After finding a permanent blood donation place near where I work, Julia and I finally got round to giving blood again on Tuesday. And unless you have a very good reason not to, you should too.
There’s more info in my previous post about donating blood.
Google Mail (no longer Gmail) has a confusing feature.
I recently got a Google Mail account to test out Google Talk. Since I was already logged into my Google account it asked if I wanted my new email account to be part of it. I said yes. Then I couldn’t log into my Google Account for anything else. The problem is they’ve decided my new Google Mail email address is my primary address and that’s what I need to use to log in.
Ah well.
Julia is going to America next year on an exchange and she needs a student visa obviously (a J-1 if you’re interested). So we had a nice trip to London to the US Embassy this week.
The first problem we faced was finding it. Using Google Maps gives different results depending on whether you use the address or the postcode. I figured the address was right since it at least showed a road with the right name.
Speaking of the road, it’s blocked off. The whole road in front of the embassy is completely blocked to traffic and has armed police patrolling it. For various reasons we needed to find a bank so Julia asked one of the police officers. Somehow feels like misusing resource - asking someone with a gun that big for directions.
Then once Julia was in (I couldn’t get in without an appointment) there was a three hour wait. But they said yes. Even the page full of Arabic in her passport (following a recent trip to the United Arab Emirates) didn’t worry them.
I now have all the parts of my new computer.
Unfortunately all is not well. After waiting two weeks for my video card, I cancelled the order and ordered a different one from someone else. Both arrived today. Other than the loss of postage to return the first one, it’s not a major problem though. But slightly aggravating. It does mean I should be able to post comments on Windows MCE tomorrow.
Not having a computer also means that I don’t have internet access outside of work.
I say this just to make it look like I’m still updating the blog.
I’m getting a new computer. Well most of a new computer. And I’ve been considering whether to get Windows Media Centre Edition or not.
The first two versions of MCE were rather lacking but after reading a lot I’ve decided 2005 is actually quite cool.
Good question. One I didn’t know the answer to until recently. It’s Windows XP a with range of new utilities for working with video, music and images (as well as bits of hardware associated with them) all wrapped inside one interface. The idea is to have your computer as the hub for your whole home entertainment system.
The most useful component is the built in DVR software (sometimes called Personal Video Recorder or PVR). Plug your TV into your TV tuner card and Windows can record stuff straight to your hard drive. But of course most TV tuners come with software to do this. Well MCE does it better to be honest. And you can also get a hardware bundle (ready built systems come with it) that includes a IR blaster. Basically it’s an infra-red transmitter you stick to the front of your set top box (Sky, cable, whatever) to allow your MCE computer to change channels.
The lowest quality recording takes up between 1Gb and 1.5Gb per hour. Reasonable hard drives these days are about 200Gb which gives you about 100 hours of video (leaving space for other stuff). Not really suitable for storage but it does allow you to burn things to DVD. Most of the time. The software apparently supports any content restriction specified in incoming media and won’t let you copy such content of the computer that made it.
MCE is actually Windows XP Professional underneath. It took a while to confirm (most references are vague about whether it’s XP Home or XP Pro) but I did find a page on Microsoft’s website saying it’s XP Pro. This means you can do everything with it that you can normally do with a PC.
One final note… you could always install MCE on a Mac.
I recently bought a book about ASP.NET: Pro ASP.NET in C# by Apress, mainly because when I was looking for jobs there were lots of ASP.NET jobs advertised. And I have to say I have no idea why. Part of the problem may be that is book isn’t very good (there are bits of vague contradictions and a general obsessive (and inaccurate) preachiness about it) but I think there are major limitations to ASP.NET.
Firstly the inability to post to a different page. Who the hell decided that was good idea? I know it can be faked but that’s just silly. And you can only really have one form on a page. Well you can only have one “rich” form that ASP.NET can access in a clever and high level way.
I’m assuming people will disagree with me (if not, why is it so popular). If you do, please explain why ASP.NET is supposed to be so amazing because I don’t see it…
Updated - Clarifying my position on ASP.net
My computer is now essentially dead. Luckily I have internet access at work and an hour lunch break :D
It’s been getting increasingly unstable for the past month or so giving me random blue screens of death. Sometimes I get a driver reference that caused the problem (and they are different drivers each time) and sometimes I don’t. Yesterday it managed to crash while trying to display the Windows log-in screen and I was left with just a cursor on black screen.
Since I now have money and it’s old anyway (Athlon 1.2GHz - back when AMD named their processor after their real speed), I’m not so bothered.
Ironically I found this out while reading an article on a wrestling site.
Apparently the new movie will be directed and produced by J.J. Abrams, a guy famous for Lost, Alias and Mission Impossible: III and is scheduled for a 2008 release. In a risky move the story will apparently focus on Kirk and Spock’s first meeting at the academy during the early days of the Federation. How they do that with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy as old as they are is a beyond me, unless they use new actors which is an immensely bad idea.
Oh and they’re apparently not involving Rick Berman in the project at all…
Star Trek, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, science fiction, sci-fi, TV
Ooooh, the blog has been up for a whole year :D