Month: May 2008

The oval office

Had a lovely day in London village.

Walked from Herne Hill to Kennington Oval (in 55 minutes), met up with Mike Jeremiah on the occasion of his 40th birthday.

Had lunch: chicken and mushroom pie and chips.

General geekery, followed by drink and dinner (curry) with lovely Rachel Foulds then walked back to Herne Hill in 40 minutes.

We had dinner at a restaurant at Kennington called Gandhi … it may or may not have had a definite article. Mike kept singing a song from Not The Nine O’Clock News off the telly. From about twenty years ago.

What a lovely, lovely day.

Street cuddle

On the way back to Herne Hill, at Brixton town I got stopped by a black guy asking for 70p for the bus. Seventy pence became two pounds became … well, he kept his palm open as I shovelled money into it.

“How much is a single fare?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Is it a bank holiday on Monday?” he asked again.

What is this Twenty Questions?!

I explained that I was from Scotland and wasn’t certain about the answers to these London-centric questions.

He then gave me a hug and his afro hairstyle brushed my face. It was really soft, and smelled quite nice.

He was going to Clapham Junction, he claimed. And then lifted his shirt to show me his belt. “Am I too thin?” he asked me.

I wasn’t sure that was an issue in the Clapham region.

Sadly I didn’t meet anyone else on the rest of my walk home.

Healthy video games … an idea

So here’s my idea for video games, right.

You know some applications have a dongle, a bit of hardware like a USB drive, that has to be plugged into the PC before the software will run. Well, my idea is to have one of these for computer games.

But it’s not just any ordinary, run-of-the-mill dongle. This one is a pedometer, which records how much exercise you do and has a direct affect on the health of your computer game character.

So if you walk and run about all day: you have a fit and healthy character who can run and jump and climb trees.

On the other hand, if you sit on the sofa all day and the furthest you travel is to the front door to pay the pizza delivery man then you may be the only character in Call of Duty 4 with an inhaler and a username like wH33zieBu993r.

Obviously there would have to be some kind of biometrics involved to make sure you weren’t cheating, that it was you wearing the pedometer and that you hadn’t just attached it to the dog’s collar.

That’s my idea. You can use if it you like.

XP Tweak Guide and AVG

Nice to see that the excellent TweakGuides Tweaking Companions for Windows XP and Vista by Koroush Ghazi have been updated. Included in the update is advice on installing AVG Free 8.0 (antivirus software).

What’s not included is the switch to ensure that LinkScanner isn’t installed.

Having used AVG for a couple of weeks, I’ve found it to be a good upgrade from AVG Free 7.5, it’s just a shame that there is no longer an option to disable alerts about disabled components.

If I have decided to switch off Resident Shield, for example, I don’t want to see an error icon in the notification area (system tray) saying that one of the components isn’t configured correctly. That was one feature that I really liked about version 7.5 that’s sadly been removed from 8.0.