Category: Personal

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New Aquisitions

So, it’s been a busy time. I have bought a new TV to replace my 40″ Sony that I bought in the summer of 2006. I don’t know if six years is a good length of time for a TV. I guess so. The problem is that I am an early adopter of technology [see this post here – currently in draft form].

The old TV was HD Ready which, it turns out, is only 720 lines of beautiful picture. It looked deep and gorgeous in HD. But it was time to upgrade. There were just too many TV advances for me to ignore anymore.

I now have an LG 3D TV. I went for 3D because Gran Turismo will output 3D and I like playing that. Do I think that 3D is a good cinema format? No. But for Gran Turismo . . .

Current TV Room Set Up:

 Home Cinema

Current Equipment:

  • Television – LG 47LM670T
  • AV Amplifier – Sony STR-DN1030
  • BluRay player – Sony BDP-S790
  • Satelite Decoder – Amstrad Sky HD
  • Console – Sony PS3 320Gb
  • Front left and right and passive sub-woofer – Bose Acoustimass Cube
  • Active sub-woofer – Sony
  • Centre, SL, SR, SBR, SBL speakers –  Sony

When I get the chance I also use a Logitech Driving Force Pro steering wheel.

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Percentage

Recent tweets have carried some information about me in terms of percentages.
The first percentage I wrote in an email and it was 50% when I was trying to be realistic.
Then I tweeted some values, 5% and 1%. I’m pretty sure that the percentage is now in exponential decay. The more time the lower the percentage.

P=100e^(-0.05t)

Soon to be looking at a 3D TV. Will post about whether I think it’s any good.

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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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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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