Hills House of GAIN

Ha-ha, well the Christmas run of posting almost daily didn’t last!

repeat to yourself :

I MUST NOT TAKE CONTRACTS THAT HAVE AN HOUR AND A HALF COMMUTE.

I MUST NOT TAKE CONTRACTS THAT HAVE AN HOUR AND A HALF COMMUTE.

I MUST NOT TAKE CONTRACTS THAT HAVE AN HOUR AND A HALF COMMUTE.

The drive and time spent in the car really is killing me. Another stupid mistake was rewriting the contract on extension to allow working 5-days-over-4, so at least I’d get 3 day weekends to work on my own stuff (i.e. Apple warez) and that didn’t really pan out either. The working day stretched from 9am to 7pm making me even more tired than before! Arriving home after 8.15pm, eating , then showering means that by the time I get to the ‘spare time’ its already 10pm.

Result : even less time to do anything useful and deteriorating health to boot. Not a good move.

However, you learn from your mistakes, and I’ll definitely take work closer to home next time.

One thing that did come out of all this was my need to enjoy the commute, so i bought a new car!

Ok, given its 120 mile round trip per day, i should have been looking for a diesel with a big tank. But i just couldn’t help wanting something special. I needed a reward for half killing myself. So I bought one of these.

It’s a brand new Lancer Evo X FQ330 SST and looks exactly like the image. Its an absolute MONSTER. A tank full only gets me 240 miles that’s on account of the tank only holding a measly 55L, and that’s taking it easy (26mpg), which translates to a visit to Shell (needs 98Ron) every 2 DAYS. I really do have to apologise to mother earth every time I get out!

However, I absolutely LOVE the car. The SST is automatic – this is the first automatic I’ve driven and I have to say its pretty amazing. The SST is    a twin clutch drive train with 2 six speed boxes so while you’re in the current gear the other box is pre selecting the next gear, so the gear changes are seamless and fast – taking about 1/10th of a second. This means that it will propel me to 62mph in fraction over 3 seconds and has a top speed 180+ limited to 155. There are so many driver aids to stop me wrapping it round a tree that the tech is more advanced than what i work with as a day job! The SST has three driving modes – Normal, Sport and Super Sport.

Normal behaves like an ordinary automatic keeping the revs as low as possible making it a civilised drive and trying to keep the MPG in double digits, Normal mode gets ~26MPG. Sport mode is where the fun starts. Throttle response is tightened, and the RPM is held in the power band so the turbo is always spooled up and ready. RPM is held in the current gear longer and clever stuff like the Active YAW control prevents the box from changing at stupid times like mid cornering. Then there’s Super Sport. This really is track mode. Throttle response is tightened up still further, and the box only changes at the red-line. I haven’t used super sport, sport mode is plenty frightening enough. The technology and engineering in this car is absolutely amazing. Another distinct advantage with this car is its a lot more subtle than my old Subaru was. It doesn’t look out of place in the Asda car park, but it still makes for a double take when you see the vents on the bonnet!

So, whilst it makes the commute a little more acceptable, I still don’t think that offsets the distance and time problems no matter how much fun i can have playing in traffic.

My contract is coming to an end , its been a fantastic 2 years at the the Library and although another extension is on the table I’m really not sure I can tolerate another 3 months of the commute of death. In addition, the 2 year limit of HMRC kicks in which means I’d effectively be taking a pay cut if I didn’t increase my rate to compensate amongst all the other HMRC worries that make you look like an employee rather than a contractor. I’m pretty sure it’s time to move on.

I sure my writing and photography output will increase when that old friend ‘spare time’ re-appears.

Check me out. I’m on a roll, a post a day, almost!. Anyway, the other night one of my old contacts, from a good thirty years ago pointed me to a site he’d found on line that had archived all our old demos from the Amiga days! OK, I’d better explain myself. Circa 1985 me and a friend called Cosy set up an Amiga demo group call ‘Magnetic Fields’ with a guy from Rotherham who’s nickname was ‘No.5’. Yes, that was the main character from the film Short Circuit. I’ll leave the real names out to protect the guilty!
So, there we were with our A500’s Hacking cracking and packing anything that moved. I think Cosy may have been single handedly responsible for the downfall of commodore, but that’s another story. I was much more interested in coding stuff, and even though I’d had published products out from the tender age of 12 (on the vic20) this was where we really got to cut our teeth.
Decent graphics hardware and a nice fast 68000 CPU running at a whopping 8mhz! We had demos coming out of our butts. I was responsible for a few of the early MF demos which are all on that site! It’s amazing to look back at what a 16 year old kid was up to cracking out 3d demos using the hardware blitter to draw lines, render sprites, and i was also responsible for one of the most famous ( or notorious depending on your point of view) virus killers at the time – Interferon.
Interferon worked by hooking all the IRQ’s to replace its boot code
so that in the event of any virus ( or a competing boot loader) stepped in, Interferon would immediately heal itself, and survive the reboot. One trick Interferon had up its sleeve was that it also
replaced all the IRQ’s on the vertical blanking interrupt, which ensured that all those vectors we replaced 50 times a second! Nothing was getting past that sucker.
Funny thing was, the most successful virus killer on the Amiga was written in 1K of assembler. 1024 bytes. Whilst all this hackery pokery was great fun it did do one thing that changed my life, I got me into the games industry, where I stayed for a further 23 years.

I wouldn’t change a thing.

One of the problems I’d had with this blog was ‘what does it say?’. By that I mean, I had tech articles I’d want to write, photo’s I’d love the world to see, and general discussion items that might be of interest. I’d never really considered keeping multiple blogs for separate content, I thought it was too much effort.

Re-visiting this now WordPress is at V3.3 i find not only is the level of integration with all the previous tools I’d used really slick, but my range of iDevices make everything easier than ever. The workflow to post & barriers to adding multiple content streams really have dissolved.

So, I’ve split my content.

I’m now split 3 ways! Although i really struggled to post anything significant for at least the last couple of years, this should help focus any work I do.

http://rob.runtothehills.org

will contain all my personal musings, thought articles and anything that isn’t covered by my photo blog or my tech blog.

http://thief.runtothehills.org

Is my new photostream blog. It will be devoted almost entirely to iPhoneography, since the best camera is the one you have with you. Apparently. Until I’ve got lots of good iPhone only photos, I’ll post some DSLR images too.

and finally,

http://tech.runtothehills.org

will contain any tech stuff I end up regurgitating. Thinking about tech blogging, there’s not much to say when you’re not at the bleeding edge especially when you no longer need to post technical articles for the ‘look at me, I’m techy, employ me’ treadmill. That’s not to say I don’t need to prove that, just less so when you have a good contract track record. However, i still love tech writing so there will be the odd bit of content that i thought might be useful or exposing something that tripped me up.

So, there we have it. 3 blogs instead of one. I really should be 3 times as many posts with a 1/3 of the work this time round.

What a complete n00b. I couldn’t get my blog theme to look like it should, so I did the whole reset thing. Deactivated all my plugins. Cleared all caches.. Updated stuff. Exported my entries. Reinstalled WordPress.
No change.
So I went all hardcore. Back to the host. Delete WordPress. ( you can see where this is going. ) reinstall WordPress.
Success! Theme works perfectly. Reimport posts. All present and correct!
OH WAIT A MINUTE. All media now gone!
#FAIL

Good thing is I was starting fresh anyway, just a bit annoying that all the pics, zips, source stuff will have gone. I could restore a backup from host, but I don’t think the old stuff is worth worrying about.
So it really is a fresh start!

After modifying the TanTanNoodles Flickr plugin to allow WordPress Shortcodes that include date ranges, it seems it’s still not quite as reliable as it should be. The two preceding posts were both initially posted via my phone included shortcodes to display the picture I’d just taken / uploaded to flickr. However, only one (the palm frond) showed up via the shortcode.

I tested the same thing with flickr api test pages where you can enter the parameters of an API call onto their test page, and … it still returns nothing, even thought the dates are correct.

Searching the flickr forums shows up that their support for searching / filtering photos is spotty at best, and some parameter searches are completely broken. Googling reveals lots of people having the same problems, even over the last few months. Not bad for a service that’s been around for nearly 7 years.