Irreverence is Justified

I got myself a Nokia N97 yesterday. It’s rather nice, and I just wasn’t ever going to get an iPhone to tell you the truth. I’ve ventured away from Nokia in the past and regretted it, so I’ve been sticking with them solidly for the past couple of years and probably won’t go elsewhere unless there’s a really good reason.

So I got this N97. It’s so packaged full with features, I’ll never comment about all of them in one post, so here’s a post about the first main thing I’ve tried that didn’t work totally awesome – transferring music.

The thing comes with 32GB of disk space. Now that’s sweet. I don’t tend to carry about all my music with me, I currently have 17GB of music on my iPod so I figured I’d put that on my N97. The phone comes with various applications for your PC, one of which is called Nokia Music. It’s rather clunky, moreso than iTunes (no, really). And it’s not good at transferring the music over.

I started it going and after a heck of a long time it was still only 30% of the way through. I should have timed it, but the worrying part was that it said that there was 2 hours 42 mins to go, then later there was 3 hours to go, then later still 3hr 12min, then later still 3h 24min. It wasn’t looking hopeful. It got as far as transferring 1159 tracks, and I hit the cancel button.

At this point, those tracks were on my N97.

Later, I started it again, assuming that it would pick up where it left off. Except it seemed to start from the beginning. I let it get to about 73 tracks done and hit cancel – this time, no extra tracks were on the phone. Strange.

So I’ve given up and am transferring them by having the N97 connected as a mass storage device. It’s much quicker doing it this way – it’s transferring at around 3.5MB/sec. Which is still pathetic since USB 2.0 should allow 480Mbit/sec, but it’s massively faster than it was before.

The only potential is that it’ll transfer all the music over, but the N97 might not pick it up and I’ll have to use Nokia Music. I really hope not.

[ Added later ]

The transfer hasn’t finished yet, but I’ve spotted that this is a documented method of transferring the music, and if the N97 doesn’t immediately notice the music, I can refresh the library. Sweet.

Have You Seen This Cat? Or maybe you’ve seen this dog.

So my right calf muscle has been giving me a bit of grief for 2 days now, started on Thursday. At first I thought it was just because I’d done something to it, but it felt better on Friday morning. For about an hour, and then it came back again. Last night it was really quite uncomfortable and I wondered what would happen this morning after waking up. Same thing; it was OK for a short period, probably no more than half an hour, then it started to get sore again.

So I started to think about an hour ago as to what it could be. I figured it might be something MS related, so did a Google for that to see whether cramp, which is what it really feels like, could be an MS symptom. And of course, it could be.

I’m fully aware I’m having a relapse, it’s just a pain in the arse that I’m getting symptoms that I’ve not had before, that being the swallowing and now the cramp in my leg. Needless to say, a variety of my other symptoms are around too, not least the balance issues and I’ve had problems with my hands over the past few days too.

I posted back on 4-May that I was having a new symptom such that swallowing was causing me problems. I think that I am simply having a proper relapse, the first one for quite some number of months, as I am also having GERD problems and worsening balance issues. The swallowing issues resolved within about 3 days, but the others are still there. Unfortunately, my left hand has started to go downhill a bit, such that I’m losing feeling on the back of it. Usually it’s the palm of my hand that goes, but not this time.

Still, things could be worse. Much worse.

I like things that make life easier. Therefore, I found Lifehacker’s “Top 10 Tiny & Awesome Windows Utilities – Windows” article of interest. I suspect I’ll use Texter to correct my typing, mainly because “the” often gets typed as “teh” because I’m hitting the keys so fast.

I got a new car for the wife a couple of days ago, and as you have probably guessed from the title, it’s a Ford Focus 1.8 Tdci Titanium.

It’s rather nice. Much faster than her old Corsa, but then the engine is almost twice as powerful. Got it second hand, it’s a year old, and as such got it for half the price that we’d have had to pay for it brand new (£10.5K against £21.2K new; sweet). Strangely, it came with no user manual whatsoever. How odd to sell your car but you want to keep the manual? Weird.

It’s got a built in sat nav which is pretty nice, it has to be said. I’ve got a Garmin in my car, one of the type that you attach to your window, and I do like it, but the fact that this one is built in is really pretty sweet.

I believe you can get your phone to link up to the car via bluetooth. Tried to work out how to do it, but I have failed. I’ll need to get a manual, I reckon, to work it out. That said, I’ll try Googling around first, see if anyone has any tips on how to do it.

The Script were on Radio 1’s live lounge. I’m no fan of Jo Whiley, so rarely listen live but do use the “listen again” feature from time to time. The Script did a cover of the Foo Fighters’ Times Like These, which sounded similar to the Foo’s version from their live album, Skin and Bones. It’s well worth a listen, if you have the time.

Bizarrely, I managed to spot the car that goes around taking photos of everywhere for Google Maps Street View… in Google Maps Street View.

I have finally found some good instructions on how to convert videos to an MP4, such that I can play it on my iPod. Clearly, this works only if you’re interested in doing this on Debian, but since that’s what I use, it’s good enough for me.

I appear to be having problems swallowing. I didn’t really think that MS might be the cause of this yesterday until I mentioned it to the wife who reminded me that it probably is. How pish. This might be connected to the GERD problems I have also been having over the past few years, as it is kicking off quite a lot at the moment, too.

I’ve been looking in to git quite a lot lately, and have started using it at home. It’s sweet. There’s a good website at http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/ which lists various reasons (and comparisons to back up those reasons) why you want to use Git rather than anything else.

Understanding z-index – some good tips on CSS positioning here.

It’s funny because it’s true.

Was at Yoshi’s Davis Cup match yesterday. Everyone in the crowd kept on shouting “Come on, Josh” which I thought was funny since he actually gets called Yoshi. But anyway. He could so easily have won. He was totally bossing his opponent around in the first set but his unforced error count was just through the roof, he just kept on missing. His backhand could do with some more work, mind you.

We’re screwed now, I reckon. 2-0 down after the singles, we have to win all the remaining ties. There’s seriously very little chance of that happening. I won’t make any of the other games as my daughter was bored half way through the 2nd set of the first match, so trying to get her to sit through any more matches just ain’t going to happen.

I really should have played tennis instead of badminton. Quite why my parents didn’t notice I could play a bit is beyond me, it’s not like they didn’t have a clue since my cousin was the best player in the country. D’oh. Hey ho, such is life.

I may have an odd sense of humour, but anyway, I find this funny.

For some reason, I’m not at my most positive when looking in to the future on the health front. I’m not entirely sure why, although it might be something to do with home life being somewhat disruptive. We’re getting our house extended at vast cost where we are literally adding on half a house on to the side of our house, although some have commented that it could be argued that we are adding a house on to our house; it’s going to be a pretty big house when it’s done, it’s fair to say.

But I think the problem is that we have been reduced to 4 rooms (2 bedrooms, living room, bathroom) for the past few days because none of the new rooms are finished yet (although they should have been weeks ago) and we have had to clear out of 3 of our existing rooms (bedroom, kitchen, dining room) because they are being extended. It’s not a good environment to be living in, and it’s starting to cause a fair amount of stress, especially for our three year old who vaguely understands what is going on, but isn’t really feeling particularly secure.

I think that all of this is making things stressful which is making my perspective on life a bit odd. Work is also pissing me off too, but I’ll not go in to that, as it’s not really that interesting, other than to know I’m feeling reasonably undervalued.

So I’m hoping that the extension gets completed soon and life can return to how it was before.

Some CSS is easy. Well, most of it is. Some just confuses the hell out of me. But not “position”, “float” and “clear” any more, thanks to Learn CSS Positioning in Ten Steps. Sweet.

And the document it references is pretty handy too.

My right hand has been giving me problems for the past couple of weeks, as previously mentioned. Thankfully, it’s started to recover. I think it started yesterday and I hadn’t realised it, but today it’s definitely a little better again. While I can still feel that there is something wrong with it, it’s easing up as I can move it a little easier now, and it’s much less painful than before.

Of course, there’s no actual proof that this was an MS symptom, other than the fact that I didn’t appear to cause any kind of injury to the hand before it started to get sore. And of course there are no external marks on my hand and the pains and feelings I was getting were completely unrelated to giving it a whack against something. So maybe it was MS, but possibly not. It’s going away; I’ll not worry about it for now unless it comes back with bigger teeth.

A Double Handful of Programming Quotes is a reasonably short list of quotes, only two of which I’d heard before. The last one (well, the last one when I read it) was by Linus Torvalds, and while I’ve read some quotes attributed to him in the past that I totally don’t agree with, this one I do. There’s a development project that I know that was exactly this – massively over-designed and, to use a quote from earlier in that list, there were no obvious deficiencies. That’s because it was so massively over-designed in an “all or nothing” approach rather than taking the approach of a little at a time. I wish I could give you more detail, I really do, but I think I might get shot by the perpetrator…

I’ll be straight with you. I’ve been involved in the web environment for over 12 years, 10 years “working” for a major professional sports team in the UK and over 8 years working in (non-web design, but heavily internet-based) development. Yes, that’s 18 years, the sports team work was in my spare time, but took up a hell of a lot of my spare time such that it quite often felt like I was working two full time jobs.

Anyway, back to the point. I’ve spent a long time in the web environment, and I have always had a deep hatred for JavaScript, mainly due to the various browsers all handling things completely differently, and as such I really couldn’t be othered.

jQuery might change my mind.

I decided to read up on it today and knocked up a fairly simple example of how to get a nice set of forms which you can choose between with “tabs” at the top. OK, part of it was heavily nicked from jQuery’s documentation, but as they suggest, you take what they have and then brutally hack it to try different things. So I got the tab called “Two” to have another set of tabs within it, which is quite neat. Try it out for your yourself, why don’t you. Hitting the “submit” buttons do work, although it’s fair to say the resultant output isn’t that exciting.

I might have to read up a little more on this jQuery thing; a JavaScript framework is probably just what I’ve been waiting for.