Many Updates

Posted on July 22, 2006 by Howard

It has been a while since I’ve updated – quite a lot of little things have happened, but nothing quite sufficient to move me to write on its own. But, here goes…

America Visit
Back again… this time for the Casuality Conference at the end of June. Seems like the casual games business is maturing, and perhaps even missing a couple of the growing-industry rungs that the rest of the games industry struggles with. Most casual games companies understand about business models and structure, not outgrowing their capabilities, and concentrating on what they’re good at.

Chicago
Took my first visit to Chicago to see the publishers who make the Sudoku books and magazines that I create some content for. That was interesting seeing what goes on, and lovely to meet the people I’ve only worked with via email so far! I spent the day with Jamie, my main contact there, who showed me round plenty of downtown Chicago including the Taste Of Chicago event – lots of food – and some great sights. Also had a great time at a comedy night in a small club, where I got neatly picked on in the front row. Very memorable! I thought the Chicago atmosphere and people were great – really polite and friendly.

More Guitar Practise
Took my guitar with me to America – quite a pain for travelling, but had some fun with it a few times, jamming with friends and learning a thing or two. It was particularly fun playing a couple of my own compositions and having other people join in and jam melodies and harmonies. I’m getting there on Stairway too, which is pleasing to my soul!

Got an iPod
I knew I would at some point, but with the disgraceful $US to Pound exchange rate (bad for the company, but great for personal purchases!) I got tempted enough while in the Apple store in Renton, and got myself a 60Gb video iPod. (White, if you must know, less fingerprints that way!). I’m reasonably impressed with iTunes, and I’ve been re-grabbing my CD collection into wav format, and then re-encoding to mp3 (with tags). It looks like it will hold everything I own on CD, plus bags of podcasts and a few films… I’m also tempted to get a Mac for musical stuff – having had a very brief tinker with Garage Band. I’ll take a bit longer to decide that one though :D

Bought a piano
This one had to happen at some point, but we went ahead with it yesterday. Maria is getting to the right age to start to play and have lessons. We went to Tostevin’s which is reasonably nearby, tried out several, and decided on a reasonably old but recently reconditioned upright piano with a nice tone and a very light action. We’ll have to clear the right space in the living room, but it’ll be worth it!

Painting
I’ve done a bit of painting – something I haven’t had a go at for years! I’m still crap, but that’s OK because they’re happy mistakes.

Heatwave
It is about as hot as we can cope with here in the UK at the moment. I’m working only a fraction of my time in the office (where it gets ovenish during the day), and lots of time overnight as it cools down. About another 4 weeks of this, I reckon…

Not too much else going on at the moment – Maria is in her summer holidays, so trying to keep her occupied and having fun, whilst Sam is at the peak of his ‘terrible-two’ness. Plenty to cope with right there!

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Electric Jamming

Posted on June 10, 2006 by Howard

Something about the hot (for the UK!) weather is making us all a bit crazier than normal. Somehow it seemed appropriate to plug in the electric guitar, crank the volume up, and the overdrive beyond what might be considered musically sane, and let rip for an hour of overdriven electric noise!

My fingers, not used to this level of abuse from sharp steel wires, are a bit more painful than usual, but I think that is fair justice for the pain I’ve caused to the family and neighbours today.

Kirk gave me one hell of a grimace at playing Dust In The Wind in a cheesy metal/rock-syncopated overdriven plectrum strumming. But it was fun all the same.

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Sky Plus Plus Plus Plus

Posted on June 2, 2006 by Howard

The hard drive in our Sky+ box has been playing up for a while, programmes getting fragmented and lost, and resets happening more and more often. It finally died last week, well out of warranty.

While it was working fine, I’d read about upgrading the hard drive in there, but didn’t want to for risk of destroying it all. Well, now was the perfect opportunity.

I bought a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10 (6L250R0) ATA133 250Mb drive today from Overclockers UK, and fitted it this evening. It wasn’t very difficult – I just followed Morlock’s Guide, and things were fine. The IDE cable had got very hot and had perished, so I bought a new cable too.

After a system reset, it seems to work, and seems to be reporting a much larger capacity, though I’ll have to fill it up a bit more to be sure. 250Mb is quite a bit more storage than the 40Mb that was in the box before – it means we’ll be able to keep a good batch of children’s programmes on there, and a good selection of films, in addition to all the series Kirk likes to keep up with, without having to worry about space too much. Here’s hoping I’ll get more time to actually watch TV too!

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Temptation…

Posted on May 17, 2006 by Howard

jag Went to visit a (relatively) local garage to look at a car for Kirk today. The car we saw (a Ford Escort Finesse) was quite adequate, reasonable condition and price, and looks like it’ll last Kirk nicely for a couple of years.

Problem is… just inside the showroom they put this, just to tempt me…

A 3 litre automatic S-Type Jaguar, in British racing green. The price is very reasonable too… it was very hard to not just agree on the spot… I get the feeling I’ll be thinking about this car quite a bit over the coming weeks!

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Summer Must Be Here

Posted on April 24, 2006 by Howard

I hereby declare it to be the start of summer…

  • I had to mow the lawn
  • I started a fresh batch of beer brewing
  • I went out and practised longbow for the afternoon

There’s probably other things that define it as summer for other people, but for me, it has arrived.

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Back From Paris

Posted on April 12, 2006 by Howard

I’m back home now, after 6 days in Paris with the family. We managed to fit in lots of touristy stuff, and generally (despite the better efforts of our youngest!) enjoy it!

I was pleased that over the course of the few days my (previously unused) French came back to me, and by the end I was able to carry on basic conversations with people, as well as get along with the basics (ordering food, asking directions, etc). I was very proud of Maria who was confident enough with her pleasantries to get by and charm everyone, and even go into a patisserie and order pain-au-chocolat for everyone for breakfast. If we keep up our promise to go back each year, there’s a good chance her French will be much easier for her that it was for me!

We saw our niece on Kirk’s side for the first time, called Flora, who was lovely, and unsurprisingly Maria adored her. Sam just assimilated her without any show of surprise as part of the family. When Flora was feeding, and we tried to put Sam into her pushchair for a sleep, he protested No, that’s Flora’s pushchair!

We had a lovely dinner on the last night (our wedding anniversary, in fact) at a restaurant overlooking Notre Dame by the river, with nice wine, and a very good piano player through the evening. We were outside (where it was cool) but with gas heaters so we were kept toasty.

All the late nights will make it hard to get back into routine (it was gone 10am before the children woke up this morning) – but I’m sure we’ll manage that. We’ll miss the French food – everything we had over our time there was good. Its a good job we’ve done so much walking, burning off more than we’ve eaten. I lost about 3lb over the week – maybe I can keep up a similar level of exercise? (I’m sure it isn’t going to be as effective as when also dragging/carrying/restraining a screaming toddler, though.)

Full gallery of pic highlights:

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Better Than Jesus

Posted on March 9, 2006 by Howard

custard

Images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary in toast, wood panelling, the mould on the walls in student digs – you’ve seen loads of those.

Mine is much cooler. It is an egg custard, featuring a likeness of Kurt Cobain.

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Skype using Treo Bluetooth Headset

Posted on February 18, 2006 by Howard

Skype is cool – but it does tie you to using a headset (headphones + microphone) which is a bit of a pain. Especially for Kirk – she wants to be able to use Skype while wandering round the kitchen, with her laptop in the corner, out of the way.

Earlier in the week, I picked up a cheap (sub £10) bluetooth dongle for her laptop. We both have bluetooth headsets for our Treos, but rarely use them. (Its not often that we’re travelling in the car and need to be on the phone!) My intention was that I could pair the headset not with the Treo itself, but with a PC via bluetooth.

Well, it took quite a bit of messing round, but amazingly it works! Installing the Belkin software was straightforward enough, and the interface for scanning for devices and setting up services was pretty good. Getting it to pair with the headset involved just a short special incantation (holding in the Headset multifunction button till it showed a solid blue light), but after that, OK.

The range isn’t fantastic – after about 4 metres, if the headset is on the wrong side of the head the audio gets a bit clipped and the connection struggles, but other than that its reasonable. The quality is acceptable too – the only downside being an echo through the headset for the other person.

I hope it works well enough for her conversations with the family!

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Bad Hearing

Posted on February 15, 2006 by Howard

My hearing has caused me problems for years. I’m not deaf – in fact, far from it, but I have real trouble identifying speech. I’ve had tests which show that my hearing is considerably above average, yet I know that I can’t accurately hear what people say.

Like today, when talking about my wife not answering the phone, and she said
I’ve had a lot of nuisance calls today, so I just let it ring then sum the southern vomit.

Actually, what she said was
I just let it ring then 1-4-7-1 it.

Sometimes its comical, and occasionally much more interesting than what was really said, but I have to admit is is very frustrating for me – and for whoever I have to ask to repeat. And I have to do that a lot. In general, any time the background noise reaching my ears is more than about a third of the volume of the voice reaching me, I catch very little of what is said. I hear the voice, I just can’t extract accurate words from it, although I can make a guess.

I get extra clues when I can see the person’s face – the lips helps me to see which words are being formed. But that doesn’t help when someone is in a different room. When Kirsten is in the kitchen with the kettle on, and one (or more) of the machines running, I just can’t make out what she’s saying. And if I’m in my own room with a PC running, I struggle to pick out anything called from a different room.

The other side of my hearing is also frustrating… the sensitivity to sound – noise or otherwise – is just too much. I find medium sounds loud (the TV on), loud sounds painful (dropping an item of cutlery on the floor), and anything more than that excruciating. Sam howling at the top of his lungs in the car is enough that I have to pull over and get out (and wear earplugs) – and my ears will be painful for a few hours afterwards. I can’t sleep at night with any sound at all – be it a clock ticking on the other side of the room, a PC running in a different room, a car engine running down the street… Hence again, wearing earplugs. ( I get mine from SnoreStore who do a fantastic service! – the Pillow Soft earplugs are nearly enough to block out Kirk’s snoring! )

Now, I thought that this was something peculiar to me – and I’d begun to understand that its oversensitivity to sound, in particular background sound, that makes me struggle to pick out speech, but I’ve finally met someone else who has the same problem! Unsurprisingly, in a loud club.

Somehow this makes me feel a little bit less weird. For something which I feel is a disability, knowing I’m not alone, makes me feel just a bit better.

I read that one disease of oversensitive hearing is termed hyperacusis – which describe one of my symptoms, but doesn’t describe why I can’t understand speech in levels of background sound that aren’t painful. ( Link to the Hyperacusis site ) There’s also Odynocusis which seems similar but I’m having trouble finding good links and definitions. The inability to pick out speech against background noise sometimes seems to be referred to as The cocktail party problem is described more generally as an Auditory figure-ground problem.

I know I also suffer from tinnitus – a set of fairly specific frequencies that I can continually hear. Bah…

More research needed… I don’t have a great deal of faith in UK specialists, given that I’ve raised this before and been told that I’m fine – but perhaps advances in understanding even in the last 10 years make it worth pursuing?

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Smoking Ban in UK Pubs & Clubs

Posted on February 14, 2006 by Howard

British MPs have voted by a huge majority to ban smoking in UK pubs and clubs. Hooray for them taking a good decision on their moral grounds, in a free vote in the commons.

For me, this is fantastic news. I can potentially enjoy having a pint at a bar again!

Of course, some won’t be so happy. The pro-smoking group Forest have already condemed it as a move against civil liberties. Nobody is (yet) stopping them from smoking at home, of course, so like many other things that are for various reasons against the law to do in certain public places, it isn’t actually an outright ban, but a move to keep it private, and where it can’t bother anyone else.

So, who wins?

  • Pub workers
  • Pub owners (much more revenue from the increased number of drinkers)
  • The brewing industry
  • The government/country (more revenue from the taxes (duty etc)
  • Non smokers who like a drink
  • People who may find it easier to give up smoking with the reduced social pressure

Who loses?

  • Smokers who can’t cope for more than 10 minutes without a cigarette
  • The tobacco industry (1..2..3.. – awwwwww)

I’m making a hefty assumption that the tax revenue gained from increased drink spending will be more than the tax lost from reduced smoking!

What about the long term health risks/benefits? Increased drinking with a reduction in smoking? I’m not expert enough to know the financial impact on our health service, but it might be a close call. Still, its a good step forward, welcome to the 21st Century, UK. Roll on 2007 when it comes into effect!

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