The schedule for the house is now up on the espc web site - see it here.

Shame about the photos. The lounge one came out better than I thought, but the kitchen ones are all blurred. Also, we could have sorted the clutter in the kitchen ones easily.

House

The house is now listed on the ESPC web site, here. No pictures yet, but Rome wasn't burnt in a day.

They screwed up the viewing times. They originally included Thursday evenings, despite our saying no to the agent who came to see us, by email, and in voice mail messages. They have sorted that out now. This week's ESPC paper will have the wrong viewing times, so we may get people turning up tomorrow night. If they do they will have to come back if they want to see the kids' room. The kids will be asleep by then.

Things have been busy this last week. Getting sucked into felling the neighbours trees, and clearing away their rotten fence did not help. Things are starting to take shape now.

It's all starting to happen

IMG_1352,
originally uploaded by mr-potter.

The estate agent came this week. The house goes on the market on Easter Monday. The "For Sale" sign went up today.

We have had three of the four moving companies come and see us. They will send us quotes next week.

In between all that, we are trying to finish removing clutter around the house, and generally trying to make it look shiney. We have been doing lots of jobs that we meant to do months or years ago. Things are starting to look really nice.

Spring

CRW_1137-p,
originally uploaded by mr-potter.

Well the weather may not be warming up as fast as I would like, but the flowers are coming out nicely. This photo was taken in our back garden.

Road Trip to France

My brother just did a trip to France.

Here are some photos from the trip.

last.fm

I have been idly poking last.fm with a stick. On the whole it is a fun toy. However, I am finding that when I do a similar artist search radio in the client, half the stuff I listen to is not there.

Still no RSS

The Bismarck Tribune has redone its site. Still no RSS. Come on guys - it's not hard!

US-o-vision Song Contest

It says here that NBC is planning a Eurovisionn Song Contest clone.

"Eurovision is the granddaddy of all talent shows and the Super Bowl of singing," said Ben Silverman, chairman of series producers Reveille.

Has this guy actually sat through a whole Eurovision? If he has, then he must not have realised that you watch Eurovision, nit for the music, but for Terry Wogan's contribution.

GAIM beta

I have been using the Gaim 2.0 beta 1 realease for a few weeks now. I like it.

The project have said that "Gaim 2.0.0 beta 2 does not include voice or video ("vv") support". Shame - because to me, that would make the app complete. But good things come to those who wait.

Saved passwords as an anti-phishing measure

My wife gets a lot of phishing emails - don't know why - but she does. Quite a lot of them are ebay ones. She can spot them a mile a way and she says that some of them are quite amusing with their bad spelling and grammar.

Well, this morning she found one that was almost believable. For reasons known only to her, she decided to click on the "log in" link in the email. She said that another clear sign that this was not ebay was because her browser did not auto-fill the login form for her.

We all have heard the arguments for and against using the saved passwords feature. But I had never considered before that it could be a good anti-phishing tool.

descpicable

Sometime in the last 36 hours, my son's tricycle and scooter were stolen. They we taken from our front lawn - right outside our front door. Not only that, but they raked through the shed and found the parent bar.

Somebody who steals a child's toys is pretty low in my opinion.

Fighting fire with fire?

http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=29962006

"Faced with the prospect of another year spent tackling the hundreds of tonnes of unwanted mail discarded in the Capital, the council has compiled an advice leaflet for residents."

Could an advice leaflet not be a euphemism for junk mail?

I do agree with the sentiment, and I hope they make a difference.

We were too early

It turns out there was a positive leap second introduced between 2005 and 2006 to keep atomic clocks in sync with the rotation of the earth. There is a slashdot article about it which also references a couple of other articles on the matter.

So, does that mean that we who are in the UTC timezone celebrated New Year one second too early? Still I suppose being one second early for New Year is better than one year too early for the new millennium.

Feed Changed

Please note that the URL for the RSS (okay - atom) feed has changed.The new link is now:

http://sasallys.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Other Stuff

A lot of stuff has happened, so here is a quick update:

all the paperwork for my US immigration has now been sent to the US Embassy in London. I have had my medical too. That means all we can do now is wait for an interview date.

We have nad some decorating done in the house. We got the bathroom repapered, and we finally got our bedroom painted. The guy who did our bedroom also painted the doors upstairs. He put right the mess I made of them a couple of years ago. The fumes that night were pretty bad, so we all camped out on the living room floor that night.

Dan has been a busy boy stting up tow blogs - this one about his family, and this one about him, and so far, his go-kart. Still waiting for Macanthony to do something with his slice of web that he got a month ago.

Kim and Balint are coming back to Edinburgh for a week in January. It will be good to see them.

Recycling

Today is the day of the week when they come and empty the bins. Usually, after Christmas, they are all stuffed full. Well, this year our bin was not. One of the advantages of having a full set of recycling bins right next to where we park our car is that recycling is no bother at all. So, all of our Christmas wrapping paper, and packaging from the kids toys, etc went into the recycling bins.

We put out our wheelie bin last night - half full. We only throw out waste food and disposable nappies. We then discovered this morning that our neighbours had filled our bin up for us. So now it was standing there with its lid up at a jaunty angle - just like everyone else. Now, what was the stuff that was filling our bin? It was black bags full of cardboard and glass bottles - all of which could easily have gone into the recycling bins. All they had to do was walk another ten paces.

Syncing my phone and my coputer

phone,
originally uploaded by mr-potter.

After a year of trying on and off to get my phone to talk to my computer, I finally managed it.

I don't think it was anything that I did - more that the software now supports my phone. So, thanks to the synce guys, and thanks to the Ubuntu mob for getting the software packaged.

This pleases me a lot. I listen to podcasts on my phone on the way to and from work. Up until now, I have had to shut down the phone, pull hte card, plug it into a card reader and copy over the files. Now I will not need to do this.

What would be really cool would be to script the file transfer. If I were a programmer, then I would write a GNOME podcatcher that woould do that.

I was reading this, which pointed to this at work. Being partially sighted, I have a CCTV system on my desk. SO, I put something I printed from the colour laser printer underneath and cranked up the magnification.

The system had a hard time finding something to focus on, but eventually would setlle down, and right enough: there are little yellow dots. If I had a UV light, I'm sure they would be much easier to see, but they were viewable.

Hoary is dead - long live Breezy!

Ubuntu Linux have recently released their next version - this time nicknamed "Breezy Badger". I have installed it on my laptop and so far I like it a lot. They have a lot of the toys I like, and even some bleeding edge stuff.

Here are a few of my first impressions:

1. I like the inclusion of some zeroconf stuff. Unfortunately this laptop is the only thing that can do it at the moment. I will need to upgrade a couple of other computers to see how well it works. I spose another alternative is to hang around a few Macs and see what happens.

2. Beagle works well - better than I could ever get it to work by just compiling the code. This makes me think that the package maintainer did a lot more than just compile the code. There is also a preference applet to go with it. It seems to be a bit disconnected from beagle - and it does not start beagled for you.

3. My laptop is an IBM Thinkpad. Ubuntu said they had done a lot of work to improve things for laptops. I can see they have - my laptop now hibernates! However, we still have the usual Thinkpad grumbles of PCMCIA screwing things up, and sound not working after waking up. I think that is a hardware thing. On the whole I am pleased.

4. they have included this new toy called the "Deskbar Applet". It sits on your panel and you can type a word or phrase into it. It then presents you with a list of places where it can search for you. It includes beagle, all your search things in Firefox, and more. It then presents the results in the appropriate application. This is my kinda toy.

So, on the whole, I am liking Breezy a lot. There are bound to be some annoyances, so I might post a follow up later.

red leaves in edinburgh?

red leaves in edinburgh 2 (see comment),
originally uploaded by lardus.

So, Alex thinks there might be nice red leaves in Edinburgh this year.

If todays windy weather continues, then there won't be many leaves left to turn red :-).