Three came along at once (and didn't stop...)

This morning I was cold and snuffly, and getting up at gah-it's-early (though those of you who actually get up early on a regular basis may scoff) to head off to uni on a chain of buses. (Well, a short chain. Two buses, in fact.) I haven't had to go outside at that time for quite a while, and it was a surprise to me that it was cold enough for me to see my breath. Almost as though it were, say, November.

I shall (mercifully, you know what a whiner I am) cut short the story about just how many full number 12 buses whizzed past before one finally stopped, and about just missing one on the way home, and having to wait for quite a while for a Coventry bus.

What I will mention, though, are the buses that cruelly raised my hopes and then dashed them. Either because they were the wrong number (the wrongly-coloured ones I can spot from a much greater distance) or because they were numberless and cheerfully declared "Sorry not in service" on the front.

I can cope, however. But I was intrigued by the pink Leamington bus which instead said "Sorry I'm Not In Service".

I disapprove of this anthropormorphisation of buses.

In need of a better fix

I had a mild panic yesterday afternoon when I got home at lunchtime and found that our internet connection wasn't working, just as it hadn't been working at 7am when I first checked, having left the computer on overnight. It's amazing how innocuously internet addiction takes you over — you swear you'd be perfectly fine without internet access for a few hours, even half a day, of course! But the moment an unexpected interruption in access occurs, you can't think of anything but everything you need to do online right now.

In my case I was positively itching to get online — and the problem is that I'm so accustomed to having always-on broadband (and an always-sitting-at-computer posture) that I don't even think of things like checking my bank balance, or looking up a word in a dictionary as an online activity; it's just something I do at my computer. Hence my trying to load a new tab in my browser once an hour or so, and having to kick myself when I realised once again that no, that requires the internet.

My computer seems strangely crippled without it, and unfortunately it remained that way until almost 7pm, a downtime of at least 12 hours. Luckily (in some ways) Kevin, who needs the internet for his business, wasn't here until about 3 minutes after it came back up (a feat of stunningly excellent timing), but it is prompting us to change ISP soon.

We looked at Pipex (Kevin insists this isn't at all because David Hasselhoff advertises for them) and a few others who still do uncapped broadband, but Nildram's £25.99/month deal seems to be very good with a limit of 50GB for all data between 8am and midnight. Zen are reasonable value, but with a very attractive one month contract as opposed to the usual 12.

Does anyone have tales or experience of any of these companies (Pete's Pipex ordeal notwithstanding)? Other suggestions are also good (we already know to stay away from NTL, TalkTalk and BT though!)

A plethora of ways to blog

For our third year Comp Sci projects, we're encouraged to set up a website to record our development. It's nice that blogs are being recognised as capable of being useful for something other than just personal daily entries, and being encouraged to keep track of ongoing progress should definitely come in useful when the time comes to write everything up next year.

Since I'm doing my project in Python (so I can use the Universal Feed Parser, and happily I get to use Django too) and using the Python-based Trac as a development helper, Kevin thought it'd be a nice tie-in to install some Python-based blogging software. The problem? As far as I'm aware, there aren't any widely-adopted Python blogging tools, and most of the ones that Kevin found and liked the look of had stopped being developed years ago.

In the end, we went for one I had heard of, PyBlosxom (after a brief failed attempt with Vellum). After spending a tedious couple of hours trying to get the documentation to load without timing out, and wishing that they had provided a single downloadable file as well, I gave up. Not just because I'm impatient, but because, to be honest, I wanted some software that just worked, that I didn't have to tweak and configure and write whole templates from scratch to get more than non-styled HTML pages without a doctype, and that generally took care of things for me. See, not just impatient, but lazy too!

In the end I asked Kevin to install Wordpress for me instead. And the irony is that I'll probably spend a lot of tomorrow tweaking, fiddling, adding plugins and putting my own template in...

The dark closing in

For the first time this year, it really feels like winter's upon us. The gloomy afternoons and dark early evenings; the fireworks from a dozen neighbouring houses; the cold weather that has finally convinced me it's not just a brief cold snap, it's here to stay; the fact that we're suddenly, unaccountably, halfway through the term, the no-longer-ignorable Christmas adverts, decorations and music; and, of course, families desperate to know a) what we want, and b) what we're doing, for Christmas.

I guess all that's left is for me to put on my Cozy Toze microwaveable slippers and accept that Winter is truly here.

They monitor your every move

This morning I was reading newsgroups and blogs, listening to some new music, when I got a new email from Last.FM telling me that someone wanted to add me as their friend.

The accompanying message was "i love your recent played tracks! regina rocks doesnt she?" (That would be Regina Spektor, whose album I had been listening to.)

Err... actually, was still listening to! I was only on track #7 and already someone had emailed me to tell me they approved.

Sometimes I feel like I'm being watched.

I have no excuse

Kevin's back in Essex again today, which means that this evening I was tasked with making Dinner For One.

The main problem with Dinner For One is that we tend to buy food in sets of Dinner For (Multiple of Two), therefore if one of us has dinner alone we end up with an odd number of bits of food so that the remaining bit languishes in the fridge/freezer/cupboard forever more. Luckily I remembered that we had soup in single cans! Left over from when I was ill and soup was the crunchiest food my throat could tolerate. Soup is definitely an annual occurrence in this house.

I am much less of an intuitive cook than a follow-the-instructions cook. This is because I am Useless, and this method minimizes my chances of ending up with inedible mess. (I just realised I am talking about "cooking" soup. You don't "cook" soup, do you... you "heat" it. In that case, I am much less of an intuitive heater than a follow-the-instructions heater...) So I checked the instructions to see how to heat the soup.

Empty the soup into the saucepan...

Damn! I knew that part. I was going to feel all smug and clever, but apparently it's a Heating Soup for Dummies manual. Oh wait, actually, I need one of those. (To be fair, I suppose it could have required you to add water, like the soup I had last year.)

...and stir gently while heating.

Okay, I'm with you. But this "heating" of which you speak... at what level of heat should I be heating the soup? Hmm. Maybe I'm just supposed to guess. Hey! Maybe it doesn't really matter, I can just vaguely follow the vague instructions and everything will turn out all right because soup is really easy to cook heat!

Do not boil or overcook as this will impair the flavour.

Oh. Bother. So, to heat this properly I need two pieces of data: temperature and duration. Let's see what information we can extract from the above instructions:

Temperature

"Somewhere between boiling point and, presumably, room temperature." Does anyone know the chemical boiling point of Heinz Cream of Chicken soup?

Duration

"Less time than it takes to overcook." Well, that's kind of tautologous, and unhelpful in the extreme.

I guess that what I am in fact trying to say is that I managed to burn soup.