04.28.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:59 am by GaZ
There has been no news recently as Hanne and I have been moving into our new place, which still doesn’t have a phone line (and therefore no ‘net access either). So here’s a few random links…. hmm I really should just make a daily-links thing like Hesam et al.
- Lego Spiderman mini-movie… spider-man, spider-man, does whatever a spider can! *doop doop doop*
Oh yeah, and the General Election is to be held next week (May 5th). So far it’s looking like another victory for Labour, but hopefully the Lib-Dems will be able to pull a few seats away from Labour’s overwhelming majority. As for the Conservatives, they can all go rot… just look at Michael Howard… IMHO he looks more like a dodgy second-hand insurance salesman than a politician… actually, I guess most politicians look like that. But I just don’t like the Conservatives.
Personally I feel immigration should be a big(ger) issue for the parties this year. Maybe it’s just because I live in the middle of a large city now which is teeming with foreigners, but I think the situation is getting a bit out of hand… but that’s not to say i’m turning into Robert Kilroy-Silk or anything.
Hanne e-mailed me this following link which is quite useful for working out who to vote for. I came out as slightly more Lib-Dem than Labour, but oviously this quiz isn’t the definitive guide to choosing your party. I don’t, for instance, agree that tuition fees should be scrapped. While the idea of free education is a good one, I just don’t believe it’s feasible in this day and age, given the price of all the resources a modern university is expected to provide for its students (and it also doesn’t help that I was forced to pay approximately £9000 a year for my tuition because, having lived abroad for most of my life, I was classed as a “foreign student”… if I don’t get off cheap then neither should anyone else! 
j/k).
Who should I vote for?
Your expected outcome:
Labour
Your actual outcome:
|
 Labour 19 |
Conservative -14  |
|
|
Liberal Democrat 21 |
| UK Independence Party -14 |
|
|
Green 6 |
You should vote: Liberal Democrat
The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.
Take the test at Who Should You Vote For
And now, back to work!
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04.19.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:36 pm by GaZ
My grandfather, who has been battling with illness for the past few months, passed away on the 11th of April, 2005. I hope he is now at peace and smiling down on those he left behind.
Mum and dad flew over to the UK as soon as they heard the news. They were actually in Singapore at the time, celebrating their 26th anniversary, after which mum was going to fly here anyway to be with my grandparents and uncle. Many of his family and friends of both past and present from around the country came together last weekend for the funeral service which was indeed a fitting send-off for a great man.
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04.05.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:00 pm by GaZ
Although Hanne and I aren’t sure when we’ll be able to visit Houston in person, thanks to the recent combination of Google Maps and Keyhole (acquired by Google last year) we can now get high-res satellite images of the city, and anywhere else in the United States! I’m not sure when exactly the photos were taken, but it must be a few years ago as it looks like the Houston Texans stadium (the Reliant Stadium?) is still under construction (but close to being finished). You can even see a plane flying over the Southern section of the 610-loop, somewhere down near Astroworld. Bonus points to anyone if they can find themselves (or even a tiny little blob that resembles them). I really like the use of javascript so you can scroll around the map almost seamlessly, and the little details like how the tooltip popups cast shadows on the map.
But once again I’m gonna have to gripe about the U.S.-centric nature of these Google services…. sure, my grumblings probably aren’t gonna have any impact whatsoever, but at least there’s a chance.
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04.04.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:30 pm by GaZ
Last weekend Hanne and I looked at a few more apartments and finally found one that we really liked, given the requirements of being cheap(er), located in the city centre, and having a balcony. Itś slightly further away from work (by about 500 yards), meaning I´ll have to get up a few minutes earlier to get there on time, but given that Hanne wakes up about an hour before me I guess I’m not allowed to complain. The kitchen is smaller, but at least it’s not part of the living room, so we won’t have a food-smell when we’re lounging around (which we do a lot). The living room is quite large, with windows that look out over Broadway Plaza. The bedroom is about the same size as the one we have now, looking out towards the south-west (away from Broadway plaza). This is where the balcony is located, with a nice, unobstructed view out over Edgbaston… I can see many a lazy summer afternoon being spent out there with a BBQ, but knowing our luck it will probably rain for the next 6 months. We’re moving over there in 3 weeks, so we’ll post some pictures once we’re there.
And now the obligatory nerdy newsflash for this interesting new topic I stumbled across earlier: XBEL. It’s a standard for storing a list of Web address bookmarks in an easy-to-use XML-based format, making it incredibly easy to read, write, and manipulate such files. I’ve been thinking about reformatting my computer again to give it a good clean, but one of the things I hate most when I reformat is that I lose all my browser bookmarks, so I was going to write a little program to store my bookmarks somewhere on my website. BUT, to make things easier, someone else went off and did the job already with this Firefox Extension. Now Firefox will automatically synchronise with my online bookmarks every time I open or close the application, so I can load the same bookmarks at home or work. Brilliant! But wait! There’s more. Alan over at Space Monkey Mafia (what a great name) has even written a Wordpress XBEL Plugin which you can use to display the links on your website (if you use Wordpress, that is). Great stuff.
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04.01.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:23 pm by GaZ
Today’s that day of the year when we’re bombarded with various “April Fool’s” jokes, but, more importantly, it’s also GMail’s 1st Birthday! Here’s a copy of the text / picture from the site, as it’ll probably disappear by tomorrow:
A Google approach to math.
On the eve of Gmail’s one-year birthday, our engineers were toiling away furiously. Notes scribbled all over the walls. Complex calculations on napkins and empty pizza boxes. Millions of M&Ms.
The result?… starting today, we’re beginning the roll-out of our new and top secret Infinity+1 storage plan. The key features are:
* Write, don’t worry.
You want to stop caring about storage. We want to keep giving you more. Today, and beyond.
* The gift that keeps on giving.
1463.501150 megabytes of storage (and counting) for every user.
* No complicated equations. No tough algorithms.
Just this one graph:
The “megabyte” counter is run by a bit of Javascript that was initialised at midnight last night with a value of 1000, and is due to continue increasing until it reaches 2000 (rather than continuing to infinity as the text above jokingly implies), because now every G-Mail user has TWO gigabytes of storage to use!! If you somehow still don’t have a G-mail invitation, and you’re interested in trying it out, then just send me an e-mail. Also, as featured yesterday on the GoogleBlog, Google Ride has been released! All these Google services are really cool and very handy if you live State-side, but I wish Google would pay a bit more attention to the rest of the world. It’s like we’re living in a third-world country over here!
I’ve been thinking about making a web-based GPS tracker for some time now (obviously in a password-protected area or something) so people can see where I am, but the technology is still a bit too expensive. When GPS devices get REALLY cheap I might try to plant a bug on other people and track their every move! Mwahahaha!! 
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