www.lewiz.org

While stocking up with various bits and pieces (including a few more ringbinders) at Tesco I spotted a cheapy looking 19” pedestal fan going for £20.

I figured I could take it back if it was crap, but I don’t think I will be doing so (short of it breaking… I have a one year warranty).

The fan is indeed very cheapy and comes equipped with five speed settings:

1. Off


2. Spinning very quickly


3. Spinning super quickly


4. Spinning like buggery


5. Hurricane

A clear win.  It is doing a great job in combating the monster that is the Pentium D.

There’s no better feeling* than the feeling you get once you’ve spent the whole night sorting things out that you should have done years ago.

I’ve finally tidied up all of my bank statements, my bills/invoices file, mobile ‘phone statements and so on.

Sometime I’ll have to go grab a few more small ring binders to finish the proper organisation.

This now means that the left hand side of my desk is now clear. This is the first time it’s been free from junk in years. Whenever I tidy my desk up I stack all of the “to do” things on the left, only to end up piling more and more stuff on top.

The trick now is to keep up as the invoices and statements come in…

Edit I rewarded myself by ordering a curry from Simply Indian in Yateley.  Not cheap, but very good.  The ordering actually had a lot to do with the fact that I’ve run out of food to put in the oven too…

You are Donatello. You are reserved and intelligent. You favor the use of brains instead of brawn.

To take the test visit http://www.brainfall.com/test8_1.php

I’ve been toying with the idea of knocking up a quick film review/sharing system in PHP/MySQL.  This would be used largely by Vlad and myself to quickly mark down films that are worth watching.

After thinking about it a minute or two longer I realised there was a much quicker way of doing it… del.icio.us.

del.icio.us allows users to tag content with for:username, indicating that the site should be brought to the attention of another user.  Today I finally got around to subscribing to the RSS feed for content tagged with for:lewiz... this means that from now on, you can let me know about cool stuff just by tagging it.

How does this apply to the film review system?  Simple:

• Tag the IMDb page for all films that you watch


• Include an out of ten rating as a tag: 9/10


• Apply any other suitable tags


• If the film was good, or you think it is of interest to your friend, mark it for their attention: e.g. for:inomine

And what if you want to share something with a friend and nobody else?  Combine the Do not share functionality with a for:username tag.

Upon arriving at Siem Reap international airport on Sunday February 25th we sorted out a taxi, loaded our bags and set off for our hotel.

On my seat was a roll of exposed Kodak colour film.  For whatever reason I decided that I’d pick it up.

Three weeks ago I got the roll developed and a handful of photos came out.  There was nothing really interesting (no child pornography either, thankfully), but as the good stalker I am… here are three shots that more or less came out.

I’ve got some Blu-tac on my desk.

I’m not sure where it came from, but Blu-tac being Blu-tac means that I’ve spent quite a lot of time rolling it around in my fingers.

It’s gone pretty smelly now.

To make matters worse, I seem to have a habit of squashing things down on top of it.  So far I’ve squashed down:

1. My mobile ‘phone


2. My old mobile ‘phone battery

It’s all very well and good until I try and pick the object up… when I can’t do it freely it takes me a worryingly long time to figure out what’s going on.

On Saturday Vlad and I made good use of the bank holiday weekend by driving out to Ladybower reservoir somewhere near Sheffield.

On arrival we needed three return trips to my car for various different bits and pieces (my wallet, my walking shoes, etc.).  On the final attempt at a little walking I was feeling thoroughly apprehensive, expecting something to go quite badly wrong.

First stop was a Cider Refresher ice lolly from the visitors’ centre, before we wandered along the west bank of the Derwent reservoir, aiming to make it to the first or second dam before catching the shuttle bus back.

Upon arrival at the second dam, we quickly made the decision to take it a bit further and walk full circuit.

The route is (as Vlad pointed out) quite deceptive, in that you think you’re making lots of progress towards a dam, only to find out that there is a branch in the reservoir that takes you on a three mile detour!

Four hours after we set off we arrived back at the visitors’ centre.  The whole route was probably around 12 miles, which suggests we managed to keep a pace of around 3mph.  This isn’t too bad, especially considering I’ve not walked for a long time, and Vlad has recently recovered from a wonky knee.

Much more practise is required to maintain a solid 3mph with 30kg packs for an estimated 20-25 miles per day!

The past weekend was pretty hectic… I travelled up to Manchester to catch the 6PM showing of Spiderman 3 with Vlad and Kirk at the Odeon.  Now, I didn’t particularly enjoy either Spiderman 1 or 2, so it didn’t come as much surprise to me that Spiderman 3 managed to reach such a spectacular low.

I’ve read elsewhere that Spiderman 3 should really have been two films (maybe like Pirates of the Caribbean?)—one to cover the crazy sandman and another for that sticky black blobby thing.  Maybe if they’d have done this we could have properly appreciated the whole relationship between Spiderman and the hot chick.

Or maybe not.  Whichever way you try and spin it, the film totally sucked.

After the film we headed to Pizza Express before enjoying some Soul Calibur 2 on a PS2 kicking about around Kirk’s house.

I can’t really remember what we did on Saturday… probably drove to my house on the M62 to catch a small airshow on the Sunday.  The airshow turned out to be smaller than expected, but equipped with an OM-4 and 135mm Zuiko, this probably wasn’t a bad thing.  With any luck there might be one or two shots worth doing something with.

After the airshow we drove back to Manchester to catch “Das leben der anderen” (The Lives of Others) at AMC (the good cinema).  This was quite a change from Spiderman… there was a plausible plot, with developed characters, good dialogue and excellent overall production.  The Lives of Others is set in the period running-up to the fall of the Berlin wall.  At times it was a little slow (as is true of many great films), but overall it was really worth watching.

The plan had been to meet up with Karen for a trip to Wagamama, or a Chinese meal, or something.  In the end Vlad and I had a nosh-up at Punjab, best Indian in Manchester.  As ever, the meal did not disappoint, although I suspect the chef has changed—the style is different, but still outstanding food at better prices.

On Sunday night I decided to head back home, only to end up returning to Manchester again on the Monday.  Monday evening was spent enjoying* some coffee in Starbucks, followed by a very roundabout trip to Samia and Ceyda’s flat for a “rave”.  The “rave” was awesome… it even included a disco ball and one of those ace bouncy balls.

I headed back about 10-11PM to work from home on the Tuesday before starting the drive down to Surrey.

I’ve no idea how many miles I covered with the three trips to/from Manchester, but I do know that my bank balance is feeling it!

Lately I’ve been working with Vlad on designing a proper website for use on an upcoming project.

In the past I’ve used PHP for various different things, including hacking together a simple blog site of my own.  This blog included the classic blog pages, as well as static pages and (theoretically) interchangeable themes.  I built this on top of PEAR and Smarty for PHP.

Never before have I been faced with designing a website that really /matters/.  By this I mean a site that, I hope, lots of people will be visiting.  The website will be an integral part of a greater project.

This website must have a number of different content types: static pages, a ‘blog’ (or similar), a Wiki-style section for easy Wiki-linking, a photo gallery and a rather specialist/custom mapping section.  There’s no big deal here… until you start actually trying to design how these fundamentally different blocks fit together in a seamless and logical way.

We’re coming close to a draft specification and there are a few key points we’ve identified:

• Once implemented, the site has to be low maintenance.  We really can’t afford something full of security holes, or even something that requires any but the most basic maintenance.  We don’t want to have to deal with spam of any form, maintaining links, categories, etc.


• The project as a whole involves travel and so physical locations are interesting to us.  We want/need the ability to provide a geo-reference for every item of content (and potentially categories too) on the site.  This means at the very least a latitude and longitude, but also an altitude where at all possible.


• Latitude and longitude is all very well and good… but what does it really mean?  The website needs to have a fundamental understanding of ‘reverse geocoding’.  Geocoding is the term given to translating a “man-made” location into a latitude/longitudinal value… for example a post code, city name, etc.  Reverse geocoding is a slightly more specialist application of geocoding, and involves (surprisingly) geocoding in reverse.  i.e. converting a latitude/longitude into a readable location.


• Access to the data must be trivial for any visitor.  This largely boils down to search, and manipulation of a structure.  For example a user might want to view all content related to a given physical location… this should be straightforward.

Having identified these problems we’ve come up with a few ideas that we hope to implement:

• We will provide a basic rigid content structure.  This will be at a country name level, e.g. England, Scotland, Wales, etc.


• Further categorisation of data will be done on a ‘free tagging’ basis.  i.e. we will not extend the rigid structure in a hierarchical manner to include, for example, England->Manchester.  In some ways this is desirable but maintenance is non-trivial and the rewards don’t fully match the effort to maintain such a structure.  In terms of the end user, if an entry has been tagged correctly it should be trivial to locate it by tag-based search.


• We will provide two different views on data: ordered by time and ordered by location.  By default the user will see both but more specific views will be available.  These will be as natural as possible.

The things that have really got me stumped are what format we will use for the URLs.  There are many different ways of expressing useful information in URLs but ultimately we will pick just one way.  In the meantime I’m enjoying* writing out URL schemes and considering their various benefits/drawbacks.

I picked up an updated copy of Karl Bushby’s travel book, Giant Steps, while looking around Waterstones today.

Karl Bushby is an ex-paratrooper from Hull who, in 1998, decided to walk back home from South America.

Apart from the fact that in 2006 he was the first Brit to cross the Bearing Straits on foot, I know nothing more about him.

I’ve had a quick flick through the book and I have to say that I’m totally amazed by it… this guy is obviously the real deal and an inspiration to anybody who has ever wanted to attempt the impossible.

More to come when I’ve got at least some proper reading done!