Wrestling with Kindles again

Out running the other day, I had the thought that I should compile all those posts I wrote about Bond films, and stick them up on Amazon as a book. Not because I want to make lots of money from a blog post, but because there's probably a lot of people who'll never read my blog, but who might be looking for something to read on Amazon. It's good to be in several different channels at once, and perhaps some of them would then decide to read Diet Croydon as well.

Struggling with R

I used to have problems understanding large volumes of data. Then I installed R. Now I have more problems.

Constantly delayed gratification

Today a big box of food arrived at my office from America; I'd ordered a vast number of granola bars from a website, rather than pay twice as much to buy them in a shop in Singapore. I am both surprised and vaguely annoyed that it's so much cheaper (even after shipping) to order food in from overseas. It's a pain having to wait for Mr DHL to bring me a box, rather than go to the shops, but I'm funny about paying an extra 12% for the privilege of taking a half-hour bus ride to a shop that sells organic refuse sacks and cruelty-free drain cleaner. Either it's good old middle class delayed gratification, or I want to be annoyed by having to wait for things.

Up against it

It wasn't my body that rebelled, but my GPS. I got up this morning, put on my expensively minimalist shoes, and went downstairs for a five minute run. My GPS declined to behave itself, and although I thought I was running quite quickly, laughed in my face. It wasn't until I got back and uploaded the data to the computer that I found my GPS had gone in the opposite direction to me and wibbled around the bars opposite our apartment.

Nurse the screens

For almost a year I've been doing all my work with a Lenovo x220 laptop. It's a wonderful device: the anthesis of the glossy, beautiful design of Apple's shiny computers, it comes in a gloomy black case with a slightly rubberised lid so it doesn't slip through your hand when you're carrying it. There is little joy to be had in looking at it: it's harshly utilitarian, rather than being a pleasure to behold. And when the lid is open, the Lenovo logo is upside down. Apple fixed that about ten years ago. Did they patent having logos the right way up, too?

A visit to the Chocolate Factory

I realised halfway through this morning that I was feeling incredibly calm and relaxed. This may partly be because it's my first day in the office in a week, but I've usually got stressed fairly quickly when I get back to work.

Last night we went to bed early, in preparation for my wife's first day at her new job, so I'd had a full eight hours of sleep. I'd got up, done some stretching exercises before work and still managed to be in before eight thirty. I haven't drunk any coffee since last Monday. And I've taken my first steps to kicking my email addiction. Together, I think they've contributed a lot to me feeling better this morning than for a long time.

Drinking to forget ... Or something

I made the mistake of going for a drink after work. Well, two drinks; but enough that I was seeing double after a Deviation and a Corpse Reviver. We walked home after that and by eight I was ensconced on the sofa.

A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again: trying to make an ebook

Remember those resolutions from a few days ago? One of them was to get off my backside and finally make a version of Diet Croydon available on Amazon, for people to download to Kindles. This is partly because I've recently discovered the Lulu e-book is horrible; the version I downloaded to check was in bold italics throughout, which is about as easy to read as this sentence. Mobipocket Reader is a special sort of hell. Fortunately, Amazon provides lots of helpful documentation for a struggling part-time author to use to get their book onto their platform.

Charles Stross, in his excellent blog, has written about why the business of e-books is not as simple as you might expect. This is going to be a worked example of finding that making an e-book really isn't as simple  as you might expect.

Death Of A Dehumidifier

Today our second dehumidifier, Little Terence Westinghouse, gave up the ghost on us. He'd been a dutiful device, chugging and whirring away for two years as he sucked all the excess moisture from the air in our apartment. But perhaps it was wrong to run him continuously for two years without a break, because at 8 this morning he shuddered and then spat out the bucket he usually collects water in.

Struggling with a new Lenovo

This morning I was given a pristine cardboard box containing a brand new Lenovo x220 laptop. It's a lovely little thing, all black and utilitarian and very, very light. Even after you've plugged the little hunchback battery into the back of it, it's still exceedingly svelte.

Lied to

I've been lied to. Regularly, without the merest hint that I was being deceived.

The Smallest Kindle In The World

I'm old fashioned, at least by futuristic standards. My ipod has no touch screen, my laptop runs Windows XP, my phone is a Blackberry. Yet I didn't think it would be this way: every time a shiny new technological toy appears, I'll start salivating. But apart from the odd netbook and a few high-end camera purchases, I've managed to resist the lure of new stuff these last few years.

Garmin GPS

There's a design flaw with the Garmin 210 Forerunner: something in the mountains around Chiang Mai find them delicious, so every other time you take your GPS out there, it gets gobbled up by the trail fairies. These are the same pests that nick your sunglasses, let your tyres down, and break your rear derailleurs, and the government really should do something about them.

The Final Cut Pro is the deepest

Last night I was up until midnight, struggling to get to grips with Final Cut Pro while drinking beer. The beer wasn't the problem: it was the only way to ameliorate the pain of working with F***in' C*** P*** or whatever that software is called.

Capital punishment in 2010

The Guardian published an infographic based on statistics Amnesty International compiled on the number of death sentences and executions, by country for the last four years. It's a very pretty picture, but I felt that there was something missing; you might suggest that China gets a bad rap, but because it's much bigger than any other country except India, of course it's going to have a higher execution rate.

It's said that a liberal is just a conservative who hasn't been mugged yet; I wonder if my opposition to the death penalty is because I haven't suffered from any crimes yet where I'd want the perpetrator to be killed. I've been fortunate; of all my friends and family, I only know of one person to be affected by violent crime. I'll return to that later, but first I wanted to use data to try to examine some of my prejudices about where and why capital punishment was popular. Well, frequent might be a better word.

Business Intelligence & Analytics

Today I attended the Business Intelligence & Analytics Forum in the Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre. That's already quite a lot of ampersands. I'll try to use no more.

Waking Up To Zinio

Woken from my slumber by a purring kitten, this morning I found my chest quite sore from yesterday's burst of exercise. It remains to be seen whether this new fitness regime, touted as requiring only 12 minutes of exercise per week, does the trick or not. Then again, it's probably perfect for me as I only manage one trip to the gym per week.

What's up, Google Docs?

My brain hurts. I spent all day thinking about things and looking at things and manipulating spreadsheets, and when I got home what did I do? I created another spreadsheet.

Motorcycle emptiness

Poor old Valentino Rossi fell off his motorcycle at the weekend and fractured his tibia, so his campaign to retain his MotoGP title in 2010 is over before it really began. Lucky I didn't put a bet on him to win, although I suppose that might have been illegal in Hong Kong anyway. Unless they decided to stop competing on motorcycles around the world and instead started racing polo ponies around Happy Valley.

I'm biassed against this, partly because I'm allergic to horses and more importantly because I doubt a diminutive man on a horse would make as much noise as an 800cc motorcycle going brrrrrrraaaaaaappppp round a racecourse.

Bing Maps, Google Earth, and further misadventures with KML

Today I got to play around with some geographical data, and I felt amazed by how far we've come. Back in 2004, I was still reduced to plotting customers on a map by sticking latitude and longitude into Excel, making a scatter graph, and looking at the results, which resembled a bowl of peas that had been stuck to a map of Britain.