It's official - I'm off to Birmingham. In a large white van. Great. 3 hours of bone rattling mostly un-silenced diesel with a hefty hunk of wind noise thrown in.

If Birmingham wasn't bad enough, I'll be working nights, alone. Time to break out the thermite socks. Shudder.

Well, the van isn't that large - it's a 2.6m high Transit but you get the idea. I just hope it holds together. It's only 5 years old and not yet done 60,000 miles.

I had a very nasty dream (more nasty than usual) two nights ago. It was very vivid, as my dreams (when I have them) tend to be. It was normal life, except one life ended. I woke up not knowing which was dream and which wasn't, as is often the case. I think I'm glad I don't dream to much - I don't think I could cope with the disorientation of dreams all the time. Usually I don't remember much about them after about 30 minutes of being up, unless I make a special effort to.

Off to finish the two remaining discussion questions today.

It just occurred to me - what exactly is 'ramming speed'? Something less than full speed? More than maximum? Or just fast enough so that when ramming does happen as little damage is done as possible?

But then also something occurred to me some time ago. How accurate can an odometer on a vehicle with ablative wheels be? Say the tread is 10mm thick (not uncommon) - how can it be calibrated for the size of the tyre all of the time? Considering that the 10mm would over time drop to the legal minimum in the UK (1.5mm if I remember correctly) , that would make a difference 17mm x pi = 53.4mm in circumference. Say that a tyre is about a metre in diameter (no I'm not going to measure the wheel on the van) that gives about 3.14m for each rotation. That means for 320 rotations (about 1km) that would give an error of about 17 metres. Not particularly accurate. I wonder if anyone has thought of this? Perhaps this is where the 10% speed 'allowance' comes in (which may be a myth)? Would this also explain the errors I have seen between speedometer values and values measured by a GPS reciever - typically between 3% and 10% depending. GPS accuracy is supposed to be about 0.05m/s, about a tenth of a km/h. Perhaps more on this later.

Coursework for week 3 - Look into Silly Window Syndrome. Loosely in a TCP transfer window what happens when a segment is not used to it's full extent - or rather not full sized segments. It has adverse effects on performance. Oh well here goes :) See RFC 813.

I'm working night tomorrow. Ho, fun. But at least that means I won't be working Friday night too. I hope. Monday I will have to see about later.

Started looking into broadband for mum.

ICUKnet have a half price installation (?32.31) until the end of march with rental being ?20 a month. Basic 256/256 connection but I don't think mum or her PC could cope with much more.

Cable doesn't seem to be an option.

According to this The AA say that the Congestion Charging in London has been a huge failure, though Ken will probably say it's been a sucess. It remains to be seen if there's actually less traffic on the roads in London. Not having been there regularly, I couldn't say. In my limited experience, though, the cars have been replaced by buses. There's thousands of the big red things crawling around London.

This, though, is no bad thing. Offering plentiful comfortable transport around any city is good.

Can't remember what else I wanted to say about that right now.

Oh yeah. Graham leaves in a little over 3 hours. I can't really describe how I'm feeling right now for various reasons. Needless to say, I was (and still am) filling up. I knew it before because of the way my realtionship with Mayumi went, but I'm reminded of the phrase 'absence makes the heart grow fonder'. Time to say hello to cheap flights to Canada.

Best of luck, Graham & Deb.

Off to Kingston to meet people some I have not seen in years. It looks like it may be a good evening.

Hacked off. Really don't want to work today. I'd forgotten how annoying maintenance can be. But there's 3 weeks of it. Well one course week over.

Well here we are nearly at the end of the first week and I have to design a protocol for ATM to central server communication. Fun.

Also 3rd day working maintenance at work. Going well. Fixed several buses, logged faults for 3 for the garage to fix. On to the next lot.

Graham has moved so I imagine his blogging would be sparse.

Continuing my look into virii - the most recent proliferation of MyDoom.A is an executable. I had thought it was a script. More detailed than that I'm not so interested in persuing at present.

I've also noticed I use 'OK' rather too much.

Off to bed!

Ok these glasses are really nice. I may have to persue a large amount of research into their use and suitable beverages.

The blogger problem seems to have mainly been due to an unexpected change at blogger detailed in the bloggerdev group on Yahoo

Ok well that was an interesting day. Drive to Graham's (for the last time in this country, more than likely) and pick up a load of stuff for our mother. Plus a nifty crystal glass decanter set which I'll take great pleasure in christening tonight. Hmmm, time to get rid of some glasses!

Then off to mum's to drop the stuff - mainly pictures, books (economics, business administration and stuff plus some aviation things) and paper. Loads of it. Some records.

Lots to do at mum's. Going to see her again on the 21st Feb.

Addendum: it seems Blogger.com software seems to be having a problem generally as I can't get blogBuddy to work either. Humpf.

This is the entry I tried to make with Pocket Blog at 08:00 this morning:

Ok first try of a blog from the train on Leaves, my h4150 Pocket PC. Some would say it would be better to dial up to the internet and do this that way but that's now a piece of cake. I coult do it, too, but I don't regard it as worth it.

I've set tasks for this week's module work plus have copies of the lecture to read on Leaves. I'm hoping this will help my organisation and time planning.

Time now: 08:00, 6/2/04

OK, with the Blogger Pocket PC client in beta and not quite working.. The Avangto Avantblog channel to Blogger acting, er, more than slightly odd and the fact I can't post the entry from the beta (or even copy it to the clipboard) means things are not looking good for Blogger.

Finally after nearly 21 months of good and trusty service (never once losing a bit or power) my Sony Clie T425 was euthenased tonight. I'm moving to the much more capable and far quicker HP h4150, though navigation will be done by the Palm Vx as it is the only device capable of accepting a GPS that I have at present.

The T425 is a little publicised unit which had a very good battery life - something in the order of tens of days with heavy use, and possibly months on standby. If I recall correctly, the lowest the battery ever got was about 60 % charge after two weeks away from a mains point.

Ok It would seem PocketBlog requires eVB which is not standard on Windows Mobile 2003.

It's a 2.7mb download. Thank goodness for broadband.

Ok done. This is from my PPC. woo

Ok hacked off with webcams. Mind you this seems a fight between the Nebula and the cam.

The Nebula is Nebula Electronics DigiTV card. As I don't have space for a CRT I use my pc with the Neb as a PVR. Good stuff.

Ok, so why a blog?
Why not? People keep journals and diaries..
I have loosely kept a journal for some time. I mainly don't update it much as I forget about it (it's not in an obvious place as I it's my own thoughts for me...)
plus I hate writing - partly because it's slow partly because I'm no good at it.

In order to cross link these while I test, here's the other blog

OK, after testing uBlog (http://www.uapplication.com/ublog.asp) I've decided it's not for me. I tried it as it's a free ASP/Database blog. Nice idea.

I'm going to try Livejournal for a bit, plus possibly find a way of using blogger on my h4150.

I think I remember why I didn't use Blogger - cos it's a web interface it's too slow.. but them I'm just impatient and should stick around and enjoy the flowers more. MMMM, flowers... I mean the IPA :)

Well here I revist Blogger in my search for a 'nice' blog.

So far I have livejournal, blogger and possibly a few others I've mislaid along the way.

Now... I wonder if there's a uberblog that can syncronise the lot? What would be the point? Hmm...

my first posting through the Avantgo sync client for this Livejournal. After entering the wrong name (why are there so many people with jfreeman names?) I got things working. Seems snazzy so far but my search for a good blog remains.

I guess, in theory, it's possible to backdate an entry...