Jims Olives take it easy for a month or two
Given the abundance of trees in the garden sporting black juicy looking olives, I have decided to cure a bunch of olives (is that the collective noun?) which should be ready in time for Xmas. Have found recipe for curing them which involves soaking in brine for weeks, with a little daily shake – then starting to taste after week 3 or so and then will marinate in something tasty. What I don’t understand about the whole business is how anyone worked it out in the first place…. If you’ve ever tasted an olive straight from the tree (and you really should try at least once in your life) you’ll know that they taste foul. The last one I tasted was so bitter that I spent the next 5 mins in a spasm of spitting and cursing. So prehistoric man must have tried one – hated it / spat etc then grunted to his mates that the shiny black things that looked good to eat actually taste like shit and they should go and hunt buffalo or something more rewarding. However, luckily one of them must have sat and thought…. hmmmm what if I popped those foul tasting bitter bombs in some salt water for a few weeks, then maybe marinated them for a while with some garlic, herbs and a little vinegar and oil – wonder what they’d taste like then? What a hero.
Tonight, after a lot of buggering around, I managed to deploy the first cut of the application to my web server. Its v. early days – right now all I’ve published is the basic look & feel, you can scroll around and zoom and thats about it.
What I’d really really appreciate is some feedback on…
- How long does it take to download (Here in the back of beyond over my mobile broadband modem – hung near the ceiling on a bit of string so that it can catch those lovely 3G rays if I’m lucky – it took forever)
- What browser / OS / type of computer are you using (only tested so far on Safari on a Mac)
- How easy does the app make it to understand what you have to do to zoom & scroll around
- How responsive is it
- What do you think of the look & feel
- anything else you can think of
For a reminder of what I’m trying to achieve (in the longer term) read this.
Thankyou
Man make fire - Man happy - Ug
It gets chilly when the sun goes down. I am mastering the v. manly art of making fire. Am starting to obsess about bringing logs in and drying them – have even attacked a few with an axe! (having noticed big correlation between starting size of log and relative ease of burning). Lisa is worried that I might start naming my logs.
Technology problems continue to plague us…. this time it was the magsafe connector for the macbook. For a while its been getting a bit dodgy where the cable connects to the connector – but it finally went a few days ago. With about 20 mins battery life left I managed to back up everything important… but where in Spain can you get a new macbook power cable?
Answer was pretty much nowhere without driving 100′s of miles and the post don’t deliver to the back of beyond where we are living.
Why dont Apple make them like this?
The satisfying glow of the power light
However, I managed to draw a very good (even if I say so myself) picture of a soldering iron, then armed with this and enough Spanish to order a beer I headed off to the Ferreteria (ironmonger – toolshop type of place) in the next village. Miraculously – after a bit of sniggering – the guy correctly interpreted my drawing and produced a soldering iron & solder – 7 euros later I was the proud owner.
So, with the aid of a penknife, my sparkly new soldering iron, some string and a clothes peg I have repaired the power cable. I’m not sure it will win any beauty prizes, but it will suffice until I can arrange to get a new cable.
Joel conquers a big rock
Since we’ve been in Niguelas, Joel has really enjoyed playing down by the little river – he’s getting quite good at doing stepping stones and building dams. Whilst its only a trickle it’s called the Rio Torrente – which is either a joke… or means that in spring when the snow on the Sierra melts it gets a bit more vicious!!
In the pic, Joel has climbed up a big rock by the river… shortly after taking this we sat together and watched the moon rise over the mountains – good boy + dad moment.
So I’m up and running on Vodafone Spain Mobile Broadband… it’s taking a while to get used to gprs speed internet (although its flicked into 3G a couple of times late evening). What a crap user experience you get from Vodafone…. heres a potted history….
- Bought VF modem – so far so good
- find out that to get it up and running on a Mac you need to download some software from VF Spains web site… which is a bit chicken & egg really – which comes first the internet access, or the download you need to get from the internet to make the internet access work.
- But – I have my trusty UK modem with me so for a measly £8 I can access the internet and download whatever it was.
- In the booklet which comes with the modem, VF Spain point you to an place on their site…. which doesn’t exist.
- Eventually – with Lisa’s help with understanding the Spanish – I find the download…. which is 35Mb & takes hours to download at gprs speeds (and if VF UK charge me any extra for downloading this then I shall explode).
- Download doesn’t work
- More searching around and it seems that the problem is that I have an existing (old) version of VF mobile connect – the new version doesn’t properly get rid of the old one, so have to manually delete, zap the pram, and re-install – Hurray… this works!
- Now am able to use the VF Spain modem to access the internet… but wait…. I now need to top up the pay as you go card before the included data allowance runs out- no problem though their (helpfully written in English) instructions make it clear you can do it online… or on the phone…. or at an ATM…. or at a VF shop.
- Attempt 1 – Online – Its not https – so no security – try it anyway… but it doesn’t work.
- Attempt 2 – Cashpoint – doesn’t work I just get an error
- Attempt 3 – on the phone (with Lisa’s help as you need to speak Spanish for this bit) – they tell Lisa that they can only top up over the phone if you have already used your card in an ATM first.
- Attempt 4 – try every combination of bank ATM’s & cards we have – none work.
- At this point, Lisa goes into bank and talks to helpful people – they tell us that you can only recharge at an ATM if you have a SPANISH bank account. They helpfully suggest that the internet cafe round the corner could top it up for cash.
- Attempt 5 – Success – nice people in internet cafe top SIM up.
- Jim weeps as he wonders why…
A) the English instructions that came with the modem failed to highlight that at least three of the suggested top-up methods would not work for most English speaking people.
B) the people at the VF Spain didnt just include a CD with the mac install in the package (or at least offer it at the shop)
Once the top up happens, you then need to text a message to convert it into a BONO – a kind of voucher for internet access – luckily we have a phone which is unlocked so we could put the card in the phone and send the text, otherwise I would have had to rant on for a bit more…..
Rant Over.
The hard drive in my macbook started making a strange ticking sound yesterday – 5 mins later it had crashed and couldn’t re-boot. Having calmed down a bit now….
- Everything was backed up – Investing in a time machine was a good plan
- A replacement drive was around £50 – and for that I get 250Gb of storage (so no more messages about hard drives filling up. 60Gb seemed like loads when I bought the thing – but when every download from the digital camera = 1Gb and theres two kids worth of pics / videos to take, it doesn’t last long)
- It happened 5 days before we go to Spain… not 5 days after we’d arrived.
So whilst the downside is £50, a day of using Lisa’s powerbook and however long it takes to replace the drive & press the ‘restore from time-machine’ button…. the upside is over 4x as much storage and a lesson learned (in not too painful a way) about keeping backups.
Good question.
I’ve been involved in projects and programmes and change etc for a long time. There are loads of tools out there to help manage this kind of stuff. Some of them are good. Some of them are crap. None of them really tick the box for me. So I’m scratching my own itch. (apparently a good way to start!).
What I’m trying to build is a simple, visual planning tool which does three things…
ff0000;">1. Makes it really quick to agree what needs to be delivered when by who by visually mapping out some Milestones & dates then being able to send a good-looking, one-page overview out to team members / bosses etc.
In my experience what usually happens is…. get bunch of people in front of a whiteboard – draw up a timeline – bung some milestones up – then change your mind – get marker pen all over your fingers because there is never a board rubber – agree on something – take a snap of the whiteboard with your phone – spend a tedious hour putting that all into powerpoint or similar – send out – realise you’ve forgotten to add a bit – recall – amend send out – you get the picture.
ff0000;">2.ff0000;"> Makes it unbelievably easy to keep everyone in the loop when stuff changes by updating your part of the plan with just a few mouse clicks. The app then makes it really easy for everyone to see what has changed.
Once you’ve sent the powerpoint around… of course things change. Over the course of the project things usually change a lot. If you are really anally retentive about updating the plan you’ll spend loads of time doing nothing else (fooling yourself that you are actually managing things when really you’re just catching up with things). If you don’t have the time or (like me) the inclination then the plan will be out of date…. Even if you give the job to someone else – they are still the only person who can own & update the one-pager so they become a bottleneck and it still gets out of date.
ff0000;">3. Helps everyone make better predictionsff0000;"> by making it obvious to everyone what’s happened during the history of the project (well we will have been collecting all that info anyway – so it would be rude not to!) – best indicator of future performance is past performance (so they say).
Pulling all of the info together to do any analysis of what has happened takes forever – so we only ever really look at the history of the project when something has already gone belly up badly enough to warrant it. If only everybody working with you could have all the analysis done for them (effortlessly – cross fingers) before things go to the dogs….
Anyway that’s my best shot to date of describing what it is I’m trying to build…. Would you want one? (lets assume its free – as in beer – for now)
