (copy, organise)
I care not for album art particularly.
I will never buy anything from the iTunes store.
I just want to be able to find what I want.
I do want to be easily able to find music when copying it to the mp3 player. (I use XNJB)

Is there an advantage to allowing iTunes to do what it wants? If not, I’ll just add, not import.