Monthly Archives: July 2004

Leffe On Tap

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Graham (Kathy’s second cousin) popped over to Bath last night. We had ace food at The Globe, then got a taxi into town. We thought we might go to the recently-opened JD Wetherspoon’s in Kingsmead, but we glanced in the window and thought that it looked a little…soulless.

(Side note for trivia fans: it seems that a new record was set last Sunday on the pub’s opening in that it only took two hours for a fight/riot/disturbance to occur and the Police to be called out. I love Bath! Lovely Bath! Alcohol-fuelled violence Bath! The Bath they would rather not talk about! Whoever ‘They’ are!)

So it was with impeccable irony that we went to All Bar One instead. It was nice, though, as they had the wonderful Belgian Trappist Monk beer Leffe Blond on tap. I’ve never seen it on tap outside Belgium – always in bottles – so this was a pleasant surprise. In respect of its 6.6% alcohol content and in deference to European bistro culture, I had a half.

So, Graham, if you’re reading this: cheers! Top night, good to see you, hope the anti-cat-allergy tablets don’t cause any nasty side-effects. Some links from our various conversations:

Bristol to get public WiFi

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Woo-hoo! Looks like Bristol is going to be forging ahead with public WiFi:

In a ground breaking collaboration of public and private sector services, Bristol City Council and Cityspace today announce an agreement to build the UK’s largest urban digital network offering outdoor wireless broadband access to Bristol’s residents, visitors and city workers.

– http://www.cityspace.com/press/level2/releases/040722-PR-Bristol.asp

It’s a shame that it won’t quite reach down to where I work, but I imagine that it might be expanded in the future.

Rescued from the Bitbucket

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This hasn’t been the longest period of silence in the history of It Could Be Worse, but I had a valid excuse this time.


While upgrading us to ADSL, Plusnet deleted my blog, photo gallery and database. They restored the sites, but the database was lost.


I got most of the anger out of my system using Plusnet’s tech-support facility and discussion forum (a note if anyone from PN is reading: I’m sorry if I came across as a bit of a prat – I was very annoyed). Once I was told that the database couldn’t be restored, I set about formulating a plan for rescuing the blog. Fortunately, when I had to force the issue last time (after Berkeley DB was found to be incompatible on a new server) I made a plain-text export of the blog entries and comments, which was reasonably up-to-date: it contained all but the last nine or so entries.


So, with a new blog in place, I imported from this dump file, and copied and pasted the other entries back in, setting the dates retrospectively.


I’ve learned a lesson: you can’t rely on people not to do stupid things, like (a) deleting databases and (b) having no backup, so I’m going to implement a backup strategy, using mysqldump and a perl script.

Archos Jukebox: 21st Century Life-Support

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A week last Sunday I turned 29 (less than a year to go ‘til the Big Three-Oh! Poop!). My present from my brother, sister-in-law and nephew was an Archos Jukebox Recorder 20, an MP3 player with, in reality, 18.6 GB of hard disk space. Mind you, this is still larger than the hard disks of our two current computers combined, going to prove that the rise of home computers with disk capacities approaching a quarter of a Terabyte has nothing to do with people writing longer Word documents ;) As an aside – has the RIAA considered the positive impact of P2P on the hard disk and computer industry? I thought not!

When I was in the sixth-form at school, I bought the early-nineties equivalent of the iPod: a slimline, powder-blue Aiwa personal stereo. Yes, I know it sounds a bit QEFTSG, but they were cooler than Sony (at the time) and had better build quality. Oh, and they were barely bigger than a cassette case. And they cost "only" £60: a lot of money for a 16-year-old, but still cheaper than an iPod.

I would wear my Aiwa on the school bus, and still be listening as I walked into the form room at the start of the school day. I would be greeted with comments like "Tim’s got his life-support on again, then!" I would guess that I was being talked about, and remove my headphones just in time to catch the comments.

I sold the Aiwa less than a year later for £50 – not a bad residual, really, making it even more iPod-like.

Anyway – I digress. I’ve ripped several CDs (albeit only the tip of the music collection’s iceberg) to 160Kbps MP3, and transferred over some other MP3s and OGGs from my work machine – and I’ve still only used 2.3GB.

Being a Mac user, I’m finding the Archos to be a little limiting in terms of synchronising with iTunes, which only supports the iPod. The Jukebox mounts just fine as an external hard disk, though, and it’s not as if I have the room to store 20GB 18.6GB of music on either of the main computers; if I did, then synchronising would be a better option. I will one day buy that 120GB hard disk and put it in my 4-year-old Mac. (PC users: Hah! Try doing that in an old x86 box. I know, you probably will be able to, but my own experience of upgrading outdated PC hardware is frustrating, to say the least. Say ‘Hello’ to BIOS incompatibilities!)

Sound quality is good, but is obviously dependant on the bitrate with which you encode your music. As I said, I’m doing all new stuff at 160 Kbps, which for me is a good compromise between file size and quality. I have some older 192 Kbps files, as well as 128s downloaded off the web (Mostly Epitonic.com – ‘tis trés legal). The fact that Nick supplied a pair of Sennheiser in-ear headphones helps, as they are some of the best earbuds available, and they’re reasonably priced, too.

The Epitonic+Not-An-iPod issue brings me to my final point: I don’t doubt that I could fill the Jukebox many times over, even by just ripping our CD collection and not going anywhere near my vinyl and old tapes. So far, though, I have (with one exception – my Coldcut tunes) just transferred entire albums onto the AJBR, because playlist managment is (I’ve found so far) not as good as iTunes and (apparently) the iPod. Thus a folder structure of artist/album works best for me (until I get to grips with the AJBR’s m3u-creation functionality) and artists which only have a single track, many of which I have downloaded from Epitonic, will become frustrating to listen to.

Odeon to Accessible Odeon: Eat My Shorts

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Matthew Somerville is a giant among web geeks: here is someone who, rather than just moan about the woeful accessibility of many corporate web sites, redesigns them. One of the sites he reworked was “Odious Odeon Cinemas”:http://www.odeon.co.uk/, a web site that only works if you use – you guessed it – Internet Explorer on Windows.

Odeon originally gave their blessing to the alternative version of the site but, citing “increasing complaints from users”, Odeon’s Marketing Director, Luke Vetere, sent a cease and desist e-mail to Matthew.

This sort of thing used to surprise me. Alas no longer – it seems that there are many corporations who have yet to jump on the Cluetrain. Kathy & I have Odeon vouchers, which we were given for Christmas, to use. I’m so tempted to deface them and send them back to Odious themselves. And to think I was looking forward to the opening of the new Odeon Cinema in Bath! Meh.