Number 1 took this photo. I guess it shows his main interest: Nutella! Perhaps it signifies the path of growing knowledge?
iTunes Albums
I spent a few hours at the weekend sorting out my iTunes library and then changing it back. I’ll explain:
My car stereo lets the iPhone plug into it. I can then browse the library and select songs and playlists etc. from the stereo display. Unfortunately the display doesn’t have many characters and so long album names scroll across which takes some time. If there are two parts to an album and I’ve jogged the select wheel while going over a bump then I have to wait ages and concentrate on the stereo display while the album name scrolls across. This is a touch unsafe and irritating.
So I decided to rename all multi-part albums with a 1 or 2 prefix so that I could see which part I had selected quickly on the car stereo display. Doing this took a while as I have my music library on my NAS drive and iTunes takes a while to adjust the music tags and then copy the new files to the phone.
That night I slept rather uneasily. It was distressing me that my albums were not correctly named. It seemed wrong.
So the next day I set about changing it back. Again it took a while but I feel more relaxed about it now. The albums are all correctly named and I’ll just have to be careful when selecting these songs in the car.
See my music collection here.
When I mentioned to WW that I had changed everything back to what it should be she said “I thought you’d do that”. I guess she knows me very well.
One Of The Rules
I broke a cardinal rule today. Car windscreen wipers should ALWAYS be left at the “off” position when the car is turned off. I didn’t do that today!
The only time it is ok to keep the wipers in an “on” position is if you are driving a Le Mans prototype car or similar endurance car.
How Many Bottles?
The latest Robinson’s Juice promotion involves handing over some profit to transform playgrounds around the country.
Transform your patch
Here’s what it says on the back of a large juice bottle:
Sometimes people get caught up on this sort of thing and don’t think about the numbers involved.
Let’s consider a small playground of size 6 metres by 4 metres, which might just be enough for a set of swings. To pay for the transformation of this mediocre patch of land Robinson’s would have to sell 600 x 400 = 240 000 bottles of juice. SERIOUSLY?
If Robinson’s sell nearly a quarter of a million bottles then they would have to cough up for the transformation of a patch on land into some swings and soft surface. I reckon this conversion would cost about £6000 (a severe guess but probably about right) and this represents a cost per bottle of 2.5p and given a profit margin of, say 40%, this means Robinson’s are laughing all the way to the shareholders’ meeting.
Essentially this is an ingenious piece of marketing and I think they should be congratulated. Well done Robinson’s. It looks like they are doing wonders for the community but in reality they are doing little.
A similar scam, sorry marketing ploy, was run by Pampers when they said that for each pack of nappies sold they would donate a single vaccination to UNICEF. This is marketing at its worst. Trying to make companies seem like they care when in reality they are just doing it to make more money (the basics of capitalism I know!).
If these companies were truly serious about changing playgrounds or helping vaccinate the world they would publish something along the following lines:
We have decided to turn ALL profits for one year over to XXXX charity so that they are able to further our combined missions to improve the health and well-being of the children of this fragile Earth.
If a company did volunteer ALL the profits from one product line then I would happily buy them over another but when it’s just part of the marketing campaign then be cynical.
Snap Shot
Here is a snap shot of the skies above Essex on the Easter Monday of 2012. You might find this interesting, you might not. I don’t care.
The picture is a screen grab from the iPhone Flight Finder app.
Dusk
It’s a still evening in Kent.
In the still of the night.
Talk Talk Part 4
My lovely router (a D-Link) started to drop connections and act a little bit funny. I put this down to overheating as I had lost the little rubber feet upon which it was meant to stand. This may or may not have been the cause for its miss-behaviour but that was my diagnosis. So I needed another router and reluctantly I went to the back cupboard and got the free router I received from Talk Talk when I signed up with them. It looks pretty grotty and has a huge Talk Talk logo on the front panel.
So I un-plugged the old lovely router and held my breath. Would the new one work? I plugged it in and turned it on, an on-switch is a luxury. Lights flashed and there wasn’t a whirring sound, the connection light blinked and flashed and went green.
I plugged in, logged in to the router and had a look at the settings. It didn’t look like I could change the SSID! Arrghhh. I don’t want my wireless network to be called Talk-Talk8654. I left it.
Later I loaded the router admin page on the iPhone and suddenly there was a settings page for me to play with. I think there was a refresh issue with the PC browser that meant the settings didn’t show. I have now changed the SSID and am a happy bunny.
I know Talk Talk are slammed in public relations but I have to say I have had an excellent service from them! Please remember that anecdote isn’t evidence!
France 2
In the year 2010, summer, we went to France again. See the 2008 holiday here.
Friday 30 July – Travel from Kent to Tours. It was very hot.
Saturday 31 July – Travel from Tours to gite near Sainte-Foy-La-Grande. It was very hot and also as the first (ish) day of August it was chaos with all the Parisiens driving down to the south of France.
Now after this I don’t really have a breakdown of the things we did. We went to lots of places. The weather cooled to about 22-23 Celcius for the rest of the holiday. I didn’t have internet access. Son #1 was hot but very well behaved. He didn’t like the pizza we bought at restaurants and so didn’t eat a great deal.
View Larger Map
Places we visited
- Bergerac
- Duras
- Saint Emillion
- Marmande
And lots of other stuff. I don’t think I wrote it down somewhere! I ate plenty of cheese and baguette and drank plenty of local wine. I also spent quite a bit of time driving on the PSP playing GT Mobile. I was hoping to increase my garage ready for the release of GT5.
On the last night at the gite, Friday 13th August, son #1 slipped and hit his head on the table in the lounge. He cut a big gash in his eye and so we went to the hospital. WW looked after him as I wasn’t allowed in to the room. He had three stitches and looked very sorry for himself!
We left on Saturday the 14th August and headed back to the same hotel in Tours. I like Tours. It’s a lovely town. On the Sunday we headed back to the UK, it rained.
80s Rock
I have been buying up CDs of all my records or tapes over the last year or so. Everytime I think I have finished I get a snippet of another song in my head and off I go and search Amazon and EBay. A list of bands that I could consider slightly embarassing to admit liking are below. I haven’t bought Hysteria by Def Leppard yet as I can’t find it cheap enough!
If it gets you emotionally then that’s what you like! The best piece of music will send a shiver down your spine.
Here’s the list of bands in my 80s playlist:
- Adrian Smith And Project
- Britny Fox
- Dio
- Dokken
- Don Dokken
- Extreme
- Great White
- Lynch Mob
- Mr. Big
- Poison
- Ratt
- Salty Dog
- Tesla
- Whitesnake
For a complete list of music on my iPhone look at this page.
Avoidance
This week I shall be mostly trying to avoid the Super Bowl result. I recorded it last night but will take a few days to watch it.
Kids, you see. They don’t get it. Gone are the days of missing lectures because I stayed up until x o’clock watching the Super Bowl and getting a bit drunk. Now I have kids I have the issue that they don’t seem to want to get out of bed late or have a lazy day. They always wake up by 06:30 and just rush, rush all day. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
So I’ll be watching the NFL final game over a few nights, trying to make the next play before falling asleep and getting up with the kids. I guess it beats my college days of not really seeing past the first quarter while playing Chase The Ace and making far too much noise in the hall’s tv room!