Category: learning curve

Spooked

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Dodging between hefty showers, and wrapped up rather warmly, we indulged Alex’s wish to take a walk around the Aguhas Ghost Trail. We had a great time in the hills above the village, but what I had thought would be a kilometre wander with the kids, turned into a 4.5km trail through dense bush, up and down valleys and over some distinctly iffy terrain.
The kids had a great time, although, due to an unfortunate miscommunication (I think) between Mum and Kristen during a loo stop, the latter ended up rather damp. She also got a nasty blister on her foot and so I ended up carrying her through dense bush, up and down valleys and over some distinctly iffy terrain. She’s not light and the going was not easy. She was also rather damp.
Once we eventually managed to get back down onto the road, I had to run back and get the car as the kids were totally knackered. And thus, we arrived at the Agulhas chippy with me covered in sweat and urine. Delightful.
However, a quick change before a late lunch of geelbek & chips and all was well with the world again.

The views and wildlife up there were amazing. But next time, knowing a bit more what to expect, we’ll certainly be better prepared.
One other good bit of news is that even though I’m not supposed to be running for another fortnight, my calf seems to have not been horribly torn again by my exertions. Happy days.
I’ll sort the photos out tomorrow.

Thanks Jamie

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Cooking blogs are all the rage and who am I not to jump on the bandwagon?

Having decided to “invite” Mrs 6k and her mother around for Mother’s Day lunch, I asked what I should cook for them. My wife thought for a moment and then said that she would prefer something “not too fancy” and suggested something using just one pot “like a paella”. I’ve been married to Mrs 6k for over 7 years now and I am well versed in picking out her subtle hints. Still, it’s important to realise that I’m still my own man. So, taking everything into account, I decided to make a paella.

Never having made a paella before, I quickly taught myself Spanish before heading to the internet and asking that trusted source of pukka recipe goodness, Mr James Oliver. His straightforward, step-by-step instructions took me though the previously unknown vagaries of cocina española, thus.

I don’t have a paella pan, so I made do with a wok, doing my bit and cementing sino-Spanish relations. And it went quite well, if I say so myself. The best bit is that we have about half of it left (simply because of the volume, not because anyone turned their nose up in disgust), so that’s lunch sorted for a few days ahead.

So, my advice to you. If you want to make a paella and you have a wok: do it.

Rejoice!

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Much rejoicing Chez 6000 as it appears that after my only partially successful repair of iTunes last week, I have managed to find another 1788 tracks that were “missing”. I’m still not 100% sure that I will be able to get them onto iTunes, but at least they’re safely somewhere on a hard drive. The next step might be a little messy, but it should be pretty straightforward.

The tracks disappeared when I plugged in my daughter’s prize from Kfm (not that I’m blaming her or them) – a shiny little iPod shuffle she got for dancing in the rain while watching the Two Oceans Marathon last month.

It brought up a beautifully clean iTunes window, to which I added some songs she liked (Coldplay, Freshlyground, Slipknot etc) and all seemed well. However, when I later plugged my Big Daddy iPod in, iTunes comprehensively failed to revert to my previous library, leaving me with about 30 tracks, some of which were by Shakira.

Issues.

I have since pieced together a rudimentary replacement library, but there were gaps. Massive gaps of several thousand tracks.
I had to root around on external hard drives and the like, but with today’s discovery, there’s “only” a discrepancy of about 900 items. I have yet to check whether they are important items, replaceable items or stuff I can (or will have to) manage without. This may be a difficult task, since sometimes, I’m just heading to the lab when I have a “must listen to” moment. It will be then that these discrepancies will become immediately obvious. Rage will surely ensue.

My advice to you if your 3 year old wins an iPod is not to plug it into your computer. At all. The best way is to find another computer and use iTunes on there. Or sell it on gumtree. It will save you sleepless nights, much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I’m sure that there is a safe and surefire way of running two (or more) iPods from the same computer. More fool me for ever imagining that Apple would have made it as simple as just plugging the new device into the USB port.
By all means, let me know the best way of doing it in the comments section below, but don’t expect me to let that little silver square anywhere near my desktop ever again.

Capisce?

Descriptive Camera

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They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but this… umm… “interesting” Descriptive Camera suggests that it’s probably nearer twenty.

The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene.

Wait. What?

Yes. There’s no picture here, just a brief description of what the picture would look like. So how does it work?

The technology at the core of the Descriptive Camera is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk API. It allows a developer to submit Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for workers on the internet to complete. The developer sets the guidelines for each task and designs the interface for the worker to submit their results. The developer also sets the price they’re willing to pay for the successful completion of each task. An approval and reputation system ensures that workers are incented to deliver acceptable results.

Each “picture” costs $1.25 to “develop” and the process typically takes around 6 minutes.
The inventor, Matt Richardson, suggests that being able to file data about the contents of a photograph would be useful in searching, filtering and cross-referencing our photo collections. This rather clumsy (but still clever and innovative) system explores the possibilities of what being able to capture this data in this in the future might mean.