Week of 5th March, 2007

Last Week

Next Week

Monday, 5th March

Back to Daynotes


Tuesday, 6th March

Back to Daynotes


Wednesday, 7th March

Back to Daynotes


Thursday, 8th March

The last 2 days of the fortnight were just as quiet - nothing on the shelves at day's end. Even though I did the evening line feed recordings, as well as ingesting them for repeat.

But the toothache has kicked back in. I think the temporary filling has started to come out. And over-the-counter painkillers don't touch it.

Back to Daynotes


Friday, 9th March

An emergency appointment to redo the temporary filling isn't available before Monday, so I'll be visiting the dentist again. No chance of getting the root canal done before the already made appointment, they're way too busy. Must see if I can get stronger painkillers from a pharmacy, the over-the-counter variety aren't touching the toothache.

After sorting that, Jane prevailed upon me to make new Youth Club membership card blanks, using Katy's old card as a template. That sample card is 2 pieces of paper, cut to size, back-to-back, with a passport size photo, and the whole laminated for reliability.

I'd already purchased credit-card-sized laminating pouches, so I started experimenting in Word. Set up a table, with cells of fixed size equal to the desired membership card size (allowing for a margin around the paper for the laminator to work), type the text into one cell, and copy-and-paste. That worked for the face.

The back was a bit more difficult. It was desired to have a precis of the club rules here, so I set up an identical table, and typed the rules as a numbered list, in 7 point Times Roman - small, but legible. Trouble was, when you copy-and-paste such a list into the next cell, Word updates the bullet numbers. It took a while, but I eventually discovered (after much muttering of things like, "D*mn*d Micro$oft software") that you need to click at the start of the pasted section, do 'Format|Bullets and Numbering|', select your numbering style-of-choice, and click 'Restart numbering'. For each pasted copy.

After much fiddling to get the two sides registered, I could print up a batch of double-sided blanks on the Brother Laser, using coloured paper. It was then simple to laminate up a photo and a blank card (cut from the 8-up sheet), suitably filled in. And very nice it looks, too.

The laminating process is simple enough that it could be done at the Youth Club. Jane knows how to do it. So all I'll have to do is update the membership lists in timely fashion - which is a quick type into an Access database.

The next pass at this will use slightly larger laminating pouches - everything is a little cramped.

Aardman Animations have produced a 40x5 minute episode series, featuring one of the characters from Wallace and Gromit's "A Close Shave" - namely and to wit, Shaun the Sheep. The BBC is airing these, 2 episodes a day, back-to-back, Monday to Friday, and I'm recording them. The DVD is expected in July, according to Play, and I will get it when it's released.

And "Airwolf" Season 2 DVDs are on their way. As is "Babylon 5 Scripts, Vol 10"

At the start of the year, I commented about the "Calvin and Hobbes" cartoon strip, and the artist, Bill Watterson, having taken 2 sabbaticals from drawing the strip during it's 11 year run. I want to locate the strips that UComics repeated to fill the gap, but I don't fancy doing an optical grep through several years of strips. Comes now, from another forum, a programme called Hunter, which will examine a folder hierarchy of your choice, and present a listing of the contents, with Filesize and CRC32 for each file. The programme author claims that this combination of file metadata shows a false collision rate of about 1 in 30,000 - that is about every 30,000 comparisons, it will find a match that actually isn't. 11 years of Calvin strips amounts to about 4,000 files, so there shouldn't be a false positive. Wait a minute...

Nope. It found duplicate files, but nothing systematic about them, and certainly not enough (or in the right places) to be repeats to fill the hiatus. Probably, they changed the putative date inside the strip, which would make it fail to match on CRC32.  

Back to Daynotes


Saturday, 10th March

The only painkillers that will calm this toothache are paracetamol 500mg + codeine 64mg, 2 at a time, 4 times daily, which I got from a local prarmacy - they aren't on open sale, you need a pharmacist to provide.

"Babylon 5 Scripts, Vol 10" arrived this morning, left on the doorstep by Postie - the box is too big to fit through the letterbox.

Back to Daynotes


Sunday, 11th March

We have visiting students again - 3 Norwegian girls, for a week.

Jane didn't get the new memberships for the Youth Club sorted on Friday, so I did them today. Only 3 cards prepared - there are more new members, I gather, but their application forms are with other people.

Last Week

Back to Daynotes

Next Week