Author Archives: essiep

Dogs at christmas

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5°C, grey but dry

The Dogs have stolen their christmas presents. They took them out of the bag in the wardrobe and sat on the sofa to eat them. With christmas day tomorrow- what else are they going to steal this weekend?
Don’t look at me like that- it’s not funny!

Ex-Cathedra

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Christmas Music by candlelight
What a Stunning performance in the Jewerly Quater. They orchestrated the pieces to carry us along which meant the audience participation bit was fully supported.
My favourites were Samuel Barber’s "Agnus Dei" and Peter Warlock’s "Benedictamus Domino" for entirely different reasons. I have new CDs. this is the third time I have seen this group perform, the best being Arvo Part and this night.
 
Best speed tests today:
 
6.00 Mbps
which means you can download at 764.94 KB/sec. from our servers.
Now we’re averaging 6.6 Mbps, not bad eh?

Shortest day- supposedly

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0°C, dense fog.

Added up – this could be the shortest day. the earliest sun-set was last week- on the 13th December and the mornings will continue to get darker for a few days yet. We have 7 hours and 39 minutes of daylight today. By Saturday, we will see an improvement of 6 seconds on that. wow!

Audigy: finally got round to putting in the new soundcard in this computer. Though it still needs some setting up, it definitely makes clearer sounds as well as doing some special effects like echo and reverb on mouse-click sounds too. The biggest change should be in games- we’ll see about that.

(w)Hoot

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7°C, cold, damp and very dull.

CDs: Tom Waits, this is a triple set which leaves me wondering why he can’t release more often so they are spread out & we don’t have to wait so long?

Game: latest incarnation of the Sturmovic flight sim series. 

Which is very nice to have just before the holiday, but I have a painting to finish….

True to my word- ithe painting now finished   ….pitcha tomorrow.
The Tom Waits triple is promising- never one to make a judgement on first hearing, all the right ingredients are there.
Finally– the title comes from the sound a bird made while I was out with the Ladies (both proudly wearing their flashing LED collars).

Faster? is it not so?

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7°C, clear.

I may be enjoying a faster internet connections, maybe it’s just the few sample tests ran this afternoon, time will tell. the best speed so far has been 1.65Mbps.
Bristol: today has seen us nostalgically driving over old cycling routes from the years I lived in Birstow. With some over-confidence, I took some wrong turns- ten years has been enough to forget, but the remembering has been rather nice. Cheddar Gorge was just the same, as was Wells.

Jitensha

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Sunday:9°C, wind & rain. c=62 miles

Only the last 25 miles were in rain, the rest was a trivial struggle against wind. After the cafe stop I actually felt cold! It’s been ages since feeling that, what a novelty! Those new brakes are the best, no more nerves on wet-road decents.
 
Linseed: note yesterday’s new horse. Much improved – yes? Those photos taken the other weekend are the cause, finally got some prints to work from. Another day’s session (or two) and it will be darker- with just the muzzle as light as this.

Form filling

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7°C, clear 7 rather windy.

Entrance Exams today: which was a time to examine human behaviour quite closely. The questions were in a booklet and answers written on omr sheets which need a simple pencil mark in the right place. A colleague and I were assigned to invigilate a group of 24 and in the last part noticed a common mistake. When the pupils turned the page for section three, they often began writing their answers in section four. Now these are not daft girls, they are all at least reasonably bright, very young, but with a bit of a sparkle nontheless.
Standing there quietly observing led me to think about the same error made so many times. fortunately for the girls- we spotted their mistakes without their losing any time- they were quick to transfer their answers into the right places ( costing no more than a minute or two).
 
there is somethign in human behaviour that is slewing the methods of this exam- something about reading intensly, using specialist skills in the mind and then making a physical movement to turn overleaf.
My solution- what about something like a scroll- or a convertina sheet where the answers are just written down and down the page, with the top folding up in a concertina fashion. that would also be easier to feed into the omr reader
OMR = optical mark reader, automated input of data to a computer.

Wireless= done.

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10°C, still windy.

Finished: the home network is up & running, the wireless network runs well enough with just below the highest level of encryption. It’s hard to see exactly how fast the connection is to the isp, but it certainly dooes not seem slower than before. My next question is- can I run the client machines without a software firewall?
 
Here is a broadband speed test site. I got 507Kbs download, and about half that for upload.

Wireless Shenanegins

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12°C, very windy, C=52 miles.

Too many options: maybe "me" is right, there are hundreds of settings in that router, probably because it allows so many standards for ADLS as well as wirelesss connections. I can get the wireless connections to wqork, but there is no incoming connection to my ISP despite the diagnostics saying the right things.
 
Linseed: that Stalkinghorse picture is near enough complete, later I will take a photo’ so you can see.
 
ok, the photo will have to wait, this will be a night of poor sleep as it is.