Furthermore: July 06

July 30, 2006

Running when it’s hot

Huh, having just read this Making Light thread on heat stress on Friday, I went out for a run on Saturday morning about 8am (thinking it wouldn’t be too hot) and I didn’t drink enough water before I went, and I ended up with what I’d diagnose as mild heat exhaustion.

Fortunately I realised I didn’t feel quite right and cut the run short, but it left me kind of vulnerable for the rest of the day. In the late afternoon, I mowed the lawn and felt fine, but when I tried to do a bit of work in the garage after that, I started feeling really stressed, and making stupid mistakes. Again, fortunately I realised something was wrong, and went to lie down and drink more water till I felt better, but it was amazing how quickly I went from fine to really-not-right-at-all.

Today the weather is cooler, but take heed from my lesson kids: be careful if you are running (or otherwise exerting yourselves) in the sun.

July 28, 2006

Up and Running

I seem to be fixed now for running, all being well. I saw Dr Speed again and she was happy, and my physio says she’ll see me one more time in 6 weeks or so, unless I have any more problems.

The main things I’ve changed to fix the PFS are:

• exercises to strengthen the inner quads


• exercises to strengthen the butt muscles


• hamstring stretches - although I still seem to be very tight there


• motion control shoes - I’m using Saucony Grid Stabil now

So far I’ve only noticed minor twinges, which is probably just me being hyper-sensitive to anything in the right knee. I have felt a little bit of ITB tension, so I’ve been given a stretch for them too. Have to see how that goes.

I just added a short run in the week, as well as a weekend run. I’ll just build up the times gradually, then add another one in the week if all goes well.

July 22, 2006

Cambridge Galleria

Went into town this morning to help out with the No2id stall. We actually had a lot of people there today so I went out into the market square to hand out leaflets - I think I got through a hundred or more over the hour and a half or so I was there.

After that, I met up with H and the girls and we decided to try somewhere new for lunch. So we went to Galleria on Bridge Street. It was really good - H had a salad (very tasty but a bit on the small side), I had a steak, which was very tasty, and done to perfection. They were quite happy to do pasta and tomato sauce for L and E and the restaurant was nice and cool, given it was pretty hot outside. I think we’ll go back with just me and H and try out the terrace by the river.

July 18, 2006

Google Talks

As if surfing the web didn’t already consume enough of my time, I’ve now discovered the online Google tech talks (on Google video). So far I’ve seen Doug Lenat talking about Cyc (now there’s a long-term AI project). I should have skimmed more of it, but you never knew when he was going to say something very interesting - the stuff about using Cyc to generate fragments of English then feed those to Google to generate more knowledge for the Cyc ontology; the large number of special purpose reasoners within Cyc (Lenat: if we have to fall back on the general theorem prover then we’re doing something wrong); and the presumably funding-related quest to make Cyc think about terrorist plots and attack and defence plans.

The other one I saw was Seth Godin’s All Marketers are Liars. Godin says something like “great technology gives you a chance at marketing”, which I thought was quite insightful. There’s quite a bit of good stuff in this one too - particularly where he talks about the “new” model of attracting an audience to your core product, then getting permission from them to tell them about something new, and then letting them spread the word because your product is so remarkable (a purple cow, as Seth would put it). Of course, first you have to catch your purple cow.

July 10, 2006

Palm to Phone - the end of an era

I’ve been using a Palm 3c for about 5 years now, and it’s been a really useful little machine. Lately though I’ve found that I’m using pretty much only as an address book so I find myself with the Palm in one hand and the phone in the other, typing in the number from the Palm to dial on the phone. This is clearly insane behaviour: the phone has a perfectly good address book, but I’ve been holding onto the Palm for some reason.

Anyway, once I looked into what it would take to move the data across, it wasn’t too hard. Fiddly, yes, but not difficult. With the thought that there might be someone else out there who needs to move from Palm to Sony Ericsson mobile, here’s what I did:

• Export all addresses from the Palm desktop app as vCard format. I exported them a category at a time, because I thought I might not want to put all of them onto the phone.


• Just to be on the safe side, I also exported everything as CSV, and since I was going to stop using the Palm, exported all my memos too. I haven’t thought of a good way to import them to the phone yet, but I don’t use them that much, so it may not matter.


• Install the Sony Ericsson phone sync application for Windows. For address purposes, it syncs with Outlook (which I don’t use), or the Windows Address Book, which I didn’t realise existed. If you are like me, just go to Start: Run… and type “wab.exe” in there.



• Now you have to import the vCard files. Before you start though, if you have addresses you don’t want to sync to the phone, you can create either a separate folder, or a separate identity and import them to there. When you set up the sync it asks which identity and folder you want to use, so you can exclude rarely used stuff that way.


• If you exported separate categories, you can create groups in WAB to import them into. Select the group you want before you start importing, and all the imported vCards will be added to that group.

When you import, for some reason WAB makes you press enter for each new card. Very annoying, but unless you have thousands of entries, not a huge problem. I also found that I couldn’t import multiple cards with the same person’s name. If that’s a problem for you I suggest you disambiguate the names either in the Palm desktop, or by just editing the vCard file - it’s plain text.

Now sync the phone with WAB and you’re done.

July 7, 2006

Importing from exported Livejournal XML

I recently wanted to move LiveJournals, for various reasons. So naturally I thought it would be good to take my old LJ posts with me to the new LJ. This turns out not to be as easy as I thought.

You can export entries, a month at a time, from the Export Journal page. However, there’s no easy way to re-import them into another LJ. I admit I haven’t looked into downloadable clients, so that might be another way to do it. In my case though, all I wanted was just to re-import the exported monthly archives as single entries.

The problem here is that you can export either as CSV, or as XML. You could write a program (or quite possibly an Excel spreadsheet) to turn the former into formatted text, but I thought I’d have a go at a simple stylesheet to turn the XML back into simple HTML I could paste into the LJ rich text editor.

Turns out to be quite easy, with even my limited XSL skillz:

• Download my simple Livejournal XML to HTML stylesheet - just use “Save Link As…”


• Export your journal, a month at a time, to XML. For each page, use File: Save Page As… to save the XML to the same folder as you put the stylesheet in.


• Now, open the XML file in a text editor, such as Notepad, and insert the following line as the second line in the file. So, after this line
  

  &lt?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt

  
  

  insert this:

  
  

  &lt?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="lj.xsl"?&gt

  
  
  


• Now save the exported XML, and re-open it in a browser - just double-clicking should work. You should see a very plain HTML rendition of all the entries. You can just cut and paste this straight into the LJ rich text editor.


• If you want to tweak the layout, have a look at the lj.xsl. I’ve left a comment about how to re-order the entries, and I’ve commented out some additional tags in the XML (mood, music etc) that you might want to pull in. Just delete the &lt!– and –&gt to uncomment the line.

Hopefully that will work for you. If not, drop me an email or leave a comment and I’ll try to help you if I can.

Reporting Faults to Cambs County Council

I’m quite impressed by this - I contacted Cambs CC on Wednesday to report that there was a big dip in the road near where I live. I used their online fault reporting service.

Thursday lunchtime they phoned me at work to report that they’d filled in the dip and passed the problem onto Anglian Water to check out the sewers beneath the road there. They weren’t bluffing either - I checked on the way home and the road has been patched.

July 5, 2006

Cafe Adriatic, Cambridge

Mrs F and I had a parents’ evening at L’s school last night - she starts reception in September. Didn’t learn much that we didn’t know already from the nursery class. The teacher seems good though. Since we had to get Jay to babysit for us so we could go to that, we decided we’d make night of it, and went on to Cafe Adriatic on Mill Road. The food was very good - I had a smoked tuna salad to start, and then linguine with mussels and prawns. Mrs F had a great starter - chicken livers and goats cheese salad, but her main was a rather limp pizza. Fortunately, they replaced it without demur so overall we left very satisfied with the food and service.

Do I recommend it. It’s not the cheapest, but it’s not outrageously expensive either. Don’t have the pizza though - Jay thought they only did them still because there are still customers coming who used to go when it was Pasta Fresca.