I got some sample chips from Microchip today. 5 days (including the weekend) shipping is not bad at all considering they came from Thailand. 😀

I kinda need to take a look around for a PIC programmer thinbgybob so I can actually make it do something though. I could also do with some breadboard of my own so I can play around a bit more. I did get a temperature sensor that I’ll be able to connect into Robert’s circuit to make the LEDs flash at different speeds when it’s at different temperatures. It’s fun playing with things like that.

I’ve received my second assignment back from my PTLLS course. It got referred because I didn’t bother putting a conclusion on the end of it. It feels a bit like being in a GCSE science class at the moment, but oh well. I’m enjoying it.

I handed in my third assignment yesterday, and I wrote the fourth one a few minutes ago. Hopefully I’ll get the 5th one done tonight before Lizz gets back and I’ll be ahead of the game again.

Lizz now lives at Adam’s house with me. It’s cool having her around, and having some of her stuff in the place. It’s become quite a bit tidier now she’s there, and that’s always welcome. 🙂 Tonight she’s going to the cinema with Kate from work though, so I’ll have a bunch of time to waste with nothing other than coursework to occupy my mind.

Actually, I do have 2 hours of an Indian cricket movie (Lagaan) to watch… 😐

I’m writing this from my new phone. It’s really awesome. I’m still discovering the features as I play around, but I love it already! 🙂

I was “reading an article”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/10/19/SS6JS8RH0.DTL&type=politics about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch after spotting the headline on Google. It seems there’s a garbage patch two times the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean. That makes it 523,594 square miles. That’s nearly 3 and a half times the size of the UK, according to some quick Googling.

It occured to me that something that size is almost certainly going to be responsible for rising sea levels… At least a little bit. It depends on how thick the layer is. Still, that’s a hell of a lot of plastic, etc. We should make it inhabitable, or get rid of it. Apparently some scientific teams have been monitoring it for a decade… How come I only heard of it today? Can I see some pictures of it?

Why didn’t anyone tell me Bob Monkhouse died in December 2003?

I was in California so it got no coverage there. I can’t believe I only just found out…

“They laughed when I said I was going to be a comedian. They’re not laughing now.” -Bob Monkhouse, comedian (1928-2003)

I’ve decided to scrap the audio cable idea and go for USB instead. Robert happened to have an old Logitech USB mouse in pieces, so with his guidance I’ve now connected the doorbell to the mouse. Now when the doorbell is pressed it triggers a left-click event on the computer the “mouse” is plugged into.

I’m running Ubuntu from a CD on my laptop at the moment and I’ve written a little Perl application using the Linux::Input module to capture that event from the event device in /dev/input and it displays a little message when the button is pressed. 🙂

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Linux::Input;

my $mouse = Linux::Input->new('/dev/input/event2');

while(1) {
  while(my @events = $mouse->poll(0.01)) {
    foreach my $event (@events) {
      if($event->{'code'} == 272 && $event->{'value'} == 1) {
        print("Left click.\n");
      }
    }
  }
}

So yeah. That’s quite good. 😀

Still can’t wait for the PIC to arrive from Microchip and I can make it something better than just a lame old mouse-click.

I’ve started working on a doorbell/computer idea that “I started once with Dave over two years ago”:http://essteeyou.com/index.cgi?id=633 and originally had over 4 years ago (although I don’t remember when exactly).

I’ve bought a wireless doorbell, and I’ve taken it to pieces. I’ve chopped up a stereo audio cable and figured out what needs to go where. Pretty much all I’d have to do from this point is solder some bits together and write the software. Then I decided it’d be better if it was USB. Now I’m waiting for some sample chips from Microchips to arrive so I can hook it up in a much more interesting way. 🙂

Good fun.

Yay, I got a promotion at work, also a bit of a raise.

Still living in Meden Vale, still got my stuff spread out over 5 or 6 different houses, still Fanta, still Dre.

I’m at work still because I’m waiting for people so I can go pick up my stuff from Nottingham. I decided I’d make a start on my new assignment for my teaching course. The brief I was given is as follows: “Summarise the key aspects of current legislative requirements and codes of practice relevant to your subject and the type of organisation within which you work.”

So I begin by looking up the obvious few acts: the Sex Discrimination Act, the Race Discrimination Act, and the Disability Discrimination Act. I found one site that linked to a site called “Women And Equality Unit”:http://www.womenandequalityunit.gov.uk which is a government website. Surpringly there’s no “men and equality unit” that I can find.

I then found “a cache on Google”:http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:fRotRtzhlu8J:www.eoc.org.uk/default.aspx%3Fpage%3D15497+sex+discrimination+act&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3 of a now moved website explaining what the Sex Discrimination Act says. Here’s a brief extract: “It also prohibits discrimination in employment against married people. Since the Civil Partnership Act 2004 came into force on 5th December 2005, the same protection is afforded to those in a civil partnership as those who are married. It is not unlawful to discriminate against someone because they are not married.”

That last sentence says “It is _not_ unlawful to discriminate against someone because they’re not married.” Aside from being a double negative that means it _is_ lawful to discriminate against someone who is married.

Meh, anyway, I better get on with my coursework. 😐

I’m stuck on reception at work at the moment while Robert’s having his lunch and it’s absolutely boring the hell out of me.

I’m still a bit ill at the moment from Wednesday, and it makes it worse. I could quite easily put my head down on the keyboard and sleep. It’s very tempting.

I’m contemplating redesigning my site again because it looks particularly ugly to me at the moment… I just don’t know if I can be bothered or not. I might see if I can import all of my old entries into some sort of engine that comes with themes to do the ahrd work for me. I do like having proper control though. I can do whatever I want with relative ease at the moment. Implementing half of the stuff I’ve got on my blog in an engine would take a while. Why am I thinking in text form?

Well. I don’t know. some changes might be in the pipelines. Or they might not. I might just delete the styles and leave you with black text, white background, and lame looking links. 😐

Rebecca and I have broken up… That’s kind of an unfair way to put it though. Rebecca had nothing to do with it. I broke up with her. I feel really crap about it at the moment, but it just seems like the right thing to do. I can’t really go into any details because I don’t fricking know them myself. :\

Sorry Rebecca. 😐

I’m staying at Adam’s house in Meden Vale in his spare room at the moment. It’s quite strange living there. I’ve got to catch different buses and all that stuff.

I don’t know how long I’m going to be there for. I would like to live in Nottingham still, but then I don’t think I can afford it alone, and I don’t know anyone who would definitely want to move there… I guess for now I’m just living in uncertainty, for a change.

I’ve got my course tonight, which will be fun. Then I’ve got to get back to Meden Vale and find Adam’s house in the dark. Shouldn’t be too difficult, I’m not 5, even though I may act it sometimes. 😐

I better go get some lunch, then go help Emma teach. It’s been too busy here for me to take a proper lunch. It sucks that Adam’s gone.