Vent of Hearing

Manic Isn't a Surname

I can't believe it has been seven years since Richey Manic disappeared.

I used to like the Manic Street Preachers, but then I used to be an Indie Kid (tm). I'm older, wiser and more boring now. Just like the Manic Street Preachers. (Although, I suspect the Manic's have retained their hair better).

This brings back the memory of the time I had a ticket to see them play at Reading University. Not the main stage, either. The small, boy we can crowd them in tight and make them sweat stage.

I went with Dave who had forgotten to buy a ticket but was hoping to get one on the door. As the prices were huge, we instead sold my ticket and went to the bar. We used the ticket money to buy lots of drink until we were sufficiently pissed to attempt to 'gain entry' to the gig.

This involved lots of roof climbing, running through posh looking dining rooms, full of dons in full drag, running away from bouncers and knocking plaintively at the fire escape door in the hope that people inside could sneak us in.

I definitely had a better evening that just going to see them play.

What If ....

For those people sweating over their A-Level results, consider this salutary tale.

I wouldn't have my daughter, my job, my wife, some of my friends; I wouldn't live where I live and this web site wouldn't exist, if I hadn't gotten an E in my Maths A Level.

Have you ever played the "What If" game, or thought about "What If" scenarios. What if Germany had won the 2nd World War? What if I'd not gone shopping that day and met Fred?

The idea is to decide what the key moment in your life is, and work forwards to find out what would be different. The key point is then to work back from your key moment, to find out what caused it.

For me, my key moment has to be meeting my (future) wife for the very first time. So, to work forwards on the easy ones, I wouldn't be married to her, and wouldn't have my daughter without her. Not difficult to work that out.

Without her, I wouldn't have stayed in Reading after university (this may count as a point against!) and I would have gone home to live with my parents in Aylesbury (the point is cancelled out). So, I wouldn't have been forced to take the first job that came along to pay the rent. This job wouldn't have been in Bracknell, and wouldn't have been so bad, that I walked into a Bracknell job agency within three weeks of joining. I wouldn't have chosen the 2nd (better) job as they were only advertising in Bracknell. A year later I wouldn't have been working for the company when they sold their software to Oracle, along with half their staff, including myself. I can see of no other scenario where I could have found myself working for Oracle otherwise.

Plenty of my friends are my wife's friends. I would never have met them without her. Many of my friends are from wife.

And this website? Well ...

My wife reintroduced my love of books. I'd stopped reading when I went to university, so I could channel my time into drinking^Wstudy. My wife is an English graduate, and therefore has a natural affinity with literature. She got me reading again, and I picked new books and old. Amongst these were the works of David and Leigh Eddings. Marry this stream with my growing use of the Internet (something my wife can't be held accountable for) and you end up with the newsgroup alt.fan.eddings. From there I came across the website of one Aquarion (who is currently not responding; reasons on a postcard), whose links sent me scurrying over the web, eventually producing this website.

But, what have Mathematics A-Levels got to do with this?

Well, I may have identified what the key moment has been in my life, but how did I get there. We need to work backwards.

I first met my wife in my student house. One of my friends had got off with one of her friends (you need to know no more). The main reason that I was living with this guy we become close friends and experiment partners on my Physics degree course. The reason for that was that we had both attended the pre-university refresher course that Reading University ran, otherwise known as the "You've failed your A-Level's but we're desperate course". Physics degrees are not the hardest courses to get into, and the staff were generally doing everything they could to get anyone in, and this three week course was the job for me.

The reason for me attending this course was that I'd achieved an E grade for my Maths A-Level course. And the reason for that .... who knows, my teacher predicted a B (in line with the grades I got for my other A-Levels; B,C) and I came out of the exam thinking I'd done really well. When I phoned up to get my results, I really thought the woman from school had read it wrong. Are you sure, I asked. I doubt I was the first or last person that asked that question that day.

What I should have done was retake the exam. Or go to my Computer Degree course at Nottingham Polytechnic. Or found another university that would have taken me. But then, I didn't get where I am today by doing that.

Top Tips

I may be wrong, but most of the Windows XP expert tips sound more like Viz Top Tips to me.

Remember them?
"As adverts on the television tell us not to use light switches if we smell gas, I find it useful to always have a candle ready for use in such emergencies."
Mrs D Bibby Rugby

vs

"Stop getting tricked into running viruses because you don’t see the file extension of an attachment.

Click Start, click My Computer, and on the Tools menu, click Folder Options.
Clear the Hide file extensions for known file types check box, and then click OK. "

So you are saying that if I Clear Hide file extensions it will show file extensions?
If I'm stupid, it still won't stop me clicking on the file to see what it does.

Declutter

You shouldn't walk into our garage. In fact, you are lucky. You can't walk into our garage. Our garage is full. Our garage doesn't have space for humans.

In reality, the above is an exaggeration. Only a slight one, mind. There is a narrow passage way for someone to move from the back of the garage to the front. Either side, rising up like a craggy mountain range in Afghanistan, are boxes. Cardboard boxes. Plastic boxes. Metal boxes.

To me, they are full of rubbish. To a teacher, they are full of resources. Let us open up a random box and see what is inside.

Corks.
Egg boxes.
Bits of cut up coloured cardboard.
A couple of pens.
A battered plastic vase shaped thing.
A brick.
Empty boxes.

Rubbish? Rubbish. However, a teacher is a kind of Super Blue Peter presenter who can make a teaching lesson out of sticky backed plastic and washing up liquid bottles. Here's one they prepared earlier, left in my garage. It is common knowledge that garages are not for cars, but I think we are taking it to extremes.

With the imminent arrival of Little Person No2, the spare bedroom will no longer be available for computers, books and other things that just make the living room look like an office. The computer can go in the dining room, but everything else will have to be relocated.

Where? Either the garage or the loft. The loft is a bit difficult to get into quickly, requiring a ladder. It is time to declutter the garage. Some teaching resources are really useful, some might be useful in a couple of years, and some are just plain rubbish.

The trick is to persuade my wife that the majority is the later and not the former.

Version 1.2

+ Author hack so that some entries are not displayed as a main item
+ A couple of CSS style changes.
+ New font

Learning Tree Innocent

I take it all back. It appears that my wife had installed the program that had plonked DSSAgent onto my computer. Cosmopolitan MakeOver 2000, made my Broderbond.

Thing is, it didn't work on my old machine and my wife never used it (she was bought it as a Christmas present anyway). I put it on my new machine to see if it would work, and it promptly ran DSSAgent. Naughty software.

Version 1.1

+ A new CSS stylesheet
+ minor changes to html templates to match the stylesheet

Thinking outside the box.

Remind me to investigate this further. Very interesting.

Improvements to come

Note that the plan is only to have the latest journal entry on this index page, with a separate box section saying "the latest in ... computing" etc. When I have time. You shouldn't see the LINKS like that either, but as a separate page altogether. Still, at least it validates now.

A List apart: XML

The latest issue of A List Apart does a good job of dealing with the basics of XML.

Strange how it leaves out any mention of Oracle's offerings in this area. The new XMLTYPE datatype in 9i does a lot to put Oracle in touch with other XML databases.

Up and Running

Far better to get going than to endlessly never get round to it.
So, I'm not so happy with the design. Very happy with movabletype. Pass the message, it is good. It lacks a couple of things that could make it perfect, one of which is coming soon.

New Years Resolution one passed.

DSSAgent

DSSAgent turned out to be spy software from Mattel. I had recently installed a kids program from The Learning Tree which, I think, is owned by Mattel. DSSAgent.exe sends information from your PC to Mattel. Mattel claim that it doesn't send any personal information, but it is rather sneaky in that it never says that it is going to do this. A quick deletion of the file, and the removal of the relevant entry from the registry stopped it from working again.

More info: Salon.com article

Moveable Type

The installation of Moveable Type has gone without flaw. The hosting server support people wanted £35 per hour to install this for me, but it seems to be very easy and works fine.

Next step, finish all the templates, modify the style to my liking and invoke the Castalian system.