After weeks of making up my mind, I made my move on the 21st of April 2005. And when you finally arrived a few days later, I was in awe. I told everyone about you, about how you changed my life. I mean, I could actually watch TV and use my PC at the same time, and ON THE SAME SCREEN !!!!!!

My Future proof TV !! My very first bonus went on this little baby. Before I had ever heard of HDTV, this TV was ready and waiting.

Last week, it ‘blew up’ and a few hours later, it was dead. Today, I took the TV to the tip.  And as I drove away, I thought of all the good times we’ve had together.

Now I’m looking for a new 26 inch screen to replace this baby, but I’ll miss you so much………..

Every year for the last 3 years, I take a week off on the week of my birthday.

I call this my Playstation holiday. I spend time relaxing, play games and having fun. Well, this year, sadly, at the very start of my PLaystation holiday, the playstation is not working.

I’ve spent most of today on the phone with technical support, but so far, no solution. The console is out of warranty as well, which is really, really sad.

A few weeks ago, I was in the market for a set of headphones to use with my Ipod. The budget was about £20, I just wanted anything I could plug in and listen to my music. I was pleasantly suprised to see that play.com had an offer for the Jabra BT620S Bluetooth Stereo Headphones With iPod Bluetooth Adaptor A125S for an astonishing £17.99. (play.com no longer sell the set, only the headphones, however, the headphones and adapter are available on amazon.co.uk)

And when my new toy arrived, boy was I pleased. Apart from the fact that I could listen to music wirelessly, I could also pause, play and change the volume from the headset, which I thought was pretty cool. And the sound was really, really good, something I took for granted until I had to use the earphones that came with the Ipod when I needed to charge the units.

But then, I had to go for a walk around the office, and that was when I realised the main problem with this kit.

And that problem is the A125S adapter that plugs into the Ipod. There are two main problems with this unit, so let me take them one at a time.

1. The unit does not ‘lock’ into the Ipod, as the port it connects to is used for a few other things, and was not designed that way. So if you have your Ipod in your pocket, and you’re walking around, it’s moving constantly, and every now and then, it slips out of place. I’ve tried my trouser pockets, jacket pockets, and breat pockets, and it’s the same everytime, the unit does not stay in place, and the music cuts out a bit too much for my liking. I’ve found that the only way to keep it steady is to walk with the Ipod and the adapter in your hand. Which is ok for a walk around the office, but not for a commute on a packed tube train.
2. The unit itself is super fragile. Taking it home everyday from work involved keeping it in my backpack. I tried my best to keep it away from stuff that could damage it, but about 2 weeks after I bought it, only one ear was working on the headphones, because the adapter was damaged. Fortunately, Jabra technical support is top class, and the unit was replaced for me within a week, very impressive. Now, I leave it in the office, and don’t take it around too much.

So if you’re in the office, you can leave the unit on your table and work, go round and talk to your teamates and use these headphones. Or if you’re doing housework, you can leave your Ipod in one place in the room, and move around listening to music. But once you are on the move, these headphones are not for you. I’m on the lookout for another set of headphones to use at home, something cheap, but quality, any ideas?

Hard Disk space: the final frontier!

Hardware: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.

hAS ANYONE SEEN MY cAPSLOCK KEY?

H lp! S m b d st l ll th v w ls fr m m k yb rd!

COMMAND: A suggestion made to a computer.

Hidden DOS secret: add BUGS=OFF to your CONFIG.SYS

ASCII a stupid question, get a stupid ANSI!

Hold a hard drive to your ear — listen to the C:

I am a computer, dumber than any human and smarter than an administrator.

I am logged in, therefore I am.

I are Pentium of Borg. Division is futile. You will be approximated.

I came, I saw, I deleted all your files.

I had a life once… now I have a computer and a modem.

I know I’m supposed to back up my files, but I still haven’t found reverse on my PC.

I was going to switch her to DOS, but she had a gun

I’ll give up my Windows 3.1 when they pry my cold, dead fingers off the mouse.

If at first you don’t succeed, call it version 1.0

In my next life I’m going to have more memory installed

Intel – still number 0.999873464508.

With several video files on my PC, figuring out a way to watch them has been an issue for my family for a while now. One option was to watch them on the PC itself, which we did for a while, but once I got married, two of us crowding round the PC screen wasn’t exactly comfortable. So I went out and got a DVD player that could platy Divx files (I got mine ages ago for under £20, but this one is available now for £37.99).

Anyway, this involved burning DVDs all the time. A discussion with a work colleague last year, and I discovered the world of network media players. I bought two, a wired media player, and a wireless one.

The ‘Freecom era’ was a very interesting one:

• The wireless and wired players have several differences. The wired player seems to have older firmware. The wireless one is much easier to use.
• The wireless player has DVI and component connections for high definition playback.
• Both of these player suffer from one major problems, the remote controls are super flaky. While they were both under warranty, I collected a total of 8 replacement remotes for both of them. Today, I do not have a single working remote control. (This might have something to do with having a baby in the house, but all my other remotes are still working perfectly).

Anyway, I think I may have discovered the best way to stream media now. And it was sitting in the living room all along. The playstation 3 is a very good media player, so good, I’m seriously considering buying a second one to use exclusively as a media player for the bedroom.

To set up the Playstation to stream, you need to have a media player running on your PC, the easiest way of doing this is to use Windows Media player. There’s a very good guide on how to set it up here.

However, the very best software that I’ve found is TVersity, and it’s absolutely free. TVersity not only allows you to stream media already on your PC, but you can also stream videos on youtube, and internet video feeds straight to your TV. It plays almost every kind of media you can think off, and unlike media player, seems to be a lot more reliable. There’s a great guide on how to set it up on the PS3 here. And it not only works with the PS3, it works with any UPnP / DLNA Devices, including:

• The Xbox 360
• The DirecTV HR20
• The Sony Vaio VGP-MR100U
• The DLink DSM 320/320R/320RD
• The DLink DSM 510/520 (firmware 1.02 or higher, older firmware versions are identified as DSM 320)
• The Philips Streamium SL300i/SL400i/MX6000i
• The Roku Soundbridge M500/M1000/M2000
• The Philips SLA5500/5520
• The Omnifi DMS1
• The Nokia 770 or N800/810 Internet Tablet via Media Streamer add-on from Nokia or via the Canola Media Player
• LobsterTunes

It’s good to see that several of my blog friends are still around.

Anyway, I was catching up on all my regular blogs today, when I found this post from Jason.  Yes, the man is a geek, but I’ve got some geekiness in me as well, as I am about to prove to you.

Back in school, maths was always my favourite subject. I loved trying to solve a problem, and battling till I found the answer. A friend of mine’s dad was a professor of maths, so his dad was always finding maths problems in everyday life. One day, my friend shared one of his dad’s many maths problems with a few of us. It took me about 2 hours, but I cracked it in the end. This was 14 years ago. Anyway, today, I was talking with my cousin who’s doing A Level maths, and I wondered if I still had it. So I got a pen and paper, and tried to solve the problem again. Anyway, here we go:

The problem

As they sat at lunch, my friend’s dad looked at the clock and it was 9pm. He then asked his son the following question:

“Right now, the angle between the hour hand and the minute hand is 90 degrees. When next will it be 90 degrees”

(In the real story, it was dinner, and it was 9pm. But I decided to use 3pm, not that I remembered the answer or the solution, but just to make sure I did it from scratch.)

So, let’s begin. First of all, this is probably not the fastest way to the answer, but it was the best I could do in 20 minutes. It took me a lot longer to get the answer as a teenager for the 9pm question, and that involved a quadratic equation, fortunately, I didn’t have one of those tonight, as I can’t remember how to solve them

OK, so let’s look at the clock. Both hands are constantly moving.

The minute hand is moving the fastest, 360/60 = 6 degrees a minute

The hour hand moves between each number in an hour. That’s 360/12 = 30 degrees an hour= 0.5 degrees a minute.

Armed with this info, let’s look at our problem.

Visually, you can see that the time this will occur will be a few minutues after 3.30.

Let’s say the number of minutes after 3 o’clock is x.

At that point, the minute hand would have moved 6x degrees from the top (number 12 on the clock face). Let’s call this value a.

The hour hand would have moved 0.5x degrees from the number 3, or 90+0.5x degrees from the number 12. Let’s call this value b.

So we have :

a = 6x
b=0.5x + 90

Since we know the angle between both hands is going to be 90 degrees, in other words

a-b = 90
6x-(0.5x+90)=90
6x-0.5x = 180
x= 180/5.5 = 32.72727277272

So the answer is at 43.6 seconds after 32 minutes past 3, the angle between the hands is exactly 90 degrees.

Wow, how sad am I, this is what I’m doing on a saturday night………..lol

On Friday, I got home to find out my Internet had been disconnected.

I then called BT, and for the next three hours, spoke to several people, and have come to the conclusion that I spoke to some of the least intelligent people on this planet that night.

The long and short is this:

1. A cease order was placed on my line. When I called BT with regards to another matter on Thursday, the lady did mention that it would seem that there was a cease on my line, to which I told her it was not possible, as I’d had the connection for less than a week.

2. BT tried to blame me for ordering a cease. The thing is, it takes 5 days for them to cease broadband. Since the connection only lasted for seven days, that means that a day or two after the broadband was connected, someone decided to cancel it.

3. BT refused to take responsibility for the ‘mistake’ to cancel my broadband, after screaming down the phone that I never asked for a cease, they changed their tone, saying that the broadband had been cancelled due to ‘technical problems.’ Of course, when I asked for further information on what these problems were, no one could give me any.

Anyway, I’ve decided not to continue with BT if only one week after using them as an ISP for the first time, they can decide to terminate my account and not tell me. I was offered a ‘dial-up connection’ while I wait another 5 days for them to turn the broadband back on, which I turned down.

The good thing about not having the internet for a while is that sadly, you get used to it.

I’m going to find a cheaper provider with hopefully, a better level of service.

And at the same time, I need to find out how to complain either directly to BT, or to the regulator for what I think is pretty rotten treatment to their customer, and blatant dishonesty for trying to blame me for the problem.

Right now, I’m feeling a bit ‘deflated’. Yeah, that’s the best word, I’m not ‘depressed’ or ‘sad’, but just deflated. Let me explain.

On the 28th of April, right in the middle of our hectic house move, I got a voicemail from a recruiter. Now, I get these almost everyday, but this one was different. The recruiter was from Microsoft. I felt my hands shaking as I called her back, sadly, I had to leave a voicemail.

The job was a Premier Field Engineer role, specialising in Exchange Server. This was my dream job no matter what angle you looked at it from. I’ve had a long term interest in messaging/email, and this would put me right in the frontline of the most popular messaging software in the world. My commute would be cut by half. They had an on site day care, so my little girl would have a place to go. And best of all, this is Microsoft !!

Anyway, I eventually spoke to the recruiter a few days later, had a telephone interview, which went pretty well, and eventually had the ‘assessment day’ scheduled for last Friday (the 16th).

Now, remember that our internet was only connected last Friday (after the interview), so doing my research on the role, the company and studying for the interview was HARD WORK. I had to sneak a few minutes at a time at work. I used my mobile phone at night to look up stuff (painfully slow on a tiny screen). If those were the only troubles I’d faced last week, that might have been ok.

A friend of mine lost his wife the Saturday before. (10th). We were trying to help him out, and I was spearheading the fundraising for the funeral (the funeral cost £5000). So I spent a lot of my nights on the phone, asking people to donate money. On Wednesday, I came down with a cold, a really bad one, I had to take Thursday off sick just to make sure I could make it on Friday. I had fever, a blocked nose, a sore throat and a bad cough.

And on Friday the day of the interview, I swallowed a dose of ‘Day Nurse’ just before going in, and for 3 hours or so, I was healthy enough to interview, once I got home, I collapsed on my bed, relieved it was over and hoping for the best.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making excuses. While my preparation was not ideal, I don’t think I would have done any better had everything gone smoothly.

Anyway, I finally got the call on Wednesday that I wasn’t being offered the job. While I had excelled in some parts of the interview, I could not answer one particular question in the ‘HR’ bit to their satisfaction, and the technical guys felt that they had to probe me to get answers to the ‘technical depth’ that they were looking for.

Now, it’s not because I didn’t get the job that I’m feeling deflated. Oh no. Even before the whole process began, I was aware that this job was ‘a step up’ from what I was doing at the moment, and I was honoured even to be considered for it.

No, the problem is, I’ve been investigating the possibility of changing jobs since we moved house, things have become a little stagnant where I am, and there’s nothing like a one hour commute in a car everyday to make you look for the next step in your career. But after going through the Microsoft ‘experience’ all the stuff I’m looking at looks so…..well, ordinary. Dull. There’s nothing out there that excites me like that role, that makes me feel like I’m on the way up, like my career is going someplace.

So right now, I’m at work, stuck doing a job I don’t feel challenged by, wondering what might have been. And judging by the vacancies I get in my email every morning, I’m going to be here for a while…………

Not even watching John Terry cry on Wednesday night could cheer me up.

I’m sure I’ll feel better in a few weeks, but right now, well, I have to sit down, and look at all the positives, and MOVE ON.

No, really……..

This morning, I came across on this item, and it made me chuckle.

Phillips has recently submitted a patent application for a underwear that monitors your blood pressure continually.

Nice. Let’s hope they go the whole hog and come up with a thong version, who knows, this might be a fashion item in years to come !!

It’s been a while since we were forced apart. 10th of April was the exact date. As I was getting ready for work, I sat down to have a quick ‘chat’ with you, to find out what was going on in the world, and to check on a few things.  I got back from work to find that, due to someone else’s mistake, you were gone. I hoped to get you back soon, but so far, all attempts to get you back have been met with frustration.

I never realised how much I depended on you. When I needed directions to get somewhere, you were there. When I wanted to find out how the football was going, you were there. When I needed to find out some obscure fact about some silly celebrity, you always knew the answer. When I wanted to chat with my ‘real-life’ and online friends, you hooked us up. When I wanted to take out my frustration on other people, you allowed me to play FIFA 08 with people from all over the world. When I had a job interview, and needed to do research on the company, or needed to brush up on my knowledge, you had all the answers after a few clicks. You were everything to me. As the saying goes, you never appreciate something/someone till they are gone. I’ve had you in my life for so long, I never realised how important you had become.

The last few weeks without you have been crazy. We moved house, and we didn’t have you to tell us where to find stuff in our new neighbourhood. I had no way of getting the latest podcasts to pass away the time. And I had to use my phone to talk to people, I mean, I had to actually speak to them !! With so much of my life online, I’ve found it hard to blog, study, keep up with internet gossip. My Playstation 3 is begging to be updated to the latest software. My PC reminds me everything I turn it on that it needs to update the security software. Windows XP Service Pack 3 is out, and I haven’t tried it out yet. Grand Theft Auto 4 is gathering dust on the shelf, and I haven’t played it online yet.

Mind you, we’ve managed to steal a few moments together. Before we moved, I went to a friend’s house to sit down with you for a few hours a week. And my mobile phone allows me to find out what is happening in the world of facebook. But it’s not the same.

Yesterday, I got a call from BT, telling me that they should have sorted out all the problems they were having, and that by next week Friday, we should be together again. 8 more days !! I have to warn you, Friday night, my wife and I will both be fighting for you, as we have both missed you very much. I suspect you won’t have a moment to rest till Sunday night when we go to bed.

Take care old friend. Till we meet again.