| Latest invention |
[Nov. 19th, 2008|08:17 am] |
It's a sign for public and private places that uses a combination of passive aggressive wording and familiar iconography to induce a dark, reflective, soul-destroying mirth in its victims.
One such sign would include the humans from these signs (Elderly people crossing) with the text "Elderly people will be tolerated".
This concept could be extended to people with learning disabilities and children, depending on the location of the sign.
The idea being that the sign is both showing reckless indifference to the feelings of any elderly people reading it while at the same time offering a crass reminder to grossly intolerant people who are annoyed by dithering seniors that they might even find useful. It's funny for me because it fails/succeeds in so many ways, it's simple, it's not rude until you think about it.
I thought of a few others but they tended to sound like stern Victorian warnings.
There's probably an element of Andrew Sachs Brand/Ross disrespect in my thinking, but it actually came to me on the way back from the post office where we were behind an impatient man who was "tsking" at the people in front of him in the queue who were in no particular hurry - a state we should all be in. When the impatient man reached the front of the queue he discovered that he'd forgotten a vital piece of information required to complete his transaction and was forced to return home for it. If he hadn't been in such a hurry he wouldn't have forgotten his vital information and wouldn't have found it necessary to express his own intolerance of the slower-operating members of our society.
[edit]
It was also influenced by the various nanny state "linguistic engineering" signs that have started popping up in the last few years, one of my favourites is the "No smoking" sign used by First Great Western and possibly others. It reads "This station is a No Smoking station". Cleverly trying to make you think about the problem from the station's point of view rather than telling you what not to do. Or not so cleverly, in my opinion. It's a blunt instrument that may as well say "This sign is a trick to make you read this sign" |
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| Twhirl updates and Apple Waveburner |
[Nov. 11th, 2008|08:57 am] |
I've you have Logic Studio or at least Waveburner installed on a Mac and you try to install Adobe AIR applications such as Twhirl you'll possibly run into the annoyance of having Waveburner try to open the Air application instead of Air. This is because Waveburner is set as the default application for .air files, but it's easily changed either as a one-off for the file you're trying to open or for all .air files. Just do command-i or the mouse equivalent to get "Get Info" for a .air file and on the Info window you should look for the Open with: section, expand it using the little disclosure arrow or whatever they're called. Change the application from Waveburner to Adobe AIR Application installer and click Change All if you want the new default for all .air files to be Adobe AIR's installer.
I'm wondering if AIR's own installer is unable to check whether it is the default application for .air files, which is what leads to it not claiming ownership of the .air suffix. I had hoped Macs were above all that "owning three letter extensions" nonsense. |
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| Barrow unfairness |
[Nov. 8th, 2008|04:03 pm] |
There was a site of great antiquity near here, but Eton College built a rowing lake on it, they've ruined the amazing view from the Thames towpath by building a large bank along it, the earthworks for this also wiped out a number of barrows, after having archaeologist sift through them first. They found various things, including a cow, a scythe and human remains. They've generously reconstructed one barrow with a similar profile in an area that is fenced off as a nature reserve. The Olympic rowing events will be held on this site in 2012, you'll probably be able to spot the fake barrow from any airborne camera shots of the site so you have advance notice of something to look out for.
I still miss the view north from the river, though, it was a graphic example of a flood plain set in a broad U shaped valley, which starts around Farnham Common to the north and beyond Holyport and Fifield to the South. You used to be able to get a real feel for it but now there are various spoil heaps, banks and landscaping literally blocking the view, this includes the large mounds built to the north of Dorney common by the side of the Jubilee river. Grrr. |
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| A pound for every time #1 |
[Oct. 9th, 2008|12:14 pm] |
Dear Client,
Our initial inspection of your proposal suggests that they will allow your business objectives to be met, your costs to be minimised and risks controlled. The symbiotic leveraging of in-house development skills and outsourcing of critical components should ensure all deliverables complete in a timely fashion. Code review results indicate that all parties involved have core competencies.
We have some concerns that future requirements may not be sufficiently covered by the proposal and would draw your attention to our technical document available here [URL goes here]. We wish you every success moving forward. [vomit]
Yours,
Slimy Consult Ant
The document would, of course, list all the arse-covering pitfalls. Maybe I'll post that later. |
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| More adventures in IP telephon |
[Sep. 22nd, 2008|10:55 am] |
In my last post I whine about telephones a lot. In this one I'll be a bit more upbeat. The unistim driver is part of the development version of Asterisk so I thought I'd give it a try by building Asterisk from source on my FreeBSD 7.0 server. The build and install went well and once I'd remembered to open up the relevant ports using pf I had my Nortel 1120E up and running, you have to enter a public IP address in the unistim.conf file on FreeBSD because it lacks a feature found on Linux but that was the only extra tweaking required.
Then I thought I'd do more bleeding edge research. I installed the SVN version of the Asterisk GUI 2.0. This turned out to be not so great but it's a work in progress so rough edges are to be expected. I was expecting to see the unistim channel driver's configuration (including the extension I'd set up) appearing in the UI but it did not. There's probably a good reason for this, but it means that I'll have to stick to the CLI tools for managing Asterisk, something I was hoping to avoid as the customer I have in mind wouldn't be happy to use a text only interface.
The great thing is that all this stuff works without mucking about, even with me being awkward and using FreeBSD instead of the more popular Linux operating system and a non-SIP phone.
Now, I could just tip the whole thing into chaos by adding some H323 gateways... |
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| IP Telephony |
[Sep. 22nd, 2008|08:03 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | rant | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
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Loads of businesses are switching to IP telephony, it should free your business from the nightmarish telecom support companies who are keen to confuse at the same time as providing very little in the way of genuine support.
Telecoms has operated under a veil of secrecy, with manufacturers obfuscating their technology and resellers bound into secret oaths to never disclose how any of their kit actually works. It has been common practice, for instance, to have support engineers on a new contract mysteriously removing any technical documentation that may have been available on site "to prevent the customer making changes". I can see why they'd do this, their job is easier if the customer doesn't meddle but at the same time if you get a new installation you'll almost never receive the documentation that shipped with the equipment unless you install the equipment yourself and then you'll hit the other problems.
The manufacturers, such as Panasonic or Nortel will only provide vital tools and resources to registered individual employees of registered companies. Unless you have a friendly working relationship with one of these people you'll be seriously short of luck when it comes to getting your office phone system up and running. Oh yes, it looks great in theory, you can go to Nortel's website and read about their standards compliant SIP phones but if you actually buy one you'll find that even if you bought it from Nortel you're likely to be unable to update the firmware, even to fix security issues, because they don't trust you. Then there's the non-standard standards to worry about, for instance Nortel sells the same hardware with two different firmware releases, one for SIP and one for their own BCM standard which uses something called uniSTIM which appears to be an IP telephony standard that's great for "enterprise".
If you read the brochures, you'll find that you can upgrade the firmware in a UniSTIM system to support SIP instead and presumably vice-versa. No. Actually you can't do that unless you're bestest friends with Nortel and you can find this out by trying to become friends with Nortel by registering.
I registered, thinking that it'd be like registering with Cisco so I could download firmware for my excellent Cisco access point. Registration failed with an Oracle 8 exception, attempting to register again I was told that I was already registered so I performed a password reset (I'd not entered a password at all, at this point!) which worked, I got access, I was told that I wasn't entitled to firmware. I was not their bestest friend.
I bought the phone from a phone dealer at a car boot sale but I could equally have bought it from a phone dealer's online shop or even from Nortel. Unless I buy a service package from Nortel they won't give me the firmware for their product. The less restrictive manufacturers will pick up the "long tail" people who are more likely to be testing the water for deployment of IP telephony in SMEs, these businesses often can't afford telecoms consultancy and are keen to be self sufficient wherever possible. This is exactly where Nortel is going to lose, unless it opens up a bit. So it was time to see if other IP phone manufacturers are as restrictive as Nortel.
Grandstream, a budget manufacturer, seems to have its firmware available for download.
Aastra does too, in fact it's on the product page and there's no registration - just grab a .zip file.
Polycom, oh...some downloads but *not* the current version, ridiculous.
Linksys has easy to access firmware and they're part of Cisco, you'd think they'd just make it a little bit annoying to access, wouldn't you?
LG-Nortel's IP phones seem to have freely accessible firmware for download, so the problem seems to be Nortel itself.
In short, it looks as though most IP phone manufacturers realise that the IP phone sector is diverse and their audience may not be a telecoms professional working for a telecoms support company but may be a person who is part of the IT team and has been given responsibility for IP telephony. Nortel may have got the memo, but it chose to ignore it. Which is odd, as their IP phones are competitively priced and made in China just like all the others.
Nortel clearly wants to be special in the same way that dinosaurs are special.
I've discovered that there's a uniSTIM channel driver for Asterisk, so I'm going to muck about with this to see if the phone is actually nice to use but I can't really recommend a product that makes the customer feel so powerless.
Someone else found Nortel's literature misleading
UNISTIM support for Asterisk
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| Korg Wavestation A/D |
[Sep. 20th, 2008|11:03 am] |
This thing has the best front panel of any electronic item manufactured in the past 20 years, I reckon. Ancient stuff with dials wins against it, but in the 1990s era the designers of the Wavestation must've decided to put one of every hardware UI widget on the 19 inch 2U front panel.
It has
- Large LCD
- Soft keys
- Numeric keypad
- Jog wheel style rotary encoded knob
- Joystick
- Diamond shaped 4 way cursor key
- LED bargraphs
It sounds awesome and I find it hard to believe its age, it can do things that the Logic softsynths don't even come close to doing. Having said that, it's possible to buy a software version of this synth from Korg but it's dongle protected or similar and promises to be a pain in the backside. You also don't get the wonderfully excessive front panel. |
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| Stuck in the dark ages |
[Aug. 31st, 2008|05:25 pm] |
OK, lazyweb, tell me where I can find a software project such as a CMS, forum or blogging tool where the developers have used the facilities available in just about any database server in the way that they were intended.
If you want an example of what I mean, view the PHP source code of phpBB3. This thing is like Windows 95, built on DOS in the way it clings to MySQL 3 style tables, even on its SQL Server schema!
It's not the lack of transactions that bothers me it is the lack of relations - the only constraints are primary keys. There's no sign of normalisation, there's not a hint of there being any possibility of referential integrity. So let's look elsewhere, how about Wordpress? No, just as bad... ok, what about the tool that looks after my bandwidth graphing, Cacti, nope...
So, I started searching and found that perhaps Drupal can use InnoDB, as can Mediawiki, in fact some people have a hard time persuading it not to judging by the bug reports I found. Unfortunately these two are just a bit too huge for my purposes - I'm looking for a schema to test out a schema parser that I've written.
Then my searches turned grim. I found this post about expression engine where the moderators were clueless, as I understand it this is a commercial product and yet it defaults to using MyISAM and when questioned the question got hidden away and nobody really answered it except to provide some very good "why the hell not?" evidence.
I wrote a PHP framework recently which had to work with an existing SQL Server schema that uses stored procedures to provide complete encapsulation, this helps with security, auditing and robustness. This weekend I ported the rather rough and ready schema parser to read MySQL schemas because I'm keen to see if I could automate the complete class generation process and generate applications merely from a schema. Then I realised that the only schema that I had which contained the same relational detail was one I'd written in order to port the framework to MySQL, something I did about a month ago.
During the writing of the framework I did a bit of research into things like Rails, Django and a few of the existing PHP frameworks (mainly laughing at, I mean focussing on CakePHP, really). Typically I found that I'd reinvented several wheels but shockingly my code was shorter and clearer which almost never happens. I was also pretty scared by the fact that I had a grasp of certain things that I didn't even knew I knew about, so it was all very educational. Anyway, this thing I have created centres around the schema as stored by the database, not as almost all the others seem to do, a schema stored in a descriptive language of some sort. To do this, the database has to be able to describe relationships between fields in different tables in quite a detailed but proper way. It looks like MySQL is now a good choice for doing this, coming closer to SQL Server's capabilities than I was expecting. But nobody seems to use it. Instead, as I dig through various open source projects, I see programmers who don't seem to care that they have a nice RDBMS. I appreciate that scale in web apps can mean moving data away from the centre, but surely that just means that the centre should be the most robust thing ever and not some MyISAM pile of junk that requires the application to do all the integrity checks.
Nobody even seems to use bound variables in PHP, either, then they jump through hoops to use nutty data cleaning scripts all over the place. Man alive, this stuff can be cured with a few moments thought and you can even extend the data objects to include bounds checking, domain validation and all kinds of relational goodness. But nobody seems to do it!
This post is probably semi-unreadable but that's how this blog thing works for me.
P.S. I also read up on SQL alchemy which looks pretty good, but then I found two alternatives that claim to be so much better and I realised I was actually reading a Python tool measuring competition so actually they're probably all unusable in the real world which is a damn shame. |
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| Estate agent simulator |
[Aug. 29th, 2008|03:15 pm] |
Using part of the idea behind megahal, the markov chains and the data from the wonderful property-bee.com I've created an online tool for writing estate agency prose.
It's here at the moment and a bit ugly. I kind of prefer ugly, though, so it'll probably stay that way. |
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| Wordpress Automatic Update |
[Aug. 18th, 2008|07:01 pm] |
Anyone who has used Wordpress and has performed an upgrade by hand knows that it can be quite scary, particularly if you've got a complicated setup. A few versions ago Wordpress started including an automatic upgrade plugin. The problem is, this plugin has some problems.
The detection of whether PHP can write to a directory isn't done with PHP's own is_writable() function but with something altogether stranger.
It tries to create a new directory then does this:
exec("ls -l $theFile |awk '{print $1}'", $output, $error);
And then spends some time analysing the results, badly. One the particularly irksome things is that it looks for 0644 as the file permissions, which is basically bonkers. The workaround a lot of people seem to use is to set their blog directory permissions to 0777, which enables the crazy script to have its own way but there's an obvious security cost here!
The other downside is that relying on shell commands to check if a new directory has been created means the script will only work in an environment with those unix shell commands are present and available, so no joy for Windows users.
I can't see why it wasn't implemented in pure PHP and I can't see why the whole function is so damn enormous. Nor can the person posting under the name of pgl in this thread. |
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| Neglecting livejournal |
[Aug. 16th, 2008|07:41 pm] |
Sorry, LJ, I've been neglecting you and the friends who know be through it. I think there's a way I can glue LJ entries, flickr and twitter together but I can't decide who should be boss. Anyway, here are the links to my twitter and flickr doo-dahs.
http://flickr.com/photos/synx508
http://twitter.com/synx508 |
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| DAB digital radio, go away. |
[Jun. 21st, 2008|09:24 am] |
I've a long history of lambasting Eureka DAB digital radio in the UK. My original argument was that it would be obsolete by the time it had reached any degree of market saturation and that seems to have been about right. The codec that most DAB radios are stuck with sounds considerably worse than FM at 128kbps, doesn't deal with errors in the stream gracefully and isn't even very good at compressing audio by today's standards. As an alternative to conventional broadcasting, fixed and wireless high speed internet access is becoming widespread. General purpose computers are being carried around in the form of the smart phone and this permits flexibility when it comes to things like codec choice as well as delivering multiple media types and interactivity. That has DAB beaten even before we move onto the near-broadcast approach of downloading podcasts and listening to them on the same day or perhaps transcoding DVB to H.264 for consumption on a portable device (Elgato eyeTV and related network DVR products).
So, reality is winning over the ivory tower model of DAB that was originally proposed by the dying national broadcasters of Europe. Today, though, you don't hear much about the future of DAB (or DVB for that matter) I think I can see why. In the greening world it'd be difficult for the manufacturers to suggest a switch to a better codec which would require recycling of the entire installed base of DAB radios.
If you are familiar with DAB reception, you'll be familiar with how DAB fails to live up to its promise of increased robustness and it's here that it disappoints the most. If someone uses our toaster, the DAB radio in the kitchen falls silent, switch to FM and reception isn't impacted at all. If you stand in the wrong place the DAB signal turns into a torrent of garbled lumps of sound, the FM radio would just exhibit a bit of background hiss. Our DAB clock radio seems to routinely choke on the pips time signal at the top of the hour, yes, it's glitch O'clock!
The car manufacturers also failed to support DAB with any enthusiasm, it's only now starting to happen on certain models of certain manufacturers. I'm sure more people would be interested in having wireless broadband fitted as standard and by the time the FM radios are not being fitted DAB will look even more startlingly quaint than it does today.
Grumble etc... |
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| Windows XP |
[Jun. 19th, 2008|10:30 pm] |
I've got one Windows XP machine left, it's my old Dell X300 laptop. I use it very occasionally, but recently my wife bought a super-cheap GPS logger from Maplin. It's great, but it only has drivers for Windows which means the Dell is pressed into service in spite of both hinges that hold the screen up having given up the ghost.
After several months of Macbook bliss the Dell finds amusing ways to bring me back to the everyday hell of Windows.
For instance, just a moment ago I decided to connect the GPS logger up so I could download the most recent tracks from it. I made the fatal mistake of using the USB connector on the left of my Dell instead of the one I'd previously used on the right. This blunder caused Windows a great deal of confusion, clearly I'd added a new item of hardware to my Dell because, you know, a USB device plugged in on the left is quite different from the same USB device plugged in on the right.
It demanded the driver CD.
Now, one of the things I like about the Dell X300 is that it doesn't have a fragile optical drive built-in. The drive is connected by USB but Dell decided that they needed more electric current than the USB connector could provide so they equipped their external DVD drive with a proprietary connector with extra prongs that... you've guessed it... only fits into the lefthand USB connector, currently occupied by the GPS logger.
At this precise point I decided that I'd chance it and hope the Dell would remember what the GPS logger looks like when plugged into the righthand USB port. I'd like to end this story by explaining how XP then showed the blue stop screen and everything went to hell in a handbasket but that did not happen and everything ended happily ever after.
I'm typing this on a Macbook, though. It only has USB sockets on one side! |
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| No! |
[Jun. 13th, 2008|05:53 pm] |
Ireland voted "No" to the (treaty that paves the way for the) EU constitution. It seems that when member states hold a referendum, people tend to say "No".
Here's a quote from BBC news online:
Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said: "I'm very, very disappointed by this result. I think it's a sad day for Europe and for our people as well."
I'm confused, he could be saying that he is personally sad or that he doesn't accept the result.
I don't know much about the legal standing of Ireland's ministers but I kind of assumed they were public servants, so the will of the people might be a factor in their working lives.
Will he resign, realising that his views don't represent the people or is it just David Davis that does that sort of stuff? |
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| Late Spring cleaning |
[Jun. 5th, 2008|10:25 am] |
We're going to tidy our house over the weekend, it's messy and cluttered at the moment so I expect to shift more stuff we don't use to the garage area. Other house news: We have new windows and heating, which will make it more comfortable in cold weather.
One of the side-effects of the new heating is a large furnace-sized hole in the kitchen. This hole needs tidying and fitting with a door whereupon it'll become a walk-in cupboard. To achieve this I'm going to have to do woodworking and plastering which will take me back to 2002/3 quite neatly.
I finished with work at Oliis on Monday and the less said about them the better, I think.
I'm working on something that is turning into a bit of a PHP web application framework. Building complex applications isn't easy and the one thing that I and others seem to forget is maintenance and the future. Good code is simple yet powerful but sometimes the real power seems to come from the tools used to create the code. This is true of ASP.net development, where your applications can be built largely with the mouse - an approach that turns into bad code after you use copy and paste for the first time. My PHP work has involved building an object relational mapper to a database that is only accessible through stored procedures, something that caused me to respond by using a database dump as input to a script that writes stored procedures to allow access. So I started thinking about it some more...
With Rails and Django, the application tends to inform the database about the shape of objects and their relations. In business, however, databases often get designed first and have stricter rules regarding their security than one might expect a web application to have. They also represent considerable investment, so mucking about with them isn't always going to work.
The situation I'm in is that in order to build objects that represent the persisted stuff inside the database. I have to create stored procedures to access that data for hundreds of tables instead of just generating some clever selects with joins. The best part is that the database has to be authoritative over both creation of the ORM and additional SPs that may be required, I have a feeling that I'm going to find out why other frameworks don't do it this way around! |
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| Get well soon |
[Apr. 16th, 2008|05:36 pm] |
It seems as though nearly everyone on my friends list is sick or recovering at the moment. The chances of this happening must be quite remote but there you go... get well soon, everyone.
I should join the queue because as I had an unpleasant muscle spasm in my back/neck on Tuesday morning which gave the associated joints something to think about, I was too scared to move my head for about 4 hours afterwards! Not the end of the world since it happened at about 4am, but still annoying and rather painful.
I am already booked in to start having physio in May. That should put me on some kind of path to recovery or at least dealing with the problem somehow. |
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| Shepherd's pie |
[Jan. 11th, 2008|09:50 pm] |
I saw Shepherd's Pie mentioned on Digg, which seemed a bit unusual. I realised that I'd only made Cottage Pie in the past. In the spirit of experimentation that should always accompany cooking I decided to make one. It was amazingly delicious and that was on the first day (cottage pie certainly improves if cooked a second time, I believe the same is true of Shepherd's pie though mine didn't get to live that long)
1 small saucepan
1 medium frying pan
1 pyrex bowl (I think I used the 1/2 litre size)
Head
1 cereal bowl of grated mature wexford cheddar
1 large potato cut into 1cm cubes
3 grinds black pepper
100g unsalted butter chopped into 4 parts
4 tblspoons milk
pinch of salt
Body
1 tblspoon sunflower seed oil
250g ground lamb (10% fat)
1/2 clove garlic, chopped
1 medium onion, finely sliced
1 medium carrot, chopped
4 substantial mushrooms, chopped into quarters.
1 vegetable stock cube, 1 tblspn flour.
Approx 1 cup of hot water.
Start by peeling and cubing the potatoes. Put some water into the small saucepan and put
the cubed potatoes in there and bring it to the boil. Preheat your oven to about 200C.
While the potatoes are cooking, get to work slicing the onion and cutting up the garlic
into tiny pieces. Put the tablespoon of sunflower oil into your frying pan (or substitute
with your favourite oil) and soften up the onions over a fairly high heat. Once the onions
are softened and browning add the lamb - breaking it up with your stirring utensil.
While this is cooking you can occasionally bash the potatoes about a bit, just to stop them
sticking together. Once the lamb is browning, about 12 minutes from start of the whole
process in my case, you can add the carrot. The next thing to add, at about 15 minutes in,
is the mushrooms. Once the mushrooms appear to be softening, usually after only a few
minutes, crush the vegetable stock cube in the bottom of the pyrex bowl and pour some hot
water over it (from a kettle, perhaps), mix in the flour to thicken it up. When it's mixed,
pour it over the contents of the frying pan and bring everything back to the boil. The
potatoes are probably ready to be mashed by now. To mash the potatoes I use a fork, but
there are dedicated mashing tools that seem to offer no real advantage and loads more
washing up. Add the butter, salt and pepper to taste. Mash the potato and add as much milk
as is necessary to make the mash slightly more liquid than normal mash would be. I found
this to be about 4 tablespoons of milk. Mix the grated cheese into the mash. By now the
meat should've boiled off the added water, pour the contents of the frying pan into the
pyrex dish and level it. Add the mash on top. Put it in the oven for about 30 minutes,
it'll be ready when the top looks a darker brown colour. You may need to experiment with
your oven, some need a higher or lower temperature to achieve the same effect.
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| Big business fears the internet. |
[Dec. 9th, 2007|09:03 am] |
Several years ago I was actively disrespecting Eureka DAB (a crappy, obsolete digital radio system that we have in Europe) on the internet via the medium of NNTP. DAB is still not universal here, but it has finally reached a stage where the receivers are reasonably priced and there's a fair selection available. It hasn't reached a stage where our bedside clock radio DAB thing can reliably emit The Today Programme without occasionally spluttering and coughing out lumps of audio in the wrong order, but then what should one expect from a crappy, obsolete digital radio system?
Anyway... back to now. I was just thinking about how big business is still terrified by facts about their own business becoming universally accessible.
Take electrical goods retailers, for instance. Faced with price matching websites they've mostly resorted to getting "House versions" of their products from manufacturers, so each retail chain has its own version of the product. This makes price comparison impossible, as you're not comparing like with like - so they do not have to compete. I first ran into this last year, when we bought a vacuum cleaner, every retailer had different product codes on its boxes for what was essentially the same appliance. I've since found out that it's common practice across all types of appliances, but if you buy and compare online you're considerably less likely to run into it. So the cartel-like plans of the retailers fails, horribly, to achieve what I expect they were trying to achieve. They still have to compete with online retailers.
Now, how does this relate to DAB? Well, going back a few years I can recall Ford making an announcement that FM radios would no longer be standard in their vehicles in "the next century", they'd all be DAB, at least in Europe. I am not of the driving persuasion so I thought I'd check the Ford website. I picked their popular Focus model. And here's where it gets strangely familiar, because if you want detailed information it launches this, in a sickening popup window.
Specification information
Features and Specifications for the Ford Focus are not available at this time. For further information please contact your local Ford Dealer.
Let's get this clear, you can't find out about the specification of the Focus on the internet "at this time". However, I can put together an options package and buy a Focus, but I can't find out the details of what I'm buying. I have to visit a dealer for that. So I'm buying sold as seen based on some pictures and no detailed description if I choose to use the internet. |
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[Oct. 19th, 2007|06:33 pm] |
Alan Coren died last night, the last surviving team-member of The News Quiz on BBC radio 4 and astute writer. This year hasn't been kind to the older, well-loved BBC people.
I have finally started lugging all my electronic junk and paperwork out of Mum's shed and into our bin/garage/spare room. I've just dumped 95% of my college work, keeping only the handouts and an essay on the Miller effect from my electronic design class.
I still need to figure out if I want to keep my huge selection of Atari 2600 cartridges and the Vectrex... |
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| New bicycle. |
[Jul. 29th, 2007|04:30 pm] |
Yesterday I bought a GT Avalanche 2.0 Disc in the sale at our local bicycle shop, today I upgraded the tyres to something that works on roads too (Hemispheres). The result is surprisingly good, I'm sure it'll be good enough to ride across Mull.
I'm sceptical about the inexpensive mineral oil hydraulic discs, the parts don't look as though they will last. The next most dodgy components would be the pedals which are utterly poor and the stem which is a bit pointy and I wouldn't want to meet up with it in a high speed accident.
It's no super-bike like my defunct Sunn Exact Flex, but it's certainly a lot better value for money. I must find a way of reviving the Sunn.
Last night we went to a dual birthday party at The Old Devil Inn, which is somewhere West of Maidenhead on the A4. The food, drink and company was great, as usual. |
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