Some children links

coppied from a posting on Pencaitland Primary Blog http://edubuzz.org/blogs/pencaitland
http://www.funwithspot.com/house.asp?locale=UK
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/funandgames/
Numberjacks gameshttp://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/numberjacks/games/index.shtml
For Doctor Who fans there’s
Dr who e-books
Dr who music maker
CBBC Wild gameshttp://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/wild/games/
Art activitieshttp://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/art/activities/
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artroom/

Blog taxonomy. the idea that some bloggers blog in one way only: Republishing, junk or research/creative. so this post falls into the first category, so what? Most of my posts fall into the junk category (personal posts of no real value) but what the heck. Heard some clever researcher fellow who loves little things that live in the ocean off antarctica. Invited to talk about global warning, I even got a question in about how bad it can become, his answer, serious! Another thing I got from this whle natural-history thing that he presented was how little accurate data we have about what life was like (temperature recordings, diet, methane, CO2 etc) was going back 1000s of years. The only "time-capsule" historians have of this stuff is things that got trapped or frozen into something. I rest my case, blogging may be boring, but so is molecules of methane trapped in ice 1Km down in antartica that was laid there 60000 years ago so that we can melt it and interpolate global conditions. Next topic is my diet LOL.

Time for more local pics

THe sun sitting low actually I had to drive with it sitting there, quite a nuisance, because for quite a bit of my long trip (50 miles) to the office, it was sitting just below the sun-visor. I think I did my back in a but ducking my eyes out of the sun in the driving seat.


I dunno where I took this one, this was early in the morning. The snow here was still very fluffy, and it never had a chance to compact either, so it almost got to the crunchy stage in spots where it had sat long enough to thaw a little and then re-freeze.


A little bit of snow from in the back yard after Xmas.

Some recent stuff in Cottenham:-)

This is a path along the lip of a draining ditch just a short walking distance behind our rental in Cottenham.



I think this pic was taken with my SE (P990i) The prob with this camers-phone is that the shutter button is quite stubborn, I suppose to stop you from photographing the inside of your pocket:-)

I am still going to figure out why photos aded to your blog appear in reverse order and not in the top-down sequwnce as you add them. I always got to copy-paste the tag in at the bottom as the poster/editor jams it in at the top each time.

Oh yeah, the camera button is quite stubborn on the SE, that means that unless you are really steady, that the extra effort to push on the button ends up jiggling the shot and blurring it. Try harder, well I think the shots will get better in the near future. But all this is hugely outweighed by the ability to have a multi-tool of the digital variety in your pocket, fun phone! Besides I did not pay for it.

Real life

Real life will carry on for us all. Sadly I think my boys will not have remembered their great grandparents. They might if taken back to the Willro park village up to number 64, I will remember it clearly. But that does not make the job of carrying on any easier for those that remain.

Taxis
Mailing a fellow who downloaded my modbus simulator from RSA I remember why driving in the UK is just as perilous. They all drive very close behind you, park on both sides of the road indiscriminate of direction of travel; and then to top it off park so that the road is only wide enough for one vehicle, I am left thinking I am on a farm-road in the Transkei. Well it is worth a laugh, because you get curteous, and you still get dumb, but at least not too many ram-shackles and donkey-carts. I have seen horses and had to follow them at a distance down the lane often enough. So who is complaining?

Peace

Ouma Braam Passed away at 5.00 this afternoon. After weeks of struggling Oupa is lost after 60 years. We are on our way to JHB to support him. There is little we can do other than be there for him. Keep him in your prayers.
Dad

---

This is not best, I cannot help but hold my breath. We miss you Giesje.

Happier campers

Not the camping type? Having a great time in our new village home, it is much quieter, only now I have some pics taken of the surrounds that need to come and get pasted up here. Going into Cambridge is still a bit of a 'mare, the traffic means you have to be sure of where you drive, and rather cycle or bus it. I shall have to try using the bus soon. Boys birthdays/combined-party on the weekend, they are getting bikes; shhh so not tell them, LOL. Rhys is quite a wizard at Iggle-pop game now, having skipped supper the other day to play. This is a sign that children are not born evil, their parents make them that way. I just have to feel a stab of guilt because when I was younger I used to skip meals etc all day long just to read and finish a book. Latter in life I would get stuck behind a screen for hours on end, first programming, then gaming. Children'ses is picking up bad habbitsss. In the old days, there were no games, you wrote your own actually, LOL.

Today's is a bit of a geeky log, WE have lots of news suddenly, moved house (sucessfully if you like)

I have included a lot of pics from a good while back of my PC, why, because I can. something I wasted a lot of time lovingly doing. Why? Why not, like why do dogs lick their balls?
Maybe one day science will have an answer for why boys msut rin through rather than around puddles. This boy likes to fiddle.

OK and some pics of my old workplace, Adroit Technologies in RSA. Yay!
Notice the small library behind my chair (keeper of all things paper/documentified - LOL). Yep, in the UK they ram you into a huge open space full of background hissying noise (aircon) to kill other peoples voices. It takes a bit of getting used to, but you do.

The light-bulbs were left over from a traffic-light (or redlight district) project that I made for a customer demo one year, I think I spent 2 weeks not working and building the demo rig with Powerpoint, ActiveX, VB script and a small spot of soldering while programming the Mitxubishi FX controller.

I can u tube, and you?

it takes a while to upload, and then around 15 mins to an hour before your movie actually becomes available. If you add the hours of editting it,5 minutes to encode it - That's a lot of waiting.

This little program is fun www.womble.com - and I made this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLk6_5PijUc - of our LAN Party in Feb 2007 down in Friars House. I am helping organize another LAN Party soon. And we have a Yahoo group running to promo the whole thing properly. gotta get some work done today, so this is just a quickie.

LAN Party

After creating a small LAN Party Yahoo group (login req.) And taking some pics...

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/epoc_lan_party/ for more pic of the Symbianites I work with having fun. Arranging the LAN party was actually an interresting affair, because it was held in London, while I work in Cambridge. I must say I am not good with names, but here we have (from right) David, Kunnal, Thando and one other person (name escapes me). On the left is Jacques, Ryan and Mr Fisher, myself taking the shot, and also not visible is Matt setting up the camcorder. Big thanks to the guys who did pitch, everyone had a good time, no complaints; so we must have done some things right. In fact the only thing that gave a hitch was the power cables that did not arrive, but we ended up with just enough power points anyway. We will have to use this same space again. I think the LAN Party success is in the welcome and quick setup, which David helped with a lot, since I got there a bit late for setup.
Driving home though London was neato. Zillions of small streets, and it just goes on and on, the lights at night when you cross the bridge is pretty cool, but it is a very busy place. At least my internal compass worked fine, and I just kept on headding north, consulting the map twice, before I found myself on the A1, and eventually in known territory again. Still want to blow some bucks on a satnav, we will give it a while.
So that was a high for 2 reasons, I have passed my probation period 6 months at Symbian and managed to arrange an event (albeit small). I suspect if I had been of the London office I might have found more frag victims, but bones to those that missed out, I will carry on.

Money-back

Can visitors to the UK get their money back if the weather does not get krappy? LOL

Sat this morning and wrote a letter from Rhys' dream.

Dear Mommy
Sorry that I broke
the cat
Love Rhys Greg Braam

All in a little story, just so from a dream. I suppose it is a short-story of sorts, there is more detail, funny how little people think so clearly. So when I get into the lowdown of what the heck is a middle school. It's a barbaric system where we send our children from one school to another as often as possible to throw them off balance. Somehow someone missed the point when it came to schooling our children.

Why blog regularly?

...sometimes the saddest things pop into your head, or do they? Catchy lines, that try to make your own life larger than it really is. Well I did hear some bad news the other day, BBC radio 2 had some fragments of an interview with a war veteran from WW1, looks funny written that way, but his storey and those of others is not funny at all. This fellow lost 49 of his schoolmates in the war. Those old gezzers are really at their end, but they were just boys when they went off to fight, and still do not know why so many had to die. I am no pacifist, sometimes I just want to blow the whole damn place up, I think that it only about 4 seconds though. I'm getting it down. One day it will be milliseconds, nowhere near enough time to actually even plot and plan anything, what can you do in 4 seconds? I still find it a bit sad though, that we can leave the love we all start out life with, and replace it with so much hate. Still not sure what makes a man believe that his mother would rather that he die for her, than that the whole family should suffer, but at least live and love him.

Is it as sad? no angry as when you get home and find the walls have been turned into an easel. Using a black marker-pen. On the week-end I tried painting over it all, quite succesfull I believe, and Rhy just had to help. Greg was a bit peeved, he was not allowed a paint-brush.

Next thing Rhys finds the tin of paint, and takes it up to his room, he painted his bedside cabinet from black to white. Quite a good job of it, no spilling, I guess he thought black sux, his old cabinet was white after all. I might think it is all about wishing to be home again, but it is just school. Stressful time for little people.

^Z

First Christmas in the UK

Boys are boys , the little and big boys play together.



It was cold, not hot for a change, still no snow yet, except the 'fake-snow-in-a-can' sprayed into the windows.



The first christmas in the UK was not bad at all, we had to suddenly rush out and buy a camp table for the extra guests, and loaned some chairs from the folk who live 2 doors down. The boys had tonnes of pressies, so nothing missing there.


Garry standing guard over the debris field after the dinner.

Assault on my inteligence

Intelligence? The 'may contain nuts' label is more insidious than initially thought.

When asked for a passkey or unlock code to GRAW, it wants it all in upper-case....? it is all uppercase, and if my keyboard has not got capslock, go get stuffed. I wish everyone would treat us all fairly, and stop nannying us. Go easy, but at least treat lowercaser as upper in a key that cannot have lower-case letters anyway?

Bleeegh!

modbus simulator

Time to talk a little about my hobby, the modbus slave simulator is a pretty little beast intended to simulate a good few modbus slaves, why you may ask, well sometimes (actually all the time if you have not got tonnes of wire and a budget) to build a test-rig for your modbus mastering application with lots of slaves attached to it.

I write this little app in about 3 week-ends and origionally it never spoke modbus at all, but a little know TI protocol. I re-worked the innards to support multiple protocols, and TCP/IP connections (I still want to support UDP someday) a few times over so that Ihave a kind of framework to allow new protocols to be added, but my greatest time spent has been on the GUI. Strange working on a GUI, but my latest work (started a week-end ago is actually on the GUI, and it is very time-consuming. Comms is much easier than GUI. MOD_RSSIM is free (link on left).

All night Starcraft

Well not all night, that is the big downside to having children, they wake you up at 6am any given day, so playing till 2am left me with 4 hours sleep, and no way to catch up on lost time, since my 2 critters do not take naps in the afternoon.
Xmas is coming, and I have to admit, Greg is still the golden boy, Rhys is the energy; the destruction rate has come down a little in terms of how much it costs to replace the things they break, but this time the budget is under pressure.

We finally got to look at what it is costing to survive and well some things need cutting down, we are on to the cheapest coffee, and the internet shopping list is being sorted by cheapest-brand from now on. I suspect eating more fish is good, but it is still not a cheap foodstuff. Trying fish at the moment, since fish-oil is good for the joints. Embarrassingly my knees hurt after a long drive, and since I drive an hour to work each way, I suspect it can only help to keep myself going. I want toget a bike on the 'ride-to-work' govt. scheme. I cant ride, but I will be able to once we move closer to Cambridge. But a bike is a great way of getting down to the shop in the afternoon, since i hate a drive, but walking a mile in the dark is not my idea of fun, how do people do it?

UK Winters are gray

Well not so far they aren't. I get a mix of white flourescent lighting in ample doses in the workplace, mixed with re-breathed air of dubious germ-load by end of day, and then the prospect of black. Yep black night at 5pm on the road home.

White or Black, but the gray is there, it's a bit well hidden from sight. I think it gets called nanny culture here. It's the kind of thing that suggests I could get the NHS to buy my headache tabs (free), just because I could get grumpy otherwise. Well that's what could happen to heroin addicts who have turned to crime (about 25K per year to feed your habit), because some police officials suspect it may help to give out free drugs to help wean the criminally active addicts. Which is known to be around 80% of the criminal offences, to pay for their habit. All because this would make us safer.


I imagine I will have to suffer headaches in silence from now on, just in case this fool idea actually gets some headway.
The times
baltimoresun

Free web access

Well almost, and in defference of free e-mail services, you may think, wow, all these free things are actually quite usefull. and you might feel justified to complain when the 'free' stuff you get (et-al flashing advertising) stops working.

But spare a thought for thos left in South Africa, they not only have to pay for broadband, but the speed is poor too. Chatting to my Buddy DJ at work is like talking through a long steel pipe, and having some idiot with a 2-way radio relaying the conversation. you get cut up, dropped and all. Gotta get a web-cam; that way I can flood the connection fully, and really tax it, because skype calls use very little bandwidth after all.

A dark day in IS

Hotmail dies slowly http://www.freedomlist.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18577&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=40

Myself this is possibly marking the beginning of the end for hot/coldmail? faithfully trimming my mailbox to stay inside the idiotic 10Mb limit every single morning has left me a little tired, and even though msn have handled spam so well, I have to say grab me on gmail from now onwards.
After slower access over the last 3 or so days, it has now been offline for about 6 hours running. Dying dying? watch this space.

Snot slide

I think the real reason I enjoy the boys in-between the tantrum phases and all, is the cute things they get up to, say and how they just innocently mess it all up at times. The slot-slide, for those who have not got boys of their own is the bit below your nose that is shaped like a slide on the way down. I am going to go along the lines of why we have ears on either side of our heads... to hold glasses of course, but that kind of thinking cannot explain the discovery and probably not genteel purpose of the snot-slide.

Xmas comming, still not settled on what to get the boys, we have long been of the opinion that they have far too many toys, and need discipline and structure more than they need toys. Rhys needs to be larning to play nicely, play educational games on the computer, and art. When he is in the mood, he creates quite good stuff with felt-pen and paper etc, but generally he is not that way inclined at the moment. I am still not happy with Nedbank SA; I have not got full access to my acct to be able to transfer moneys about and pay people. This really sux, because I have a debt collector after me, but nedbank will not let me pay them. Because I am not able to present myself at a branch to issue an instruction. This fraud thing is getting a bit thick. I am almost going militant with people who screw with security and get up to disconnest dealings without realizing who they really are hurting. take for example the snow culture amongst the pop-stars. Every few lines of coke kills a innocent person on the other side of the globe in the making of the drug. Very f*** clever peter. I know if all drugs were legal, there would be no drug crime, hey this is utopia we are living in, or is it utipia?

Go figure.

Paranoia

It is not easy getting into things in the UK, I must say you keep wondering about how things really do work, traffic for instance, you see a sign, 70 (miles/hour) and wonder why are these guys zipping past? Then latter on everyone is creeping along at 40 in a 50 zone? what gives, it's enough to get you really on edge.

And now it is damn cold, I hear there is a spray you can use to get rid of the ice on 'yer car windscreen.
I got a scraper, and that works ok, but it does not work without at least some effort. It RSA I could just get it off with a quick swipe, the stuff this last week was a bit tougher than that, and the side windows also got a touch. Next week is warmer at least, so no complaints yet. I have gotten me a really nice jacket, and we went down to St Albans to see the fireworks last night. I think Rhys and Gregory enjoyed it although it was a bit scarry for Greg after a while. They had a really good show, about half an a hour long.

So far so good, My father has a skype phone in RSA, he lives in Cape Town, so I suppose it's time I got one, I have been looking around, but 24 quid is a bit much. You must excuse my typing, this is an english US not UK keyboard. Something on my shopping list, I know, but it damn well works perfectly for everything else, so why scrap a perfectly good keyboard? I have to look out for something else too, the seal around the kitchen door has been muched away by someone with a big knife or a saw, they did quite a number on the door, and it is a bit of a puzzle, but the gap lets in cold air by the tonne now that it is so cold, at least I will have some chance next week to fix. I am in London most of the week on course.

That's the funny thing about training, I am doing the introductory courses still, but I am there 2 months already, the training is just not soon enough to keep up, and they are all booked up. OOOOOO, did not have a nice day on wednesday, the fellow who is in the desk just opposite me had a heart-attack, I've only known Michal for a few weeks, he is a little older than me, and started at Symbian 2 weeks after I did. We are just getting to be friends, in a comeraderie kind of way, becase we are both new at the job, but now he will be off work for a month or so. Michael stays just other side of the bay from Henk and Crista (left RSA about 4 years back) in Brixham, and is renting in the north of Cambridgeshire. it just makes you think about life in deeper context when you have a scare like that.

Anyways, gotta get some e-shopping done for that skype-phone. I can't believe my father beat me to it in the techno-race.

Life is a fragile thing

Well you just get the reminder, in your face when the bloke you are just getting to know just freezes in the chair across from you. Suddenly you have some rushing about and a CPR exercise, all very real this time; in front of you. And the whole time you wonder what happened? A heart attack is not a funny thing at all, probably stress one might say, I'm stressed, but not that badly. I'm pushing myself, but not that much. I suppose I could get mroe excercise, get a bike!

But I am just thinking what is happening to Michael, how is the family coping, was this unexpected? I was happily carrying on with my day, not a thought for the possibility that tomorrow will somehow be totally different. Well it is just a little different, and it is worrisome. I am in no position to do much about it either, living really far away and all. I am thinking that if I stayed much closer I could do more to help out after the fact in some ways. It's all selfish perhaps, but staying closer to the workplace has it's advantages above being able to leave for the office a bit latter in the morning.

As I am a new guy on the team at work, I am trying to get involved in the after-hours activities of the team, a bit difficult if you have got a hours drive ahead of you afterwards. It's worth the effort, but still a factor.

Ha time is a fleeting, and it's time for the monthly banking duties, pay pay pay. I am still stressed about energy/heating bills for winter. We use more gas in the central-heating boilder-system in winter, and the cost per unit also climes over winter, so how do I estimate the effect. Xmas shopping sits bang in the middle of it all, how do folk in the UK cope? I am worried about what the electricity will do, since we have to use the tumble-dryer more now that stuff does not try out.

I am a bit peeved at the comparison and change around the world. Climate change and all, and Pik is dead :-(