We’re getting new carpet. Well, after over 20 years it is probably time. Anyhoo, we wanted to get something very similar to what we already had, only with more of the carpet stuff. We solved the problem by taking a corner of old carpet to the shop. I think we got quite a good match….
I said goodbye to over 50 years of my past today. Two men came and took away the piano. Our family got it in the 1960s and I, and my sister did our piano practice on it. Then it found its way into our house and we inflicted piano lessons on our kids too. It has been a fixture in our house every since.
It’s been rather neglected for the past few years though. It was heralded as an interesting instrument when it was launched because it used a novel, weight-saving design to mount the keys. Unfortunately this design also meant that after a while all the plastic key mountings fell to pieces giving the instrument a rather snaggle toothed appearance and making the keys not work properly. Then the felts all got sticky so that notes would play forever so for the last while it has been a nice ornament but not really useful. So we decided to get rid of it and get something more up to date that we might actually play. This was done with a heavy heart, but you have to keep moving forwards in this life.
I asked the man who took it away if it would go to a good home. I had a vision of some kind of retirement home for pianos where they could see out their days with plenty of tunes and whatnot. “Well”, he said “we’ll melt down the frame and turn the case into firelighters”. Oh well…
Blimey. Long blog posts are fun to write if you have nothing else to do. I may need to rethink this….
It’s been a bit quiet on the blog for the last few weeks. I always said that I blog because I want to force myself to do interesting things so I can write about them. Recently there have been so many interesting things going on that I’ve not had time to write the blog, which is an interesting problem. Or perhaps I’ve persuaded myself that I’m too busy to blog…
That is going to change a bit now though. I’ve decided to experiment with “project blogging”. I’m going to take the thing I’ve just done, which is create some JavaScript code that runs in a web page and can load code into ESP devices, and write it up. I’m doing this retrospectively from diaries that I kept during the development process. If you’re a programmer it might be an interesting read. The posts will appear around the time I did each task. I’ve tidied things up a bit to reduce the number of dead ends and whatnot.
They start around here. If you then click the left hand link at the bottom of the text on each post you can move through them in order. There will be other topics here and there too, and some pictures. You can just see the project posts by using this link.
I’d love to know what you think of it and how I can improve the presentation content. Feel free to comment (he said dangerously).
One of my shifts has managed to make its own way to Leeds all by itself by stowing away in a bag. I hope I get it back. It has sentimental value, if no style at all.
A casual reader of this blog might form the conclusion that all I do is buy Lego and go to Burnby Hall. Having said that, for the last couple of days they would be completely correct.
This post doesn’t reflect well on me. I present it as a salutary tale about greed.
When I started working on the “Connected Little Boxes” I invested in the domain name “cleverlittleboxes.com” as I thought that might work for the name of the product. Then I found out that there actually is a company called Clever Little Boxes which rather scuppered my plans. So I switched to the name “Connected Little Boxes” which is just as meaningful and ties in rather well with our “Connected Humber” project. I spent another six pounds or so on “connectedlittleboxes.com” and went on my merry way.
Last week, via a domain sharing thingy, I got word of an offer for the “cleverlittleboxes.com” domain. The mysterious purchaser was offering 199 dollars for the domain name. Visions of riches swam in front of my eyes. Or at least, enough riches to get a new iPad. So, having done some research on the domain selling site I sent back a counter proposal of around half the price of what I saw as comparable names. This is a long-winded way of saying that I got greedy.
Anyhoo, today I got a rather sniffy response from my mysterious buyer, complaining about my profiteering actions and dropping the offer to a very iPad unfriendly 50 dollars or so. Oh well. I’m going to hang on for the domain for now and see what happens.
We went shopping up town in Hull today for the first time in a very long while. It was sad to see that some places haven’t made it through the pandemic, but it was great to see that McCoys is doing well. They are something of a Hull legend and benefit from a chunk of outdoor space on the side of Victoria Dock which is a great place to sit and watch the world go by as you chow down on their huge portions.
Great stuff.
I bought my Lumi keys from Anderton Music. The only device they had available was an “opened box” unit which was a bit cheaper. However, when the keyboard arrived it turned out that someone had done a bit more than just open the box and look at it. They’d also used all the download voucher codes that came with the device. It is at this point my heart began to sink a bit, what with having to go back to Andertons and ask them to sort it out. However, the good news is that they owned the problem and kept me informed as they fixed it. I think the true measure of a company is how well they work in “failure mode” when things go wrong. In this test Andertons passed with flying colours.
Here’s another Harlow Carr picture. Because I like you.
Today finds us at Harlow - Carr gardens in Harrogate. These are awesome. If you live near enough, get down there and have a walk around. If you don’t live near enough, make a special trip. They even have a “Betty’s” tea room on site. Wonderful.
It turns out that there is a gap between “making it go” and “making it useful”. Today I’ve been filling this gap for the ESP uploader software I got to work yesterday.
Today was supposed to be the day that I lured a bunch of hapless family members to the house with the promise of free food and then got them to move a piano into the garage. Thanks to a nasty little virus that’s not how it turned out. Fortunately nobody is actually ill, which is the only part of good news in the whole thing.
I didn’t even know that black tulips were a thing until number one wife planted some….
I think I might actually be a writer now. I’ve spent the day working on another Hackspace article, along with a bit of editing.
We’re getting some new furniture. To go with our new curtains. This means that we have to get rid of our old sofas. Today some lovely people from the British Heart Foundation came and took them away. Of course, it wasn’t without incident. When it was delivered they had to dismantle the big sofa to get through our “quirky” (read that as small) front door and into the house. When the collectors arrived I thought I’d taken everything into the right number of pieces but then we found that one chair would not pass through the opening without further surgery.
And one of the four bolts (have you noticed that it is always the last one) holding the base on just would not come out. It was quite fun, two folks holding the chair up in the doorway while I grappled with a mole wrench and a spanner, all the time trying to observe appropriate social distancing.
In the end I prevailed and hopefully someone else will be able to make use of what are really comfy chairs.
I had my first Covid vaccination a while back. And today I had my second. I see myself as a squeamish and self-centred person (I only faint at the sight of my own blood) but I got by just fine.
Some things are hard to do just because you don’t know how to do it. Today I wanted to move some music off my PC onto my iPhone. I’ve got Apple Music but some of the stuff I like doesn’t exist there. Or it exists for a while and then vanishes. Anyhoo, it turns out to be very easy, at least for me. I just had to open iTunes on my PC, import the folder containing the music files onto the PC and then wait a while. Eventually they appear on the phone. Now I can play the copy of my “OK Chicago” single. Or I could just watch the YouTube video:
We bought some curtains today. I’m quite happy to buy curtains as long as I only have to do it every ten years or so. And of course it lets me trot out one of my favourite jokes:
“Doctor, I keep thinking I’m a pair of curtains”
“Pull yourself together man…”
Thank you.
I’ve just ordered a new (to me) camera. Rather excited about this. It should arrive at the end of the week.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Make your own programming language. Find out more here.
