All posts by Armand

Personal

Windows 7 kicks Vista’s ass from the install

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Thanks to Microsoft fluffing the deployment, Windows 7 only became available properly last night (Saturday night) making it much easier for me to nab one of the 2.5 million licenses being made available in the next two weeks. The MS servers crashed at the official release time and they deployed an Akamai delivery network that seemed stable for my download last night.

So far, a much simpler installation, and better hardware support than Windows Vista had… It will be a pain to manage the process when the beta expires.

Although IE 8 seems to suck as much as IE 7 at the moment. WordPress doesn’t seem to render properly…

Personal

Bring on Windows 7

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I’ve reached a point of incredible frustration with Vista, to the extent that for the first time since Windows 95 I’m going to install and OS beta. Well, assuming I can get one of the 2.5 million downloads of Windows 7 Microsoft is making available tonight… Have already asked around the office to see if anyone with friends at Microsoft can get me in on it if I miss the download window (no pun intended)…

XKCD today therefore made me chuckle (as usual, when they’re not off in the depths of programmer geekery that goes over my head).

And I don’t want to go to Ubuntu or OSX for a variety of reasons. ’nuff said.

Personal

Christmas Holiday Craziness

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Christmas has been amazingly busy so apologies for the lack of posting and hope you all had wonderful seasons and enjoyable new years. Some of the things filling my time:

1) Flights to and from Malaysia

2) Introducing Amanda to about 30 people in my extended family, another 20 in my extended extended family, about 20 additional family friends and a number of randoms and associates. She did amazingly well in overwhelming circumstances and I think mostly had a good time!

3) Visiting Taman Negara in Pahang, where we jungle walked, I spoke Malay to Orang Asli, and we stayed in the delightful Traveller’s Home.

4) Visiting Malacca for a dim-sum fest, travelling on a ferris wheel at the Malacca River Pirate Entertainment Park (consisting of four rides), an interrupted swimming session on the 9th floor of the Ramada Renaissance caused by a brief monsoon shower.

5) Reading: The Reluctant Fundamentalist, finishing the brilliant Bad Science and diving into the Inkheart trilogy, as well as devouring the brilliant ‘Invincible’ Ultimate Collection 1&2 which Arvind bought me for Christmas.

6) Saying “I’m Batman” a few times following Sheila and Dave’s purchase of a full Bat-costume for me for Christmas.

7) Shopping with Amanda for the ‘ring’ and learning from my Aunty Ann about the four Cs of diamond shopping.

8) Three days in the ‘honeymoon’ suite of a less good hotel in Pangkor, including a scenic tour of the Island, some slightly grotty beach, and the most awesome clamshell poolside showers. Flickr will soon have photos. Despite grottiness, was a lovely escape and involved driving down some wonderful plantation road and all the adrenaline that entails (overtaking the lorries involves finding a window and then accelerating into oncoming traffic).

9) A lot of food, including Roti Canai, Dim Sum, Cantonese & hokkien mee, peanut-free Satay, Bhatura, Dhosai, Appom (sp?), and even fish and chips and lamb chops for good measure.

10) Tourist visits to KL Tower, Central Market

11) Shopping visits to 1 Utama, KLCC

12) A lot of jetlag

13) A fantastic Christmas eve featuring the increasingly infamous hat game and the family’s first Secret Santa, a resounding success (I got a Superman Belt Buckle which I failed to work out was from Geets, but she didn’t clock that I’d given her Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker DVD either, so we were even)…

14) New Year’s Eve on Asian Heritage Row in Central KL

…and a great deal more. The first couple of days back have been characterised by jetlag, kitchen construction, a cold, and initial attempts to improve healthiness through swimming and resisting completely unhealthy food. This will be helped by the completion of the kitchen…

Anyway, if you want to know more on any of the above points, let me know and I’ll find some time to write further.

Post holiday email count: 960 in my work inbox, down to 560 after initial pass on Sunday and down to a mere 368 after a second pass early this morning. Fingers crossed for a sane January, but it seems doubtful!

Personal

Gambling for alien research

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Having just received an emarketing blast from SETI requesting funding for their research efforts, and also been playing too much on-line poker, and also reading some Phillip K Dick novels, and also been waking up too early due to jetlag, the following, slightly loopy idea occurred to me…

SETI should set up an online poker system in which people wager either computer cycles or money against the possibility of winning space related freebies. The ‘money’ bit could be done in partnership with a major online poker company (PokerStars, PartyPoker), and wouldn’t cost them anything as they could offer to transfer winnings (minus buy-in) to SETI instead of the user. The space-freebies could consiste of some kind of alien cred league table or information, for example essays by Carl Sagan, appropriate Sci-Fi… all distributed digitally. The computer cycle bit could tie into their @home software and it could tell you how much ‘time’ you owe to SETI each time you log in to either the poker application or SETI@home.

For those that don’t know what I’m talking about, SETI is all about discovering intelligent life on planets other than Earth…

Anyway, brain clearly addled. Toodles.

Personal

The good side of jetlag

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This morning I’ve…
1) written to some possible wedding venues
2) signed up for a wedding planning website
3) spoken to my brother as he travels back from Sri Lanka (via Google Talk)
4) played a poker tournament with Matt in London (4th place, damn)
5) fixed my dad’s email problems, which required a call to technical support
6) established why the interwebs to Europe is slow (deep sea cable cut)
7) obtained information from Amanda’s parish church for the wedding
8) woken Amanda up

I’ll wager my productivity goes down as the day goes forward.

Personal

Travelling

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I’ll be between London, Hampshire, Kuala Lumpur, Petaling Jaya, Jeruntung, Pangkor and International Airspace for a bit, but as it’s holiday time posting might actually get a bit more regular. Keep your ‘ask Armands’ coming at me, I’m sure I have a few in a backlog to write up and will make efforts to keep y’all entertained.

Personal

Booze inventory

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Having avoided my liquor cabinet for some time, on account of it being in a very mouldy vault, I forced myself to go through it this morning and made some rather excellent discoveries. Or rather, rediscoveries as I must have bought most of this stuff over the course of my last 7 years in London.

Salvaged from the mould:

5x bottles of nice champagne
5x assorted whites
6x assorted reds
2x brandy liquers
3x assorted whiskeys, including a nice single malt
1x sambuca
1x tequila
2x vermouth
1/2 a bottle of rum (why has the rum gone?)
5x assorted spirits, including the excellent Vana Tallin purchase on our Estonian voyage in 2004.

In fact, all that seems to have gone off was a bottle of sherry, a half bottle of port and a bottle of pre-mixed Sangria I bought on holiday in Madrid in 2001 and was probably never going to drink anyway.

An excellent haul, and once we’re done refitting the kitchen (a fun January, post-engagement, post-Christmas treat), we’ll have a party and see if we can get some cocktails mixed up.

As an extra bonus, the Transformers (Robots in Disguise, not electrical apparatus) I’d stored in inadequately sealed containers, seem to have survived their ordeal relatively unscathed. Woohoo!

Personal, Update

…we’re engaged!

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Is the excited email/phone call we’ve been making (on my part, in a haphazard and therefore probably ineffectual manner) as we share the good news of our betrothal. Am happy beyond sense, and will probably stop grinning at some point, but I wouldn’t bet on it happening soon.

Everyone’s been asking how it happened. Here’s the story:

In the lead-up to our second anniversary, having long decided that Amanda was the girl for me, I went ring shopping. When my spirit was crushed by my own utter cluelessness, the crowds and then the price-tags on New Bond Street, I asked Sarah to help me shop and, with her help, the following Saturday I managed to track down the appropriate token (the ‘rock’, as it were, is yet to be purchased and I knew in advance that Amanda wanted to be involved).

On the evening of our anniversary, I asked Amanda to get home early as she could and to dress up warm. We dashed out and I got us a cab to an undisclosed location. (Well, obviously I disclosed it to the cabbie or it would have been an expensive and frustrating taxi ride!)… which was Primrose Hill, the location of our first ever date. We strolled up the hill, shivering with cold and delight at the amazing view of the city the summit affords, thankful for clear skies and dry weather.

“I think my feet are getting a little wet,” I said, romantically, knowing that at some point I would be dropping to one knee. Amanda threw some appropriately dismissive insult in my direction but nonetheless we moved to the tarmac-clad viewing point. There, after some further moments admiring the view, each others’ eyes (awww…) and fumbling in my pocket for the Georg Jensen ring case, I reminisced about the fact that two years previously I’d lacked the courage to ask her for a kiss, but this time I had a more important question…

And the rest, as they say, is history. Oh, she said yes, obviously (after a pause for shock – I’ve finally managed to catch the girl who identifies her birthday present by the folds in the wrapping paper by surprise!). I’m looking forward to keep trying to surprise her for the rest of our lives together.

For the curious; I didn’t ask her family for permission — I’d thought to but had guessed (correctly) that Amanda would want to be the one to relay the news.

Television

Spooks

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Been getting into Spooks lately. Tonight’s episode annoyed me slightly as they used an iPod Touch to hack into an iMac which was on the desk of a CEO of a City Firm – improbable on many fronts. Generally it was an awesome episode, though, just annoyed the geeky party of me, as I’ve never seen a non-marketing/design/publishing firm make widespread use of Macs — even at Google, where people can use pretty much any machine there want, there’s a fair mix of Mac and PC.

However… Spooks itself has clearly been having an impact on me. Today, walking back to the office at lunchtime, I didn’t see any bins where I’d expected to and so naturally assume that MI5 had moved them somewhere due to the threat level.

I think my brain works funny.