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Chris Garrett's Personal Blog

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You are viewing Chris Garrett's personal blog. He also has a professional business blog called Chris Garrett on New Media and also Makerhacks, a site about 3D printing, Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Read more about chrisg.org here.

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Geek days are happy days

March 10, 1999 by Chris Garrett

Today was a wonderfully geeky day for me.

Firstly, my 3Com PalmIII “palmtop” electronic organiser arrived. Not only is it a really cool toy, but I think this will be the first organiser I have ever had that will truly make me more oganised! Already nearly all of the post-its have been taken down from around my monitor. Who knows, I may even start remembering dates and anniversaries ;O)

Secondly, the new Star Wars Episode 1 trailer has been released. The first trailer, the teaser, was a short appetiser, this is the real trailer, the proper advert. There is no way I can download this massive file on my ickle 56k modem so I am depending on Damian and his bit fat firehose of a leased line to do the business for me. I can’t wait!

Filed Under: archive, Geek Tagged With: archive

Moving on up

March 9, 1999 by Chris Garrett

Today was moving day, and what a moving day it was!

From 8:00am to 11:pm we were shifting boxes and bags. I can’t believe how much stuff we have got. Our possessions are now spread between

– 1 dining room

– 1 conservatory

– 2 garages

– 4 bedrooms

It’s a miracle we got it done. Between six of us we had to make three trips in the van, use three cars, and to make things just that little bit more difficult, we had to do all this in a foot of snow, hale, rain or whatever else it could throw at us.

But we moved.

And we have to do it all again in two weeks time when our house is finished.

Filed Under: archive Tagged With: archive

Working late

March 5, 1999 by Chris Garrett

14 hour day today (including commute). Who says the work ethic is dead? ;O)

To start off with I was pretty productive, I got a hell of a lot done. After a while I just got tired and started having difficulty thinking straight.

I have always known I was a “stay up late, get up late” type person, but now I have worked out the times I am most productive for certain tasks.

From getting in to 10:00 my time is best spent answering emails, calling people back and doing routine admin tasks. Between 10:00 and 12:00 is a really good programming time. The afternoon, between 12 and 2 especially can be really good for thinking/creative work. Towards 3 or 4 is a good time for meetings or research as my brain changes down a gear. I pick up towards home time and kick into ultra high gear. If I work over this actually increases until fatigue sets in. About 7:00 is pretty much the peak, trailing off steeply the other side of 7:30.

I wonder if this is just me, or if this is a universal thing? I don’t mean the exact times, just the general concept of optimum times of day for certain jobs ..

Filed Under: archive, Geek

More Dwarf

March 4, 1999 by Chris Garrett

I nearly forgot Red Dwarf was on tonight, just shows how busy we are! Got in and the video set up just in time.

Things are getting pretty scary on the house front. We have to move out and our keys have to be in the estate agents letter box by midnight Tuesday the 9th at the latest. So as of next tuesday we are pretty much homeless, I hope our new house doesn’t fall through.

My latest magazine article is out. It has been pretty well received if my email inbox is anything to go by. People *really* seem to enjoy Internet Works.

I would like to do more articles, but the editor says he has loads of articles already, so I am kinda on standby. Although there is nothing to stop me taking my ideas elsewhere ..

Filed Under: archive Tagged With: archive

Nostalgia

March 3, 1999 by Chris Garrett

How old do you have to be before it is ok to be nostalgic? ;O)

Today Brian and I were discussing “the good old days” of computing.

Remember those old “TV Sports” consoles? Little blocks of plastic that took several of them fat-type batteries and drained them within a week. You would plug it into your television and be greeted with a black and white screen showing a square bouncing between to rectangles. That was “tennis”. Other games or sports were represented with various alternative placings of squares and rectangles. Remember the noise it made? “buuuuuurp bip”.

Cool!

Next came the expensive Atari games machines. They took *cartridges* and whoever owned one was the envy of everyone they knew. My cousin Jonathan had one of the wood-veneered variety. It was just like the arcades, Space Invaders, Pacman, that tank game I can’t remember the name of ….

After that was the true personal computer revolution, ZX80/81, Spectrum, Vic20, C16/64. The computer age had arrived.

Kids today will never know the excitement of seeing a computer game on your telly in colour for the first time. Or the agony of spending hours painstakingly typing in hundreds of lines of code from a magazine, only to find there are bugs or lines missing (or even worse forgetting to press “return” and using the down arrow instead like my Dad).

Anyone born in the 80’s will probably take home computers for granted, those born in the late 80’s will probably wonder if there was life before “Sonic”.

Of course I don’t want to go back to those days, I am looking forward to Quake 3 like most computer geeks, but it’s nice to look back once in a while.

Maybe in the future kids will wonder what people did for entertainment before all computers were interconnected ..

Filed Under: archive, Geek Tagged With: archive

Net vandals

February 24, 1999 by Chris Garrett

This morning I got in to find an email telling me “You suck”. It was a message sent to me by my website to tell me someone had added a guestbook message.

It seems some people think it is clever to leave (ho ho ho) “comedy” messages on my guestbook. Do they think I am going to leave a badly spelled insult on my website for all to see? People who do this obviously don’t have the intelligence to know I actually read what people put up there and have their machines IP Address and Host Name, so each message is ‘traceable’.

I don’t really care what people say on my guestbook, I just delete the immature stuff, but several people have noted the lack of email links on this site. Sorry and all that, but it’s the only way to prevent spam. There is a message facility in “You To Me” where you can send simple text messages, *if* I reply *then* you will get my email address. *If* I reply.

Once the Internet seemed like it was inhabited by intelligent, witty, kind people.

Like you and me ;O)

Filed Under: archive Tagged With: archive

Sweet smell of coffee

February 22, 1999 by Chris Garrett

Two downers today :O(

Downer 1)

Netbenefit have sent me a invoice for two more years domain name fees for my company that hasn’t existed for months. £80! £50 of which is “administration fees”, I *know* there isn’t £50 of work there, greedy b’st’rds. When I called to complain the snotty bloke on the other end of the line said “don’t pay it”. Yeah, right. They know my credit card details, I ain’t leaving it at that.

Downer 2)

A really good coffee usually cheers me up. We have good coffee at work, but we don’t have a filter machine, just cafetieres and I don’t like the floaty bits you get.

We have a nice coffee takeaway place (Pret a mange) near work, and as I had mistakenly brought a frozen meal that requires a grill (d’oh) I thought I would go get a McDonalds Italiano burger and a nice mocha coffee. As usual Ann placed an order for a mocha too.

Pret give you takeout in paper bags. Why I didn’t use my McDonalds tray that I keep in the car for just these occasions I don’t know. As I went round the roundabout at 40mph the bag with the coffees in fell over. I thinks to myself “I’ll be clever, I’ll stop that happening again by placing the bag between my legs”. I picked up the coffee bag and poured hot coffee all over my car seats, all over my coat and all down my legs, while still hammering along at 40.

So … no coffee … boiling hot liquid down my sensitive parts … a stained, sticky car seat …

…. but at least my car smells a bit nicer ;O)

Filed Under: archive Tagged With: archive

The Buyer

February 21, 1999 by Chris Garrett

“The Buyer” was round today with his mum measuring for curtains and carpets, etc. Good job he took his mum along, he didn’t have a clue.

He’s not going to budge on having us out of the house. Our house isn’t going to be ready until three weeks after he wants to move in, so that means three weeks with the inlaws. Git.

It’s not just we are going to have to stay with Clares Mum and Dad that’s p*ssing me off, we are going to have to move house *twice*, have the cats vaccinated so they can stop in a cattery (the cattery fees on their own aren’t cheap) and we will have our belongings spread over lots of kind folks houses instead of one convenient place.

B@st*rd!

We were supposed to go through to see Simon and Julie, but we are much too p*ssed off to have a good time, Clare especially. Rearranged for next weekend.

Clare has a stinker of a cold any way, and it pelted it down with snow on the way home anyway, so maybe it was for best we rearranged.

Instead of seeing Simon and Jules we called in at Nigel and Traceys, who I have started calling our “therapists”. Whenever we are down we seem to end up either at McDonalds drivethru or Nigel and Traceys. We had a good old chat and bitched about the world and felt much better.

As I said above, the weather on the way home was horrendous, hope it’s better for work in the morning.

Filed Under: archive Tagged With: archive

Red Dwarf 8 Day!

February 18, 1999 by Chris Garrett

I have been looking forward to this day for a long time, almost as much as I am looking forward to the release of Star Wars Episode 1 : The Phantom Menace

Red Dwarf 8 Day! :OD

Maybe it wasn’t as exciting as it could be, we had seen this episode being filmed after all, but still I got a buzz watching it. As is usually the case the rare times I have something I really want to watch on telly someone phoned, luckily I managed to tape the episode.

We had been to a party style thing for my Dad and had to travel home at lunatic speed, nearly knocking over our car stupid cats in the driveway.

I am told our tiles are on our new house now, shouldn’t be long as we are moving in.

Still haven’t remembered the jiffy bags, despite Sea reminding me. D’oh! ;O)

Sorry Nick, Dave and Hilary, I *will* send that stuff – honest!

Filed Under: archive Tagged With: archive

world of adventures

February 16, 1999 by Chris Garrett

I have been neglecting my journal this week, I have been away and later in the week simply been too knackered when I have got home to do it. You know what it’s like, especially anyone who works with computers, some times when you get home the last thing you want to look at is a cathode ray tube. So I am typing this on Thursday, hoping I can remember what happened.

Monday/Tuesday I was Daan Saaf with my boss seeing a client. We spent about 10 hours travelling and a night in a Travel Lodge all for a two-hour meeting. It was kinda fun tho.

Clare lost her purse on Monday, luckily there are still honest folk in the world so she did get it back, but only after cancelling all her cards.

Filed Under: archive Tagged With: archive

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