Alex Harries's diary

When I go to the UPSU homepage, I see things a little differently to most people because I have a couple of bits of content loaded in a "hidden" box - great while I'm working on new toys for the site.

One of these toys is the Portsmouth Weather feed, which uses a slightly modified version of the Mambweather module for Mambo (first spotted on Fred Bradley's GapStudentsOnline.com).

I've designed it to fit into a tiny bit of screen real estate, as you can see from the pic on the right, but I still don't know where I'm going to squeeze it into our already packed homepage. For now I might just tuck it under the "directory" links until I create a BBC News headlines box under the current UPSU news boxes.

Any better ideas? The winner gets precisely nothing but a warm fuzzy feeling :o)

(And, in answer to those of you at the back of the class: no, I won't be sticking it there. Eww...)

I've just re-packaged up the TomTom Go 510 I bought this afternoon from a well-known high street retailer. The first thing I noticed when I got it home was that the seal on the memory card's container - which you have to break to use the TomTom - was already broken. Someone had already been there, and like finding one's toilet seat still warm when you go to use it, there's a certain associated feeling which isn't entirely nice. Of course, things just went downhill from there...

Starting up the TomTom, the last known location was just half a mile up the road from the shop I bought it from, and a route had already been planned to Southampton University. Very curious...

The fun really started when I connected it to the Macbook - first I found that just lightly touching the TomTom while it was in its dock cradle was enough to disconnect it from the computer, interrupting the USB connection. Of course, I only noticed this when my laptop told me a device hadn't been properly removed, and the TomTom software - which had already crashed twice before then - decided to crash again.

Not wanting to feel left out, when I connected my phone to the TomTom ('cos it you can use the TomTom as a hands free kit. Apparently...), my phone promptly decided to join in the party by crashing as well. TomTom: 2, The Consumer: nil.

Then, after connecting once to the laptop, the TomTom decided it wasn't going to play any more and stopped showing up when I plugged in its USB cable. Knowing Apple's notorious inability to explain a problem when it sees one, I tried plugging it into Windows, which gave me an error saying that "the device you have plugged in has malfunctioned or is faulty. If unplugging and plugging the device back in does not fix this problem, replace the device".

Oh, right then. The old "replace the device" message.

Bugger.

So, tomorrow morning it's off back to the shop. I haven't named them here because I want to give them a fair chance to correct this problem, and if they don't play nicely, I'll name and shame them. Oh happy days...

This has been an angry greyhead broadcast. Thanks for reading ;o)

This is awesome - a brilliant way of bringing different communities and groups of people together, pioneered by a group of Parisians. It's also exactly what I'd love to see on UPSU.net with Portsmouth's student population (and why stop there? Why not make it all-inclusive?).

(Or maybe the whole social groups thing on t'internet is just a manifestation of us web geeks' collective desire to find non-threatening ways of making new friends? Where's a psychology student when you need one? ;o) ).

/al - bedtime 

I am, anti-climactically, referring to my Christmas reading I'm afraid...

I've just opened "Passing For Normal" by Amy Wilensky, a story of her life coping with Tourette's and OCD (for those of you who watch Shameless or Father Ted, apparently Tourette's doesn't just manifest itself as random outbursts of Father Jack-style blasphemy - I've been told...). It's a fascinating insight into this amazing woman's life (to date), and I'm reading with amazement. Find out more on Amazon.

QI's "Book of General Ignorance" is another bit of reading I've done this Crimbo. Until now I never knew Hippopotamus skin weighed about a tonne (a quarter of their total body weight, apparently). Nor did I know the Universe was beige (how boring). Or that Henry VIII had only two (or, arguably, four) wives. Or... Oh just go and buy it - it's great.

The creator of Dilbert has written a less well-known book and released it under the Creative Commons license. Entitled "God's Debris", it bills itself as "a 132-page thought experiment wrapped in a fictional story", and warns that it's not for people with set views on religion. For the rest of us, I think ("hope" maybe?) it's going to turn out to be something of an eye-opener. Another one I'm looking forward to finishing. You can download it below...

•  God's Debris 329.55 Kb
  

I also picked up "Ever Dated A Psycho?", a tongue-in-cheek (and occasionally flashback-inducing) book on how to go about finding that special, psychotic someone. Or something like that... Well worth a look I think :o)

Another Waterstones special was Chris Ryan's (y'know, author of "The One That Got Away") latest tome, "Ultimate Weapon". I gave up playing "spot the spelling mistake" after I reached twenty, but the story was a fairly absorbing - if predictable - read. If nothing else, I now know the mountains to the north of Iraq are somewhat chilly...

Other things I've read this holiday include About 345 more words in this entry