Category Archives: Personal Stuff

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-06-10

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  • We passengers have now been told by a loud man a dozen times that some buses are to be rebodied. Restraing myself… #sheffield #
  • Bugger. Ray Bradbury dies. Was reading some of his short stories over the weekend. Very sad. http://t.co/PtF76x3l #fb #
  • Now that would be silly, @britmic. The Czechs did ok with Havel – surely we could find our equivalent? #republic in reply to britmic #
  • To those who ask abt who would be UK president- doesn't have to be politician. There are thousands of other possibilities in uk. #Republic #
  • To those who ask abt who would be UK president- doesn't have to be politician. There are thousands of other possibilities in uk. #Repulican #
  • Jubilee exploitation – makes you puke. http://t.co/nfgLO4eg How's that 'proud to be British' thing working for you today? #
  • Repeats of Inspector Morse and Have I Got News For You seem a better bet than this concert dooberry…… #
  • Spent a quiet afternoon and evening watching old whodunnits and good-bad tv on Alibi. Anything happening in the world? #fb #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-06-03

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  • Journalists being prevented from getting near anti-jubilee protests by police, despite having press credentials. #jubileeprotest #
  • I'm sure that I just heard that the amount of gold leaf on the barge thingies is enough to cover a soccer pitch. Austerity? #
  • This flotilla – about to set out as a revenge raid on Holland fo the Medway raid in the 17th century? #
  • Osborne spending out of recession – clearly doing what he's told by the IMF! #
  • We are bunting. We will assimilate your architectural and decorative uniqueness into our own. Resistance is futile… #buntingkills #
  • Oh the horror – bunting covered blimp explodes in flames landing at Lakenhurst, New Jersey… #buntingkills #
  • #buntingkills bunting causes low flying birds to crash in the streets, exploding on impact and killing party goers…. #
  • Hope we don't find @richarddignall cocooned by that spider that went for me this morning! #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-05-27

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  • David Cameron – proof of the old saying that the problem with political jokes is that they get elected… #
  • Whoops – would appear that spanish bank Bankia has shares suspended. Rumours of #bailout bid. #euro #
  • It's a beautiful morning. Love to all my friends. That is all. #sheffield #sunnyday #
  • My last Joe's Jotting was on #facebook #ipo – http://t.co/JLtnhDjE – more to come later. #

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We lost a family member last night…

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My wife and I have always had cats – folks who know me may remember the comment I often make that I love my cats more than I love the vast majority of human beings.  Whilst I  say it with a smile, I sometimes think there’s a large amount of truth in that statement, particularly after watching the news on TV…

Last October we had a new arrival – Georgie (named by my God-daughter) turned up out of the early evening darkness and took up residence.  We had no idea where she came from, but she was in  bad state – skin and bones, matted and dirty fur, starving, cold and tired.  Within a few days it was obvious she was going nowhere, and our ‘boys’ – our two male cats – found they had a new housemate.

Georgie in her basket

The photo on the left was taken a month or so after she joined us – she’s fatter and more ‘together’ there – the grey bits of fur are where we had to cut off some seriously matted areas which quickly grew back.

We had no idea how long she would last.  We knew she was old and probably had a few health problems, but she kept defying the odds.  We first said ‘She won’t manage it to Christmas’, then it was ‘Won’t manage the winter’.  She did – she also took to wandering around to our next door neighbour and sitting on her lawn, getting fed in two households.  Despite her age she tackled the cat flap with gusto, leapt up and down on to tables, helped to type Tweets on computers, took the phone table as her bed and became one of the family.

About 10 days ago she became less active and her habits became quieter – this wasn’t too much of a surprise as she did this occasionally.  Over the last few days it became clear she was not herself and so a trip to the vets was arranged yesterday, where it became clear after tests that she was a very poorly lady indeed and that she probably only had a few days left with us.

We decided to let the vet put her to sleep, and went back to the vets to be with her – it was typical that as soon as she saw us she jumped up and purred. She left us very quickly, very peacefully.

It’s astonishing how big a tiny cat with us for only 8 months could leave such a big space in our hearts and lives.

Happy (Belated) Birthday Speccy!

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It always takes me a while to catch up with things, but it was recently the 30th Birthday of the Sinclair Spectrum. Like many of a certain age, the Speccy was one of the computers on which I cut my teeth.  I was lucky enough to have been exposed to most of the popular home computers of the late 1970s and early 1980s by virtue of my first job and the fact I wrote articles for the computing magazines of the time.

I’d already bought a ZX81, and became the Z80 Machine code Guru for my employer – I was also writing books for Melbourne House on the Z80 based MSX machines – and the two worlds overlapped when I was asked by my employer to develop a way of extending the BASIC language of the Sinclair Spectrum to allow new commands to be added to the language.  I managed to deliver the goods – oddly enough around the same time a magazine article was published that detailed a similar approach to my own – and I added writing books on Spectrum Machine Code programming to my repetoire.

I also wrote a fair number of articles about programming and interfacing the Sinclair machines, designed interface cards for it for my employer, dabbled in a little light robotics, but rarely actually USED the machine for anything!  When I needed to write these articles and books I used my BBC Model B which had a proper keyboard.  How I hated that rubber monstrosity on the Spectrum – the later Spectrum 2 had a better keyboard and made life easier, but one still had to deal with the multi-function behaviour of the keys.  I think that that was the single biggest hitch with the Spectrum; had the ‘dead flesh’ keyboard just had ‘normal’ keyboard functionality, where you typed stuff in letter by letter, I think it would have been easier.

Still, I can’t grumble.  This was in the days when if you were good enough to write and have your material accepted by a publisher, you got paid for it.  This may seem something of a novelty these days when blogging and other forms of self-publishing seem to have ripped the heart out of traditional (OK, paid!) technical writing, but those magazine cheques of £40 or £50 went a long way!

I think that the Spectrum was one of two machines I bought (the other being an Amstrad 6128) that actually paid for themselves from my writing.  That immediately makes the Spectrum special to me.  I also learnt a HELL of a lot from it about low level programming, hardware interfacing, robotics and the Zen like patience needed to manage that keyboard and a tape recorder for saving and loading programs…..

Funnily enough, 30 years later, I spent several hours in my current day job looking at an interfacing problem involving a PIC Microcontroller.  And the solution I eventually suggested was one that I dragged up from my Spectrum interfacing days….

Variations on a Spotify theme…..

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I found out tonight that there are over 70 versions of the Bob Dylan song ‘All along the watchtower’ on the online music service Spotify.  I sort of worry that there might soon be a ‘Watchtower radio’ channel online somewhere that plays nothing but versions of the song –  and, of course, there are songs on there with just as many if not more cover versions.

I should add that I’m quite a Spotify fan – heck, I even have a paid subscription to it – and I can’t remember the last time I popped a CD on when working – I just go to Spotify and play my choons from there.  Every now and again I search out a particular favourite of mine and see what other versions are around – there are usually a few that I’ve not heard before – and after you prune away the Karaoke versions it can be quite an interesting musical experience to listen to a few in succession.

I find it a good way of finding new artists that I might like. By listening to cover versions of music that I like in the original, it removes a variable from the complicated equation of ‘do I like this band / artist?’  If I already like the song, it comes down to what they’ve done with it. A good example of this was when I came across a cover version of Neil Young’s ‘Like a Hurricane’ done by the Dave Matthew’s Band – I liked what I heard and became a fan of the latter based on what they did to the Neil Young classic.

What was I looking for when I was searching through covers of ‘All Along the Watchtower’?  Well, fans of the TV series Battlestar Galactica will recollect that a very ‘arabesque’ influenced version of this tune had a very significant role in the series, and apart from that it was a bloody good version.  We’re getting there – a recent addition to the lists was a cover by Dominik Hauser and Tim Russ and that was pretty damn close!

And should you ever want a version of Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ as played by a string quartet, I point you here… 

 

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-04-22

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  • Whoops! Need to watch which WordPress buttons I press!! #
  • Last year, Osbourne said that UK would give no more money to IMF. £10 bn later….can we all say 'Bunch of lying cuntservatives?' #
  • My later 'Joe's Jotting' – what makes for a competent human being? http://t.co/jgQVhwZo #
  • Hmph….Worldpay refuse to activate one of our websites because of a bug. A bug in THEIR code. Way to go, Worldpay…. #

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