Ich liebe es

Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 22nd March, 2006 @ 23:41

I'm really letting this whole blogging thing slip this month, this being the third post and we're in the third week of the month. Must do better next month.

I've been pretty busy if that's a good excuse. Went into London on Friday and Richard showed me where all the wires go and which knobs to turn and buttons to press to operate two set top boxes, a DV deck and a laptop on the projector for Monday's demo day. I was pleased to see my special cable was still working. For some reason the Amino STB doesn't output a ground with it's video so I took a short length of speaker cable, removed the sheath and wrapped it around one end of a double-phono back-to-back connector so it could pick up the ground from the audio line. Unfortunately I couldn't find any sellotape, so a sticky label had to suffice. Fortunately found a little tape later to make it more permanent.

So yes, our IPTV system (at least the demonstration version) is held together with sticky tape. Oh, and we needed some assistance to make it more reliable, so of course we called on our friends at Cisco to see how we could leverage the power of the network, now. And they helpfully provided one of their manuals for us to place on top of the connection when it's in use to keep the image nice and clear. Which is about as much use as has ever been made of that particular tome.

Friday night was spent out in Bedford with Ally, and actually appreciating that the town centre isn't too bad a place on a Friday night. Many different kinds of beer at The Wellington made a good start till 11pm, then to some Australian bar that wasn't massively frequented, which suited us, and that closed at 1am. Stevie need snacks, but the Caribbean food stall that had set itself up over the street didn't look too appealing. Assuming Subway would be shut we wandering into Tesco Value Subway, or rather The Sandwich, for something that was actually similar in price to the real thing, yet similar in quality to the expectation created by the value brand.

Up early (for me) on Monday morning and down to Stratford to perform my very first demo day (because Richard was gallivanting about Scotland), which I thought went pretty well considering various factors. First off, VoD wasn't working, after lots of playing about and with a little help from George it was up and running, then as soon as I got to it in the demo, it wasn't feeling quite so athletic. I was also more nervous than I was expecting and rushed a little bit and lost my thread once or twice. But all together I thought it was a pretty convincing performance and nothing a bit of practice couldn't fix. The main thing (and I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong) is that I managed to speak up enough so everyone could hear and didn't mumble too much. A definite improvement on my former self.

Monday afternoon/early evening involved looking at and hearing about some really cool technology that I'm really excited about the potential of, but don't think I should be talking about here for now.

And since then I've been remotely assisting Richard in getting a RegenTV head end working in our project partner's office up in Scotland. It's been going pretty well really. Some pretty modern SATA hardware meant that the stock Debian Sarge CD wasn't able to do it's job, so I got Richard to install Ubuntu instead which behaved much better, despite his instance on calling it Umbungo Linux.

Talking of Linux, I'm sure you've often seen a crashed out Windows display in public places, well how about this one...

And along with the new company and all that's been happening there, and being single again, etc, stuff I haven't written about here, but that everyone knows now anyway, I made a little self-image change too...

It's got past the prickly, irritating stage, which is good. I think I like it, so it might be permanent. Saw a pic from a couple of weeks before when I was clean shaven and in need of a hair cut. It's pretty bloomin' different!