Communications

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Considerations

Kneel
I haven’t been running for about 10 days and I really am feeling as though I need to expend some energy! I think I injured my knee during a 5 mile road run that I did on the 28th December.

Create Maps or search from 80 million at MapMyRun

 

I’m pretty sure that I injured my knee on this route. There was no cross country. Now, my knee only hurts when I kneel on it. I can walk and run fine. I went to see the Doc last night and he said that I should keep running. There are two things that might happen. The injury might improve and so that means I don’t have to worry or the injury will get worse which would mean I can actually find out what it is. I’m hoping to run tonight.

Clouds
Do I pay for some extra space on one of my clouds? I currently use Microsoft SkyDrive for keeping my computers syncronised. I have just had to change from having Skydrive Mesh installed (which I really rather liked) to having to install Skydrive (which I’ll get used to). I have had to change my working practises slightly to accomodate this change as Microsoft are turning off the Mesh service.

I can pay GBP30 a year for an extra 100GB of storage on my cloud which would essentially mean I can back everything I do at work and home up. I also own a NAS drive currently set up at 1TB. I also back things up onto that. How many back-ups should I have?

I am concerned about an EMP.  Not sure why but it does bother me!

Shatner
William Shatner (for it is he) recently tweeted and I’m going to quote him here as I really liked it:

Now repeat after me: Jedis and Yoda: Science Fantasy
Starfleet and Tricorders: Science Fiction
MBB

The guy is great. Although he tweets a lot and fills up my “friends only” tweet space. I have two accounts. See this communication.

These are my latest considerations.

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Latest iPhone Backgrounds

These are my latest iPhone backgrounds. Many thanks to @Cmdr_Hadfield and his tweeting of pictures from the ISS!

Current lock screen:
Sunrise through the atmosphere.

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Current home screen:
The ISS solar panels.

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The Price Of Love?

For Christmas I had promised WW a new overnight bag. A nice leather one. I did put a price limit on it though as I thought some bags got to silly prices. WW seemed happy enough with the price limit and we thought that she would be able to find something suitable.

There we were in House of Fraser in Bluewater and looking at the bags when we found one that was the perfect size, colour, material and type. In fact it was perfect. It was so perfect that when I looked at the price tag I thought about selling my car and trading it in for the bag, however in reality I laughed out loud and bitterly moaned that it probably only costs about GBP30 to make. I think the brand of the bag was Chloe, which means nothing to me. A price tag of GBP1195 was a touch steep though.

So WW is still looking for a bag!

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I’ve Seen The Future

Ok, now these are impressive. I was at the Kiddicare store in Thurrock, Essex and I noticed that the shelf tags looked quite a bit different to the card barcode things you normally get in a superstore or shop.
I looked a bit closer at these tags and was pretty sure they were LCD displays with some sort of stock count thing going on. While closely inspecting a shelf tag a store worker came along with a bar-code reader device and so I asked if the tags were LCD.

YES!

I also asked if they were radio controlled with real time stock updates.

YES! The stock tags update every five minutes.

I was so impressed with this use of tech that I nearly forgot what I went into the shop to buy. I have seen the future, and it will be.

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The Country

Here’s some photographs I took while walking the dog yesterday morning. I think next time I want some really good shots that capture the look and feel of what I see I’ll have to take my D-SLR.
Problem is that by the time I have set the D-SLR up properly the moment will be lost!

WW2 Barrack Ruins

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Sunrise

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The Path

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More Sunrise

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Even More Sunrise

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Magic Page

My #2 son likes reading books. Although that’s a touch inaccurate. Really he likes sitting on someone’s lap and getting them to read a book to him. He’s only 18 months so I think that’s forgivable.
I am pretty sure that he knows something that we don’t though. Whenever I get to the last page of a book he keeps trying to find another page. He scrabbles at the cover and tries to prise another page open. Now normally these are board books and so he can be forgiven for thinking there is another page, but I just ownder if one day a new page will open and create more of a story for him. I’d consider that magic.

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Testing Heaven And Hell

In my last communication I stated that I thought the difference between my two relative frequencies was not significant. I think I have now performed a test, but whether it is valid or not can be up to you.

If Heavy Metal focuses on the dark side of life then there should be many references to to Hell in the song title. Conversly, there should be only a few references to the term Heaven in song titles. If this is the case then it could be expected that the frequencies of each would be independent of each other, assuming the subject matter for songs is random and the use of words follows this.

My Calculations follow, but essentially I have found that, at a 5% significance level, the distribution of Hell and Heaven is random and that the frequency of hell is close enough to the frequency of heaven for this to be so.

hell1

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I am fully aware that I have really pushed the limits of my significance test and it probably doesn’t even work properly for this type of problem. But, my happiness about this communication remains about 75% (+- 3% for 95% confidence level).

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Heaven and Hell

I’ve been thinking about the dark nature of heavy metal music and I am not sure that the reputation is deserved!

My hypothesis is that heavy metal music and hard rock is not at all as bad-ass as people think. I predict that the number of song title references to Hell will be fewer than those that reference Heaven. At the time of writing this is just a confirmation bias speaking.

Assuming that my music tastes for heavy metal and hard rock are reasonably consistent with the music genre and assuming that I have a random collection of this type of music in my library I will perform a count of the words in the song titles of my library.

This really is being done live. I don’t know the results at the moment. Here goes:

Heaven:

  • Heaven’s Dead
  • Heaven Sent
  • When Heaven Comes Down
  • In Heaven
  • Heaven Can Wait (Gamma Ray)
  • Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
  • Heaven Can Wait (Iron Maiden)
  • Stairway To Heaven
  • Heaven Help
  • Heaven For The weather, Hell For The company
  • Heaven Can Wait (Meatloaf)
  • Good Girls Go to Heaven
  • Christmas In Heaven
  • I Wish U Heaven
  • To Be With You In Heaven
  • South Of Heaven
  • Heaven’s Gate
  • Super-Charger Heaven
  • Heaven and Hell
  • Heaven Tonight
  • Heaven Beside You

So that’s 21 song titles that include the word Heaven out of around 5000 songs in my library.

Now for Hell:

  • Cold Day In Hell
  • Right Next Door To Hell
  • Highway To Hell
  • Go To Hell
  • Heaven for the Weather, Hell for the Company
  • To Hell We Ride
  • Hell Child
  • Bat Out Of Hell
  • Into The Lungs Of Hell
  • Green Hell
  • Hotter Than Hell
  • Help Me I Am In Hell
  • Hellraiser
  • Run Like Hell
  • Come Hell Or High Water
  • To Hell And Back Again
  • Hell Awaits
  • Hellbound
  • Hell Raisers
  • Heaven and Hell
  • Hells Bells
  • Hell Ain’t A Bad Place To Be
  • Hell Or High Water
  • Private Hell
  • Hell To Pay
  • Earth On Hell

So that’s 26 references to Hell in a song title out of about 5000 songs in my library.

Now, I have no idea if that a significant statistical difference. It doesn’t seem so to me. It also appears from the titles of some of these songs that perhaps the context in which the title is used might be more important. A couple of the Heaven songs seem more to do with the dark side that good stuff and some of the Hell songs come from sayings.

I don’t think any conclusions can be drawn from this initial study. Perhaps with a research grant I’d be able to investigate the context of these words within the Heavy Metal form and get a good answer.

Rock On!

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Angel

Here’s a picture of the guardian angel I have looing over my Christmas tree. We have a non-religious star at the top of the tree and this chap is standing to attention just below that. It’s nice to consider him overlooking the children and keeping an eye on them. Much like Obi-Wan in this comminication.

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Bring The Noise

The latest fashion for drinking water from a bottle with a “sports top” has caused an epidemic of slurp sounds as people release the bottle from thier lips and air rushes into the bottle.

As an aside, I would have to say that the bottled water industry is an utter con. In the UK practically all tap water is potable. It is such a waste of resources and CO2 that water is put into plastic or glass bottles and then moved around the country by truck to be sold in shops as an alternative to the (often purer) water that is supplied into every home by the kitchen tap. Bottled water should be taxed greatly to compensate for the waste. The marketers of bottled water have done a marvellous job and the environment is going to suffer. I can’t think of a single argument for selling bottled water in the UK.

So, the prefered delivery recepticle for bottles of water at the moment is the sports top. A bottle top that doesn’t have to be turned to open the bottle, just pulled with the hands and teeth. This, in itself, is not a problem. The problem is the small aperture for the movement of water into the mouth. When squeezing the bottle to force liquid refreshment into the mouth the bottle compresses and sometimes crackles as it does so, this is reasonably noisy. But the most annoying part is when the lips are removed from the bottle and the air rushing back into the bottle causes an awful slurping sound. The gust of wind pushing past the lips and teeth and through the aperture can make a sound that just grates.

When bottle tops were screw tops there was plenty of space for air to enter the bottle IF you chose to have a small gap for air at the top of your lips, just under your nose. Now, apparently, this is an incovenient method of bottle top. Everyone should be using the sports top but not everyone is doing sport. I think it should be renamed the common top for lazy people. Let’s have a new design top for proper sports people.

To stop the slurp you just need to blow air into the bottle and allow the water to flow out into your mouth without creating the negative pressure in the bottle. Simple.

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Table

I was called to the front room the other day as son #1 wanted to show off his handy work. He had set up his play crockery set as a tea party on the little table. I was very surprised by the symmetry and neatness of it all! Quite pleasing to the eye. What have I created?

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Meme

One of the standard explanations and examples I use when teaching the mechanics module of A Level is to consider driving a car around town. Most pupils have experienced, or are aware, of people thier age who drive circuits around the local town trying to get noticed. I used to just talk about this practice but a few months back a friend was talking about his teenage experience of this form of behaviour and he used the term:

Barry Laps

This term didn’t really need any explaination as I already knew what it meant. I’ve never really partaken in the the Barry Lap experience. I think the closest I got was riding around Bishop’s Stortford on my Honda NTV 650 with Daryl on his Silverwing just after we had set up radio communication between us. We went around town a few times chatting to each other on the way. Being able to easily communicate between different bikes was far more of a novalty than trying to get attention from onlookers. This was in 1999 and quite before either of us owned mobile phones.

Anyway, I hope that with my continued use that the term Barry Lap might one day make it into the OED!

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Testament – KoKo

Went with my best man and best pal to watch Testament at KoKo in Camden on Fri 30 Nov 2012.
They were good and very good fun to watch. Not a great front man but the music was hard and fast.
Liked the venue. Small and intimate.

Here are my photos:

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School Visit

My sons wanted their bedtime toys to come to work with me today. So Rabbit and WooWoo sat in the front seat of the car so they could see where they were going. Then a bit later in the day I took them into my classroom. Here they are in front of my desk and visualiser.

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Rabbit and WooWoo in my office at work.

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Upgrade

It’s coming up to the time when I can upgrade my phone. Upgrade is a curious term as essentially it means I sign up for two more years on an increased tariff. So although it sounds like I’m getting something for nothing it’s the mobile carrier that makes the money!

I need to get a phone with more memory. I don’t like having to delete apps because I want more music on my phone. My iPhone 4 has 32Gb of memory and it’s not enough. This means I have to go for a 64Gb phone. Also, as I have completely bought into the closed garden that is the App store and iTunes. I don’t want to have to spend a load of money re-buying all the apps I have for iOS on another OS. However, if the contract and phone is a ton cheaper that might be the most cost effective way to get what I want.

Anyway. In a few weeks I will trundle down to the Vodafone shop and sign up to spending a ton of money with them so I can have a phone that will fit all the stuff I have bought from Apple. The thing is that along with the new phone I need a case, screen protectors and new cables given that Apple have decided to “improve” their USB connector. That’s even more money. Is it worth it given that the network coverage in my house is rather shabby!

 

Network Coverage

IF Vodafone are willing to give me a Sure Signal box then I am going to stick with them. It’s a box that connects to my hub or switch and gives me a good signal throughout my house. At the moment if I am in the lounge then WW can’t get in touch although I guess she could call the home phone if I knew where that was!

If Vodafone can’t do the deal then come March I’m off to another carrier that has a good signal throught my entire house.

 

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