Choc Flic Rox

Went to see "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" tonight. It has had mixed reviews, but we ignored them and went anyway. And what a good move it turned out to be. Very good film. Lush visuals, very inventive, good acting and a happy ending. What more can you ask?

Write them thar words

Writing words today. In between writing programs. In between seeing programs that I have written eat aformentioned words and refuse to spit them out again. Number one son and I are writing some course material. Of course, as true computer professionals, when given a task we spring into action and immediately device and perform a complex set of displacement activities, which are more fun than the actual work but don't necessarily get us anywhere.

In this case we are devising a tool which will make it easier to write the words. The tool will be a wonderous thing, able to track versions, create websites, leap tall buildings etc etc. At the moment it sort of works. That is it makes me think that I've made it work and then swallows all my beautiful text. It how has a large and prominent save button. Which I press around every thirty seconds....

The kind of good news is that it is now useful. Which means that we need to do the actual work I suppose.

The Quest for the Best Picture of them All

I've, kind of, bought this, well, er, big LCD screen. It works a treat on the Media PC that I, er, kind of bought, at Christmas. I've also, er, kind of, bought this digital TV tuner for the Media PC which means that I can get rid of the nasty, noisy analogue TV signal (which actually gives the best picture) and replace it with the graphical certainty of computer data.

Except that I can't get digital ITV. Our TV aerial, although very good for birds to sit on (one of them sat on it when we had the gas fire on to get toasty warm, fell asleep from the fumes and woke up right behind the fireplace with an awfull headache. What fun that was - but I digress) is no good for actually pulling in the signal. Especially digital TV.

So number one son and I toddled off to buy a wide band aluminium extrusion with a large number of elements. We got this thing home, assembled it and fitted it in the loft. Before I went to the trouble of threading the wire all through the nastiness which is our loft I directly wired it up to make sure it worked, which it did. So it was out with the cordless drill and into the deepest recesses of the eaves to get the wires into place. And of course once I'd done this it didn't work. Life is unfair sometimes. And so it was out again to get a booster amplifier to get the signal up to a level which actually works. Most of the time. Unless the wind is in the wrong position and the trees have leaves on them. Such is the price of being a pioneer.

Possession is Nine Tenths

Bought a real, proper, Compact Disk last week. Normally I don't do this, because my wonderful Napster thingy lets me download any "bangin' new toons" for free. But this one wasn't on the network, so I had to actually buy a shiny silver disk in a box. I quite enjoyed the experience. It was nice to haver a proper sleeve with nice artwork and some kind of resale value.

The music (Speak for Yourself by Imogen Heap) is great. I got to wondering if, since I've actually paid real money for this record and got a physical artifact, if I will listen to it more.

Turn it off again

In Hull we are blessed in that we have our own telephone company. This means that phones are generally cheaper to use and we have had revolutionary things like untimed local calls for ages and ages. However, the phone company are now changing the way that you pay for your phone lines, which means that I now can't really afford our second number.

We got it ages ago when you had to use one of these quaint little modem things to warble your way onto the internet. After having free and frank discussions with number one wife, who made unreasonable demands like wanting to use the phone every now and then to actually talk to people, I/we decided that a second phone line - which was installed for free - was an equitable solution (and stopped me from having the handset shoved somewhere where holding a conversation would have been difficult in the extreme).

Nowadays we have that new fangled broadband thingy, and only need the one line. Previously I've just paid a small amount per quarter for the second phone with the intention of perhaps using it for a fax machine or something later. But now rental and phone calls are being bundled together in a way that means I would get to pay for lots of calls I don't make anyway. So the phone has to go. Unfortunately that is the phone with the broadband on (are you still with me) and so I went off down town with the mission to swap the broadband over and kill the phone line.

You might think that if you were a phone company who'd just made changes to your charging scheme that would affect all your customers, many of whom might want to talk to you about the way their bills have gone from a fiver to twenty quid, you would put extra people on the desk on a Saturday morning.

You might think that one of the assistants, noting the huge queue of gently fuming customers, might decide not to stroll off and take his tea break - treating us all to a cheery wave as he left us down to two operatives.

You might think loads of sensible things. But of course not everybody else does. The good news is that the person I dealt with was friendly and helpful. And that at some point in the future all the things I want should happen. Here's hoping.