radiac.net

Hello everyone! It has been a while. My silence hasn't had anything to do with not having anything to say - in fact the opposite, I've been pretty busy. Here's a quick summary:

• It was Leela's birthday on 27th January, and on the 1st February we'd been going out for 3 years!
• I went back to Kent at the end of January for meetings and to dig things out of storage. I had the meetings, but literally couldn't find anything I was after in the boxes. Erk - did I throw too much away when I moved?
• My car ist kaput. It's got new tyres and a new battery, which did improve it a bit, but it's still stalling whenever I take my foot off the accelerator, and the engine warning light lit up on the way back from Kent. I'm waiting for someone to get back to me on where to find a good garage in Cheltenham...
• My framework is nearly ready for use. Yes, that framework I've been talking about for years. It's in Perl, the core is done, and I'm just finishing off some of the modules. Work permitting, a release should be imminent.
• My nose is still dripping, 4 weeks after the operation. It's a bit better, but... will it ever stop?
• Leela is being pursued for council tax that she doesn't owe - from 2004. Leela lived somewhere for 3 months in the summer of 2004, and sent in her proof of student status while she was there. Now, after total silence for the past two and a half years, they have sent her 3 letters within 5 days; "Please send us proof of student status", "Please pay outstanding council tax" and now "A liability order has been made against you". Interestingly, the court order was dated the day before the first letter was sent...
• And now for the miscellanea: I've been to the cinema to see The Last King of Scotland (8/10), Babel (4/10) and Notes on a Scandal (7/10); I've been out for several meals to celebrate several things; I've installed a Jabber client for Google Talk (are you on that?); and I have, at last, moved all of my sites to my new server.

Well, that'll do for now.

We woke up today to find everything covered in snow. There's not as much as they were promising, but there's at least 5cm, and it's still falling.

I love snow. Walked with Leela to work this morning; there's something about snow that makes everything wonderful and clean when it has just fallen.

Makes me wish I had a long commute to my office :p

This has to be an entry for the Dumbest Idea Ever awards. Stop muggings by painting yellow privacy boxes in front of cashpoints. Yes, because the yellow lines on roads work so well.

I can see it now. A man stands at the edge of the yellow box while he waits for the lady in front to finish withdrawing money. Bored, he looks into the nearby shop windows, unconsciously shifting his balance. His toe edges over the line. Police rush in from all sides, batons raised, and they tackle him to the ground. Police helicopters hover overhead, police cars screech to a halt, filled with more men ready to assist. The officers scream 'Sir, stop resisting!', while beating our protagonist about the head. They drag his limp, bloodied body off to the awaiting meat wagon. Justice is served.

The mugger, meanwhile, stands outside the box waiting for the lady to finish her transaction.

But no, wait. I'm being unfair - they've done trials. Conclusive trials in Manchester, where there was a reduction of 66% of muggings at ATMs with privacy boxes, compared with a 34% reduction for those without. The mere presence of yellow boxes in the city has put the criminals off. Conclusive, eh? It must be because muggers have an innate respect for people's privacy. Or perhaps they are afraid of yellow. I don't know, but I thank god that our politicians do.

Labour government, painting over the cracks. Only this time, literally.

Just seen the latest version of the Google image search. Looks like even Google gets some things wrong from time to time:

The little popup box blocks the 'Next' button. I know I can scroll out of the box and it will disappear, but there's no delay before it opens; skipping to the bottom to click on 'Next' means I have to be careful, or I end up going somewhere I didn't mean to.

Not the biggest mistake I've ever seen, but I somehow expected better from Google, inventors of the perpetual beta.

I've started using my PDA a lot more recently - last week I found new drivers for my CF wifi card, so I've installed a decent browser and have started using it all over the flat. I've started using the to do list and calendar again too; I remember I tired of it last time, but I think the benefits will outweigh the 'No, I wrote 1, not I' moments. I've also put a new SD card in - £6 for 1GB? I remember when I had to pay £400 for 120MB of storage. Bah, when I was a lad...

I'm also about to replace Open Office with Real Office. It's not that Open Office is especially bad, or that I need any of the advanced MS Office features; it's just that it has a habit of going wrong when you try to do anything more complicated than plain paragraphs. I could probably get by with it if I just needed to write the occasional letter, but I need it more than that. I need Publisher too, so I'm getting the Office Pro bundle. In the past 3 years I've needed Publisher and Access about 5 times combined so it seems a bit of a waste to get them, but each time it's been quite crucial, and has caused no end of problems. And if I get them all under the correct license, it's only ~£40 extra. Ahh, things were so much easier when I was little and didn't worry about licenses... ;)

I want to upgrade to Vista too, but think that'll have to wait; I doubt my ageing system would be able to cope too well, and I don't have time for an upgrade right now. And it wouldn't hurt to wait for the first service pack either.

Oh yes, and my car. My car is still broken, but at least now it is booked in to a garage, for this Friday. This is, believe it or not, the first time I've ever taken my car to a garage for anything more serious than a new tyre or a broken wheel, so I have absolutely no idea what I'm walking into. I'm nervous.

And with that, I'd better get back to work. My PDA is saying I have 18 things left to do today, and that code won't write itself.

Yesterday I ordered Office, and realised that the new Cheltenham address may make my credit card company whine, as my other new addresses have in the past.

Eager to avoid any delays, I rang them up, told them that I was ordering something expensive off the internet and having it delivered to a different address to normal. I was then put through to another local call centre to give them a temporary address, this time in India. The nice lady I spoke to was very polite, it's just that she didn't understand anything that I said. She asked me over 15 security questions - I lost count - and I had to tell her what I wanted to do three times. No, I don't want to change my address, I want to add a temporary one. No, I don't want to make an enquiry about my latest bill? I just want to add a temporary address.

I then had to spell 'park'.

After 15 minutes of madness, she said that she had added my temporary address, and that all was fine. Woo.

Well, needless to say, today Dabs e-mailed me telling me that my credit card company had refused the payment. Yay.

I rang Barclaycard, this time getting through to the fraud department in a UK call centre. I had just answered the first 3 security questions when my other phone started ringing, with a with-held number. I told the lady I'd ring her back.

On the other line was the Barclaycard fraud department. Again. I answered some more security questions, and then asked them why it had been blocked. They said they didn't know. Great. But at least they promised me that it has been unblocked, and that now it will go through just fine.

It's a bit annoying for me, but at least it is good to know that if someone had stolen my details they wouldn't be able to order Office. Unless they went into a PC World - spending £500+ on the high street doesn't make Barclaycard blink. Even when it's in a random town you've never been to before.

I've e-mailed Dabs again, so we'll have to wait and see if it actually will go through fine. But what do you want to bet that they don't auth the payment in time for it to go out in today's post? It's going to arrive on Friday morning, when I'm out taking my car to the garage. And then I'll have no car to drive over the parcel place to pick it up.

Internet shopping - great until something goes wrong.

I finished installing Office 2007 about 15 minutes ago, and have loaded up most of the programs and had a fiddle. Everything seems very shiny, and even the ribbon seems like a good idea, so far.

But what impressed me most was that I have already managed to crash Publisher. All I tried to do was to import an image.

True, Publisher has always been the poor relative of the Office suite, and every release merely brings it up to the level you'd have expected it to be at in the previous release. Still, it seems a shame that the three main programs (Word, Excel and Powerpoint) are the only ones to benefit from the ribbon, at least most of the time.

In fact, most of the dialog boxes don't seem to have have changed much since Office 2000. This makes the whole thing a bit ragged at the edges, and gives a lot of it the feel of a half-finished beta. For example, Outlook doesn't have the ribbon at the top, but does at the top of the e-mail composition window (because that's Word based, I guess). Everything is blue and 2007, until you get to the 'Send' and 'To...' buttons, which are W95 grey. From Outlook screenshots I've seen, I don't think it's supposed to look like that - but it does on mine:

Even without that, it's all a bit too inconsistent and incompetent for a program suite that costs so much and is used by so many. The options systems in Outlook is a classic example - there are approximately one million different option menus hidden around the various screens and menus, and none of them let me tick a box that says 'Automatically expand all mail folders' or 'Read in plain text', which is a shame.

It's also a shame that Outlook notes still have the same interface that they had in Office 97. ~100px square yellow popup windows with no scroll bars? I think the fact the text is still rendered in Comic Sans sums up the dev team's attitude towards them.

It's all a bit sluggish, but then I expected that - it takes up 2GB when installed, and I'm running it on my laptop (Office 2007 requires XP or higher), which is a feeble 1.5GHz machine with a mere 512MB RAM. I can't help thinking of Impression Style on my A3000 - it runs fine from a single 800 KB disk, on a system with 1 MB RAM - and in many ways, it's better than Word. Still, hopefully Office should be a bit more responsive on my desktop when I get round to installing Vista on it.

Here's an entertaining aside: US customers pay ~£150 less for Office Pro, and get Accounting Express bundled with it too.

Now that I've been using Office for just over an hour, what do I think? Well, at first glance it looks very shiny, and I like lots of the little things they've done. But delve a little deeper and it's riddled with bloat, bugs, inconsistencies and missed opportunities.

A typical Microsoft product then.

Do I regret buying it? No more than I did when I clicked the order button. I've struggled for the past couple of years with Open Office, but no longer - I need full document compatibility with the stuff I'm sent by clients.

And, sadly, that's exactly why Office will sell fantastically well.

Last night was Leela's first on-call, and everything went fine. Until 11.30, when she was just off to bed - the phone rang, and they wanted a drug. She went in, and despite their records saying they had plenty, they didn't have it in stock, and they didn't have it anywhere else in the hospital. So she had to ring Gloucester and get them to send it over in a taxi. At midnight. Baptism of fire!

And today was my first trip to the garage. I took the car in at 8.15 this morning, and they rang me at 12:45 to say it was ready to collect. When I first saw the bill I gasped, but on reflection it's actually very reasonable. I will go there again.

They've given it a good service, replaced a whole bunch of bits and pieces, and reset the engine management system. The emissions light was apparently a sensor fault, but they couldn't see why it had triggered. Hopefully it will work fine now - I've got to drive it around a bit to teach the engine management system how I drive, and then see how it goes. Although, joy of joys, it looks like I need to have the dashboard stripped down to replace the blown bulbs, I need a new auxilary drivebelt and cambelt, which sound terrifyingly expensive, and I will need to replace my exhaust system within 12 months. Yay! Cars are such a joy!

So, I just gave my car a little test drive over to Sainsburys (10-15 minutes), and it stalled 5 times. Twice without even moving the length of the car. Looks like I'll be booking it into the garage again then...

And before anyone accuses me of my driving style, this is sitting in traffic in neutral, with handbrake on, clutch fully depressed (like me) and my foot off the accelerator.

Am now very tempted to just drive it to the scrap yard and pay them to 'fix' it... ;)

Hot on the heels of that petition against road pricing, there is now a petition for it. Yes, that's right, there's a petition for road pricing, and it even has signatures. But they won't be getting mine, and I won't be linking to it either.

I probably stand to gain from a road pricing scheme, as most of my miles are off-peak, on little quiet roads and empty motorways, but I'm still against it. It's the big brother principle of being tracked, and not knowing how much your journey is going to cost. Or getting delayed in a meeting and having to pay the full whack for getting stuck on the M25 in rush hour, as if the delays weren't bad enough. How are you going to charge customers for that? And no matter what the government proclaims, on top of that your driving patterns will be available to police; the insurance companies will want in; etc etc.

They say it would be fairer because those who travel greater distances would pay the most, but I thought that's how petrol duty worked? And if you're not getting taxed by the gallon (sorry, litre), maybe I'll just swap to a nice big 4x4, then I can just roll over the fields to avoid the jams. It's not like they're not already getting enough money out of those of us who drive - in the last financial year I paid £750 in fuel tax alone, and I only did ~11000 miles.

If improved public transport could get me door to door from Cheltenham to Sevenoaks in 2 1/2 hours for £20, then I'd be all for it. I currently face twice that time and price, excluding taxis, but it's not just the money - it would be virtually impossible for me to carry my bags, boxes and equipment across 5 or so vehicle changes. Public transport can't even get me to the supermarket and back, and just the thought of the queue at Sainsburys - hundreds of people loading their weekly shopping on and off buses - makes me giggle.

It's a pipe dream - public transport can't and won't be able to replace private transport, and it can't even get close, no matter what hair-brained scheme they come up with. It's for people who are too young or too old to drive, or those who live in or commute into large cities. I don't see why people who don't fit into those categories should be forced to foot the bill for those who do.

If they could make public transport a viable alternative then it would be lovely, but it would require far more money than is going to be raised by any road pricing scheme. Especially if you consider that if public transport was indeed brilliant, people would switch, the government would lose a substantial amount of income from petrol tax and road tax, or any road pricing scheme that was introduced. And when starved of money, they'd just quietly cut back again, and if not from public transport then from somewhere else. Where this week? NHS is on it's knees, armed forces are stretched to breaking point... ahh, never mind, those schools had too many computers anyway.

I'd also be interested to see the effect on the commercial transport industry, the industries that depend on them, and the cost of living as a whole. Not to mention places like Cornwall, who depend on the tourist industry - if getting stuck in a 5 hour traffic jam on the A30 wasn't bad enough, are visitors going to put up with localised time-sensitive congestion charges too? And if not, what exactly is the point of a road pricing scheme touted as a solution to congestion?

If it comes people are going to pay, and it's not just going to be the drivers.

The car's with the garage again today - but only just, it stalled 5 times on the one minute drive to them up the road. Three times without moving, waiting for the lights to change. Jokes.

It's been there since 8am this morning, and I'm still waiting to hear how it's going. Unfortunately in this case, I doubt that no news will be good news, at least where my wallet is concerned.

Stop the press! Literally just as I was about to post the entry, my phone rang. Off to pick up the car now - wish me luck.

Update: Seems a bit better now! He cleaned the EGR valve, and it now seems to be fine. Need a bit more driving before I can be sure, but... fingers crossed!

From Wikipedia:

EGR is typically not employed... at idle (low-speed, zero load) because it would cause unstable combustion, resulting in rough idle.

Interesting...