Preparing for the off

Going to London tomorrow as a guest at the Microsoft Imagine Cup Finals. Going away always worries me. What to pack? Which gadgets to take? Will I have room for any clothes in the bag? I want to take both the new (and very well behaved so far) Tablet PC and the big camera. But I also might need a clean shirt. Such complications.

Zoo Keeper - Match those Hippos

The Nintendo DS is a great toy. It actually takes gaming into a new place. Some of the games are just plain silly but they are not like much else and they are pretty compulsive. Like Zoo Keeper, now available for less than you think and great fun. The premise is very simple, swap animals around in a zoo grid to get lines of more than three and so trap them and put them back in their cages. (I'm not sure if this would work in real life, but the lion has a completely square head and so I don't think we are talking about super realism here).

Anyhoo, the game is great. Number on daughter has now taken ownership of my DS and has been matching hippos for the last hour. She says she blames me for her "touch screen cramp".

Number one son came back from Durham today to rehearse his Imagine Cup presentation for the final next week. Looking good.

Nissen Dorma and Buy a Table

Took the old Nissan out today. First time in a while. I'd forgotten just how much power there is in the old warhorse. Took off like a rocket at the line and then wrapped it around the first lamp post on the corner. Not good. Fortunately I was playing Gran Turismo 4 on the Playstation and not messing around in real metal, plastic and rubber. I won a few races and took part in some enormous car wrecks. Lovely. Then I popped it back into the garage for a week or so.

One of my minor ambitions is to take a proper fast car out somewhere (rallying would be best I reckon) and just see how much of my racing experience maps accross in to the real world.

Then we went out to buy a fan (v. hot today) and came back with a table and four chairs. I don't think we have ever bought a table intentionally. It was, of course, the last one in the shop and suitably reduced in price.

One Man's Poison..

Some time ago Max asked me for my honest opinion about Tablet PCs (this implies that I have a dishonest opinion as well - but we'll let that pass). Anyhoo, I gave him the good word, which is that slate Tablet PCs are great to rest a paper notepad on but pretty much useless in real life unless you are doctor doing ward rounds or a ticket officer on a train. Max is neither of these as far as I am aware.

"What you really want", I said with the voice of one imparting great wisdom, "is a convertable Tablet PC where you can twiddle the screen round to get the tablety writing goodness but also make it into a proper notebook so you can actually use it to get things done. And the best of these..." I continued, building nicely to a climax "... is the Toshiba Portege M200". Max listened, took notes and then went out and bought one.

This morning the phone went. It was Max. He was not happy. To say he was displeased with his M200 would be an understatement of gargantuan proportions for which no suitable analogy has presented itself yet. Apparently nothing works properly with the device. Nothing. Devices come and go like ships in the night. Programs crash for no reason. The docking station (a hugely impressive edifice of plastic, metal and thick cable) does not dock properly. If his office was on a higher level I really think he would have thrown it out of the window. And it was all my fault.

Hmmm. The funny thing is that I've been saving my reach out pennies to get myself just such a device. So I bought it off him. In the face of tales of woe, a screen backdrop of a lemon on the device and streams of invective about it which would make a stoker blush. I've got all the bits. Thing is fully loaded and just like new. Which it very nearly is.

There is nothing like getting a new computer to set you off on a stream of displacement activity of the highest order - although I did write some exam questions whilst I re-imaged the machine from the back up DVD. It is OK so far, and Max is very happy 'cos he can now go out and buy something made by Sony.

I wonder if he will ever ask my advice again.

Time for Toys

I buy toys. Not season tickets for football teams which probably won't win. Not cigarettes that will probably kill me. Not alcohol which may well do the same. But toys. Got a new one today.

For some time I've been considering getting an external disk drive for my computer. I have no particular need for this I supppose, but I do have this ability to convince myself that I do. And I can kind of make a business case to myself because I do sometimes need to move files around.

So off down to PC World and look at what they had. The had a bunch of cute little disks that nearly hit the spot, and one rather interesting gadget from BNI. The Personal Media Drive is externally just like any other external disk drive. You plug it into your computer and chuck files at it.

But it has a couple of little extras. A socket to plug the telly into and a receiver for the remote control that comes with it. You see this little box of magic can hold videos, pictures and music (after all they are just files of data) but it can also play them. I copied a few files onto the disk and pretty soon we were watching Scrubs. It works wonderfully. If you are looking for a 40GB external drive you would be mildly bonkers not to get one of these. And PC World had it 30 quid off. Talk about fate.