Ross Brown dot net

It’s been a while since I posted anything here (I bet I’m not the first blogger to write that phrase…) but at least I have an excuse! Sophie Grace is now over 4 months old and weighs over a stone - she’s been taking up most of our time and energy recently (but in a really good way). She’s developing loads; she can hold her own head up, focus on things and she has recently started to chew things. Everything and anything gets a good chewing - fingers, toys, clothes… But the best bit is she has started smiling and laughing - it’s just the best feeling in the world when she smiles at you. I will put up some more recent pics when I get a chance.

We’re planning on taking a trip to South Africa to see Candi’s family next year. We’re hoping to time it when her cousins are off school and the weather is warm. It’ll be really nice to get away for a bit, we haven’t had a holiday for nearly 2 years now and we’re feeling the stress a bit.

My brother Jed has resigned from his 9 to 5 and started his own business. I helped him out with a website (he came up with the company name all on his own) - JB Marine. I hope it goes well for him. Sounds like he’s got enough work to keep him busy at the moment.

They say that you can never predict when a baby will arrive, they just come when they are ready. Last Thursday we had an amazing surprise when our baby daughter was born 5 weeks premature. She shows no signs of ill health and weighed in at 7lb 4oz, which is a pretty decent weight for any baby, especially a premature one. We think she just got tired of waiting and wanted to meet us!
Our fears about not making it to the hopital on time turned out to be nothing to worry about, Mum was admitted in plenty of time (17 hours early, in fact!) and I was able to stay with her throughout most of the labour. She was incredibly brave and only had 2 paracetamol to dull the pain
They are both home from hospital now and I am making the most of my 2 weeks paternity leave. In no time at all I will be back at work, so it is important to me to make the most of this time we have together. So far, I am loving every minute of Fatherhood.

So, say hello to Sophie Grace Brown. I have uploaded some pics to my gallery so I can show her off in true ‘proud Dad’ style!

Click here for the pics or go straight to the slideshow.

Oooh, has it really been six months since my last post? Blimey. Just goes to show how your priorities can change, I suppose! What’s new…. oh yeah, I am going to be a Dad! The due date is towards the end of July - maternity (and paternity) leave is signed off…not long to go now… we are surprisingly prepared - we’ve bought everything we can think of that’s baby related and even the hospital bag is packed and ready to go. Where we live is an equal distance from 2 hospitals - I’m hoping it’s not a quick labour otherwise we may not make it!

I finally got myself a decent MP3 player! I’ve been putting it off for years, mainly because none of them have been exactly what I want*.

It’s a 30Gb Creative Zen Vision:M (a black one) - it has pretty large capacity (but I’ve still filled it!), it’s technically superior and cheaper than the competition too. I’m not really interested in putting video on it, so I have just loaded it up with [tag]music[/tag] (for now, at least).

Unfortunately, my mp3 library was a mess and I needed to get it into shape before loading it onto the device. Luckily I don’t own any DRM-protected content, it’s MP3s all the way (so I don’t have any compatibility issues), but this may be an issue for you if you have purchased music from an online store. I can thoroughly recommend Allofmp3.com for buying music online, since they sell in non-DRM formats (and they are surprisingly cheap).

Here’s what I did:

• Sorted out the MP3 tags. This is so the player knows the artist, album, genre, year etc. This helps with finding and selecting music to play. There are any number of ways of bulk-editing MP3 tags, I used Musikcube, but I know Musicmatch and others have a similar function.
• Sorted out the folder structure. My songs are now organised in folders based on artist and album name. Again, use your favourite software to do this automatically (based on the file tags)
• Split my mp3s into albums I wanted to sync, and those I didn’t. Because I have a large collection, my whole library wouldn’t fit onto the device so I needed to split it. For this, I created a directory called #NOSYNC and moved all the artists and albums I wasn’t going to sync into that. This made it much easier when selecting which files were to be copied across.
• Downloaded the album art. The Creative Zen Vision:M displays the album art when playing a track, if it is available. With everything correctly tagged, I downloaded Album Cover Art Downloader and let it loose on my collection. It worked well for most album tracks (except obscure / out of print ones)

After that, it was just a case of syncing the music library with the device. Lovely.

Now I hit ‘random’ on the way to work and there’s always something to listen to. I think it will take a while for me to get bored of 30Gb of music, but there’s always the FM radio if I do!

[edit] Creative have released a new firmware version for the Zen Vision:M - version 1.30.02. You can download it from the Creative support site

* And no, especially not iPods, because I buy a gadget for the technology, not because I want to be part of some stupid fashion trend. Besides, any techie knows iPods suck.

My first post of 2006! Happy New Year!

We had a great Xmas down with my parents, it was good to see all the family again. During the time off I managed to take some more pictures with my new camera, like the one above. I’m still learning how to use it but it’s cool. I’m also going to get a polarising filter this week.

In an unrelated newsflash, it seems that the long-anticipated Video On Demand (VOD) revolution has finally arrived here in the UK…Well, almost. I remember doing a paper on VOD back in college many years ago and we were definitely expecting it to have arrived sooner than 2006…So anyway I found out that Sky TV have recently launched Sky By Broadband and gave it a go. They’re offering a fairly good selection of sports clips and movies and the best bit is, all of this is available for no extra charge (if you are a subscriber to all Sky Movies / Sports channels. Incidentally, they are currently doing a 1/2 price offer, see sky.com).

Picture quality is pretty good, although I ended up using Windows Media Player to play the downloaded files because for some bizarre reason the Sky player won’t let you watch in fullscreen mode. So, it’s not a perfect viewing experience and the selection could be better but overall it’s not bad and I’m glad Sky are doing it.

My lovely new Canon 350D digital SLR camera has arrived (still no sign of the memory card though - damn you, Pixmania! I had to buy one from somewhere else in the meantime)

The weather was fantastic today for the time of year, so we went for a walk down the River Thames to test it out. The banner picture right at the top of this page is one of mine from today (what do you think?). I have put the rest of the shots online in a gallery too, feel free to have a look. They’re not that impressive (I was getting used to the camera) but you should get the idea - it was a really nice peaceful time down by the river.

I also blogged about how Google Earth now has updated UK map data, the last picture on that page shows the spot we were taking pictures of the Leatherne Bottel from today.

I thought I had found a megadeal when I ordered my Canon 350D from Pixmania, for £556. They still haven’t shipped it (over a fortnight later) so today I cancelled my order. Turns out now I can buy it from Jessops down the road for just £20 more (after taking shipping charges into account) and actually have it in my hands the same day. I think this is the first negative online buying experience I have had, but I suppose I have been lucky before now (and my experience pales in comparison with the abusive tactics employed by one NY camera retailer).

If you were thinking of using Pixmania, be warned that they don’t always honour their “ship within 24hrs” claim.

[edit] Well, I tried to cancel the order, but would you believe they had just shipped it before they processed my cancellation request, so I ended up receiving the package yesterday. When I opened it up there were three problems; 1. No CompactFlash card (I guess they shipped it separately, but it still hasn’t arrived) 2. European mains plug (not a huge problem since they gave me an adapter, but it looks rubbish) 3. NO ENGLISH MANUAL!

Aside from the fact that it took them two weeks to deliver a stock item (despite their 24hr delivery claim… hahaha) I am pretty unhappy with the service I received.

I’ve done a bit of digging on their site and if you read the small print, they do say the manual is provided in French, German & Italian and they give a link to a Canon site where you can download an English version…. but I still think it’s poor show on their part and personally I’d rather have a properly-produced paper book than a stapled-together A4 version.

How I wish I had read some customer reviews first! Have a look at the Pricerunner users’ experiences with Pixmania. It seems I am not the only one who has experienced a long delay and poor customer service.

I really wish I had just bought it from Jessops in the local high street, since the price difference is negligable but I’ll chalk it down to experience. All I can do is pass on my negative experience and hope that if you were thinking of buying from Pixmania you will do a bit of research on them first. Try giving their customer service line a ring on 0870 118 117 and see how long it takes them to answer your call (I gave up after 25 minutes). If you manage to speak to someone, ask them how long delivery will be before ordering and ensure you get an English manual - I had to pay £13 from Canon for mine, making the total saving £7 vs Jessops and I still don’t have my memory card!

I’ve started to buy Lotto tickets online, because it’s so quick and easy. I got an email from them this morning:

We have some exciting news about the ticket that you bought for the Saturday 26 November draw. Please Sign In to your Account at the National Lottery website for more details.

My heart nearly stopped! I recently won £500 in a prize draw at work, so I was imagining what it would be like to have won something twice in one month - and just in time for Xmas too!

After logging in, it turns out I only won £5 on the Thunderball draw. Ah well, better than nothing, but I really thought it might have been a lot more!

I stumbled on this Reading travel info website (I can’t actually remember how - so many links, so many clicks…). Leaving aside for a moment the fact that the site looks like it was designed in a single sitting by a colourblind 4 year old, there is actually some useful content on there.
Because of the appalling site design, it’s actually not possible for me to say with any certainty whether these links will actually work, if not you can get to them all yourself from the main page. Oh, and it seems to be very fussy about browsers, I couldn’t get it to display properly in Firefox and had to resort to using IE (but I’m OK now).

• This link should take you to the Trafficam Reading page, which has a map of web-enabled traffic cameras around Reading town centre. They’re updated every 5 minutes and whilst it’s a shame they’re not live action, they should give you an idea of current traffic congestion. Click on the purple camera icons, currently they are all working except for one.
• There’s another webcam page for the M4 motorway cameras between junctions 5 and 13.
• There’s a page showing town centre car park information. Interestingly, it has a facility for forecasting car park usage at a given date / time in the future. As an experiment, I asked for figures for midday on 23rd Dec and it told me there were close to 2,000 spaces available. I’m highly sceptical about that, to say the least!
• Perhaps more importantly, there’s also a document explaining the current proposal for knocking down the flyover near the Oracle and making the IDR a one-way traffic system - Horizons: The future of the IDR [pdf]. If you’re quick, there’s still time to get yourself along to one of the public consultations. The last one will be held in Reading Town Hall on this Friday 25th Nov, 10:00 - 19:00. I might take a wander down there myself.

Tags: transport announcements Reading travel

Edit: It seems the same webcams are available on the BBC Berks website.

According to Webroot, a whopping 55% of consumer PCs are infected with spyware or adware. I thought of offering a low-cost removal service (either via a site visit, or using some form of remote control software) to do a basic clean-up. If the problem is more involved, then I’ll charge more to fix it. It’s hardly a new idea, but the sheer numbers involved ought to make it lucrative. I know at least two people who have actually bought a new PC, rather than tackle a seemingly unsolvable spyware/virus infestation. The question is, do I have time to take this on?…. errrr no.

If you think you have some nasty software installed on your Windows PC (and there’s a better than 50/50 chance that you do) you should find some sort of guide to removing it, or ask someone techie to help.

A high percentage of home users don’t have any anti-virus software installed either, so if you think you may be affected, the first thing you should do is get a virus scan (there are some free online ones here). There really is no excuse, there is even a free AV scanner you can download if you don’t fancy paying for one.

If you’re not sure if you have AV software or not, you could test by trying to download this test file - it should be flagged as a virus in your software (even though it is actually harmless - see this explanation)

BTW, it may be worth pointing out that I’ve never personally had a virus and I’ve been using PCs for over a decade. I put this down to being careful!