Pavement marking

I spotted a couple of guys marking up the pavements around our office today. Presumably the road and pavements are going to be dug up and these guys mark all the subsurface cables and drains. The whole thing looked very cool. As though the pavement had been attacked by mathematically inclined graffiti artists. Apparently the colours represent the type and location of subsurface structures: blue for water, yellow for gas, red for electric. I have no idea what the orange or green are used for.

Invisio G5

I have a new bluetooth headset, kindly donated by Vic who doesn't really like it that much. The manual is here, it's a complicated little beast.

Being a statue is not a real job

I run past the London Eye a few times a week. In the summer there's an avenue of people being statues between the Eye and Waterloo Bridge. Fair enough, some are quite believable and the kids seem to enjoy the surprise. The other day though I spotted a new one. A chap, oldish, badly spray painted silver with a baseball cap on and sat down on a black plastic chair, one of those cheap chairs you see stacked at the back of a village hall with buckled legs. Is being a statue just too demanding for him? How many real statues on plastic chairs are there in the world? Perhaps he should consider a less active job, like being a cadaver perhaps? I have taken to shouting 'get a real job' as I run past.

Za's first show

Zara took part in her first show this weekend when she took part in the Stevenage Showing Show. It poured with rain but that didn't stop her grinning from ear to ear for the whole time in the ring.

Etymotic 6i Isolator Earphones

I took possession of a set of these headphones this week. Once you work out how to fit them into your ear - tip, wet them and slide them in until they feel a little uncomfortable, then tug your earlobe, seems to do the trick for me - the sound is amazing. And best of all they're isolating, so on the tube in the morning I can't hear anything other than the music and the people I am standing next to can't hear a thing either. If there's one down side it's that they fit too snugly. I keep missing phone calls when I have them in, but it's worth it for the quality of the sound.

20/20 World Cup Winner's Curry

A comfortable victory for Morris in the 20/20 World Cup Fantasy Competition was celebrated last night at Rajmoni on Upper St with the presentation of the Desmond Dekker Memorial Cup. However tragedy struck soon after with Morris accidentally breaking the cup in half as he enthusiastically put it down on the table. All's well though and after the application of some super glue the cup is once again back in one piece.

Getting pidgin working with gtalk

After installing version 2.2.2 of pidgin I couldn't connect to gtalk with it, due I believe to firewall restrictions here at work. I kept getting a disconnected error. Changing the following advanced properties sorted it for me.

Change the port to 80
Set the doman to talk.l.google.com