PushingJelly

Well I am well and truly sick this week. I have a throat infection to die for and sound like a strangled frog. My doctor has signed me off for a week so that I don’t spread the plague therefore I am left at home with bugger all to do.

It was a chance (mostly one sided) conversation with my Dad that has prompted me to look at the family tree. I have been a member of friendsreunited in the past and saw that they have genesreunited as well so I thought I would work on the GR site to piece together the various factions of my family. So far I have only tackled my Dad’s side of the clan and am hoping that my uncle (Mum’s brother), who is also into genealogy, can furnish me with lots of dates and names that I can put into the system.
I have also found a useful application for the Mac called (inspirationally) “MacFamilyTree” which is kind of database to store all the names and connections. It is that good I am actually considering buying it – yes I know, amazing. The really cool thing is the the GR website exports in the file format the software uses natively (,ged), so I can just squirt the info accrued on the website directly into the app. I think it may be some kind of open standard for genealogy software. This kind of stuff is great when it works.

It was Wifey’s birthday today and when I asked some time ago, she said that she didn’t want a pressie but a tidy house and no stress instead. This I did (to a degree – I am ill) but I get the feeling I messed up again somewhere. Perhaps she did want a present after all. She has lived with me enough time now though to know I don’t do subtle in either direction. If she wanted a gift then she should have said so. Never the less, I said that I would put some of my hard earned ‘private cash’ toward a really nice present with the rest of the money she got for her birthday – We’ll see if she takes me up on the offer.
She better get in quick though, this genealogy lark is a real money pit. I spent about £20 last night doing census searches for distant family members. Oh well, at least in the future I’ll have a record to show the kids where they came from and who their relations are. We are not a close family by any stretch of the imagination and there are a fair few branches – one of my direct ancestors had 11 kids (they always said there was madness in my family and there’s the proof if ever there was), in fact my Dad told me earlier that they had to rent a room from a family down the street just to house them all. I will never remember all the names so it will be nice to have it on record.

I have a terrible memory, as Ian or Wifey will tell you given half a chance. Although I can quote verbatim large parts of the HitchHikers guide to the galaxy radio series (a favorite when young), if you asked me what I did earlier, of if anyone called today, chances are I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Bearing in mind I am only 36 this is a bit worrying. I would like to be able to blame “all the drugs I did when I was young, man” but being extremely boring, I barely touched alcohol (with some notable exceptions), let alone anything harder. I guess I will invoke that old chesnut that “I have too many other interesting things to think about” line and put it down to eccentricity. I actually think it was the MEC cleaning fluid I used to clean circuit boards with during my time as an electronics engineer so some may say brain damage, but I like the idea of being eccentric. Its a English thing I guess.

Speaking of which it was recently St George’s day here in the UK, and there was the usual bout of flag waving from the natives and shouting of good old St. George. Now I am proud to be British and of British decent (as far as I can tell so far) but don’t you think it is a wonderful irony that these flag waving “English loyalists” are actually celebrating the exploits of a Palestinian soldier of the Italian Roman army and a traitor to boot who sided with the Christians when the Emperor at the time (Diocletian) ordered him to slaughter a load of them. The only connection to England was that King Edward III wanted to promote the concept of chivalry and dug up George’s legendary exploits (in the crusades and such) as an example of good practice. WikiPedia has an interesting article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_George .

WikiPedia.org is, in my opinion, just fantastic. It is one of those rare gems on the net (along with Google when it started and bbc.co.uk) which remind me of the original vision of Tim Berners-Lee. The contributors obviously have seriously large amounts of spare time to give this stuff away. There is much discussion over the validity of the information on the Wiki, (FUD from traditional commercial encyclopedia manufacturers I think) because of it’s “edited by the people” approach. What they don’t get is that it is self regulating in that although someone may change or edit an article for their own designs, there are an army of editors waiting to correct it. This and the fact that it is still audited by login will keep it on the right path I think. That is not to say there are not problems with this approach. Because it is dynamic, there isn’t the same snapshot of ideas you get with printed media. As opinions change in the mind of the population of contributors, so will the information in the Wiki. An extreme example would be the rise of a religion or dictatorship that is of the time and that everyone of that time believes in, only for it to be discovered as a bad thing years later. A social historian would not be able to look back on the Wiki and say “in 2005 they thought this way, what can we learn from this point of view”. By the time the regime had faded the Wiki would have been updated and the ideas and information lost. Taking regular snapshots of the information is a possible solution but the size of the database may be prohibitively expensive to implement.
All that aside, one can only look in wonder at the marvel of free knowledge that is constantley refreshed and updated and that the world (providing they have a connection to the Net) can contribute toward. This is the sort of thing that rivals Caxton’s press for the betterment of mankind.

Other stuff this week: My nipper also had his birthday with a bowling party on Sunday which was enjoyed by all. I got to play with a helium tank for the balloons (no that’s not why my throat is sore Ian!) and managed to be the only one at the party to be told off! Bearing in mind there were twelve 8yr olds attending the party, I think that was pretty good going. If you were wondering why, I stepped on the sacred bowling floor in outside shoes. A heinous crime apparently.
Tiger is due V. V. soon. The speed bumps to the G5′s happened yesterday – We did tell them, and I am sure the iMacs will follow suit really soon and then the PowerBooks – No G5 there yet though – still too thirsty and hot.
Apple are still on the accusation trail, apparently snapping up a Canadian startup with some H.264 tech – I think it was a codec in silicon. Decoding H.264 is very resource hungry and if Apple want to develop a iMovie Pod or iMovie Store that delivers to Mac Minis in HD then they will need some nice custom silicon to do the tough stuff (just my speculation of course).

Well that’s enough of my rabbiting for tonight.

Tomorrow: how I improved UCLA’s room temperature fusion while I waited for a screen refresh.

Getting twitchy again now though,,,,,,,,whats on macsurfer?

Ok well, I guess that I’d better add an update to my blog (the natives are getting restless!).

I am probably not in the best frame of mind today and please excuse any negativity you feel from this entry. Personal reasons only which I am obliged not to go into here.

Over the last week we have been holding presentations to the powers regarding our project. (I say we, I have been doing the presenting and Ian has been following up with comments).

As usual there has been the internal politics to contend with, including an interesting episode where, when I was doing the presentation my line manager refused to direct any questions to me, choosing to ask Ian instead. Call me paranoid but….

We have received a nice shiny Xserve G5 which we have fitted into a rack. This will (initially at least) be the FileWave server and responsible for the distribution of all those file set packages out to all 700+ machines. It will get some help along the way from its booster buddies but its gonna have its work cut out for it.

We have a test lab now (with a fully functioning network – don’t ask) furnished with six iMacs and six G5′s – nice! They are all built but as we are now deploying Tiger (Yes!) we will have to rebuild them again before they are used. The wait for 10.4 is killing us, more so now that we know its gone GM and sent for duplication. We want it now! Oh well only another week or so.

My two children both attend Karate classes at least twice a week. The eldest is a brown belt and the nipper is a green. The littlen’s mind wanders a bit too much for his brilliance to shine through, but the eldest is very good indeed and won a student of the year award from the club – it turns out she has a real talent for kicking ass.
On Sunday I was involved in a pressure point seminar run by the club (I videoed it for them) and at the end, as a result of speaking to the chap who runs the club, I talked myself into attending a self defence class, today.

I was rather apprehensive about going. I had never done anything like it before and being slightly neurotic, I worried about several things, not least that I wouldn’t be able to string two moved together and I’d look like a complete fool in front of a bunch of black belt perfectionists and get my ass kicked. Also, knowing about the whole respect thing from the kids lessons I was anxious about being late for the session.
When I had discussed it with the Renshin (Karate instructor) on Sunday, I was sure he said it started at 8:30pm. Being of that paranoid frame of mind I checked this with wifey who confirmed it. I arrived at the car park at 7:45 and found the room in the gym where the session was to be held. At about 8:05 I looked through the window and there was already a class in session (I expected this as wifey also said there was an earlier class). As the room was quite small and I didn’t want to disturb them and show disrespect, I killed some time until 8:20 and went back to the gym.

Looking through the window again, I saw that there were quite a few faces there I knew from the kid’s Karate sessions and so I quietly shuffled in. One guy, who we shall call Bob, a northerner who teaches the kids on Mondays made the mistake of making eye contact so I hooked him. Poor Bob.
It was about then I found out that the class from earlier was THE class, it started at 8pm, just before I arrived the first time. Fantastic.

I was feeling very much a fish out of water. I didn’t know what to do or what to expect and I give all credit to Bob he was extremely patient. It turns out Bob is a special needs teacher and so is used to helping less able individuals. Bob exhibited the patience of a saint.
My biggest fear at this point was hurting the guy. I am pretty chunky and Bob is quite small. I have seen him take many blows and hits in the sessions with the kids, but he is so nice that in my ham fisted attempt to follow instruction, I didn’t want to do him a crippler. Showing perhaps too much restraint at times, I made it through the session without inflicting too much pain on Bob and building the associated guilt on my part. Bizarrely I was very conscious that my behaviour might reflect badly onto the kids (there’s a turn-up for the books, its meant to be the other way around surely?)
Bob was in control all the time of course but had a way of boosting my confidence enough to make me think I was doing it right independently – the art of a good teacher I guess.

I am used to seeing Bob teach my children. I kind of assumed that is why he was at this session. In discussion he described his level of expertise in the techniques we were performing, his being 1 or 2 on a scale of 1 to 10. The chief instructor being 10. I reflected this on the way home and thought perhaps he was actually there to learn instead – here’s where the neurosis kicks in, because now I feel guilty because I commandeered his time and held him back in some way.

We looked at the dynamics of knife attacks, pushing and some pressure points, all useful if you have the presence of mind to use them when some nutter is trying to kill you. The “it just comes naturally” bit will develop with time I am sure, but at the moment grabbing another guys hand and trying to hurt it without really hurting it is a little alien to me.

So here’s the thing, I was apprehensive about going because I didn’t want to be injured when after all was said and done, it was me that beat myself up.

I’ll go again next week, it was odd, but fun. Next week though, I’ll pick on someone other than Bob for his sake.
Just fetch me a splint because I don’t think the next guy will be as kind.

“Pshhhhhhhhht and now in other news Apple launched their new OS today”, 10.4 Tiger! Only 17(ish) days to wait for the full release in our greasy palms. I am rather looking forward to it – especially server. New toys are always fun.

We have now ordered an AMP agreement for the project, nothing to do with Quad or Denon but a way of getting updates to the OS for the next three years. Tiger here we come!

10.4 is known here as Tigger (like the A.A.Milne character), especially around our operational management mainly due to Ian and I calling it such in every meeting we have with them. Its strangly satisfying hearing them say it back to us and them not know why we smile.

Its the small things in life that make you happy isn’t it?

They say that moving home is the most stressful time of your life (along with having children).

With the expiry of my demo of iBlog and my fear of giving my credit card number to someone in the far east I haven’t met I have moved (rather painlessly I have to say) to the excellent blogger service. I am still not sure what the “value proposition” is for google (who own blogger) but I’ll make hay while I can and host the blog here for now. Thanks Google!

So there you go, sorry for the leave of absence but I had no mechanism to blog. Updates should be a bit more regular from now on.