My Strelitzia seems to have bifurcated this year. I dunno, maybe this is actually a really common occurence, but it took me by surprise.
Bernard has now spent the past six nights in a bed. Well, with the exception of the time that he’s spent on the floor next to his bed, or on one occasion, underneath his bed.
He seems to be much happier without bars. When he wakes in the morning, he doesn’t have to wail at ever-increasing volume until someone comes to rescue him. Instead, he can just slide out of bed and waddle around upstairs to his heart’s content.
A consequence of this change is that the POÄNG has been returned to the sitting room, and a bean bag moved upstairs to replace it. The POÄNG is a most adequate gaming chair, and certainly beats sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the television. Ironically, on Sunday I completed Tomb Raider Anniversary ((which I’ve been playing since mid-January)) and so now I have a lovely gaming chair, but no games to play while sitting in it.
On an unrelated note, you see that “YOU ARE HERE” thing at the top-left of the page? What are your thoughts on the usefulness of that? Many thanks.
I’ve been cycling a little bit in the last couple of weeks. I take each day as it comes, depending upon the weather, but I think that I’ve managed four days so far. This comes to about 40 miles.
As I mentioned in September last year, I bought a cycle computer so that I could keep track of my average speed. Unfortunately, I found that all those statistics were having a detrimental effect upon my enjoyment of the ride. It’s hard to really relax and enjoy it when you’re trying to beat your personal best by 0.1mph. So this year I’m leaving the cycle computer at home and just taking my time. Ironically, I’m probably faster because of it.
Categories
Consumption
Joy of joys, last Sunday I went into Dyas and found that they now stock plug-through energy meters for £10 apiece (apparently £13 on the website).
First device to get measured up was the fridge, which we found to be consuming about 0.4 KWh per day (average over a 4 day period). We took a vacuum cleaner hose to the coils at the back, and found that the usage dropped to about 0.33 KWh per day (also measured over 4 days).
Next up is my computer. Even before anything was switched on, I was finding a draw of 11 W, which I guess is just the power supply keeping itself alive. Once the computer is switched on and settled down, this is up to 70 W. Turning on the monitor takes us up to 110 W, speaker system up to 113 W, desk lamp up to 160 W.
I was surprised by how much more energy the computer consumes than a fridge. We are always being told how the fridge is such a significant slurper of juice, yet having a computer on round the clock equates to having five fridges, and that’s without the monitor switched on. Putting it into standby or hibernate mode obviously reduces this greatly, but that’s not much help if you are actually using the thing. Maybe our fridge is just phenomenally efficient. Your mileage will vary, obviously – the odds are that your computer isn’t an AMD Sempron 3000+ with three hard drives in it.
What should I measure next?
A while ago, Karen and I had a fantastic idea. Bernard used to enjoy playing with our wallets, so we gave him one of my old ones. We filled it with old train tickets etc to give it that authentic walletness.
Last week, we had ordered a curry and Karen was upstairs hushing Bernard back to sleep. I was tidying up the sitting room, and saw Bernard’s wallet and toy mobile phone on the coffee table. I tossed them into his toybox and thought nothing more of it.
When the curry arrived, Karen got into a bit of a panic when she couldn’t find her wallet. I didn’t have enough cash in mine to pay the guy at the door. After a while, he got tired of waiting while we turned the place upside down, so he told us that he’d leave us to it, and phone us later on to get our credit card number.
Mere seconds after he’d driven off, it all clicked into place in my head. I lifted Bernard’s wallet out of his toybox and put it back on the coffee table.
Happy 5th anniversary, Karen. Looking forward to the next 50.
Categories
Indecision
I have a number of email addresses, all of which find their way into the same inbox. There is one address which I use as my primary address. Entirely unsurprisingly, it’s of the form something @ thisdomain. It seems to get a lot of spam, which is a shame, as I thought that I had done a decent job of guarding it.
It would be very simple for me, configurationally speaking, to switch to using somethingelse @ thisdomain as my primary email address instead. Any email sent to the old address would get the error message that the specified mailbox could not be found on this host.
Naturally, my only concern is for my existing contacts. When the old address suddenly stops working, will they have the sense to open a web browser and go to http://pete.nu to find out what gives? At present, that page just redirects to the blog, but I could very easily change it to display a huge message saying *I have changed my email address, use this contact form to get in touch with me.*
On the one hand, spam doesn’t trouble me too much because GMail’s filters seem to be reasonably reliable. But, on the other hand, it would be nice to not have to scan a couple of hundred email subject lines each day to check for false positives.
Should I go for it?
I estimate that over the course of a 24 hour period, I am collecting (and discarding) approximately the weight of my own head in nasal mucus.
Categories
Sleeping duck
Bernard reflected in the knobs of our new bathroom cabinet. At the time of writing, it’s not yet up on the wall. We’re going to need a bigger drill.
