I put a message in a sealable bag, put it in a bottle and corked it up. Lizz and I went to Scarborough for the day, and afterwards we stopped at Filey so I could throw my bottle into the sea.
Hopefully it wasn’t smashed against the rocks after we left. 🙂
The flag pole in the picture is where I threw the bottle in.
I’ve been having problems with sound in Ubuntu 9.04 since I installed it last week. Today I decided to download a live CD of a different distribution to see what it made of the soundcard.
I randomly picked CrunchBang Linux from a big list. It’s based on Ubuntu, but is considerably more lightweight because it uses OpenBox instead of Gnome.
As soon as the system had loaded up I started the music player, added Modest Mouse – Float On to the playlist and clicked play. Everything just worked right away.
Why can’t Ubuntu handle it if an Ubuntu-based distribution can? o_O
I logged into Cafepress for the first time in at least a year today. Turns out that I’ve sold another couple of T-shirts on there since the last time. Not exactly big sales, but I’m pleased to have a few dollars available on there for something that I only wanted for myself. Good stuff.
My first Android app Petals Around the Rose has reached over 1600 downloads since it was released nearly 2 weeks ago. I’m impressed with myself on that. It won’t go up very quickly now though because it’s not on the first page of new apps in its category.
I’ve started thinking about coding my second and third apps, but these will be considerably more complicated, so I’ll probably end up quitting them one day fairly soon. I’d like to make something that I can legitimately sell and not feel like a rip-off artist. It’d be great to make some real money from something!
It’s Thursday afternoon and I don’t have work tomorrow! Lizz and I are going away to the seaside. 🙂 I have missed the sea and the sand… It’s only a day trip, but it’ll hopefully be lovely.
Can’t wait to get away.
Luckily some of the time in between will be taken up by Katy, Dave, and Hayley coming over for spaghetti bolognese. It’ll be awesome if it’s anything like as good as Lizz usually makes. I’ve just made myself hungry thinking about it.
I noticed I had no reception earlier. I restarted my phone thinking that could be the problem. Turned out that Ricky’s phone had no reception either.
I looked on Twitter and found a couple of other people with the same problem. After a bit of Google News searching I found that all service went down for German T-Mobile customers and they’re getting a day of free texts for it. Not much use if you don’t get anywhere near your contract level like me…
Part of the reason it took so long to get the network back up is to do with the fact that the engineers couldn’t be contacted on their phones. Embarassing.
I’m wondering if that outage is related to this one. It almost certainly is. Perhaps it’s some sort of attack on T-Mobile’s servers, or a problem caused by T-Mobile routing traffic through other servers while the German ones undergo maintenance… Guess we’ll find out soon.
It’s incredibly handy having Twitter around as an instant news source! 🙂
I just read an article about Stephen Hawking being in hospital with a chest infection. That’s very unfortunate, obviously. The main focus of the article, however, seemed to be the work Hawking has done on writing books that the average person can understand. It includes the following text:
Hawking didn’t try to answer the questions for his physics and mathematical colleagues. Instead, he wrote it for the average person who wanted someone to walk him through the expanse of the galaxy, exploring black holes and the idea of alternate dimensions.
The emphasis in that has been added by me. I think that’s a particularly bad choice of phrase for an article relating to a person who’s in a wheelchair.
“It’s been a steep learning curve and a lot of effort.”
How I did it: I planted a few plants in pots in the spare room and spent a considerable amount of time digging two squares out of the garden to be used as vegetable patches.
I planted potatoes in one and they’ve now sprouted. I’ve got plenty of other things to be growing in the other patch, and I’m looking forward to it all growing and being eaten!
Lessons & tips: Plan in advance. A long time in advance.
Think how long it might take you to plan it all, then double it. Expect to still be rushing around at the end.
Don’t expect everything to go according to plan the first time.
Resources:
It took me 2 months.
It made me Super happy 
All over the BBC sports page you can see articles with taglines that go like this “England’s Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton are quickest in the first two practice sessions for the Chinese Grand Prix.”
Based entirely on that sentence alone you’d expect that Button did the fastest lap and Hamilton did the second fastest lap, right? Wrong!
Hamilton got the fastest lap in the first practice session, but only managed the 13th fastest lap overall by the end of the second session.
Look, BBC, I know it’d be nice if both British drivers we in the top 2, but they’re not. Stop writing misleading text because it sounds good.
kthxbi
“Worth it for the laugh, especially when something gets flung much further than expected!”
How I did it: Dave and I bought some wood and some tools from B&Q one day.
We assembled a frame based almost entirely on guess-work. We changed a few things around when we realised how wrong we were, then we left it for a few weeks.
When we finally got back to working on it we bought some cement and set it in an upturned CD spindle case with a closed hook sticking out. This turned out not to be weighty enough, so we bought some big bolts and stuck two bricks to the throwing arm.
I cut up one of my shoelaces from an old pair of trainers and tied a knot around a stone on one end and tied a loop in the other end.
A screw was sunk into the non-weighted end of the throwing arm and the looped end of the string was attached to that.
Using the tied up stone we pulled it down and through the middle of the trebuchet lifting the weighted end of the throwing arm. Letting go of the stone resulted in the stone being fired to the other end of my garden, hitting the fence with a loud and satisfying bang. 🙂
Lessons & tips:
Resources:
It took me 3 days.
It made me jump and laugh.
I cancelled the dedicated server I had with CoreNetworks today. I’ve barely even looked at it for months and it was just an expense I couldn’t really justify.
Now that I won’t be paying for it every month I should be able to pay off my credit card pretty damn quickly. I don’t use it for anything else. Well, every now and again if I have to order something online outside the UK I will use it, but that’s not too often.
It’ll be nice to get this one done.