The Goldfish Chronicles

A picture from last week’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. A tornado and a rainbow, interlinked. Very cool.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0506/tornado_nguyen_big.jpg

Here we find the primordial blog entry, devoid of meaning and focus, but bravely pushing on to enact the reflective-speech that is so necessary to redeem the existence of the blog itself.

Interesting month or so.

My parents visited and got to meet their grandson for the first time in 6 months. The kidlet has gone from a cute inarticulate lump to a character-full proto-toddler, and much enjoyment was had by all. I’ve always loved playing with kids and Nathan is no exception, our one hour when I get home brightens my day.

I got to cook for my parents; pork in cream/mustard followed by a lemon curd victoria sponge. The last couple of months have reminded me that cooking is one of my great loves and it feels very good to have a few recipes that have gone beyond tasty bachelor-grub and can be considered real-food. The sponge is especially rewarding as it’s my first new dessert in many years (my other two favourites being deep chocolate brownie and apple crumble with custard). Making lemon curd from scratch is a very enjoyable experience.

The third in my list of great loves is reading. Last week saw the arrival of our latest set of bookshelves, mostly intended to house my computer book collection, though there’s a bit of room for Nathan’s books and Carrie’s CDs. Finally putting all the computer books onto the same 9 shelves is a happy thing.

The last of my great loves is computing. Sadly some thinking today has lead me to think that the constant headaches I’ve been experiencing for a month or two, and the sensitive left-upper jaw that I’ve had for 6 months is not due to nocturnal grinding of teeth as the dentist thinks (we think I sleep with my mouth open, at the very least Carrie has never heard me grind) but because I’ve been lying on the floor and holding my head up with my hands. I do this to watch TV, read a book, but mostly to use a laptop, especially the Dell laptop for which I use an external mouse. It nicely explains why the pain is all on the left hand side, I use my right hand for the mouse.

My left shoulder is quite painful too, for the same reason. I was aware of this but hadn’t considered that it might be screwing my jaw until I read that this is a potential cause of jaw-disorder.

So no more lying on the floor for me. It’s going to be hard to change that, it’s been a habit since I was a kid.

I’m usually a very canny shopper. True I’ve made my mistakes, it took me two Sharp Zaurii to realise that I no longer had any need for a PDA, I bought the Hauppauge PVR-350 when a 250 would have been fine (and much cheaper) and I continue to be drawn into buying games from the makers of Europa Universalis (good in principle, always buggy); however usually I do pretty well.

A month or so ago, I bought some bits. I’d been correctly stingy and avoided buying a new ipod/iriver to replace my original ipod (whose battery is almost dead and it’s just getting out of date); but then I slipped and threw an Apple Airport Express into the basket. A week later, I was holding a white lump of plastic, a small pamphlet manual and wondering just what the damn thing did.

Turns out the Airport Express is a bit of a jack of all trades. It’s not great at anything it does, but does have 4 core features.

1. USB print server.
2. Wireless access point.
3. Wireless booster.
4. HiFi/Stereo connector.

The problem is, these just aren’t very exiting.

1. We upgraded a while back to a wireless printer, so a separate print server is unnecessary. Plus you can probably get a wireless print server from Hawking or somebody for less money.
2. Few need an access point instead of a router/firewall/access-point/switch. I can see some need for this as tying the access point to the router causes wireless network speed issues when the switch gets busy.
3. Boosting a wireless signal appears pretty complicated. Apple only push it for use with their Extreme router, but that’s typical Apple. It can apparantly work with my Linksys router, but that has a great signal so I’ve no need for any boosting.
4. A nice idea, but it doesn’t work. I originally thought this meant that I could have something in the basement broadcasting FM to the stereos. I had visions of programming a repeating loop and broadcasting to the house. Instead all it does is allow you to use the HiFi speakers from your computer instead of the computer speakers.

The last point is the one that was most interesting. Although I misunderstood the feature when first reading the marketing, it still seemed like a useful concept. I have an iTunes server running in the basement and loved the idea of attaching the server to the HiFi and having it play an album. This isn’t possible, you have to attach an iTunes instance (on say your laptop) to the server and then play to the speakers. This means your laptop is a part of the network needed to play the music, and if it happens to be 802.11b then you’re out of luck as it won’t be able to keep up.

The one redeeming feature would be if you could attach a USB drive (such as an iPod) to the express and play the music from that. A firewire variant would be nice, but I understand that this would drive up the price. If they were to add a firewire slot, then they could attempt to muscle in on the nslu-2 market.

So overall, the express seems to be an item that does many things, but none of them well.