Am I Spam?

I've sent some email of late which I don't think has been read at the destination. In fact, I think that my deathless prose has just ended up in the spam folder of the recipient. I wasn't offering any little blue pills, I was just getting in touch. But perhaps because the correspondence was from a new address and the content included a web link the filter may have decided that this was fishy..

What I really need is some form of "From Rob and therefore highly important" tag that will get the attention of people the world over.

Then again, if it fell into the wrong hands.......

Pirates Ahoy

Went to see number one daughter play tonight. Actually,didn't see her play at all, since she was in the orchestra pit at the York University Gilbert and Sullivan Society production of Pirates of Penzance.

The PR machine

Now, as you all probably know, I'm not really one for culture. I remarked, as we were listening to what I now know to be the overture, "Aren't there supposed to be singers in this..."

Anyhoo, the production was excellent. It is surprising how many of the songs have found their way into my head over the years. It was great to see the performers enjoying themselves as much as the audience. Actually there is not much of a story to the show, it is more a collection of sketches and songs and a bit of shameless pandering to Queen Victoria at the end. But that didn't get in the way of the fun. I took the tiny camera and grabbed a few snaps.

Pirates!

Ladies!

The model of a modern Major General....

The Police

The happy ending....

Got Hardware

I've got me some .NET Micro Framework hardware. Donald, my co-author, has sent me an i-MSX system to play with. It is very nice, but scarily fragile. Given my experience with hardware earlier in the week (current thinking is that I converted a functioning but wrong memory device into a non-functioning but still wrong device by cunning use of a nailfile- at least it should give the chaps at Ebuyer something to laugh at before they stamp "Rejected" on my letter) I fired the device up with some trepidation.

At present it doesn't work. This is no surprise. It connects via RS232 and so I'll need to use one of my copious collections of cables and lights to get the signals aligned correctly on the plugs. But it does light up. And it looks very promising.

Valentine's Day

Found a screw that fits the Motion. So now I'm kind of happy.  And I got some nice things for Valentines day from number one wife.

I bought her, amongst other things, some chocolates, an exercise ball and a book called How to Kill your Husband.

Idiot

I'm an idiot. No, really. Hard to believe, but it's true. Here's the proof.

I've been using my Motion LS800 tablet PC for a while and I really like it. It is tiny, works well and is on the way to becoming my traveling companion of choice. But it could really use more memory if I want to run Vista comfortably on it. And I do.

It is supposed to be a bit hard to take to pieces and upgrade, but to someone who had a lot of Meccano as a kid this sounded like a challenge. So I ordered a memory stick from Ebuyer and yesterday it arrived.

Getting the back off the device was OK, there were some nasty plastic catches but nothing I can't handle. A tip though, if you are thinking of upgrading a Motion Tablet, grow your thumbnails a little bit so you can slide them under the edge of the back and then use them to pop back the little tabs without scratching the case. I'm kind of due for a manicure at the moment, and that helped a lot. Anyhoo, I got the back off and pulled out the old memory chip. Then I get the new chip out of the package and I hit a snag. These memory devices have a little slot which aligns with a tag in the memory socket. Except on the new chip the slot didn't. It was around half a millimeter in the wrong direction.

And this is where the idiot bit comes in. A smart person would have just gone "Oh dear, have to send it back and get a replacement". But an idiot goes "I'll just grab a nailfile and open up the slot a bit so that it fits". So I did. And after a tiny bit of adjustment I had it fitting perfectly. But of course it didn't work. So now I have an expensive damaged component (which I probably damaged) that doesn't work. A situation broadly similar to taking a bundle of fivers and flushing them down the toilet.  In my defence, it had been a long day at work and I wasn't mentally at my best at the time I did all this. But I still think I'm an idiot.

I'm not sure if the slot was in the wrong place because it is a different type of memory (even though I took special care to make sure that it was the right type) or because the thing was badly made. I've sent the whole thing back to Ebuyer (with a note inside explaining what an idiot I've been and throwing myself on their good nature).

And to cap it all, after I'd put original memory back in and put the Motion back together I find I've lost one of the screws that holds the back on.

Idiot.