sort of technical

My Ascent to Suffolk and back

I took advantage of today’s sunshine to ride over to Sproughton in Suffolk to see Andrew Vass and Alex Pearl’s exhibition. My GPS took me straight there for once and let me keep a track afterwards of my speed and height above sea level in Ascent thanks to Geoff for this application. As you slide a yellow dot through the graph of your speed, another friendly dot moves through the route on a map. You’ll see that I didn’t make 122 mph made by unfortunate jailed biker Mr Bennett.
Here’s a graph of my speed
picture-1
and here’s the map of the A14
picture-2

Getting to know the Asus EEE pc

I took delivery of this little toy yesterday and so far am not too impressed with it. It seems hopeless at connecting to wireless networks. I connected to one unencrypted network but my own seems to cause problems. Isn’t this kind of computer called a ‘netbook’? The ‘net’ part ought to be easy. The keyboard is pretty small and so is the screen but I think these will just take some getting used to. I hate the ‘simple’ interface which seems to be aimed at small children and I haven’t found out how to get back to the normal Linux desktop. The webcam works with Skype which is hopeful. Battery life is ok but not impressive…

Macbooks and weightlifting – and trivia

…a complaint about Mac laptops in general. I have a nice G4 Powerbook that started to break down just over a year ago and, with a few months warning, gave me enough time to work through the lengthy bureaucracy at my university to order a replacement (ordering a Mac was a bit odd for a start in a place where most people use Dells). The standard machine they supply is the white plastic MacBook I am typing this on. It of course has this cinema proportion screen, great for watching dvds which occasionally I have done but a waste of space for writing stuff which is what I usually use it for, and a waste of weight. I hate carting this white blob of plastic around (even the black one is really just a white blob of plastic disguised as something cool and black).

So, what is the moral of this story, to conclude? There isn’t one at all. We all spend too much of our affluent lives going on about this kind of banal trivia.