Neil Hopcroft

I totally approve of aerosol cheese, it has more structural integrity and less air than I’d expected.

For lunch today I went to the Tescos Ultra at Bar Hill. Where I discovered most of the population of Cambridge and sandwiches in singing christmas packaging.

To start with the car park is full of people trying to park as close to the store doors as is possible, so nearly half the carpark is empty while people argue over spaces in the other half….I pulled into one row toward the emptiness where I discovered someone sitting, looking like they were waiting for someone to leave a space, so I waited for a little while thinking they might get out the way soon, then went to go past them to the easy spaces further along the row. They defensively lunged for their space blocking my way in the process and took a couple of swipes at it.

The stores entrance was guarded by police but they didn’t seem to be stopping people who had the boldness to just walk past them, I was in, and venturing beyond the ‘this is lunch’ section drags you through christmas everything before you can get to the store itself.

I don’t understand how a store like this can support itself – it is outside Cambridge, so I guess it covers the villages and a lot of commuters who come to Cambridge from the west, but there isn’t any local population to speak of, a few hundred in Bar Hill perhaps, but anyone in Cam or to the North will use the Milton store.

Still, that doesn’t stop the place being incredibly busy of a lunchtime – the queues meaning that its not a quick grab-lunch experience.

But the space of the place amazed me – I wonder what the future historians, those who discover the relics of our race, will think when they discover the ruins of buildings like this. What they will think of the people who came to worship at this great hall of commerce.

…giving up their freedom in the hope of being chosen…

Oh, and the lovely Cheryl brought me some aerosol cheese, which is quite a delicacy stateside, from what I hear. I’m still too full of honey and pepper chicken to have tried it yet, looks fabulous, though.

Grandi: You’re bouncing.

“I decided to tackle another Lego challenge: a medium format Pinhole Lego Camera”

The output is not quite SLR quality.

Is anyone using IssueCrawler?

Its a system that compiles aggregate data about a particular issue into a form which can be easily visualised – so, say you were searching for information about the WTC attacks on Sept11th it would give you a (logical) map of how a number of sites link together allowing you to understand the structure of the information available on the web about that issue. The maps are SVG maps which took me a little while to get working in Firefox, and even now they’re a bit odd, but the kind of information you can get out of it looks good. It takes a while to collect this kind of information so they cache the crawls they’ve done before – you can browse the archive of other peoples crawls to see the sorts of things that are covered.

Login is required and they’ll ask for some information to go with that – but if you’re interested in visualising connections between information about issues of interst to you it is probably worthwhile.

Cell processor SDK…I’ve not had a chance to play with this yet, nor do I have a PS3 to test anything on, but it looks like it might be an interesting project.

btw, can anyone think of a sensible use for a 4Mb ECC RAM stick?
(found shortly after thinking ‘ouch whats that scratchy thing I’m standing on?’, though I think it did more damage to me than I to it)

Should I buy one of these? Its a WorkInProgress on the OpenWRT site…

I turned up during Global Noise Attacks set at last nights gig in the Man on the Moon. They’re kinda fun but rather more, erm, on display than necessary…still, I’m guessing it can get pretty warm on stage even in the winter.

Next up were Rome Burns, who seem to have forgotten to invite Captain Sensible to turn on Simons lights, so there was an impromptu ceremony with the guy from Devilish Presley. (I wonder who turned on the Cambridge christmas lights this year…? It only got into my conciousness last year because there was some controversy “we can’t have someone from a band called ‘the Damned’ turning on Christmas lights!”). Still, Nev was rocking out, to the point of injuring himself if his post-stage mopey face was any indication of what was going on…

They were followed by Screaming Banshee Aircrew, who are a band I’ve been meaning to see for a long time, having heard a few of their recordings and been mighty impressed. They didn’t let me down – nice stage presence, beautiful voice, daft songs about weeding. Shame they managed to short themselves out before their finale, but somehow they seemed quite shocked that they’d managed to keep going so long without breaking anything. Must see more of these guys (though preferably without repeating the bit where I say stupid things to their cute female singer…).

Finally there was Devilish Presley, who came on after a considerable amount of furious faffing around by the sound engineer trying to ressurrect whatever electronics SBA had managed to short – I decided to sit out the way at the back for these guys, having seen them only last weekend. I like their show and they seem good people but you can have too much of a good thing, better to catch with people instead, even if its really too noisy for proper talking.

Its a bad thing when you are woken up by configuration management nightmares, isn’t it?

“Just /how many/ configurations do you want to maintain? In CVS? With a team of 20 developers?”

I wrote a long and confused entry trying to explain the quietness happening here. I can’t. Its just the way it is. I’m not feeling particularly engaged with the world at the moment, like I’m not really a part of society any more. Like I don’t have anything useful to contribute, but equally, like it has nothing for me.

Its not that I’ve not been doing stuff, its just not felt like it was things I wanted to write about – nothing particularly interesting. Well, there was some geocaching and the Last Dance/Devilish Presley/Rome Burns gig in Colchester, and tonights in Cambridge. But I don’t have anything to say about them that you won’t have read anywhere else.

All of which suggests that I’m in need of some kind of change to my lifestyle – but what? I have some ideas but I’d like to hear if anyone has any thoughts before I bias the discussion by suggesting the things I’ve already thought of. Besides I don’t have any idea about *how* to go about the changes I have thought of, but thats another story.