SatNav and NavSat

/

We went from Hull to Harrogate on Sunday. And then, because we wanted to get home, we went from Harrogate to Hull. On the way back the sat. nav. tried to send us a different way from the one it used for the outbound journey.

I hate this. It happens most of the times that I go somewhere and then, surprise, surprise, come home again. It reminds me of one of my favourite railway station jokes:

Customer: "I'd like to buy a return ticket please."
Ticket seller: "Where to?"
Customer: "Back here of course...."

Anyhoo, for any navigation software writers out there, here are a couple of tips for your next version. 

  1. If I try to plot a route that seems to be the direct reverse of the one I've just driven, just reverse the route and give it straight back to me. 
  2. If you're planning a route from A to B, plan it from B to A as well and compare them. Then pick the best one. 

Feed the birds

/

I think the name was carefully chosen to inspire confidence

We're embarking on a bit of garden renovation. I'm not a fan of gardening. It seems to me that you do it and then, after a year or so, you have to do it all over again.

Anyhoo, one thing that we seem to need is a bit of grass where there is presently just tundra. We've put down a bunch of seeds with a really impressive box (see above). I don't think SMART actually means that the seed has a Bluetooth interface, but it wouldn't it be awesome if it did.

Goldilocks Gas Struts

/

I think I'm the first person ever to write a blog post with the title "Goldilocks Gas Struts". Not that it's a first I really want. I've been improving the guinea pig cage to give it a "lift off roof". The problem with a cage that has doors at the front is that if your pigs have a sprightly nature (and ours do) then you can open the door and then find that the hairy monsters have made a break for freedom.

They quite enjoy the process of being caught. We don't enjoy the process of catching them.

I've fitted the hinges and the cage lid now opens rather nicely. That way we can do stuff in the cage without any risk of escaping pigs. And I quite like the god like aspect of removing their sky.

Anyhoo, next I need to find something to hold it open. It turns out that you can buy gas struts to do this thing, and they are very reasonably priced. They are calibrated in Newton's, which is interesting, but not particularly useful to me. I bought a couple of 120 Newton ones, figuring that the lid of the cage is quite heavy.

Not that heavy. I couldn't get the darned thing to shut. So I bought a pair of 60 Newton ones.

Which of course are not heavy enough. The lid won't stay open. What I need is the "Goldilocks" ones, which I think will come in at around 80 or so.....

Ziggy Stardust Live

/

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is one of the best albums ever made. Fact. It says "Play Loud" on the album sleeve. Good advice.

Tonight we saw it played live by Holy Holy, a band containing the original drummer, "Woody" Woodmansey and long time Bowie collaborator Tony Visconti. Singing duties were taken up by Glenn Gregory of Heaven 17 fame.

It. Was. Awesome.

The band were "really tight" (to coin a phrase), with Woody's rock steady drumming underpinning some brilliant musicianship. Glenn Gregory is not David Bowie, and didn't try to pretend to be, but sounded great as himself. There was no messing with the material, no added flourishes or frills, and the rendition was all the better for that.

They played the whole album, in order, and then moved on to other classics, including a fantastic version of "Life on Mars".

There's a strong Hull connection to this work, several of the original Spiders from Mars, including Woody, were from the city. Not surprisingly the venue was packed, the music was well loud and we left with our ears ringing.

Fantastic stuff. If you get the chance to hear these folks, just go.

Working on it....

/

Windows 10 is lovely. But there are some things that it does that drive me a bit nuts. Like, when I've downloaded a file, and then want to find it in my downloads folder.

Not a particularly strange request you might think.

But Windows 10 acts as if I've just asked for the cure for cancer and the ten millionth digit of pi. Along with next week's lottery numbers. My powerful machine with it's ultra-fast hard disk (at least that's what the salesman said) grinds to a halt while the operating system "works on" finding the files in a folder.

Why?

Rip Off Britain

/

Apparently household insurance is important. I'm not keen on living in a box, although the single is awesome, (out of date pop culture reference alert) and so every year I've been paying a chunk of money to Legal and General so that if anything terrible happens they'll come round and sympathise with me whilst explaining why they can't pay me any money.

This year I took a proper look at the renewal price and it seemed a bit high. So I did a bit of digging and discovered that I could get equivalent cover for around a quarter of what I've been paying.

I rang up the company, was told that mine was a special "Rainbow" policy that was not arranged directly by the Legal and General. I think it's called Rainbow because I'm the crock of gold at the end of it.

Anyhoo, after 25 minutes on hold and being cut off, I finally manage to find a person to talk to. He asks if I'd like to cancel the policy. I ask him what he would do in my situation. We both agree to cancel the policy.

I'm not saying which company I used to sort out my new insurance, but apparently I can now take a cuddly toy to the movies with me for free.  I'm pleased that I've saved some money, and cross that I've been paying so much over the odds for all these years. I'm now going to carefully examine all my other policies and whatnot to see if I'm being ripped off by any of them too.

It seems that the phrase "valued customer" is now as outdated as ones like "liars don't prosper" and "manners maketh man". Life eh? 

Ramshacke Rock is back in Groove

/

Some time back I was bemoaning the way that the "Ramshackle Rock" playlist had vanished from Groove. Well, it's back.

I've now got a mental picture of boffins at Microsoft nervously scanning my blog and then rushing down the corridors to their machines so that they can put right any wrongs that I've noticed. But then again, that's probably not how it works.

But I do like the curated playlists in Groove. Unfortunately, owing to the vagaries of Bayesian logic (which is how I think these things work - you can find a nice description here), I'm not getting exactly the same tracks as last time. But they are all suitable ramshackle.

And, as a major plus, you now have the option to save the playlist for future use. Excellent.

Home Alone Rob

/

I'm having some time "Home Alone" as number one wife is away for a few days. This is rather interesting, as it doesn't happen very often. I've been going round the kitchen to see what happens in there and taking a look in the cupboards. Most of them seem quite sensible, with some things in them that I recognise. Cups, plates, breakfast cereal etc. Others are rather strange.

Apparently there's a "magic cold cupboard" that holds the milk and whatnot, and a magic warm cupboard which is where I can put things if I want to heat them up. Although I'm not completely sure about why I would want to do this. Perhaps it is something to do with this "cooking" thing I see so much of on the telly.

There's another magic cupboard with a round opening that I can't quite figure out. I put some crockery in there and turned it on, and all that happened was a horrendous noise and a lot of broken bits. So it's not for washing dishes.

I've been shown a bunch of things in the "magic cold cupboard" that I can transfer to the "magic buzzing cupboard" to make them warm enough to eat. I've even been planning my menus for the next few days.

In my opinion the way that we eat today is boring. Just because something has worked fine for many years is no reason to keep doing it (at least that is what seems to be driving the world these days). What we need is some novel approaches to eating. Heaven knows, we've had enough of experts telling us how to eat over the years. It's time for some radical thinking. I've come up with the following possible plans.

  1. Eat nothing. This might serve as a handy weight reduction plan and definitely save some money. However, the long term prospects may not be great.
  2. Eat nothing but food that I really like. After millions of years of evolution and adaption it seems stupid that things that are supposedly "good" for me don't taste very nice. My body knows what it's doing. If it wants nothing but honey roasted peanuts and Kellogg's Cocoa Pops then perhaps that's nature's way of saying that's all I should eat. There may be a downside to this, but I'm struggling to think of one.
  3. Eat everything on the first day. Number one wife is back on Sunday. I could eat a whole four day's worth of food today and then nothing for the rest of the week. I'm struggling to understand why we don't already do this. It would be so much more efficient. On the other hand, I may discover why about half way through my third lasagna.
  4. We normally have breakfast, lunch and tea each day. Why? I could have all my breakfasts on Wednesday, lunches on Thursday and so on through the week. If I run out of meals I can start at breakfast again, or even invent new ones. This would add a bit of novelty to my life and bring back memories of my time in a bedsit when I actually did this, for the simple reason that the only food I had to hand was Kellogg's Cocoa Pops.