atomicvindaloo.com – the occasionally drunken ramblings of an urban philosopher

Prestonwood – Highlands course

Ξ April 29th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Family, Me |

Well, the first thing that strikes you about Prestonwood is that it’s big. Very big.

I was expecting something impressive just by it’s very nature and the fact that there are three courses there but, driving up to the club “house”, it became apparent that Prestonwood is more than just American big. The “clubhouse” – I have to call it that, as it’s more of a club “palace” – is a grand neo-something building that could probably house the population of Henley and lose them. In fact, Dad and I had a few moments of indecision as to where we actually needed to go to register and pick up the cart etc. In the end, we tailgated a couple of folks who clearly knew what they were up to and managed to find the pro shop.

Lots of lovely dark wood paneling, lots of friendly faces and one (presumably the chap in charge) who look a little miffed that we were there cluttering up his nice neat domain. Still, our host’s name was mentioned and he thawed to a mere glacial.

He kindly told us where to find our cart and my hire clubs and left us to it. Unfortunately, he told us where to find our cart and my hire clubs in what appeared to be a language other than English, so we sat outside the pro shop hoping that they would find us. We gave it fifteen minutes and I decided to pop back in and try again. To give him his dues, he stuck to his story. Sadly, he also stuck to the same language, so I went back outside to contemplate.

With two minutes till tee-off, I had to invoke my joker and call up Tim Nice-but-dim – never fails in America for some reason. A polite bit of Queen’s English and a clear inability to do my own shoe-laces up, and the kind gentleman explained – in English! – that we needed to wander over to the buggy park where everything would be waiting for us. Result.

We trundled off to the first tee and were met by a lovely wide, open fairway ruined only by the acres of water surrounding it and cutting us off from the first green. Now, anyone who has played golf with me knows that I tend to get one – maybe two – shots per hole right and do so consistently for the rest of the round. So, I may drive like Tiger (ahem) and putt like a prawn, or drive like a 2CV and play approach shots like a natural. Never, though, good drive, good second, good approach and putt out.

So, it was with a little trepidation that I waited to see if the drives would be any good today. At least we weren’t being overlooked by a hoard of people. But I really didn’t want Dad’s first impression of his average-golfer son being driving the ball two-hundred yards at a right-angle to the fairway and braining a turtle in the lake.

I withdrew the driver and, whoa! These are hire clubs?! Stone me, if I could afford to buy clubs like this back home, I’d play more often. A brand spanking new Taylormade Burner. I could finally see why they call them golf clubs! Back home, a hire set of clubs is usually a mish-mash of the things that real players discard on the course – wonky, furrowed and about as much use as a handbrake on a canoe. These babies, however, were the real deal.

So real in fact, that I whistled the ball down the fairway to the edge, leaving a simple chip over the water and onto the green. If I’d had any more face, I’d have claimed that it was played-for. But, as it stood, I was happy enough to just get in the cart and trundle down to the point that Dad’s ball had turned sub-mariner.

True to form of course, I walloped my next ball straight into the lake but – hey – any sticky-beaks watching from the club-house would only have seen the gangly Tilley-hat wearing half-wit drive like a true pro – clearly, and eccentric English-man who plays quite a bit.

That set the scene for the rest of the round. Every drive was a good-’un – although, I have developed a gentle slice. Which worked very well on the dog-legs, but not brilliantly on the straight ones – 70% of the fairway stuff was good and the putting ….. Well, the putting was a bit of a let-down. I’m used to playing on greens made of grass, not glass, and struggled a little with the concept that merely frowning at your golf-ball would send it scuttling twenty yards off in a seemingly random direction.

What else about the course? Well, I can’t fail to mention the lovely ladies who trundle round in the opposite direction with carts full of food, soft drinks and beer. How decent of them! Or the HUGE houses lining some of the fairways, one of which would have made a bloody good hotel. The seventeenth hole – tee, water, island with green (which we both hit!). The bunkers – oh the bunkers! – like a scene from Beau Geste. But, all-in-all, what a brilliant laugh.

An absolutely superb course – designed for a golfer like me (you can read what you want into that) – and I wish I could be playing it again now. In the next few days or so, I’m going to play on my local course – Badgemore – and compare. I’d love to buy a Taylormade Burner, but I’ve just found out how much the cost. Still, I can work on that slice. Next stop, sub-110.

Hardy Heron is here!

Ξ April 24th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Uncategorized |

As the production version of Hardy Heron is a little late, I took the plunge and upgraded to the release client – based upon the knowledge that there was code-freeze yesterday.

The upgrade process itself went very smoothly.

The current version of Firefox that has been installed as part of the process (3.0b5) has a much lower memory footprint – which is nice. Foxyproxy and tor work fine through it too. However, unplug isn’t compatible and has been removed.

Upon rebooting, I was hit with a wall of errors from truecrypt and easycrypt – all of which looked horrendous. And, upon trying to open easycrypt, all I got were password errors.

I tried using the horrendous truecrypt command-line interface with no luck, and a modprobe -f truecrypt revealed a module error.

I bit the bullet and backed-up the easycrypt volume-file and then removed the truecrypt package (version 4.something) and installed the latest version (5.something). This version comes with it’s own GUI (just enter truecrypt) which I used to mount the backed up easycrypt file. Bingo! Everything is there.

Apart from that, I can report that everything else is working fine and dandy – and I’ve now got Compiz on the intel card in this laptop.

Pros:

Pretty seamless

Cons:

Bit of a heart-stopper with truecrypt

Overall:

9/10

Update

Ξ April 23rd, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Me |

For those of you who remember the two posts that I made private.

I’m in the clear! 

What a trip!

Ξ April 23rd, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Family, Me |

Fark my old boots. One and truly – what a doo-lahly few days. For starters, this could be a long one – after all, you don’t normally cram thirty-nine years into three days do you – but I’m also stuck on this pissing plane, with a broken TV and a plus-sized gentleman in front of me, which means that this Dell XPS M1330 (go on, please!, look it up on t’internet or, even better see one) doesn’t actually fit between me and the chair in front. Imagine then, what’s happening to my poor bloody legs.

So, anyway, back to the here and now. Three days have passed and any of you folks out there who know what happened over that time will know why the blog went quiet. To say that I was getting a tad nervous as Dad was due would be an understatement. I think that the fact that, unlike meeting Mum, I was kind of on home turf actually made it worse but, as with Mum, as I saw him wander through the door of the Umstead terrace, bloody hell. I’m sure there would be a musical interlude for it in a film but, in real life, it’s a hammer blow. (A nice one, not a bad one).

I’ve done it wetly, and I’ll do it more officially, but publicly, Suzanne and Debby there is no way on this planet that I will be able to repay you for what you have done this week. a) In terms of pure and simple honest kindness and b) in (I was going to say “display”, but that would be far too derogatory) a very hard and honest lesson in how someone can be so true.

Dad and I played golf on the Highlands course at Prestonwood Country Club. I know for a fact that Charlie would probably give his first born son for that chance to play on that course. Farking hell – it was amazing. The hire clubs that I had were better than my ones back home by a factor of quite a lot. The greens were like glass. The whole environment was incredible and …….. not only a par on a course that would make the London Marathon seem like a little potter down the local park, but my lowest ever score! Cough118cough. Great success!

Apart from that, Dad and I have chatted. Bloody hell, have we chatted – and not stilted or forced, just like two brothers almost. You folks sitting there with your normal lives will probably now switch off. However, I can’t believe how similar we are (not you and me, Dad and I). It’s very _very_ spooky. Now, as I aluded to a couple of sentences ago, that means absolutely nothing to you. Of course you’re like your parents – In fact, you’re probably pissed of that you are. (It’s called taking things for granted). Well, I’ve spent thirty-nine years knowing that , somewhere, there must be someone out there like me and, over the last twleve months, I’ve had the honour to meet the two of them. And, not only that, but – science folks, can you tell me why someone I have never met in my entire life has _exactly_ the same mannerisms, habits and even colloquialisms – despite growing up in a different county, culture and era.

It may be that we’re mutants, but crikey (look. I forgot to swear there) it has been an amazing and intense few days.

I’m going to shut this one down now. Only because I’m absolutley knackered, fostering a DVT and in danger of rambling hugley.

Jules. Thankyou, I love you and the kids with all my heart.
Suzanne and Debby. You’re diamonds. People like you are so few and far between that anyone knowig you should be honoured.
Dad. Wow! That’s all

And then there were three ……

Ξ April 16th, 2008 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Work |

Another man down. Kim to Consultancy and now Costanzo has turned to the dark side. Sales. One less wing-man, another MIS manager assimilated by the BU.

Thorsten and Christophe, like me, are in shock. Costanzo, we saluted you. Enjoy estars.

A battle of wills

Ξ April 15th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Me |

The lifts are slow in the Umstead. Well, actually, the lifts aren’t slow in the Umstead – they have made themselves slow by deciding to enter into battle with me.

When you get in the lift at the lobby, it helpfully declares in a posh Southern accent “Lift going up”.

When you get in the lift on floor five, it helpfully declares in a posh Southern accent “Lift going down”.

I’m sorry, but I’m not being told where to go by a lift. So, when I get in at the lobby and get told where I’m going, I press the button for the ground floor. She soon changes her mind then! “Lift going down” she corrects herself.

Same thing for floor five. She tells me we’re going down …… sod off. “Let’s go to floor six” I tell her.

As a consequence. The lifts in the Umstead are slow.

Two hours ….

Ξ April 15th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Work |

….. of free wifi left, and I did promise to upload the photos tonight, so here are a few of the Umstead and here a few of tonight’s nose-bag. (By the way, the signal strength here is good, but the upstream bandwidth doesn’t like a bunch of photos heading to Flickr – sorry Umstead!)

I should also mention that there’s a shoemaker’s elf that lives in this room. Every time I turn my back for ten seconds, my toothbrush or shaver are laid out where I need them, the TV’s on the channel I want or some other useful thing. I may leave a piece of chocolate in the corner of the room and see if I can spot them.

Oh. And the US voltage can’t charge this laptop as fast as it uses juice.

Fear it!

Ξ April 14th, 2008 | → 2 Comments | ∇ Me, Work |

In the last twenty four hours, I have seen an army helicopter being towed down the freeway by a redneck, a man in spandex running through the lobby of building S and been invited to attend the SAS sci-fi club tomorrow evening. This is America. Fear it!

Welcome to Cary

Ξ April 14th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Work |

Well, it’s half six in the morning here and I actually managed to get some sleep – so good result all round. Flight wasn’t too bad, food wasn’t too bad, US customs was a nightmare! Over and hour to shuffle through and get my fingerprints done again – luckily, though, they’re the same as they were last year, so America remains safe.

We’re staying at the Umstead – which is very nice. The only down-side concerns the cost of everything in the hotel. It’s a swanky gaff with swanky prices, so a trip to the Flying Saucer was required last night to restock the system. Now, however, my body thinks that it’s missed breakfast and lunch and I’m absolutely ravenous. We’re meeting up at eight to go for waffles or some such, so don’t get between me and the food!

Just watching the weather forecast on NBC and it looks like we’ve bought the UK weather with us.

And as a little bit of deja vu, what do you know?! Last year the TV was full of the “Imus controversy”. This year, it’s “Bob’s Indian comments”.

GPS Tracking software

Ξ April 11th, 2008 | → 4 Comments | ∇ Uncategorized |

Hey look! I’ve decided to start reviewing things now, and what better place to start than software for my latest, greatest toy the N95 8GB.

One of the features that drew me to the phone in the first place is it’s integrated GPS. Allegedly very clever – using GPS and aGPS – the phone can use Nokia Maps (with voice tracking if you bunce them some more money) and Google Maps. The performance of the GPS can wait for my review of the phone itself, but one thing that really grabbed me was the ability to have the phone track my every move – useful for when Jules wants to see if I’m hiding in the pub or not.

One site that I stumbled across containing a useful forum for the N95 is the aptly named Nokia N95 Users Forums on N95 Users, and it was there that I was introduced to a couple of pieces of freeware; GPSed and 3DTracking. Both promise GPS tracking on the fly but, more importantly, both promise to constantly (or as frequently as you want) upload your position to a web-based implementation of Google mapping. I’ll take them one at a time;

3DTracking

Only first, because this is the first one that I installed. The actual concept is simple, visit http://free.3dtracking.net/ and download the appropriate software.

Once installed, start the application and record a point or two, then upload the track to their server.

Once that has been done, you can create an account on their server using your IMEI number and you are now registered with the software working correctly. They even provide helpful instructions on how to integrate a Google map with your own data onto your own web-site. All very handy indeed!

Actually I wouldn’t know, I’m afraid.

I installed the software and opened up the application to it’s rather frugal screen, obtained a lock and registered a couple of points. Then stopped the track, selected to upload the data and the application advised me;

“Error 500 Please report to 3dtracking”

Nice.

I tried several times, and I tried reinstalling the software several times too – all to no avail. So, no worries, they do actually have email contact details for support, so I contacted them …………. and nothing. Contacted them again ……….. still nothing.

I’ve also posted to the forum but, love them, I get the idea that most of the denizens are kewl tings of softer teen years – more interested in themes and dat rather than the technical aspects of the OS.

So, in summary;

Pros:
Sounds ace!
Easy to install
Can host map on your own site

Cons:
Doesn’t bloody work and there’s no response from support

Overall score:

0/10

GPSed

Here’s another free application that promises to track your location. This time, the map is hosted on their own site and the general public have to sign up to view your “Public” maps (surely not some form of email harvesting), but you can publish a link to a map that shows your current location.

Again the process is simple;

Download the software and install

Sign up on their website

Fill your boots

The testing of this piece of software is a little more extensive, as I actually managed to get it sort of working! The first thing I would say about the application is that, as a Java app, it’s very slooooooow through the old menus and settings. It detects the internal GPS (which 3dtracking didn’t) and you then set your various account details, how often you want it to upload data, whether you want it to auto login etc. Every one of those selections is painfully slow to come up and painfully slow to save.

Still, once done, we’re ready to go. Get a GPS lock, start a new track (which you name) and set off. I thought it would be fun to do this in the car, so set the upload to once every minute and did the school run.

When I got back to work, I stopped the track and the application then proceeded to save the track to disk.

Well, actually it didn’t. Every sodding time I’ve tried to save a track to disk, it fails telling me that there’s insufficient memory or disk (yeah – just four gig). Kindly though, it then gives an option that, if you’re not going to save to disk, it will upload your track to the server. Select that, and the application kindly hangs. Every. Bloody. Time.

So, app manager and kill the application.

Back into the application, and you have the option to open existing tracks. The first one I tried was corrupt, but the other two were OK. One of the options available on the old tracks is to send them to the server, so I did. One via WiFi and one via GPRS. After more interminable waiting, both attempts confirmed that the tracks were uploaded successfully – which was nice.

I popped onto the website and logged into my account to view the tracks and …….. nothing. Uploaded them again via WiFI ……. nothing. Uploaded them again via GPRS ……… nothing.

But what of the tracking data? I was uploading it every minute so ……….. ah. Nothing except my start point.

Pros:

Easy to install
Free
Informative operation screen

Cons:

Doesn’t work
No choice of hosting map on your own site
No support or contact details on the site

Overall score:

A generous 2/10 – as it actually did something