BinaryJam

As this is the time of the climate change conference there is a lot of news about climate change. Over the past few weeks I’ve heard more and more about climate change.

Listening to the Today programme each morning on BBC Radio 4 I get to hear politicians spouting their latest green message. But there are some that particularly stick out.

The most notable was this morning an American representative was being quizzed about the current administrations attitude and actions relating to climate change. When asked about the continuing increasing carbon emissions from the United States and how poor their performance at reducing this has been, the response was that whilst they agreed there was an increasing rise in carbon emissions their own scale of measurement they used to measure improvement showed that they were doing really well.

Did you catch that their own scale of measurement showed that they were doing well. Well this blog doesn’t get many hits really; I don’t expect it to, but on my scale of how well its doing it’s the best most successful god damn blog in the world.

I’m feeling quite disappointed about progress on environmental issues so expect a few more posts like this, on what I did start as a sharepointy blog.

Earlier this week I was late for work, which is no big deal and it gave me the chance to listen to radio 4 programming that is not the news.  I was listening to Midweek with guests like Rupert Everett two and two artists and the last guest was a man who has a blog.  I enjoyed the other guests but this last guest was intriguing. 

He is an inner city London ambulance driver who for the past two years has kept a blog.  Quite a popular blog, but until this interview I had not come across it.  Some bright spark publisher has had the idea to take this man’s writing and turn it into a book. 

Blood, Sweat and Tea: Real Life Adventures in an Inner-city Ambulance

Now this isn’t the first time I’ve heard of blogs being turned into books so far I have heard of two

1. The confessions of a Video Store Clerk (Yes that kind of video store)
2. The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky

I have read the blog of number one and own number 2 (which I wish I didn’t as whilst the writing is good I am undecided about how I feel about a compilation of others works in a book I do hope the profits are shared out to the other writers or at least to an agreed charity, if not this is why I am uneasy about it).  Its also as dry as you can get.

However this blokes blog/book has some great stories in it and is worth hunting down.  As the title suggest it details the day to day activity of an Ambulance driver the highs and lows and the stupidity of the human race. Why casualty is feeding the nation nonsese and what people dial 999 for will horrify you, unless of course your one of those people who have never actually had proper flu and think a bad cold qualifies. Please note: Doctors, Hospitals and Ambo’s (His name for Ambulances) can’t cure colds and flu, flu vaccines don’t cause flu (the virus components are dead), antibiotics will not clear up a runny nose.

For those in the UK you can try to “Listen Again” on the BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/midweek.

The blog is still up and running and you can continue to read about these adventures on

http://randomreality.blogware.com/blog

Last Note.  I recommend the video store thing too but not at work, learn the horrors of DVD returns and the bliss of the anti-bac handwash.

tags: random+acts+of+reality, blood+sweat+and+tea, book+recommendation, blog+recommendation

When you hear this from your four year old you have to wonder is this a good thing or bad.

Dad, have you seen my boba-fet ?

I need my light sabre !

sung – “Sherree da di da da, bop the cat bah”

I don’t care that the lyrics aren’t right but the fact that my kid is trying to sing rock the cashbah – The Clash at the top of his voice was great.

Down side

Macdonalds spoiling all my good work by giving out crappy pop music players

We don’t do MacD’s very often but the one time we do, damn.

Well I finally upgraded my home PC, its been a while I was making do with an AMD XP1900+ and whilst faster than my previous PC it never behaved like the workhorse that was promised.  I mean take video encoding or picture manipulation, it was slow, real slow, primarily due to the lack of extensions in the chip that the intel had.

Living with the AMD was also a problem, it was so loud and cost to make it cool quitely was a little steep so it stayed upstairs in the backroom.  You could hear this thing from outside the room with the door closed.

This new chip though, talk about small, talk about cool, talk about quiet.  Hey I’m just using the standard components that come, admittedly the graphics card I have at this minute is passive cooled, but this new build is almost totally silent.  I have it in the lounge and you cant hear it above the TV, Sky+ box and of course the wind tunnel that is the xbox360.

Anyway a little advise for those thinking of upgrading to a core2duo.  BEWARE.  Hardly anyone else has one and when your build goes wrong for whatever reason there is no one to swap parts with.

Take my build put all the pieces together, turned it on, wheeeee……off……wheeeeee…off.  Not good.  So what is it Motherboard, Chip, Hard drive, graphics ?  I trim it down to smallest amount of components and connections, power, memory*1, chip, on switch.  Same again.  Swap Memory.  Same again.

Ring…Ring… “Steve Help”, “Well I have AMD64 mate with DDR not DDR2, but I have a card to try, bring it over”.

Long rambling short, the video card was duff, put in any machine it stops it booting, but had this not been the problem I was pretty much stuffed in diagnosing chip vs motherboard.

So bear that in mind if you upgrade, try and have a spare available for as much as possible (oh and a PCI graphics card is really handy).

Since I started looking at XNA my son has been poking over my shoulder asking what’s that.  I explained that this is how you could write computer games.  Now he wants me to write him a game,  I should have known this was coming.

So he gave me the design for the game he wants.

It has to have pirates, starwars and spiderman who fight and help each other the evil dog robots (from starwars I, they look like dogs to him) are there as well as singing walking chairs and at the end is an elephant and a rhinocerous.

So it’s a little rough aroud the edges but he is 4.  Think I might struggle with licensing.

I was lucky enough to be best man at my friends wedding over the weekend.  I had my speech all laid out on my HTC wizard mobile device, which allowed me to edit and make adjustments up to the last minute.

But afterwards the brides brother came up to me and explained that at this wedding were amongst others a Russian rocket scientist and he himself was an aeronautical engineer, and they all thought, “Geek”, when I read from the device.

I don’t know whether that is a good thing or bad.

tags: geek, smartphone, pocketpc

Whilst reading Scott Hanselman’s blog I clicked on the ruby on rails site.  The Ruby site is showcasing its spawn and via shopify, a real neat idea for the small business, I found this

http://shop.thepasty.com/

I cannot think of a better use of the internet than to get pasties delivered.

tags: Pasty, Web, Shop

This is what I woke up to this morning, ducks having a kip in the puddle outside my house.