Recent happenings

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admin
on October 22, 2008
in Art and Photography, Gaming, Social and Travel
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I’ve not had much to say of late but that’s not often a sign that I’ve had nothing on, but more often a sign that I haven’t really figured out what’s going on.

One thing I’ve been trying to do more lately is to play more real-time chess instead of the correspondence kind that I started practicing on. Playing the game with much greater time constraints has different demands on your approach so develops different skills, namely your working memory and fast recognition of different piece configurations. Some of the best players in the world have very highly developed skills in this area. I’ve been playing a few games with a 30 minute bank and 5 seconds per move which is just about do-able for me. I’ve managed to win one game so far with 8-9 minutes left on the clock but that was fast for me so I don’t think I’d go down to a 15 minute game just yet. The main problem with this kind of game however is that you have to find 30 minutes to focus on one thing and that’s something I’m not often able to do.

After forcing myself to conclude my over-researching activities I “invested” this morning in my new piece of glass, which is photo-geek talk for a lens. This will fill the hole left vacant when I smashed my 50mm portrait lens, although I’ve managed to partially reassemble it, it’ll never quite be the same again with dust inside the casing and a damaged auto-focus motor. I decided rather than simply go for another portrait lens I would open up a new area for myself in the shape of macro photography and so I’ve bought a Sigma 70mm Macro lens which is supposed to be razor sharp and a good all-round performer but for the slow auto-focusing which is normal of Macro’s.

Concluding my lens research I tuned my focus on the exciting world of boats! Yes, boats. The primary motivator for this was a conversation with the dad about how nice it’d be to have one moored in a different country (France, specifically) as a holiday home and secondary means of transport to tour the country. It does seem to be a costly hobby however so I’m considering joining a course to earn a Royal Yachting Association certificate in Inland Waterway Helmsman Competency. Quite a mouthful but I think it’d be fun to do and it has the added bonus of the option to upgrade to the International certificate required for European “boat driving”; well, I’ve still a lot to learn on the terminology front!

I shall wrap this up here as I am also trying to modify my writing style to reduce waffle so perhaps next time I break a disk I won’t have a 50MB database to restore..

Bit ‘o downtime

Published
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Dave
on October 17, 2008
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After my power-supply died a few weeks ago which took down my website and other things, I managed to get things back up and running in just a few days. About a week after this however it turned out all the commotion was too much for the previously trusty 7-year-old hard disk that I had powering my server and it gave up the ghost forever.

Fortunately I managed to get the data off it but this took a good couple of days of trying, most attempts were just a stream of errors printed to dmesg which is never a good sign, then one cold morning it just started working, long enough to copy the database dump that is the heart and soul of this and a few other web sites I host.

Since the purchase of the old hard disk, technology had moved on and instead of buying more antiquated junk I scavenged the only working PATA hard disk I had left. Unfortunately this happened to be the one hosting my home PC operating system so this wasn’t a small task. But it worked so instead of spending £25 on an 80GB PATA disk which had probably spent 2 years sat on a factory shelf, I spent £40 on a 500GB SATA disk for my home PC and looted it’s boot disk.

So here we are, back up and happily buzzing away, not bad for a PC that resembles more Frankenstein’s monster than your common shiny 2U rack-mounted DELL webserver with all mod-cons. I’m hoping this will be the last time I have wake up the data-centre security team for some time.

A manly day working with wood

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Dave
on August 24, 2008
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So today being the middle of a 4 days weekend, and come the first poll to officially extend the weekend to 3-4 days I would be the first in line, I have been making best use of it by doing some new activities and learning some new skills.

I have found myself few few times in recent weeks working with wood in a number of ways and to my astonishment I have found this was something I enjoy, muchly! What I enjoy about it still eludes me but I think it’s something to do with the achievement you feel from having crafted something useful from a natural physical mass, man’s irrepressible need to make the world his own in it’s purest form. Well whatever it is, I like it and I shall keep doing it!

To this end we started this morning by clearing out the garage of a very large collection of cardboard boxes that had appeared by magic as it never seems appropriate to immediately throw them out when you get one so if you never get around to disposing of said boxes said magic occurs. I managed to fill my usually spacious Pug 306 to the rafters with flat-packed cardboard in order to take it around to the local recycling centre so they can become new collections of boxes generating new manifestations of magic. But the boxes aren’t the point.

The point is that the clearing of the boxes made me take notice of the sorry state of our garage door, the door which has been literally propped up against the garage for the last year, so “door” is a very loose term you might apply to this plane of wood filling the otherwise vacant hole in the front of the garage. Although I know my landlord has vowed to dispose of the garage, which certainly will dispose of itself in the next decade, I applied the formula of reason and decided that it would still be worth my while repairing the door as I still expect to have use of the garage for a good 2 years, at least that’s the lead time on a verbal agreement from my landlord going from the historical statistics. This required a number of things, two new hinges, a new latch and a new padlock. All of which I acquired earlier today along with some coarse sandpaper and a bucket of cheap gloss paint in a moment of madness where I decided that I might also paint the door too which mostly consists of peelings of paint at this moment, but a few futile scrubs of manual sanding lead me to decide the best way forward with the painting idea is the acquisition of a belt-sander, which is pending.

I successfully fitted the new hinges and hung the door in a way where it not only stays in place but also opens and closes without scraping on the ground! point to me. But in the process of hanging the door I noticed that the corner post of the garage is almost entirely rotted through and is damaged at the base bringing my estimate on the garages self-destruction down to a mere 3 years at best; or the next very windy day. Point to the garage. However for now, it will do. The lock was fairly simple though for mounting the hook part of the latch, I needed to recycle some of the old rotted wood due to a lack of better alternative but this seems to have done the job. The door looks pretty secure, I just hope no one has a go at it because although the lock and hinges are fairly heavy duty, it would take less effort just to bring the whole structure down for easy access, and that would be annoying.

Extracts from my long-term life plan

Published
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Dave
on August 16, 2008
in Education and Home
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As I mentioned in my last post I have two primary goals over the next 5 years. These are not something I wish to discuss publicly but those most close to me probably know what they are. I have put together a number of different actions that I will be pursuing in my life over the next few years which I will discuss here.

Since my last college course ended I have been keen to continue my education but there was a number of options which I’ve now been able to whittle down to what I would consider the best in terms of what I would get from it and how useful the knowledge attained would be to me. I am in the process of getting enrolled with the Open University to study a BA honours degree programme in Business Studies. Having already achieved a high-level qualification in Management I am able to gain a head start on this programme essentially skipping the first year so I expect it to take 3-4 years depending on how quickly I decide to proceed with it. One of the benefits of the OU is that they allow you to define your own pace which I will need to decide upon once I’ve sampled the course I will be studying. This is only possible now thanks to an excellent project they run called Open Learn which is a website you sign up to where you can study samples of their courses and interact with others on the site doing the same, just how you would when studying towards a qualification. I first module I will be studying is available in sample form and I need to work through it over 15 hours.

One consequence of the OU course is the demands on my time. When speaking with a course choice advisor she told me that I would be expected to work 16 hours per week on studying. This would be either the whole weekend or several week nights and a Sunday. Although this is not impossible to achieve it will force my hand on a few lifestyle changes. I intend on continuing to work full time for the duration of the degree, this is without question as I quite frankly can’t survive without the income, so the time will need to come out of my personal time. This will leave me with little time for myself so in a sense this will instil in me the discipline to make the best use of this time as I can. I see this as an opportunity rather than a threat.

Financially the course is not going to be cheap either but it’s not unaffordable. One thing I like about the OU is that the course price includes all the materials you will require for study, so I don’t need to account for book purchases and so on. The first module is a big one at just under £800 and later the level three modules are significantly more expensive. Although I am a regular saver inspired by a useful lesson found in Rich Dad, Poor Dad to pay myself before anyone else, I will still need to live frugally compared to today and increase my savings, which I will do in high-interest accounts so again I see this as another opportunity. Carolynne and I have ongoing efforts to clear the house of things we don’t need and this will be the income stream for our holidays and house products which will be a joint investment as much as possible.

A further lifestyle change is that I am needing to take care of my body more. I have taken up running in recent weeks and I am enjoying it more every time. I have so far gone from an exhausting 1.2 mile run to a not-so-bad 1.8 mile run. I started this by investing in some running trainers and shorts, which have a little pocket for my iPod Nano at the back too! So my running has been comfortable and enjoyable rather than painful and full of regret like it has been in past times. I believe in the concept that a healthy body brings a healthy mind and that I am feeling the effects of this already. I have been able to think clearer and faster and I’m remembering more easily than I do when I’m physically idle, hopefully this is a trend that will continue.

As anyone who knows me will testify to, I am an enthusiastic amateur chef and this will also help my lifestyle changes. I recently built some bedding that will house my new organic vegetable garden and more often than not now we are making meals from scratch with a full awareness of it’s ingredients so I can avoid too many fats and salt and sugar content. Also there are cost benefits to this as growing my own vegetables will reduce my grocery bill by a small margin. I now shop for small amounts more regularly and use only the basket (except for very heavy items) so that I avoid impulse purchases in the shop. When possible I promote the local businesses walking down to the butchers and grocers instead of driving to Tesco, this has the benefit that they often will know where the food came from which you won’t often get from your typical 18 year-old Tesco employee!

I find that I also need to vary my hobbies more too. Although I love my photography I need to do more of it and I found working with wood very enjoyable when I made the bedding so I would like to explore this more. I intend on clearing out the garage to convert it into some work-space so I can do this and learn new skills, it would also be good to install a punch bag for much needed stress relief :)

This is only small part of what I have planned but you get the general idea and from this I expect to have a much more fulfilling future with a wider range of experiences.

Life planning

Published
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Dave
on August 16, 2008
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There’s been a little progress in the general life category of my mind over the last couple of months. I’ve been presented with a number of forks in the road of opportunity and I’ve been spending a lot of time mulling over which one will lead me to where I want to be in 5 years time. It seems to be very easy to get lost when deciding on what you want to achieve (your goals) and how you believe you will get there (your methods). I’ve found it easier to organise my approach to this in a way that can apply no matter what you want to do with your life or how you wish to do it.

My long-term plan schedule I define as 5 years. The reasons for this are partly because it is common practise to choose 5 years for your long-term plan but ultimately this is an arbitrary line in the sand. I chose 5 years because I predict a lot of upheaval and change in that time given my age and my current distance from my primary goals. More comfortable people may choose a longer time-frame but that’s just not me.

At this point in my life I have two primary goals. Unfortunately for me, true to my personal mantra never to choose the path of least resistance, both of these goals are colossal undertakings but achieving either will be a serious credit to my own ability and perseverance and most definitely worthy of celebration. If I could achieve either one it would be a certain boon for my self-confidence as well and the world would be my oyster as they say! This is the personal development benefit to setting yourself goals because who wants to be living the same experiences in life every day until the end?

My goals will define how I get there and what I will do over the next 5 years. Achieving your goals however still requires some degree of luck, ignoring this fact is the first step to failure unless you realise that you can work luck in your favour by moving yourself into the right position in advance, just as a chess player sets up his board for the attack, this is strategy. Your strategy will invariably involve commitments in time, money and even changes to your life-style and possibly even location. It takes time to explore each of your methods to analyse what changes you must make to yourself. Identifying these changes will allow you to decide what compromises and sacrifices you are willing to make to achieve your goals and allow you to prepare yourself mentally in advance for you to make those sacrifices.

However, even the best laid plans may not always work. You might come across an insurmountable obstacle or even a risk that the pursuit of one of your goals will leave you isolated from your support network and fall back plans. Defining a plan B will help with this and this is often the answer to the question “what is the least that I would accept”, the way I see it, the space between plan A and plan B is filled with compromises but you need to decide how far you are willing to compromise to achieve anything that is acceptable to you. If you find the pursuit of plan A takes you out of the space between plan A and plan B then you need to understand the risks that you’re taking on. Frequently this will be an investment that might not pay off, financially or otherwise, and exhausting your resources leaving you unable to pursue an alternative path.

This this the framework in mind I’ve been using to be able to decide on my goals and my methods, I’ve defined the minimum I could accept and between the two what alternative paths I could potentially take from these I’ve decided on what is the best path taking into account the risks of each. It’s a long road and I will review it continuously but maybe I might just get somewhere out of it in the end.

Ramsay update

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Dave
on August 16, 2008
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It’s been nearly 2 months now since Ramsay joined us and it’s not been without it’s ups and downs and at times we’ve come close to giving up and rehoming him but it seems every time the thought entered my mind he would wander over and put his head on my lap. Ironically this is the only time he ever goes near my lap against his promises to be a good lap cat..

For a while Ramsay took over Yukis role in waking me up at 4am every day by sitting and meowing at the bedroom door which was always closed at night. Since Gonzo died I’m not able to let the cats out at dark but the disruptions to my sleep was becoming a problem. I pondered many potential solutions but the one which finally worked was to keep Ramsay and Yuki in the living room at night. This also had the benefit of keeping the mess in one place which is easier to keep on top of and also it helped Ramsay and Yuki become more trusting of one-another.

Yuki is a very different cat now compared with how he was when we first got him and he’s a very placid and affectionate cat who never bite anymore! He’s been trying hard to get to know Ramsay but his efforts have not been welcomed. They are at the point now where they clearly aren’t scared of one another and will happily sleep next to each other but they still won’t touch. This morning we watched Yuki attempt to get Ramsay to groom him by placing his head next to him while he was cleaning himself. Ramsay didn’t like this and bit Yukis head a number of times which looked painful but Yuki didn’t seem to mind. He then almost licked his ear but thought better of it and went back to cleaning himself. So we feel it’s getting close now.

Recently a local un-neutered Tom has been terrorising Yuki and Ramsay, attacking them in our back garden almost every day and in some ways this has brought them closer together. Unfortunately it’s difficult to get near the Tom as he is scared of people which makes us think he might be stray. We are planning on getting a trap to reach him and see whether we can find his owners and negotiate a solution to this problem. We’ve already had to take Yuki to the vets once as a result of the fighting and we can’t afford to let it continue, particularly if he gets seriously hurt.

I still miss Gonzo and I feel guilty that we still haven’t found him a tree, however I signed up to the Manchester Tree-athlon last week and I’ve put my sapling request down as a Silver Birch which I will dedicate to him. I’ve been trying to find a good sapling for Gonzo for a while but they are either much too big or overpriced. At least Gonzo will help me on my goal to getting fit and losing some weight even from his cloud and I hope in a month or so Yuki and Ramsay will be almost as close as Yuki and Gonzo used to be.

Move Haiku

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Dave
on July 30, 2008
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Introducing Ramsey…

Published
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Dave
on June 28, 2008
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Introducing Ramsey…, originally uploaded by DSNelson.

Ramsey is our new resident Chat Noir.

He had been at the cattery a few weeks and on each occasion we met he was sleeping although last Sunday he decided to come say hello albeit sleepily. One of the volunteers told us that he was suffering from feline depression and wasn’t feeling well so I decided to take a chance as he was happy and purring when I petting him and he even let me pick him up.

For the first 3 days he slept over 23 hours of the day and rarely moved. He was very unwell which we suspected might be cat flu. He had infected eyes and a stuffy nose, he could barely breathe but for panting and wheezing. We spent all the time we could with him to nurse him back to health and 5 days later he’s right as rain.

He and Yuki are at arms length but there’s been no significant aggression other than the odd warning hiss, in time though I’m certain they’ll be best of friends.

Life After People

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Dave
on June 23, 2008
in Video and Music
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Life After People was a programme that recently aired on Channel 4 and I made a point of watching partly through the power of incessant advertising and partly because the content of this programme had been the subject of some of my more morbid thoughts in recent weeks. The programme is filmed in a documentary style although the content is entirely fictional, theorising how long it would be before nature could repair the planet from the scarring of human civilisation.

Starting from day one and progressing at regular intervals up to 10,000 years into the future it tracks the aspects of human technology that would fail first and then decay eventually to disappear beyond the point where you could recognise what it once was. Also included was a view of the animals that live amongst us and the fate that would befall them once we stopped feeding them whether we intended on feeding them in the first place or not! In all it seems well reasoned although I think they still underestimated the impact on the mighty cockroach to whom human civilisation would be a pebble in the road I’m sure, albeit a tasty and life-assuring one. The programme also took a brief tour of Chernobyl to illustrate some of their research into the progression of nature in absorbing a city of a population of 50,000 over the last 25 years and the parallels were realistic.

After some more research it seems this isn’t a unique topic and is a common thought-experiment with many varying conclusions about how the future would potentially pan out. Some describing specific scenarios for the demise of human civilisation and others leaving that out-of-scope; one even goes along with the biblical rapture where mankind spontaneously disappears for judgement although such things are not to my taste. It goes to show though that there are no clear answers to such a broad and complex question and trying to answer it without any distorted pre-conceptions is also a tough one to get right but then this also opens up to a lot of artistic license, as long as you don’t mistake it for hard science.

I would like to believe that the majority of the damage that mankind imprints into this planet’s surface will one day be cleared allowing the next leading character in the story of evolution to start from a clean slate (if there’s any left). This may or may not be a result of the probable destruction of mankind, a genuine and complete exodus to another world or one possibility I enjoy the idea of is a Nox-style society ala Star Gate where mankind elevates itself above the surface to allow nature to run wild and unhindered by man’s structures living in true ecological harmony. Hippyish perhaps but I don’t suppose any of mans actions are in balance with nature, it’s one saving grace is it’s brevity and the hardiness of natures foot soldiers, the plants and I do believe that anything which isn’t balanced with nature can only fall to inevitable decay and ruination of both.

I enjoyed the programme although not so much as the ideas that it gave me following watching it. It was reassuring though because it does appear at times that no matter what we do, in the end we are insignificant to this planet almost as much as we are in the greater universe.

Recent turbulent events in life

Published
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Dave
on April 15, 2008
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It has been some time since my last post and this is something that was sadly unavoidable and not merely born out of forgetfulness. My life has been turbulent for the last few weeks and effectively so has my mood. Akin to my self-imposed rule against drunken Ebay and especially drunken Amazon, I choose not to post while highly-charged with emotion.

The main cause of my recent bout of grief has been over the sudden death of my beloved chat noir Gonzo at the hands of a local Taxi firm. Gonzo was a fantastic cat, the best I ever knew, was dearly loved and has been very missed, especially by Yuki whose having to sleep alone at night now. Since the bereavement Yuki has displayed some unusual behaviour both expected and unexpected. Firstly after a few days of searching for Gonzo he got down to claiming everything in the house as his own; being that Gonzo was the dominant cat of the house Yuki has sought to place his scent on every piece of furniture, loose item and person he could find. He has also shown a new passion for hunting. He has brought us 3 presents so far: one large half-eaten rat and 2 bird eggs of unknown origin, each has been carefully placed on the doorstep as sacrifices, now that Gonzo is not here to play worship to the almighty providers of food Yuki is clearly taking up the slack. Although the behaviour is sweet in a cat-sort-of-way I wish he’d stay away from the rats!

Prior to this event my last house mate Phil has left the building to return to the inescapable black hole of culture that is Rochdale, so we have in-fact lost 2 members of our household in as many weeks rendering a intense sense of emptiness at home. To try remedy this Carolynne and I have purchased some new artworks by an American artist named Kedra Binney, although we didn’t opt for originals on this occasion we acquired some small prints as a trial and will consider buying an original next year should she return to showcase in Manchester. We are also considering adding some colour to the drab rented wall, the cream has finally gotten to me and we will likely be painting one or two of the smaller rooms as an oasis of colour to recharge our drained creative batteries.

After Phil had vacated the rear room downstairs of our house we have used the space to create a real dining room! I purchased an Ikea “designer” table in dark wood which looks mighty fine if a little big for our own use but I expect this will encourage us to hold dinner parties in the near future, stranger things have happened; but either way it’s a big upgrade from eating from the coffee table, or more often, off my lap.

After a looong wait my Sigma 10-20mm ultra-wide angle lens arrived 2 whole weeks after purchase, I won’t mention the retailer as their poor delivery times and unbreakable wall of customer ignorance does not deserve the publicity or my future business, even negatively. This has helped raise my spirits slightly out of the gutter. The first real test of it was a Sunday walk up Pen-y-ghent in North Yorkshire, my second mountain climb in recent weeks and the highest so far. At 2279 feet I was able to capture some quite stunning vistas and the UV filter presented a gorgeous blue hue from the sky, I was very impressed even if I say so myself but I give the true kudos to the tools over my own shaky frozen hands. That part of the country is very beautiful, even the long winding drive up there was deemed pleasurable by the ever changing views, the fawn that leaped across the road ahead and the wild falcons flying above…

I hope to capture more photos next month when on holiday in Wales which I’m looking forward to muchly; it’s a family holiday which I haven’t had in some years so I expect eating sandwiches while sitting in the sun between long games of cricket, a little surfing and hopefully some kite flying!

Things are just about turning themselves around.

Bonsoir.