Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Brain Location Services

…was a slogan I saw on the side of a van earlier this week. I didn’t take their number.

Middonaitomesu again last night, after a miserable day sat at home waiting for the weather to be less grim before going out in it. Still, at least I kicked off one of the projects thats been hanging around in my head. Not that it will come to anything, since I’ll end up spending too much time working and forget where I got to with it. Its always the way. One day I will finish one of these projects.

This one is a protocol visualisation tool, to allow visual debugging of protocol logic. Once it is done I have another project which will use it, to create a personal web, some means of attaching comments to sites and being able to index those automatically – I never really got the hang of using bookmarks in an ordered way, so rather than fix my head, I’m going to make a programatic solution instead.

Midnight Mess was more of the same – the music, the people, the place, etc. There were a few notable events – Deathboy went down extremely well with the audience, I fell off the stage (which was arranged as a seating area) bruising my back, I met a confused looking German.

Today, I go for a walk in the park, buy some food and try to recover – these late nights aren’t good for me.


Categories: Memories.

/ 7 Comments

7 comments

  1. evilmandykins

    this is totally unrelated but…. did you post on a minidisc forum regarding sony finally doing something interesting by bringing out HiMd? the person posted as neilh, so i thought of you :) (i did say it was unrelated)

    Reply
    • neilh

      No, not me. MD isn’t something I’m into – I got an SD player which makes MD look decidely gargantuan, so I’ve skipped that evolution. I’m neilh4, really, after , Neil Horner and Neil…damn, I forgot his last name.

      Reply
      • evilmandykins

        hehehe no worries :) i was just wondering as it looked like teh sort of think you might say. . . the new md units rolling out have upload capability and the himd discs now hold 1gig, which is fairly impressive theorhetically you can fit 40ish cds onto one HiMD disc. and they will do data as well (can you tell i am trying to decide on some sort of portable music player? lol am split between a low end ipod or a nice-ish but cheaper minidisc).
        anyhow… :) make me stop watching the discovery channel!

        Reply
        • neilh

          STOP WATCHING THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL!!!!!

          Erm, you won’t discover anything, you know that, don’t you?

          As to MD, even a GB is pretty poor data density if you’re considering somehting as large as a minidisc. SD can now go that far and thats the size of a postage stamp – admittedly the cards are a good deal more expensive than a blank MD, but with 40 albums worth of music, how many do you need?

          (your icon is scaring me, haveta scroll it off the top of the page)

          Rotating media is so fragile, too, solid state is the future.

          Erm, but if you want a minidisc player (or something else…?) I can take a look over here see if they are cheaper than in London…the exchange rate is quite good for you at the moment.

          Oh, and you heard any more from ? Is she OK? Where is she?

          Reply
          • evilmandykins

            hehehe the really sad thing is that the program that is on is one i have seen at least 3 times already… but i can’t find the remote lol

            i knwo that minidiscs are largeish by comparison, the thing being that i like that its a technology that doesn’t put all your eggs in one basket (for example if you lost an ipod, or it was damaged, replacing the unit is very expensive vs if you lost a memory card/disc you havent lost quite as much. (that makes sense in my head. prolly not to anyone else tho :)) tbhi hadnt thought of sd players i will do a little research to see if its a viable thing for me :) rar!

            which of my icons scares you the least? i will try and use the less scary ones…
            (and how does the pig scare you? lol)
            virtually everything is cheaper outside of london lol, if you could take a look taht would be very neat :D i will go away and do a little research on this sd stuff, and see if it will play ball with my mac… the minidisc i am considering is the mz-n910 (or possibly the mz-n10 they are similar, but the battery life is better on the 910)
            the best price i have found for teh japanese model is on bluetin.com 159 ukp. which is a lot of money for it not even being a hi-md…

            kaytea hasn’t said anything on lj yet, i imagine we’ll get a report when she has calmed down, and gotten over jetlag. she is prolly in michigan by now ;/ it really sucks that she got sent back ;/

          • neilh

            That icon is less scary. I think the pig is the scaryest.

            Will look out for md players for you…the sd player I got is the SD80, about 200quid by the time you’ve got a decent sized card and the software (which is utter crap, I might add, so you could save yourself 50 quid if you can find a decent SD aware writer package). MD is probably a good deal cheaper than this, though, and is very common here so way cheaper than back in the UK. Oh, and looks like I’ll be visiting England around end June so can bring it with me then-ish (depending on how staying-here I get talked into).

  2. neilh

    Stumbleupon looks interesting, but its a bit less directed than what I’m thinking, and a proxy-index would probably be a part of it (and, it seems like it should be easy to do, but maybe would take a bit longer to do it well). I’m not sure that my idea will really work out, its a kind of metaweb that lives on top of the real web. I’m trying to think how to code it, once I’ve got a bit more done I’ll post a description and throw it open for more ideas…

    Reply

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