The blog of Steve Root

  • A very lucky week for Steve!

    Do you remember the saying that things always come in threes? Well, I really should buy a lottery ticket. Instead the numbers I would have picked had I bought a ticket for Saturday will be 7,11,32, 40,48,49.

    Why do I tell you this? Well I believe the odds of me winning the lottery are so far stacked against me I’m not going to spend the money on a ticket. However, I have just won TWO competition prizes. Yes, TWO! Maybe the lottery could be the third…. Oh, hang on, I’ve had THREE prizes this year now, I never got round to blogging about the first.

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    So, here they are in order. I won an iPod Touch back in May. This is the second iPod I’ve won, the iPod shuffle came from Ford in 2006. The iPod Touch was won in April after I replied to a survey on out-law.com. 16Gb of music player worth around 200 promptly borrowed on a long term basis by my wife. Well, I wouldn’t use a music player much but it did reveal to me the clever touches an iPhone would have. I can’t have an iPhone because it isn’t as flexible as I need it to be as a PDA organiser and phone – the touch cruise is still a better option for me. However the safari web browser it has built in outperforms Internet Explorer mobile version and Opera mobile so if it weren’t for the application flexibility I like I’d probably be on an iPhone already. Out-law.com is an online legal magazine that reviews ongoing, erm, legal things. I find it well written, informative, impartial and it’s one of the few RSS feeds I have set on my phone.

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    Last week a ‘signed for’ package arrived in the post. In it was a prize courtesy MXR Digital. There was a competition in a trade magazine which, for some reason, I decided to enter. I must have had a lucky feeling because I won a Pure Highway DAB Digital Radio for the car. Looking at the prices online, they’re around 70. I wouldn’t choose to buy one though on long journeys I do occasionally wish for some different radio entertainment. However, now I have it I can’t wait to find time to put it together and play with it. It transmits to the car through an FM transmitter built in or through a cable you can plug it into. Hopefully I’ll have some free time in the next week or two to try it out and report back.

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    The third prize is a lot more special than this little picture shows. I’ll be telling you all the amazing technical features later when I get to play with it, once it arrives. Today, I got a phone call from the magazine and email from the supplying company to say I’ve won a flat screen, 23″ TV. This, however, is no ordinary flat screen TV. It’s a Bath-o-vision 23″ wall mounted, mirror fronted flat screen TV worth around 1,800. Excuse me while I pick myself up off the floor. How on earth can you justify that for a TV? Well, this TV is designed to go in a bathroom, or swimming pool. When turned off it looks like a normal mirror. When turned on, you get to have a decent size TV with a wide viewing angle (178 degrees!), HD Resolution and a built in digital TV tuner. This is not the kind of TV you’ll buy in the supermarket! It’ll be a month or so before this prize arrives, the company are organising for the magazine to visit for photos of them presenting the screen to me.

  • GPS Logging from my PDA…needs a little work I think

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    I spent the afternoon of my day off going for a walk. From my house in Faversham I walked to canterbury via some woodland, old villages and the North Downs way. As my PDA has a GPS receiver built in I thought I’d try logging it’s output to see exactly how fast I’m walking nowdays. Last time I checked, walking without a rucksack on clear footpaths and not too hilly, I walked an average speed of 6km per hour.

    Well, my first fast analysis of the log file shows I’m going a little faster. It also shows I need to improve my map reading, I certainly don’t remember passing through customs on my way to Canterbury via South Africa and Germany…. hmmm, perhaps there’s something wrong with those logs.

    For completeness, I’ll add my PDA is a Windows Mobile 6 HTC Touch Cruise. The GPS logging software is called Sunset from Kharsim.net. The GPX log file sunset created was uploaded first to http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/ and the analysed view came via http://www.everytrail.com/.

    I’ll try and spend a little time finding the flawed data from the log then finding a better way of creating route paths and analysis. Everytrail does look reasonably complete from a fleeting first impression and has the facility of hosting the maps so you can zoom in and out. Now, how to find the error lines in that GPS Log and remove them.

    To finish on a high, my average walking speed according to my GPS is 3,758 miles per hour. Must dash, I fancy visiting nipping down to the south of France before tea time, should only take me 20 minutes from here 🙂

  • The Island (Victoria Hislop)

    If I’d seen this book in the second hand bookshop, I would have been unlikely to choose it. However, it came highly recommended by a friend who lent it to me and I’m so glad they did!

    The island is a story of a family history and it’s discovery by a girl from London. Her mother has rarely mentioned her past so the London girl sets off to discover it, taking us back to before her mother was born.

    It’s hard for me to say just why I enjoyed this story so much. Perhaps it was that the story covered such a wide range of time and that I’d love to know as much history of my family. To know my grandparents grandparents would be wonderful. Perhaps it was that the story felt so real; trials and tribulations of life randomly spaced with the happy times of families rich and poor. Perhaps it was the setting, the island and nearby town of Spinalonga. Spinalonga was a leper colony until a cure for Leprosy was fond after the second world war. Perhaps it was that when a group of city folk were deported to Spinalonga due to their leporsy, they didn’t give up made a place where people went to die into a place with a living standard that nearby mainlanders began to envy.

    I found it hard relating to some of the greek terms, in the same way as someone from Greece would probably stuggle to comprehend the translated meaning of Mr Brown, Right Honourable Mr Brown, Prime Minister Brown and First Lord of the Treasury – being all titles related to the same person. I think a similar thing was happening with the titles of the women in the story, growing from girls into women.

    Spinalonga is a real place and I’m not entirely sure at what point fact ends and fiction begins. Another friend said she visited the island having read the book and been on holiday in the area and the island is accurately depicted.

    Rootie Rating; 5 out of 5 – I’m so glad is was recommended to me

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