Two articles on spaceflight this week, three on how the UK is experimenting with current coronavirus response, and two on chemistry about nomenclature and new ideas on what determines C-C and C-H bond length. Also, a great week for new music.
My 13 year old Sony EarGuard PXC450 headphone cushions were dozing. These are the 2nd set. Sony don’t sell replacements anymore. So I ordered a 3rd party set from Amazon. 👍🏻 See pics. Last picture shows my DIY Bluetooth conversion 😬
Ordered spare cushions. Can I get 20 years usage out of them?
Summer is in full swing (in the northern hemisphere), and that means that it’s almost time for the VMworld US conference. I’m hearing the San Franciso siren call. Must resist this year! I love San Francisco and have been to a lot of events there. Several Apple Developer Conferences, a few MacWorld conferences, and VMworld. I was there so often from 2006 to 2012 that the staff in the Courtyard Marriott on 2nd Street recognised me and knew my favourite drink in the bar!
VMworld is the technical, networking, and socialising highlight of the year for everyone interested in all forms of virtualisation, hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud, modern application deployment, intelligent storage, and more. With over 20,000 IT professionals in attendance, along with all the important IT vendors, a week at VMworld delivers a fire hose of industry innovation and best practice that it’s hard to get in such a pure form anywhere else.
The 2019 event returns to the Moscone Convention Centre in San Francisco and will occupy Moscone North, South, and West in the SOMA district of the city. So, in addition to the full-on technical and business information available, there is ample opportunity for extracurricular activities. From craft beers in the Thirsty Bear near Moscone South, strolls along The Embarcadero from the Oakland-Bay Bridge. Past Pier 39 to Fisherman’s Wharf, then on to Fort Mason and the Golden Gate Bridge. With many more city delights like dinner in Chinatown, a week at VMworld in San Francisco is not to be missed. I’ll maybe go to another one in the future…
VMware has a Convince Your Boss page if you are looking to justify attending. Some advice: plan to wear layers, bring a hat, and wear comfortable shoes!
Time flies. It’s 15 years to the day since I first posted that I might have testicular cancer. I did. A pure seminoma it turned out. Which is a good type to get, if you have to get any at all. Very treatable.
So, you should still get to know your nuts!
I’ve decided to start playing cricket again this summer. I stopped in 2003 when I had surgery for TC. I did play one game towards the end of 2004 but got side tracked after that. Time to go back. Hoping to get fit enough to work up a reasonable head of steam when bowling from the city end at Stormont
Looking forward to it 🙂
I deleted Xcode from my Mac. The two version I had installed were using 20GB of space on the hard disk. I haven’t used them for months. I just don’t have the skill or inclination to write software that I would be able to put on the Mac or iOS stores. I’ve enjoyed tinkering in the past just so I know what people are talking about in relation to Apple platform development. Other things interest me more now though. I’ll still keep REAL Studio on my Mac for the times I want to bang out a simple program for my own use. I’ll still keep up to date with GUI issues on the mac and iOS devices. So I’ll still be reading books about this. Like the excellent Tapworthy.
I guess this means I won’t be going to WWDC this year. I could justify it in the past but not now I think. Given the lack of Mac OS X Server content last time and the fact the Xserve is no more. Which may, or may not mean the death of Mac OS X Server as a viable server platform (let us run it in VMware vSphere!). It’s unlikely that the 2011 WWDC will have much enterprise ICT content to justify attendance for non-developers.
This means I may not spend at least a week in San Francisco in 2011. Yikes. Of course I have enough Marriott Hotel points and BA miles to go for a weeks holiday. Could even go WWDC week and sit in the sun to read & write during the day and have a few beers and concerts at night…
I support this idea from the National Secular Society, and the goals of the Secular Charter.
I haven’t posted a followup in the TC Treatment category here on the Soapbox for a year and a half. Which is good 🙂 Anyway, still alive after 7.5 years…
In response to the blog post by Dad Who Writes, about his journey from Catholicism to atheism I thought I would post here what I said in the comments to his blog post.
I don’t have a similar journey to share. I’ve always been an atheist. My parents were not religious. They did force me to go to Sunday School for a few months (so I would see what it was about) but I didn’t buy into any of the God stuff. This was a Church of Ireland protestant Sunday School. I have a brother 12 years older than me so when I was growing up I was reading his science and engineering books. I think I started to tell people I didn’t believe in God from around the age of 8 or so.
I was recently slagging of Formula 1 as boring on Twitter. And it is. Watching it is so repetitive. But what would be really interesting would be to combine the GPS data from real races and F1 games, like that shown in the Playstation 3 trailer shown here, to allow you to compete in races that have just been completed. Take the Monaco grand prix last weekend. If the games companies and the F1 organisation made all the data for the race available as an in game download, via a subscription model, then gamers could rerun the race and try to beat the real drivers. The real drivers cars in the game would go round the track and pit etc., as they did in the real race. Using the GPS and other data that is collected during the race. I think that would be cool. And much more interesting that the real thing 🙂 There would need to be logic built in to allow the other cars to avoid you on the track and stuff. But that shouldn’t be too difficult to build in.
Sometimes I despair. I really do. The content in the article by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in The Independent has made me despair today. Especially the bit quoted. Read the rest via the link below. Or maybe not. Do something to make yourself happy instead.
Iranian painter Delara Darabi, only 22 and in prison since she was 17, accused of murdering an elderly relative, was hanged last week even though she had been given a temporary stay of execution by the chief justice of the country. She phoned her mother on the day of her hanging to beg for help and the phone was snatched by a prison official who told them: “We will easily execute your daughter and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Her paintings reveal the cruelty to which she was subjected.
It was 6 years ago today that I had an appointment with a Urologist in the Ulster Hospital to get a check-up for what looked like testicular cancer. It was. Now 6 years later I’m 50% deficient in the bollock department [the other one still works 😉 ] but still here to annoy people. Which is good.
I’m not sure Willpower is the correct title for this post. But it’ll do. I recently posted this tweet to my Twitter stream:
To which Bill Cooke replied:
This got me thinking. I tend to make what looks like snap decisions about some things I want to do and once I’ve made such a decision it doesn’t matter what happens. I stick to it. So last week after a few weeks thinking about it my brain just clicked and I decided that I had to start following a more healthy lifestyle. I recognised the feeling I got at the time. It was like a virtual line in the sand and I’ve had the same feelings with other decisions before. For example I stopped smoking in the 1980’s with a similar thought process. I thought about it for about a month then one day I smoked the last cigarette I had and decided that was it. I never smoked again. That was over 20 years ago. Another, more trivial example, comes from when I was playing cricket. I was always a bowler and a joke with the bat. One year I decided that I needed to improve my batting. That year I came 2nd in the 2nd XI batting averages and scored a couple of fifties. There are other examples as well.
It seems that when I make a decision of this type I stick to it. So even if Bill’s comment is true, and to be honest I have had periods of hunger between meals in the last week, it doesn’t matter as I’ll just ignore it. It’s a strange felling and thought process to describe to people. It’s like a binary switch in my brain is flicked when I make one of these decisions and that’s it. I do whatever it takes to bring about what I’ve decided. Does anyone else get this? Does anyone know what I’m describing here (badly describing)? Is this just a manifestation of willpower? I don’t know. I just know that I recognise this type of decision when it happens and can now say for sure that the goal will be achieved. That might sound big-headed. It’s not meant to be.
Interestingly I think there is another thing that I’ve been thinking about for a while that seems to be heading to another decision of this type. It’s quite a profound one as well. Maybe more details in future.
What would be good if I could decide that I want to be a shit hot iPhone developer using this process 🙂 Unfortunately it doesn’t feel the same when thinking about that topic so I don’t think it’s going to happen. I’ll have to just trudge along on that topic.
Happy days. Just upgraded to newer version of WordPress. All seems to be working okay. This post will test the Twitter integration is working as well.
Larry David is cracking up waiting for the USA election to happen –
I can’t take much more of this. Two weeks to go, and I’m at the end of my rope. I can’t work. I can eat, but mostly standing up. I’m anxious all the time and taking it out on my ex-wife, which, ironically, I’m finding enjoyable. This is like waiting for the results of a biopsy. Actually, it’s worse. Biopsies only take a few days, maybe a week at the most, and if the biopsy comes back positive, there’s still a potential cure. With this, there’s no cure. The result is final. Like death.
More at: Larry David: Waiting for Nov. 4th
A new Conservative Humanist Association has been formed for atheist and humanist Conservatives. That’d include me then 🙂 Just renewed my membership of the Conservative Party by joining the Northern Ireland Conservatives. If you want to see normal UK politics operating in Northern Ireland, and if you have Conservative leanings, then join up. If you don’t have conservative leanings then join on of the other UK wide parties NI sections.
I’m reading Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope at the minute. The following excerpt struck me:
Sometimes we need both cultural transformation and government action – a change in values and a change in policy – to promote the kind of society we want. The state of our inner-city schools is a case in point. All the money in the world won’t boost student achievement if parents make no effort to instil in their children the values of hard work and delayed gratification. But when we as a society pretend that poor children will fulfil their potential in dilapidated, unsafe schools with outdated equipment and teachers who aren’t trained in the subjects they teach, we are perpetrating a lie on these children, and on ourselves. We are betraying our values.
I work in an area related the UK Building Schools for the Future programme. I think that the money being spent modernising schools is money well spent. For the reasons outlined by Barack Obama in the quoted text above.
The book is highly recommended.
I’ve started using my exercise bike again. I don’t think I’ve used it for about 10 months. Recently I’ve been feeling overweight and just generally not as fit as I usually do. I’ve also had a more or less continuous pain in my side (near the incision scar from my TC operation) since last January. I think I did a mischief to myself last year between Christmas and New Year when I went to Ikea Belfast to get some new drawer units. The ones I bought had warnings all over the flat packaging that they should be handled by 2 people. I picked them from the warehouse on my own and also loaded them into my car and house by myself. I was in a hurry. It may have been a mistake. In the 2nd week on January I was at the BETT show helping set-up and staff the stand for the company I work for. I had to take it very easy when helping move stuff onto the stand. The next week 3 of us flew to Macworld in San Francisco. I had to get a colleague to lift my case from the carousel for me in SFO. I thought it was just a pulled muscle and it would heal up after a few weeks. But it didn’t. I started thinking it was a mild hernia of some description. I went to see my GP in June and he gave me ibuprofen gel to use on the area. I did this for a month but it didn’t make any difference. If anything it’s been worse recently as I’ve been lugging servers about in work as part of a new VMware based system I’m deploying. I went back to my GP but the upshot of that was to continue with the gel and either get my yearly TC check-up brought forward or wait until November and get them to do a scan. I decided to wait. I also decided to do some exercise and eat more healthy food to boost my general fitness. So I bought a pair of scales to see how much I weigh. I know from when I played cricket that 80kg (12.5 stone) is the weight that I feel healthiest at (I’m 6’2′ ish in height). Rather worryingly the new scales give a different reading depending on where they are. In the place where I will always use them they are reporting that I’m currently about 86.6kg (13.6 stone). So about about 6.6kg (1 stone) above my optimal weight.
I’ve been exercising on the bike for a hour a day for the last 3 days. Unsurprisingly it does give you a lift. I think I’m inherently fit. I always have been generally fit so I get an instant payoff from exercise. In the 24 hours after the 1st day using the bike I noticed that the pain in my side was a lot less than it had been. In the 3 days since it has remained a lot less painful. It’s still tight and tender to the touch but it’s not the constant pain that it was before. Could it have been an internal hernia of some description that popped back to where it should be during the 1st hour on the bike? Here’s hoping, but time will tell. I’m putting a pile of Dell, HP and Apple servers into a rack tomorrow in work. Lots up lifting (carefully!) and crouching, bending during that. Be interesting to see how it reacts.
UPDATE on 30th August: The pain in my side is definitely better. It’s still tight and tender to a vigourous poke, but it’s not the pain I’ve had for the last 8 months. I’m so happy. That was starting to worry me a bit.
It’s been 5 years since I posted this about my last zapping session for TC. Happy days.