So it’s the second Sunday in November and I have just been eating Xmas (there is no Christ left in it these days) pudding and brandy butter. True enough I am usually the first to lambast the ever earlier starting of the commercial festive period, but as this was in the name of charity, I felt I had to partake in the testing of the pudding. I may well end but burning in my own damnation now…
So I joined the masses and now have a Jesus phone. It’s more toy than phone really. We’ll see how it goes.
Quite how I’m not sure, but I passed my motorcycle test yesterday (DAS, Direct Access) with only 1 minor. Scarily I can now go and ride any motorcycle I want on a public road. Thankfully for my own safety and that of others I was quite scared enough on a Suzuki GS500 at 70mph and I have no desire to own a sports bike. Indeed, I’m not sure why I need a motorbike at all, as I work at home and you can’t stick a mountain bike on a motorbike… Still, its good fun 
I’d been thinking about getting a “netbook” since the original Asus 701 was released, but having tried that there was no way my fat fingers were going to manage using it. The whole market has expanded recently and I tried the Merida thingie (another MSI Wind clone) in Sainsburys the other day and it seemed pretty good. Sadly though, it had no bluetooth so I didn’t buy it. Looking online threw up that PC World sold the Advent 4211, same thing but with bluetooth and a higher spec webcam, for 20quid less - 70quid less than the equivalent MSI Wind. I happened to be driving past a PC World on Wednesday afternoon so I stopped in and bought one (that experience is worth a posting of its own…).
I have no idea what the ULCPC bit means but it comes with XP, which works much like XP does. Its been bastardised by “The Tech Guys” but I’ve not really seen how other than the restore partition and the pointless Advent manual that is for desktop PCs and so was swiftly deleted.
The hardware itself is pretty nice. Its a full spec MSI Wind (bluetooth, 802.11n, Atom 1.6Ghz, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, 10.1 LED screen) but with Advent written on the hood and in silver and black. The first thing that I noticed though, and so have others by the looks of Google, is that the trackpad sucks. You can not disable tap clicking (which I always do on laptops ‘cos I hate it) and consequently I keep mis-clicking and often find the curser darting about. The buttons too are a but poor, smal and because its one bar, pivoted in the middle, hard to click. Its better with time, but I feel a mod is needed.
Otherwise the little netbook rocks. Its pretty nippy for general internet browsing and Putty work (which is all I do when out and about). The bluetooth talks to my N95 so I can dial-up with 3G. The battery (a titchy 2200mA thing) seems to last for about 2 hours and the charger is pretty small for carrying about too. The keyboard, though small, is quite usable and is better after a few days use (the , . and / keys are really to small, but hey). The screen is gorgeous and despite being small is really nice to use.
If I was picking fault, aside from the trackpad, I’d say it is weghted badly so tends to rock back when the screen is open and that the power cord connector could be higher up the side (sit the 4211 on your lap and you find it pushing the cord up, which isn’t good for it).
I may stick Ubuntu on it too, but to be honest XP is behaving pretty well for me. All in all, I’m pretty pleased thus far with Advent 4211 and hopefully time will be favourable to it. We’ll see.
I have decided that anyone using IE6 is a ludite and doesn’t deserve to be able to enjoy things as I mean them to be seen 
As such i have decided to not bother putting in hacks to make IE6 work with transparent PNGs. Sorry IE6 user, whoever you are. I also need to go play with Wordpress 2.6 I suppose too.
This last weekend was the first ‘dig day’ of the Black Canon Collective, which is a new club I’m helping with that was started to make the old unofficial Longleat trails official. Its been a fair while since Longleat shut the place down, for totally understandable reasons, and its been a fair amount of work for the club to get things organised and in place so that club members can once again go ride. This weekend though made it all start to feel worth it. Saturday saw the dodgy old building fenced in and the best track on the area not being felled, B.B.M.S., resurrected. A few of us went back Sunday but we slacked off the building and rode I’ve forgotten what riding tight rooty tracks is like and boy did I suck! It was a really good laugh though and with everyone giving each other encouragement and line/riding advice the achy legs from post drivering on Saturday were soon forgotten. I may have to start riding flats though….
Well here is an interesting thing. I looked at my on-line banking today and saw I had been charged twice (same merchant, same amount, different dates one day apart) on my debit card for a transaction. I called my bank to question this, ‘cos I certainly didn’t fill my car up twice… As soon as the lady heard me say “Asda Petrol” as the merchant, she stopped me. It would seem, according to my bank, that Asda have double charged a whole lot of people due to a “major processing error” on their end. I should be refunded by “the middle of next week”. One wonders how wide a scale this double charging is. I have heard nothing on the news and there is nothing on the internet, yet my bank knew right away of the issue when I said “Asda Petrol”. I hate to think what would have happened if I had not had a spare 40quid in my account - I’d certainly be asking Asda to pay charges. How can this happen in a modern banking world? Still, for me, no harm done and I’ll be happy once I am refunded. I will think twice though before using Asda’s pay-at-pump again though.
Is it just me, or was the who Apple WWDC ‘08 keynote a huge let down? I have not seen much in the techsphere that would agree with me, people seem all excited about a “new” 3G iPhone, but for me the whole thing was a let down. Sure, isn’t it nice to see a cheaper/faster/smaller iPhone, great, but its nothing all that new (similar spec to the original iPhone really) and the AppStore we’ve known about for ages, so basically other than MobileMe and the iPhone 3G there was nothing else new. Where were the new MacBooks? (ah yes, Intel delayed the platform they’d be based on for 6 weeks so I guess those got delayed) Heck, where was anything Mac?
Also, whilst I’m moaning a little about Apple, now that the UK has iTunes movie rentals that work on an AppleTV, why has the price not dropped like it did in the US when they got rentals (and thus Apple subsidized the price)? I’m glad I picked up my AppleTV in the US when I was over there, ‘cos at the moment the price differential is unjustifiable.
After week of the weather “Will it? Won’t it?”, the sun came out for this years Bristol BikeFest. Last year Bob and I wandered along on the Sunday to watch Neil plug around for 6 hours solo and walked much of the course - it looked quite fun, though there was little vibe in the pits, but Sunday is apparently always quieter. This year Bob anf Colin entered the Saturday 12hr as a pair and I went along to ‘bitch’ (pit-bitch - fix bikes, keep an eye on laps and change overs, etc). Owing to Bob and Col going to the Foo Figther’s gig on Friday night, we didn’t arrive ’til after 8am, for a 9am start…
This year, due to “wild flower damage” last year, the main arena was now right next to the camping site, which, when we arrived, despite paying for camping, was full. We managed to squeeze the car into a small gap and Col quickly sorted his bike and went off for the start.
All told it was a fun course, but rather to short (several people got bored on Saturday and went home early) with a lot of singletrack. Now singletrack is usually good, we mountain bikers like riding singletrack, but in a multilap event with a lot of different speeds of people in, too much is a bad thing, especially with a short lap. From speaking to many riders there were a lot of rude, arrogant tossers riding, who would not ask to come by, but would barge past with no warning, or who would refuse to let anyone else past, even when asked. This, for me, is always what lets XC racing down. I know I’m not fast uphill, so I don’t mind letting people by, but I am faster than most downhill… end result, roadies pass me uphill and hold me up all the way down.
Sadly it all ended badly for Bob, as one of the aforementioned tossers held her up for most of the lap, then when he did say “come past on the left” he cut her up and put her into a tree, without even stopping to see if the girl he’d just put into a tree, at some speed and who was now sprawled across the track, was even okay. Thankfully two chaps behind stopped, helped bob to her feet and got her bike straight (thank you gentlemen!). End of race for bob, so with Col tired and still no camping spots, we headed home.
All said, not a great event. It should be though, but sadly it wasn’t due to the overly relaxed organisation and XC roadie tossers who take life way to seriously.
The trouble with something like WordPress is that fiddling with templates becomes addictive and highly time consuming. I never quite could be bothered to make the old template do what I wanted, but then I came across a blog which was laid out just about how I wanted mine to look. Thankfully the template was a modification of a free one, so with a bit of fiddling I soon had things kinda how I wanted. Then of course I started seeing little things I wanted to fiddle with! Bah! I need to find an easier way to make transparent rounded corner backgrounds ‘cos they are time consuming…