Category Archives: Ramblings

Solar panel report – 09

I think I neglected my planned annual New Year’s post about my solar panel performance. ((I say annual, I think I’ve only managed it twice before.))

For much of the last year, I’ve not been able to get screenshots off the computer gizmo that duplicates the controller in the airing cupboard.

Turns out, once the room was tidied up a bit and I could track the cables back, that the Cat 5 cable that comes out of the airing cupboard to the nerve centre had just dropped out of the back of the router.

solar-100823

But from the graph I can pull now, it looks like we got the best part of of 3,600 kWh in both 2008 and 2009.

And the good news seems to be that we’ve already had as much sun by mid-August than we had in the whole of the last two years.

August has been pretty crummy this year – or at least, has matched torrential downpours with short sharp bursts of sun. (Which makes getting the leaflets out fun)

But we did have some really good weeks in May and June that seemed to have a made an impact on the bottom line on the solar front.

And 3,600 kWh worth of gas would have been another £140 or so, if I’m doing the multiplication correctly based on Nottingham Energy Partnership’s energy cost comparison table.

Other posts about my solar panel:

Speaking Welsh

The time before last I was in Wales, I was in a pub with a group of friends when we got into a weird and unpleasant conversation with a “poet” (= stoner). He was trying to either cadge more dope or share what he had, and we weren’t into that. My friends looked away and melted off to the bar, and somehow it was me in the conversation without a lot of back up. Somehow the guy thought me standoffish and in much of the ensuing nattering before I parked him on someone else, I got roundly upbraided for being an evil Englishman who hates the Welsh and should F off home.

The irony of having such an attitude landed on me was a little strange. I’ve spent not insignificant amounts of time in conversations with fellow evil Englishmen defending the Welsh from the sort of person who believes they only speak Welsh to spite him. I have a languages degree, ferchrissake, of course I value linguistic diversity. I’ve spent months at a time with the Welsh national anthem stuck on the brain. ((of all the words in Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, “enwogion” has got to be my favourite. enwogion o fri = men of renown, but Google Translate has enwogion by itself as “celebrities”))

It’s not the first time I’ve been confused with those other, evil Englishmen on sojourns into the mountains and valleys. When I went to help the pretty much doomed Lib Dem effort at the Ogmore by-election in 2002, I had my only experience of campaigning against Plaid Cymru. Out on a doorstep Plaid campaigners pointed out a sign on a house that read “Cartref” and said that if I didn’t know what that meant, I had no business being in Wales. I didn’t then. I do now. It’s the Welsh for “home”.

Good middle-class culturally aware people, when travelling, make the effort to learn a few phrases, and how to pronounce place names. In about a week on Cyprus, I just about got my head around the Greek alphabet, ((now all but forgotten again)) and tried out “Kalimera” on the few days I was awake early enough. In Rome, I got up to “espresso macchiato per favore” and in Prague, it was “pivo, prosím.” I get a bit further in French and German, what with my degree in modern languages ‘n’all, but it’s the tenet of all travellers that if you make just a token effort to communicate in any other way than by shouting English, you get a lot further.

So how about applying the same principle to our trips to Wales? Should we learn half a dozen judiciously placed words and phrases, and using them in conversations with shop and bar people.

Bore da!
(hello!)

Seidr / Cwrw / coffi / te / dŵr
(cider / beer / coffee / tea / water) ((I once heard a story about the importance of accents: dŵr means water but dwr means idiot. People didn’t like driving vans that had “Welsh Idiot” written on them. Google Translate suggests this may not be true. ))

Bara / Llefrith
(bread / milk)

Araf / heddlu / dynion / tacsi / ffôn
(slow / police / gentlemen / taxi / phone)

Mynedd / afon / dyffryn / llyn / rheilffordd
(mountain / river / valley / lake / railway)

Diolch.
(thank you)

Is that worth doing or just hopelessly patronising? Somehow, trying that in Barmouth and Porthmadog, (( hi de hi campers! )) I feel a whole lot more stupid than I ever have in Larnacka or Prague. What do you think?

Nos da!

Today in “ooh, shiny” news

I have identified a need for a number of gadgets and am presently trying to decide how and when I can afford them, if at all.

1 – a new laptop

I had a rather good laptop last in 2007, which was my main computer, and what I used for work in Chesterfield. It got stolen while we were on holiday (along with all my files – now I backup using Mozy) and since I had just stopped working in Chesterfield, I elected to replace it with a desktop computer, which is still pretty much everything I need for routine work, internet and light gaming. It’s regrettably not beefy enough to play the last version of Civilisation on, and so almost certainly won’t be beefy enough to play the next version. ((link helpfully doesn’t use Vista’s system of calculating system spec and I basically can’t understand a word)) ((the fact I can’t play Civ may actually be a good thing – I’m not going to have the time in the forseeable)) ((have mostly been playing Freeciv recently and it keeps whupping my ass)) ((I basically need to write a post about Civ, clearly))

The main use for potential future laptop is for the few weeks in the year when I have to work away from home – essential would be the ability to write blog posts and edit sound files using Audacity.

I’ve tried using one of the early Linux EEE PCs and the Council lent me a sub-notebook when we were doing the paperless pilot, and I think I confirmed to myself that they are just too small to be useful. The EEE PC is a bit of a pain to type on, and the Council mini computer had such a tiny screen it wasn’t easily possible to use the Council’s email system on it.

So, I think I need a proper laptop. Wandering around PC World presented me with an enormous, almost bewildering, degree of choice.

One thing’s sure, though: I don’t have Mark Pack’s budget.

2 – an iPad

I’m a little promiscuous when it comes to OSes – my present active gadget list includes a Mac Mini doing media work on my desk, playing DVDs and iPlayer, an iPod Touch, a broken Linux EEE PC, a Nokia phone and a main PC. Somewhere I have my beaten up 2003 laptop, an IBM Thinkpad which really refuses to die, also running Linux. although doing so so slowly as to be next to useless for actual work.

For a long time, I was an iPhone refusenik. I’ve been a Nokia user ever since I first had a mobile phone. But unless they do something amazing pretty sharpish, my N95 will be my last Nokia phone. I’m not sure whether to go iPhone or Android next, but either platform simply leaves the Nokia miles behind.

In fact, I only bought the iPod touch because using the N95 as a media player is such a terrible experience. If you put anything like 8gb of media on it, it slows to a crawl. The software for syncing is awful, just awful. Their recent “upgrade” of the sync software from PC Suite to Ovi Suite made matters worse – and actually removed functionality in favour of funky videos, to howls of protest from anyone who actually uses the phone rather than sees it as some Nathan Barley-esque SpeechTool.

The UX of using the iPod Touch is so good that it’s become simply the best way of having a mini computer near the telly for all items such as checking twitter, email and facebook, feeding my Foopet eKitteh, or checking out any of the numerous apps, many of which are brilliant – including Carcassone, the Good Beer Guide, and Monkey Island.

And of course the iPod Touch is good for listening to things on. iTunes makes adding podcasts to it really easy, and I mostly use it for that whilst leafleting. It has 60Gb of songs on it that I almost never listen to and the most uptodate BBC podcasts that help make leafleting less of a chore.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying I could totally see how there would be room for an iPad in our household as the not-quite-a-computer that lives in the sitting room, for light gaming, light internetting and light pretty-much everything else.

But the only thing about it that rules it out is the price tag. The cheapest one is the best part of £500, which could buy you a proper laptop that could do full on everything instead of light. I have reservations about whether it could be used for typing more than a couple of hundred words for away-from-home blogging, and the fact that it doesn’t have any way into it apart from the Apple cable means I couldn’t use it for editing sound files, one of the key things I have to do when I’m away from home.

3 – an Amazon Kindle

I’ve gone into some of the reasons I want one of these in an earlier post. Partly it’s the early adopter thing (although I’m way behind on the whole ebooks front). Partly it’s the idea of carrying a lot of books in a small space – something that’s particularly exercising my mind as for practically the first time ever, I’m going on holiday abroad by plane for a full fortnight on our honeymoon. I don’t think I can fill a suitcase with enough books to keep me going 2 weeks, and it’s vitally important I have something to read on the plane coming home as trashy paperbacks are the only way I can stay sane through all the hours of sitting in departures and on the plane itself.

http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?t=nileshomepag&o=2&p=26&l=ur1&category=kindlestore&banner=1QVAVYTJKE8XAVG9FP82&f=ifr

Another email arrived from Amazon today to goad me into buying a Kindle by announcing the launch of the Amazon UK Kindle Store – which lets me get a feel for how much more I’d be spending. The costs don’t seem too bad, particularly for titles that aren’t in the first flush of youth, but they are more expensive, for the most part, than secondhand paperbacks, without even the benefit of being able to pass them around friends and family.

Loading the thing with a fortnights’ worth of books is going to set me back a fair bit, and doing so would be a bit of a leap into the unknown – would I in fact get along with reading books on a gadget I’ve never actually touched or played with? I’d be lumbered with the bugger if I spent all that money, loaded it up with a fortnight’s worth of reading, and then found it was actually a major pain to read. I’ve played with a Sony Reader in John Lewis and they seem essentially OK, but really it would only ultimately be possible to road-test it by owning it and trying to read a novel on it.

Conclusions

Well.

They’re sort of overlapping decisions, and a “perm any 2 from 3” type problem.

All three should be able to be used for reading committee papers on the Council, assuming the Council keeps its promise about unrestricted wifi in meeting rooms. (( currently you have to use a Council computer in the few rooms where wifi is available. Long term, I don’t want to have to have a Council computer because I want one computer I can use for Council and personal use not separate Council and personal computers ))

You could read e-books on all three, but it would make more sense on the Kindle and the iPad.

You could buy a reasonable laptop plus a Kindle for the cost of the most basic iPad.

Both the iPad and Kindle are essentially only gateways to make you pay more to either Apple or Amazon.

The main things ruling the iPad out are the price, the lack of keyboard and not being able to use it for sound.

I’ve gotta make my mind up soon because I need the new laptop before conference.

Decisions, decisions.

(NB, one suggestion, put it on the wedding list – has been half-ruled out for a number of reasons including trying to stick to things that will last for all of married life, not just the next few years, the lack of certainty of getting it, and the fact that these are things for me, not us!)

Alex Foster’s patented music annotation system

Shortly, I’m off on my annual choir week, in which I join a diverse bunch of talented singers, and pop off to one of England’s cathedrals for a semi-monastic séjour singing services.

This year, St Pauls, London. Eep!

Most of the singers in the choir are better than me, or at very least, more familiar with the music, since they sing with church choirs year round, and I haven’t found the time to join a choir in Nottingham.

Since we sing something different each night, that quite often puts me in the position of having to robe up and go out and sing music I’ve rehearsed barely twice before. I’m not the sort of shrinking violet who mouths all through the services without actually making a noise (although I’m not above doing that in the really difficult bits)

The choir has a library of its own music and a system which means broadly you get the same copy back each year, so I’ve developed a personal system of annotating musical scores to give myself a fighting chance of getting it right a) in the services and b) next year. One particularly good year, my notes were so on the ball, I managed to point out to a music teaching colleague where he was going wrong every time I got it right, and he didn’t, thanks to my notes. Tee hee.

The system is simple. Normally when scribbling notes on your music, all you do is ring a note that causes you trouble. My system is one of lines rather than rings, that give you more information about WHY a note causes you trouble.

If it’s pitch, the line next to the note is vertical.

If it’s duration, then the line below the note is horizontal.

This helps you tell yourself what it is about a note that has tripped you up in the past. Was it a difficult note to pitch? Was there an unexpected interval between two notes that led you to be sharp or flat? Or was the note longer or shorter than you anticipated?

For particularly difficult notes, use two lines either side of the note, or above and below. Sometimes, I also incorporate arrow heads too to give an indication of whether the unexpected pitch of a note is unexpectedly high or unexpectedly low.

And for those beastly notes which are both higher than expected and go on longer than expected, I draw a square around them.

The other key mark I make on music is for sudden bits of unison. As a bass singer, I don’t expect to be singing the same as other parts, and quite often, when all the parts are supposed to be singing the same, I have a habit of trying to harmonise. These are often the parts where we’re all singing loudly and when mistakes are particularly noticeable. So, to warn myself we’re all SUPPOSED to be singing the same note, I draw a vertical line that connects all the staves.

Simple really, but this system of lines around notes has saved my bacon and it can save your’s too.

Is anyone using a Kindle?

http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=nileshomepag&o=2&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=0M5A6TN3AXP2JHJBWT02&asins=B002Y27P46

Amazon have very kindly got in touch with me, as a valued customer and one who tries to make a few pennies from their advertising programme on these pages, to give me a heads-up about the launch of their new version of their e-book reader, the Kindle.

Their most basic version, the Kindle Wifi, is almost, just within the sort of price range where I might be able to justify to myself buying one.

I do appreciate that it’s basically another hi-tech way of making you spend more money at Amazon than you otherwise would… but ooh, gadget, shiny shiny.

It doesn’t entirely fit too well with how I currently consume books. I don’t read much these days: my life and free time for reading is almost entirely spent on the internet looking at funny pictures of cats. When time does allow for reading, it tends to be low-rent, hi-entertainment fiction of the violent murder / comedy ‘tec variety. I’ve been reading detective fiction my whole life, so why stop now?

So, consuming books: I generally go for mass-market paperbacks that have been out some time. I buy them in volume very cheaply – sometimes the £0.01 secondhand special on Amazon, sometimes at fleamarkets. They sit on Mount Toberead for a while and eventually I will read them – often when I am on holiday, sometimes at a rate of 2 a day. Once I have read them, the books often go on a journey around family and friends, and some of them return, and some of them don’t

Ultimately I end up with huge numbers of books sitting in piles, and I’ve no final way of getting rid of them once they’ve been around the family. Some I do want to keep, but many I’d be happy to offload. But by the time I’ve finished with them they have no value, and selling them is a pain. I must find somewhere I can donate them.

But that pattern of book-buying would come to a screetching halt if I bought an e-reader. For starters, the books would cost more than the current penny plus P&P. Secondly, I would get less value out of them, as I wouldn’t be able to pass them around the friends and family. But on the plus side, I wouldn’t end up with a house full of dustgathering dustjackets. And when I do go on holiday, I wouldn’t need an extra suitcase for the books!

The other half of ideas that are going around my mind Kindle-wise are the potentials for work use of it.

On the council last year, we had a paperless committee pilot. I’ve not got around to writing about that here seriously, but there is a lighthearted look and some serious comments here.

There is scope for using a Kindle for committee papers – all the papers are available online, and all start off as Word docs or PDFs. It could be pretty easy to send them by email to your Kindle address so that they show up for use in committee. I can’t really tell in advance how easy it would be to handle the multiple documents you need (typically in committee you have the agenda front page, a briefing document, a report for each item, slides for half of them and your own notes, which is a lot to juggle electronically) and there would still be the thorny issue of page numbering, of which more later.

Sending docs to Kindle seems to be free for the Wifi version, but there is a strange cost for the 3G version (which I do not intend looking at much.) The 3G service is billed as free (read: included in the cost of the books you buy) but there is a small charge for using the 3G service to download your own documents.

A Kindle does look like it would be quite fun to cart around Lib Dem conference – all the papers for conference are available electronically as well as in print, and you could shove them all into a 250 gram gadget much more easily than cart all you need with you. But will the daily sheets be so easy to find? Will the wifi work with commercial hotel wifi that often needs you to input credit cards etc? Questions questions.

(and the thinking ahead to conference reminds me: I had promised myself I would finally buy myself a new laptop before conference to help with blogging and podcasting. I can barely afford that at the moment, still less if I buy a Kindle too. Hmmm…)

I need a sound engineer!

Here’s a question. I’m sure it must be possible to do, and I’m sure it’s a kludgy, nasty way round a problem.

If I’ve got a TV making a noise, and I want to make recordings of that noise using my Zoom H2, which has a Line In hole, is it possible to plug the line in into the TV’s headphone socket, whilst still having the TV making a noise to the people in the room? What’s the minimum amount of kit I would need to do that? headphone splitter, one cable, one set of portable iPod speakers?

I know ideally I want a pre-amp feed (( please stop me if I’m talking nonsense here )) but I think that might be on the complicated side.

I could just sit the recorder in front of the telly and let it tape the sound using its built in mics, but that seems a lossy way of doing it and would have the added disadvantage of including in the recording all the sarcastic remarks of the people present.

Bonus marks available if you can guess the application I’m going to put this knowledge to 🙂

Today’s political triumph

Irritating Twitter feed @NottinghamNews announced today:

As part of the redevelopment of Nottingham Railway Station (The Hub), a new facility for short and long stay cy.. http://bit.ly/aUvrcY

It irritates me no end that the Council muck up Twitter like that – they use it just to duplicate a feed somewhere and they never care that their titles are too long for Twitter’s character limit. It means that the important word from that press release CYCLE or BIKE is totally missing from the tweet.

Still, that’s not where the success lies. I haven’t persuaded the media people to use Twitter correctly.

No, I retweeted their announcement, fixing it so that all the necessary words were included:

RT @NottinghamNews At Nottingham Railway Station (The Hub), a new facility for short and long stay cycle parking opens. http://bit.ly/aUvrcY

And got an immediate query from a friend: how much does it cost? Is it free?

Good question. At the time of writing, the press statement on the Council website is silent on the issue. And because it talks of the investment and the cost – new facility, CCTV, solar powered LED lighting – it all invites you to think, ooh, expensive!

It seemed pretty likely to me that it would be free, so I phoned up an officer in Transport Strategy to check. Didn’t get the officer I know from committee, but the polite receptionist had exactly the same reaction as me – um, I expect it would be free, but I’d better check. She checked, phoned back. Yes. It is free.

So I phone the media department, and here it’s the same schtick: person answering phone needs to go away, but in a few minutes, the press officer who made the press release gets back to me. He agrees with my point. It is free. It would be a good idea to mention that in the press release. I’ll get onto that, councillor.

Hooray!

Five minutes and five phonecalls later this paragraph:

The facility will provide safe quality sheltered parking for 92 cycles that can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The area will be well-lit, with lighting columns and solar-powered LED lighting within the shelters and will be monitored by CCTV.

… becomes this paragraph:

The free facility will provide safe quality sheltered parking for 92 cycles that can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The area will be well-lit, with lighting columns and solar-powered LED lighting within the shelters and will be monitored by CCTV.

Can you spot the difference?

If I hadn’t had two copies of the statement open, I’d just have assumed I’d overlooked the word on the first time through. But that is not the case! Today, something good actually happened because of a suggestion I made.

*sigh*

In these Coalition days, you have to take your triumphs where you find them.

Pudding club: BBQ special

Pudding club was at our house today as we celebrated the hottest day of the year with a barbecue in our back garden. Which is not looking bad right now, but will look better when a) the Thomson & Morgan “instant cottage garden” bundle arrives and b) when/if the plants grow.

I don’t do barbecues that often, but when I do there’s a few things I always do. Today, I added in a few more things.

The one meaty thing I’ve been doing for ages is a chicken satay. Take mini-breast fillets ((my friends don’t trust me to cook bone-in chicken safely on an open fire, and whilst they’ve all gone for gas barbecues, for me, it’s all about having a fire )) and marinate overnight in chopped ginger, garlic and chillies, with lime juice, sherry, oil and soy sauce helping out with liquid.

Now mostly in years past, I have just bought a pack of satay sauce and that is nice enough. But today my car wouldn’t start, so I couldn’t go to the big supermarket, and so I had to make it out of store cupboard ingredients. Chop a clove of garlic and a chilli and lightly fry. Add in about 6 tbsps chunky peanut butter and enough coconut milk to make it a barely-runny consistency.

Get the chicken out of the marinade, and run skewers through it, then cook on the barbecue until done, and pour the sauce over the top.

There were also burgers and sausages as per norm, without a great deal of thought in them. Just buy burgers, making your own decision about price vs quality and cook until cooked.

This time, I made all the bread: Dan Lepard’s onion hotdog rolls formed into long thin rolls for sausages; and a batch of burger buns made with 700grams breadflour, 350mls milk, yeast, oil, sugar, salt and beaten egg for glazing, based loosely on a recipe found here.

In all the heat, the two batches of bread dough didn’t so much as rise as collapse sideways off the edge of the baking tray, so the resultant cobs were a little on the flat side, and bigger than intended, but all tasted nice enough in the end.

In terms of sides, I made Manda’s delicious tepid salad of mushrooms, lentils and pearl barley in a balsamic reduction; a really sharp coleslaw of red cabbage, apple, carrot with a honey vinaigrette (which could have used more honey, to be honest); and one of our guests brought that day’s harvest of potatoes duly saladed.

But it was the dessert that was really good and definitely something I will do again: Grilled pineapple. After the meat was done and the barbecue was cooling, I took a fresh pineapple and cut it into 6, removing the tough core but leaving the skin and leaves on for decoration. A quick go on the barbecue is enough, cooking all sides until they get a visible griddle pattern, and a bit longer on the skin side, because that’s tough and can take it.

The warm pineapple is delicious enough by itself: all the huge flavour of ordinary fresh pineapple but with with slightly less chewing.

If your barbecue is the sort of affair where you sit around a table with knives and forks, you might like to serve up the bits of pineapple straight from the grill. However, by this point, we were all sitting on the floor in the “glade” bit of my garden (( I have a glade and a fountain. At least that’s what we call it – it’s not nearly so grand as I like to make it sound )) so I chopped the pineapple into chunks, put it in a bowl, and let people help themselves with skewers.

What really made it, though, was an aromatic sugar syrup I had made the night before: 300 grams of sugar in half a litre of water, boiled up with a chopped chilli, a branch of thyme and a finely sliced lime. This, poured over the pineapple bits, was just lush.

Will has a point about Bejeweled

Will Howells writes a good piece about removing the game Bejeweled from his phone.

Bejeweled is a PopCap game and they are very good at making games. Worryingly good.

From their stable I have enjoyed Zuma, Zuma’s Revenge, various versions of Bejwelled, and Plants vs Zombies. Especially Plants vs Zombies. But I came to PopCap firstly through Peggle.

Once you move beyond Bejeweled, they have a curious “try before you buy” policy. You can download any of their games and play them for an hour on a free trial before you have to pay up to continue.

They know they can afford to do this, because they know their games are so good that you’ll play them for an hour, barely notice the time passing, and then feel seriously aggrieved when your time is up. So aggrieved, you’ll reach for your card and stump up the usually fairly reasonable sum of money just to carry on playing.

Each of their games starts really simply, so anyone can play them. They even run on an average specced machine. They ramp up the skill level fairly steeply, but train you as you go so that you keep pace. Plants vs Zombies, for example, teaches you a new plant and a new zombie each level, and it’s fun, cutely drawn, and the music is good. Before you know it, you’re battling with dozens of zombies in a wide variety of scenarios. Peggle was the same. Start with the simplest of levels, and build up gradually.

Many of the games are easy enough to complete, but even if you play every level and defeat the ultimate boss monsters, the game doesn’t end. You can replay every level with a higher win ratio. There are seemingly infinite challenges based on the basic game engine. And the reward for even little wins is pleasing enough to make you want to keep playing: every successful Peggle level end ends up with rainbows, unicorns and the Ode to Joy. Srsly. And despite how that sounds in words, it’s great! Here’s a review of PvZ – and I endorse everything in it.

Peggle, PvZ and Zuma have a basic level structure and a game you can complete. Bejeweled, Chuzzle and their ilk get increasingly more complex, but technically if you got good enough, they’re probably infinite. (( Much like Cybertron Mission, where after the first four levels, you just got the same levels again with nastier bad guys )) They even have normal modes, where you get hazards, and “zen” modes where you just have the fundamentals of the games without the pesky threat of dying. So you can keep playing for ever.

I’ve been more than happy to pay for several of these games multiple times over, so that I can play them on more than one computer. Then, when I got an iPod Touch, mainly for leafleting (( and mainly because the UX of trying to get podcasts and music onto my Nokia N95 8GB – and still use it as a phone – is just too ghastly to do routinely )) I bought the games all over again through the iTunes store.

I have an ever so slightly addictive personality. If I like something, I get a bit obsessive about it. This usually manifests itself in reading all the books by an author, renting all the films with an actor and eating all the chocolate in the house. (( Unhelpfully, the addiction generally only manifests itself in unproductive ways. I have never been addicted to work. Or canvassing. Or leafletting )) Heaven knows what would happen to me if I even started taking a little bit of drugs. But with videogames it manifests itself with unhelpful obsessive playing. I’ve had nights where I’ve played PvZ all night. 6 hours straight is not all that uncommon. I’ve definitely played each of the games for so long that they have caused me pain in the mousing hand. And when I’ve switched hands, they make the other hand hurt too.

But the worst game I’ve been playing lately from the Popcap stable is Bejeweled Twist. Like Bejeweled, you have to match gems into rows of 3, 4, 5 and 6, and when you do, they explode and new gems cascade down. The method of moving gems is different – you have a rotator cursor that takes four gems and moves them clockwise. If you can pop gems with every turn for a successive 10 levels – well over 100 consecutive mini-wins – you get a Fruit Gem. If you pop 4 gems, you get a Flame Gem; 5 gets you a Lightening Gem. If you fail, the game makes a heart-rending “disappointed :(” noise at you. On the way, there are hazards like gems that are stuck and won’t rotate, bombs that tick down with each turn, and DOOM GEMS that tick down with each non-productive turn, but that can’t even be exploded!

Bejeweled Twist screenshot

Look at the screenshot. I’ve been playing this game for days. I’m on Level 57. There are fruit gems galore. I’ve over 9 million points. Somebody stop me!

Colleagues, if you value your free time and your wrists – and Will, this is especially applicable for you – DO NOT DOWNLOAD BEJEWELED TWIST.

And if you don’t want to download it – here’s a handy link

Blue Moon

Today there will be a blue moon – the second full moon within one calendar month. This doesn’t happen very often – once every few years. The next one will be August 2012, with the full moons falling either side of the London Olympics.

This time, there will also be a partial lunar eclipse.

Those reading from Australia don’t get their full moon until January 1st, which makes January the blue moon month for them.

I read about this first on Wikipedia by accident quite some time ago, and put it in my diary to look out for when it happens next.

This piece on Yahoo News goes on to explain that it’s not really a significant occurrence for real astronomers:

A full moon occurs every 29.5 days, and most years have 12. On average, an extra full moon in a month — a blue moon — occurs every 2.5 years. The last time there was a lunar double take was in May 2007. New Year’s Eve blue moons are rarer, occurring every 19 years. The last time was in 1990; the next one won’t come again until 2028.

Blue moons have no astronomical significance, said Greg Laughlin, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“`Blue moon’ is just a name in the same sense as a `hunter’s moon’ or a `harvest moon,'” Laughlin said in an e-mail.

Spoilsport.