Hair Expertise

For some reason I saw some GMTV this morning. I usually shy away from such things because they are bad for my blood pressure. But I happened to be in the room and the TV was on and they were interviewing a hairdresser. And the hairdresser said:

"Of course, your hair changes every seven years....."

And the person talking to her just nodded and agreed. And my blood pressure went up (told you it would).

I just hate it when people make statements like these (and I hate it when others agree). What is the basis of saying this? How do they know? Why is it seven? Was my hair exactly the same for the first seven years of my life, and then turned another colour, or curly or vanished, until I was fourteen when it came back, or whatever? What happens if you are bald? Does this only happen on multiples of seven years. If you make it to 22 with a full set of follicles does this mean you are OK for the next six years?

I've done some research on this (actually searched for "hair changes seven years" on the interweb) and I did find one other person that mentioned this "fact". So I guess it must be true..

Pitch Car Fun

I bought a new game on Saturday. Nothing strange about that. But this one is a racing game which is made of wood. It is called Pitch Car and it is very silly. Not as silly as Very Silly Games of course (cunning plug) but silly nonetheless.

Pitch Car originates from France and is a racing game where you flick wooden cars along a smooth track made out of pieces that you can fit together. Sort of a grand prix shove-halfpenny game. I've a feeling that it could be quite skilful, but we've only played a couple of times so far. But it is great fun. Oh yes.

I got the game from Archeron Games who operate out of a shop in the middle of Hull. They are worth seeking out, and - because one of the people recognised me from my day job - I even managed to get a bit of discount.  They have some really neat board games, along with other bits and bobs.

I actually just said this...

"Have we missed 'The Day After Tomorrow'? I thought it was yesterday...."

I'm so proud of myself.

MVP Chronulator

One of the nice things about being a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional is that you get a free gift each year. Last year the gift was a rather nice business card box with some toys in it. Whilst it was a nice box, I don't have much of a need to store that many cards. Having seen number one son's Chronulator I had an idea....

The world's first MVP Chronulator

The workmanship is not first class. You can see a scuff mark on the bottom left where the Dremel slipped, and I need to line the meters up a bit better.  I should also change it so that right hand meter goes up rather than down.

But it works, and it is showing the correct time (near enough).

The guts.

Doing the Impossible with Vista

I put Service pack 1 on another machine today. It was the media PC I built a while back and use it for watching the odd telly program. The upgrade took ages. There was much hard disk rattling and everything moved as if in treacle. I wasn't very impressed to be honest, in fact after the upgrade everything seemed to have slowed right down, even simple things like opening up the browser took over a minute. Very poor. Then one program claimed that there was not enough memory for it to run, which was a strange thing for it to say on a one gig machine with nothing else loaded.

Except that it wasn't a one gig machine any more. The ram had come loose and I had Vista Ultimate running on a box with 256M of RAM. I suppose I should have spotted this earlier, but I'm very impressed that it did anything at all. I opened up the box and re-seated the chips and it seems a lot better now....