Archive for July, 2008

Cleaning your teeth is important and well worth it.

That having said, if you’re anything like me, you’ll find it a bit of a chore. If only there was some way to combine it with other such activities to take up less time. Then it came to me – teeth showering. We have a walk in shower and the sink is right next to it. The solution is to just take your toothbrush into the shower.

No lack of water should you need it to clean your toothbrush once done and if you want to rinse your mouth out you can just stick it under the shower head. Give it a try, you’ll never go back.

But it didn’t, it happened to Si.

He arrived at his new flat in Leeds today, unlocking the door and locking it behind him once in. It then came for him to leave the flat. So of course, step 1 is to unlock the door. The only problem is that the keys didn’t work.

So I drove round to try them from the outside. Nothing. Well, I say nothing, I now know where Si’s flat is. But still, Si is currently locked inside his flat. And we all thought the days of crappy student houses were over.

I think it’s saying something when an attendance of 12 for A-Soc in the middle of summer when all the students have gone home and when we’re not even running a tangible event is a low turn-out :D.

Having got in from work rather tired on Monday evening I got a good 2 minutes to sit down before we headed down to the part for some kiting.

It’s been a good decade since I’ve flown a kite and they’ve changed just a little since I was young. I don’t remember them being twice as big as me and I was a lot smaller back then. Still, that only makes them far more fun. I was good to get to Roundhay Park there – that’s actually the first time I’ve been since we moved next door to it.

The wind wasn’t amazing so we didn’t manage to get on the board but hopefully this dead summer air will soon make way for something a little more interesting and the real fun can begin :D. Never the less it was a lot of fun even it if could technically be counted as a sport.

I’m just watching Pen & Teller’s episode exposing self help schemes. Tina, who is doing a fire walk as part of a self help scheme to remove her fear just said…

Live is divided into love and fear

Donnie Darko anyone :D.

Life isn’t ever going to slow down it is? I hoped it would when I graduated, that it wouldn’t be quite as hectic. I didn’t want it to slow down too much, I would have settled for just a bit. But I’m not sure I’m actually going to get that.

Having had our house warming on Friday at which I managed to work my way through a bottle of spirits without being too worse for wear on Saturday we headed down to the Deer Park for some recovery steak. Having eaten that I headed off straight to work for an interesting night of watching smartly dressed Opera in the Park goers look very out of place and made it home to bed for around 3am.

Once again dragging my ass out of bed a little earlier than I would have really liked to we headed back to the Deer Park for Sunday lunch. Having got back from that I then spent the afternoon battling through a week’s worth of freelancing work I needed to catch up on before heading to the pub quiz.

Friday saw our long time coming (though possibly not so awaited) house warming.

I never really put much thought to it, I’m not even sure I got round to inviting people and was quite suprised when quite a number of people began to tell me throughout the week that they would see me at the party on Friday.

Still Friday having arrived it was all but dead until 10:30. Still with Kieran having turned up all the way from London, a few other select guests and there being plenty of alcohol in the house, we had sufficent company and drink to make it a good night anyway. Not that it was a problem was once the night drew on the guests began to flood in.

The party ended up going on till around 5am before the approaching daylight sent us running for cover. Not too bad for a group of suburbian based OAPs ;).

When you use Windows, disk space randomly disappears.

When you use Linux, disk space randomly disappears just as rapidly. Luckily, when you are using Linux you can use the disk usage command to see which folders are eating up all the disk space. Chances are you won’t be able to do anything about it, but you can at least look at it.

I’ve wanted something similar that I could use on Windows to give me an overview of my directories and tell me where all the disk space was actually going. Recently I found a tool called WinDirStat which scans a drive and gives you a breakdown of the space, files and sub-folders of each directory as well as a graphical representation of where all the space is going.

For example, on my system the fact that half the map is blue suggests I really need to clear my WoW downoads out while the amount of green suggests Windows comes bundled with too much crap. More importantly I can see at a glance that Program Files is using 42% of my disk space while My Document is using 31% and I can then break it down into the various sub-folders and find the offending files.

It uncovers some interesting things – for example Thunderbird is consuming a crazy 4.3GB of space simply storing my emails! World of Warcraft uses 8GB. Windows by comparission only uses 4GB.

One feature of Firefox I’ve just found about is smart keywords. If you hadn’t heard about them easier it is basically a way to run searches on any site you like from the address bar.

Basically, you go to a website you want to be able to search without visiting, select the search form and select add a keyword for this search. For example, on Amazon (I’m using Amazon because the stock example is IMDb and I wanted to do something different :p), you could enter “amazon” and then to search via your address bar you would just type amazon digital cameras and it would bring up said page.

A lot of obvious sites to do this with are already in the quick search bar on Firefox but I don’t find I ever use this even when I’m searching these sites because you have to change it away from Google before you search and then change it back to Google after you’re done and in the time you have done that you could have just typed in the URL of the site, especially given that can be done via keyboard shortcuts and if there is one for selecting a different quick search engine, I don’t know it and can’t imagine it would actually be much of a shortcut if it does exist.

While I don’t think it’s particularly useful to be able to search Amazon or IMDb this way as I don’t actually visit them that much, the more I got thinking about it the more I started thinking of sites that it would be useful for. Notably, Wikipedia, Mininova and eBay – all of which I go to one of my recently visited pages at on that site just so I can get to the search bar. I mean, who ever really wants to look at the Wikipedia homepage? I’m guessing it will also work with the search on Facebook too.

Much like the way that Christian gatherings are mostly dominated by discussions of the latest episode of Neighbours, A-Soc meetings run along similar lines with Doctor Who. It’s massive, it’s conference-going (perhaps even in full custume) and it’s at the point where people brag about a friend of a friend who once new a guy who had a friend who did some paperwork for the show.

With that in mind, I had been meaning to catch up on my Doctor Who for ages and given my life is now without point nor purpose it seemed an excellent time to get caught up. It’s been quite a while since I’ve last watched it so I’ve started re-watching it from the start of the revival.

My initial critisism of the revival was that it’s too over dramatic – the world is in mortal danger every time. Which I think is true having re-watched the first season though not quite as much as I thought. It is certainly too over-dramatic though. The whole thing about The Doctor and Rose kissing, and looking into the heart of the TARDIS and such, it’s just a bit too Hollywood-ised. Still, I guess that is the modern world.

Christopher Eccleston made a fine Doctor. Hopefully David Tennant will be equally impressive.