Net Phase 2

Some good news on the grapevine today.

It seems that NET Phase 2, the planned extension for the Nottingham Tram, has been given the green light by the government.


This means extension of the current single tram line in Nottingham into a three line network, one of which will run past the bottom of my parents' road. The scheme has been in the pipeline for absolutely ages, but this is due to the British imperative of holding multiple consultations with every blade of grass along the route, and extending the timetable over a long period so as to maximise the spend on overheads and the chance of cancellation.

Today's good news means it's one step closer to actually happening though!

Hurrah! No more faffing negotiating the traffic in the car and trying to find a parking space in the broad marsh multi-storey. Just walk to the end of the road, get on a tram, and step off into the middle of market square. Much faster than the current bus service too, and with direct connections to Nottingham station!


I remain cautiously optimistic about NET Phase 2. There are still a number of doubts. For example funding has yet to be officially approved by the Department for Transport, and that includes a decision on the controversial Workplace Parking Levy which is part funding the scheme. The WPL is of course very politically unpopular due to the motorist knee-jerk persecution complex vote - an effect which I may have mentioned before as being something that I regard as a kind of cultural madness.

There's also the fact that, even if a decision on funding is actually made in the near future, construction of the new lines won't begin until after the next general election. This gives me a bit of a sinking feeling. Evidence of what's gone on recently with a Conservative administration now running London and the shelving of the cross-river tram scheme there implies that a new Conservative national government may not look favourably at the NET extenstion, because a tram isn't cars.

Where on earth we could put more cars in Nottingham is of course a very good question; the roads are already full of cars, and the space between the buildings is full of road.

Time zones

Ahh, once again it's that time of year when some helpful individual in the past decided that we should all move our clocks an hour forward... or is it back? I forget. Just like I always forget exactly which weekend it is.

This isn't helped by the way in which my growing older has coincided with the acquisition of more clocks. A clock in each room, a clock in my car, my watch, etc etc. I have to go around and change them all.

I just think this is really silly. It doesn't change the amount of daylight available, so if some proponent of daylight saving time is so keen on making use of the daylight in the early morning in the summer may I suggest they just get up earlier? Making the rest of us faff about with all of our time pieces twice a year is not helpful at all.

What would I like? I would like this country to choose which bloody timezone it wants to be in and stick to it.

Rant ends.

Being very un-PC

What am about to say flies in the face of what I believed even just a year ago, and I would have been horrified if I'd heard myself saying it. I am fast becoming an Apple Mac convert.

I have had enough with Windows. I have owned three different PCs over the last decade, running Windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows XP, and a defining feature of all of these for me has been that with a PC there is always something that's not quite right.

Let's illustrate this with an example or two; just the first few that come to mind:

My old Windows-XP laptop currently has an idiosyncrasy whereby if I close the lid whilst it is running it goes into hibernate mode, which is fine, that's what it's supposed to do, but when the lid is re-opened for some inexplicable reason it comes back out of hibernate mode and then immediately shuts down. I cannot for the life of me work out why, let alone try to correct it.

Switching off the login screen, which I really don't need on a computer only I use proved extremely challenging, as the options that control is aren't very well labelled and getting the combination that would not bring up a dialogue box asking me to sign in was a true exercise in trial and error. I finally managed to make the accursed box go away on startup, however any time the computer comes back out of standby mode it still appears and asks me for a password.

My laptop also seems to think it has a US rather than a UK keyboard, which most noteably swaps the " and @, and makes typing the £ symbol impossible. After a couple of hours of trying to figure out how to correct this little quirk, I gave up and decided to live with it.

My PC at work has an intereting little tick in that whenever a USB stick is plugged into it the stick is recognised but it's impossible to access it. Due to way Windows XP assigns drive letters, and the number of network drives on my work computer, windows wants to assign the stick the same letter as an existing drive, and this conflict prevents the stick from becoming visible on the desktop. In order to gain access to the USB stick I need to go into the disk manager application, which Microsoft seem to delight in changing the name, location and format of with every update, and manually change the stick's drive letter to one that isn't in use.

I could go on, but I'm sure you get the point. It's 101 little things like the above that are ever present in a PC that have brought me to this point of complete dissilusionment with anything that's running Windows.

So, what does a Mac do that a Windows PC doesn't?

Well, to put it simply, it works.

Somehow a Mac simply manages to not have any of these issues, or at least has a far, far fewer number of them. I have formed this opinion from playing with my Dad's discarded Mac this weekend, which he recently replaced with a newer version.


This is a Mac Mini, a desktop computer in a teeny tiny case. This is the whole package, and the idea is that it will work happily with whatever monitor, speakers and USB hardware you already have, keeping down the costs of replacing an old computer. The one I have inherrited has displaced the tower of my old Dell desktop, plugging into my existing flat screen monitor and speakers. All I needed was a USB keyboard and mouse, so at the weekend I treated myself to one of Apple's very nice flat keyboards and a new webcam.

All I had to do was plug it all in, switch it on, and it worked perfectly first time! At 4 years old one would expect it to have developed all manner of ideosyncracies, but so far anything that I have come across that I've not been completely happy with has been so incredibly easy to find in the options and change.


I think I'm going to become hooked, and I'm already trying to work out how soon I can get myself an up-to-date Mac Mini, or maybe one of the new MacBooks.

Google

Over the last couple of years Google seem to have adopted the practice of frequently putting up a unique image in place of the tile on the main page of their search engine. I saw this one today and felt I needed to share it.


Wow! Remember the very hungry catapillar? I do!

Herveum

I feel that having taken ownership of the word "herveum" that producing some kind of formal definition might be in order.

So then, a Herveum:

her • ve • um 
-noun
1. A unique 7-letter word derived from the letters found on a scrabble rail during play, applied as a name to an as yet un-named article or concept.


It should be noted that at present there are only two hervea defined. "Herveum" is obviously the first. The second is the word "hexipig", which is the name for a 6-legged pig.

Doodles

Something that is a little bizarre is that I have always somehow become friends with the sort of people who like to doodle in notebooks. The kind of person who, whenever there's a spare moment, will suddenly become very artistic and with the aid of a pencil or pen start to deposit the contents of their brain onto the next blank page.

This happened quite a bit whilst I was at college, but it came to a head in university and I remember sitting in lectures whilst a piece of paper was passed up and down our particular row. The shared doodle that no one of us could take individual responsibility for would grow in complexity and surreal insanity over the course of the lecture. In fact I still have most of those doodles tucked away in a file somewhere.

I am also one to doodle when I have a spare moment, however my doodling is rather a different cup of tea. I am not a particularly artistic person when it comes to drawing animals, people, or anything organic. I do, however design things and do drawings of them for a living, so I can draw things quite well. I will occasionally draw spaceships, aircraft, machines, etc. One time recently, during a particularly... interesting... course I was sent on by human resources I drew a train with bigfoot-truck type tyres crushing a national express coach.

More often though my doodles are mathematical and are linked to my attempts at programming in DarkBASIC. I have always enjoyed problem solving and anything that involves establishing systems and methods, as long as I get to see the results. This is why my doodles are usually A4 in size, involve line diagrams with position, force and velocity vectors, have a good serving of differential equations, and live in their own folder. It's a very unusual way to relax by most people's standards, but I find it really works for me.

Whether I will ever progress any of my DarkBASIC programming attempts to a useful result is yet to be seen though. I guess I do it more for fun, and oddly yes it is fun!

Pub Scrabble

This weekend has furthered my assertion that I really love Oxford.

Yesterday I met up with a bunch of hypnosis people in town for drinks, dinner and a spot of pub hypnosis. I had a lot of fun and as usual I've written all about it in my other blog, BlackMeridian.

Anyway, today I had the pleasure of meeting up with a couple of them who had stayed overnight in Oxford before facing the long drive home. We found a nice pub, the Lamb and Flag, and sat down to some lunch and a game of scrabble.

There is just something about the pubs in Oxford that really appeals to me. They're my kind of pub, even late in the evening. The atmosphere is always friendly and it's actually possible to socialise because there's no loud music and you can hear what other people are saying.

In any case, I have yet to be in any other pub where the loudest source of noise is a heated debate in very posh accents about the intricacies of Viking battle dress. I kid you not!

I have also confirmed to myself that I am still rubbish at Scrabble.