boreders

I suffered my first significant exposure to Windows Vista a couple of weeks ago, and I’m still bemused by the experience. I was roped in to help someone make an old piece of software work and it seemed like a simple enough task. I used the Internet to identify the problem and identified I needed to alter a .dll file somewhere. So, the next step - find the .dll file.

Now, in Windows XP, I choose Search from the Start menu, stick the name in - perhaps with a wildcard - and off it goes. Vista - simplicity seems to have got lost somewhere amidst all the fancy Apple-esque graphics. I tried to use the quick Search, which sits within the Start menu, but it couldn’t find what I wanted. Is it something to do with Vista wanting to set up some fancy index? Anyway - I managed to find the more involved search facility and just stared… tapping pathetically at the various options, dropdowns and radio buttons (or something along those lines). Maybe someone intended it to be easy and intuitive, but it wasn’t. I don’t expect to read an online manual or help file to use something as basic as a search facility. It took me about 10 minutes to fathom out without assistance, poking and pushing options that looked promising.

I’m not impressed.

The fact I had to suffer this experience because Vista uses a non-backwards compatible version of Direct X simply tells me that this operating system doesn’t belong anywhere near a computer I own… I shall manage with XP until I finally have the time to spend loading up an instance of Linux in some form or another. I have no desire to go there… unless Microsoft start producing software that brings the user back into the frame rather than simply trying to amuse people with resource-hungry eye candy.

I spent the night in with my family, eating good food and playing board games.

I did not become uncomfortably hot, claustrophobic, or drunk. I did not get stepped on, spilled on, or jabbed in the ribs. I did not hanker after a kebab or find myself pissing against a wall in a shop doorway. I did not find my hearing painfully impaired by dance music spilling heedlessly from pub speakers.

I did enjoy myself. I did spend the time with people who mean something to me doing something enjoyable. Works for me.

Nigella Lawson seems to have a lot to answer for. Aside from being a kitchen tease and a bit of a MILF, she has set the country a-racing to try something different with a bit of gammon. There can’t possibly be any other good reason why I found myself wandering past the jam section of Tesco today to find a man weighing up the difference between two jars of Ginger preserve.

I guess it isn’t a surprise that Nigella Express has topped the bestsellers lists at Amazon and Waterstones, beating Jamie at Home by a long shot. I have to admit to buying a copy for my wife and searching round for the best deal on Ginger Beer at the supermarket today. It’ll be gammon for us too in the New Year!

So, whatever will TV cooks come up with next, exciting we home chefs into a giddy frenzy to do something just a little different? They’ve had us conjuring up special things, basic stuff and now we’re doing it in a hurry - next? Rustic style? Everything steamed? All prepared underwater?

Can’t wait.

Now, where did I put my Nigella video and that stainless steel reamer?

I noticed the cover of a paper had a story concerning South Korean scientists creating a trio of cats that glow red under ultraviolet light. Apparently, this breakthrough means a great deal to medical science. Creating clone cats that glow in the dark offers medicine the chance to experiment on curing human diseases. Um… because these cats glow. And… um… we all like people who experiment on defenceless animals.

No. I don’t quite get the connection either.

I can see value to the cat loving community, who could have cats that show up in the back garden if you shine a black light in the bushes. Yes, that makes sense to me. However, how this relates to furthering understanding in genetics and how animals, almost entirely unlike us, can assist in developing cures to very human conditions entirely escapes me.

The scientists seem to suggest that if we can create cloned animals with human-like diseases then we can more easily work on the discovery of cures - but, I’m drawn back to the memory of that drug trial where a chimp dosed with a new medicine suffered no ill effects, but humans who used a dose at a fraction of the strength turned inflamed into balloons.

Just for clarity, Mr South Korean Scientist, cats and humans are not the same thing. No even cats with human voices, like Garfield or Custard.

Driving provides a thoroughly wretched barrier between home and work. I could enjoy my day far easier if not for the 90 minute plus commute (that can balloon to around 4 hours or more on a bad day). In a world struggling to cling on to the environment, where the atmosphere grows thin and thicker in all the wrong sorts of ways, we can do without road trips double or triple in size at the drop of a hat.

Curiosity seems to be a strong factor in the problems on the motorway. Yes, sometimes an accident will strew debris across the whole carriageway; but, more often than not the evidence of an accident gravitates toward the hard shoulder with considerable speed. Efficient emergency services want to get the traffic flowing again, but rubbernecking prevents that from happening. People cannot help but stare wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the smallest evidence of an accident. The chance to spot a drop of gore or a horrifically twisted wreck overcomes the natural sense of urgency that generally grips those doing 100 mph along the outside lane.

You can easily link congestion with rubbernecking just by taking an active part in one of the queues yourself. Having sat on the motorway for an hour covering half a mile, you finally reach the site of the accident - then, as if catapulted by an invisible siege engine, you go from 5 mph to maximum speed in the space of 6.8 seconds. The congestion dissipates in a moment, like a thin morning mist evaporating under the rays of the rising sun. It beggars belief.

Perhaps drivers should be required to wear some kind of crash-sensitive blinker system that prevents them looking left or right when within 5 miles of a pile up. You can see the value of the automatic traffic control seen in the movie ‘Minority Report‘, because taking the human factor out of the driving equation means more time moving toward your destination - and less time staring at insurance write-offs and distressed drivers.

Last night I got caught in the sort of traffic jam that you never want to see at the end of the day. The sort of jam where you’re moving so infrequently you could safely go for a short walk without worrying about interfering with the flow of traffic. So, as I had reached a point yards from a sliproad, I decided to take my chances with a back road tour of north Cheshire. I came off the motorway, headed towards Warrington and aiming for Lymm, knowing that this would get me going in the right direction for home without all the hassle of not actually moving.

Heading into the outskirts of Warrington I reached a junction where a right turn would take me off to Lymm, as I wanted. The raod might have been wide enough for two lanes of traffic if not for the fact that the drivers heading straight and left weren’t especially tight to the kerb and on the right, several people had parked half off the road. So, I made a minor course adjustment towards the right, remaining on my side of the road, and waited for the light to go green.

At this moment, coming from the direction of Lymm, arrives an articulated lorry wanting to head towards the motorway - the way I had just come. He made the turn and got as far as me - and then starts swearing. This guy was easily in his 40s+ - and yet I was suddenly confronted by a blathering psychopath who might as well have been a drunken teenager in overtly combatitive mood. He nudged forward and I tried to pull a little into the left again and he finally got the space to squeeze his cab into the gap. Apparently I was a f*cking idiot or something, what with my being on my own side of the road trying to turn left and he trying to drive an enormous lorry up a minor road in heavy traffic and with parked cars forcing him to come over from his side of the road to mine. Oh yes, that was my fault.

Do haulage companies specifically look to employ people with a hair-trigger temper and attitudes akin to football hooligans? I had no issue with my own conduct, because I wasn’t doing anything wrong - but to have already contended with heavy traffic and a delay that meant I was going to miss an appointment, I didn’t need abuse. I hope that the lorry driver was headed to the motorway and I hope he got stuck in the jam or the one that formed on the opposite carriageway filled with rubbernecking nosy-beggars.

I wish the world of entertainment and legality didn’t make teasers and sneak previews so hard to watch most of the time. I’m excited about Battlestar and the prequel movie Razor, so when I noticed a sneak peek at the pre-Razor story about Adama, I clicked on through for a look. I sat through trash advertising to get the message that I couldn’t access the content in the teaser in my country… Damn. So, I trundle over to You-Tube instead and watch it there instead… No less entertaining to watch, completely lacking in stupid adverts and, no doubt, entirely against some legal code somewhere. However, I got to see it in the end - and reasonable well worth it it was too…

Adama, in the midst of the First Cylon War, engages the enemy over an ice planet with no apparent value to the toaster-headed menace. What are they up to and why defend it so hard? I’m sure any fan can take a wild guess… I thoroughly recommend skipping Part 1 and probably Part 2… Part 3 starts the really good material in a pitched battle over the ice planet - and Part 4 definitely offers the best fan material, as Adama gets to battle a classic Cylon Warrior in some fancy hand-to-hand combat!

This article picks up on an issue I have noted before - the trademarking of colours. It would seem T-Mobile has claimed magenta, within the confines of the tele-communication industry, while my previous bugbear on this relates to the Post Office’s trademark of an admittedly very specific shade of the colour red (presumably within whatever arenas they seek to trade, which would likely to be far more widespread than T-Mobile).

While I appreciate the concepts of brand and identity in establishing a company and its presence in the marketplace, this sort of thing just seems like a minefield. How can you know that you’re not going to get royally screwed by some enormous company and their vicious lawyers without spending weeks in intensive research…

Given T-Mobile already took measures against a German On-Demand book publisher for their use of magenta in an advert (which included other - currently - safe colour variations), how seriously do we need to consider this kind of thing in future? Is it safe to go out of the house anymore without double-checking your wardrobe with your lawyer? (Yes, well, obviously it is… unless you’re into some kind of street advertising and another street advertiser has a trademark on the colour of your favourite sweater).

I’m struck by a dichotomy of purpose in the mornings… and I really have to get it sorted. On the one hand, I like to get up in the morning, have breakfast, drink some coffee, check messages - that sort of thing. Well, I actually don’t like the getting up part much, especially as my first alarm goes off at 5.55am. And the second goes off at 6.10am. I get up eventually, but that depends entirely on the mood of me - my body will either like the idea of an early start or it won’t. Anyway, I like to have the time to wake up basically - which is why I spend time doing things like feeding the cats, checking the hamster and making sure the last bits of the washing.

On the other hand, I need to set out for work at 7.30am to get there for 8.30am in good time. It should take me 45 - 50 minutes to commute on a good day, with fair traffic and a prevailing wind from the north-west. The last first and the last few miles are the worst. I get the pleasure of sitting in car park style traffic for a good ten or fifteen minutes at one end or the other. It makes me want to go back to bed, snuggle up in the blankets and go back to sleep again. Maybe that’s the problem - the prospect of what I have to do makes it harder for me to get up and do it, making me late and complicating the journey further.

What am I to do?

…especially when I read that the body has a bunch of clocks that don’t necessarily all reset themselves at the same time when we jump forward or fall back an hour. Could be down to my adrenal gland releasing my dose of stress hormone cortisol too late in the morning…