How many posts can I wring out of one thing? Well not too many more out of my over-designed Bedside Clock app as version 2 is finally finished and has been uploaded to the Marketplace.
It was the first time I’d done a version upgrade (the new thing), and it was slightly more painful than expected as because I’d added proper multi-language support it wanted me to add multi-lingual comments to the descriptions shown in Zune too. I again used the Bing Translate website to do this, so apologies if the quality isn’t very good :-(
If you are using the app, then hopefully it will pass the testing phase and be available for download very soon.
I’m very happy with my work provided Windows Phone 7 phone, but that means my Google Nexus One Android phone I bought a while back was not being used. Hilary was still using her old Samsung not-smart phone, but with a bit of work we’re now a completely smartphone household.
The main work was to extract all her old contacts and type them into our Google Domain web interface, which means they automatically get synched once the phone was setup. Other than that, it was easy to wipe the phone of all my assorted crap and start again. How exciting!
I can’t remember ever having a referendum that I’ve been old enough to vote in, and with my postal vote I’ve now voted Yes to switching to AV rather than the current “first past the post” for general elections.
To be honest I don’t think it will make that much difference and am not 100% sure about my decision but the main factor was the ridiculous arguments of the “No” team, basically saying it would cost lots of money (it won’t) and people won’t understand it - how patronising can you get? Also you can usually be on pretty safe ground if you vote the opposite way to George Osborne.
Actually that’s the real attraction to AV in that you can vote exactly how you feel, so I can now much more easily vote “anyone but Tory” and have half a chance that my voice might be heard.
We were having a few people around on Sunday, so I decided to make some cupcakes (a new thing). Hilary also was baking and made - amongst lots of things - some chocolate muffins. Bake-off!
I think you can see from the pictures that Hilary’s muffins with the chocolate drizzle and the mini-egg on top clearly win on presentation against my “St. George’s Day” themed cupcakes. However I think I did win on taste (banana and chocolate chip) and moistness, so we’ll call it a draw :-)
Day 112 and I’m starting to forget what I’ve already done - which is obviously a problem if you’re trying to do something new each day.
Apart from the hand-built index page, there is a search on Posterous but it isn’t the greatest of features. I wanted to do some cooking tomorrow (stay tuned) and wasn’t 100% sure I hadn’t made the thing I was planning before.
Now it turns out I hadn’t, but to help the discovery process I spent a fun couple of hours doing something new and going through the site and adding tags to each post to categorize them.
I didn’t realize Posterous had this facility, and in their usual efficient way you can even do it via the original email. I’ve attempted to do that here so hopefully you can find all of these rather self-reverential posts about blogging.
I was heading out for lunch and on Brewer Street I saw something new - a paparazzi running around taking shots of a celebrity (or two?) on the other side of the road.
It was really hard to see who it was without being totally uncool and running over ourselves, so neither myself or Ross really identified the mystery person(s). Some desperate research to uncover celebrities who were currently in London, and our (well my) best guess was Jennifer Garner who was at the premiere of Arthur.
However when writing this post I’ve figured out who it was - “So You Think You Can Dance” is on the TV (after Hilary’s favorite Dr. Who) and it’s presented by Cat Deeley, who has exactly the same hair and look as our mystery celebrity. I’m 90% sure of it :-)
On the way back from Reading the timing was really bad. It was a sweltering day in London, and with Spurs playing Arsenal at White Hart Lane it was going to be a nightmare getting back to Tottenham on the tube. Therefore I decided to try an alternative way home, got off the Circle line at Euston Square and for the first time got the bus home.
I knew there was a bus that went from there to Manor House after I’d done the same in reverse a few weeks ago, and when a 29 to Wood Green turned almost immediately it took me to Manor House from where I can walk home.
It was a bit mental on the way, with Finsbury Park packed with Arsenal fans and police vans, and then the Seven Sisters Road full of Spurs fans singing on the buses on the way up to the ground.
It was a great game (3-3 draw) which hopefully kept everyone reasonably happy, although the sirens through the night suggest otherwise.
I was on a 2 day work thing in Reading, and it made sense we stayed over so a group of us headed out into the City Centre for dinner and a couple of drinks.
I’d not really seen anything much of Reading but we ended up by the canal near the Oracle Centre, which was pretty decent especially on a sunny evening. After a good meal at Giraffe some of us ended up in the Allied Arms before heading back to the delights of the Travelodge.
The final piece of my over-speced phone app v2.0 is now in place - I have a phase of the moon icon in the top corner when it’s nighttime. Another fantastically useful piece of functionality.
It was actually pretty easy to do once I’d found the algorithm online, and as ever the hard bit for me was doing the graphics. And who knew a nearly full moon was called a gibbous moon??
Just doing some final testing of the app on the train home, so just about ready to release the update. Should be done sometime in the extended holidays I hope.
Taking advantage of my new, “super-fast broadband” I decided to go mad and try watching the baseball in HD.
Usually I had to force the speed back to much slower otherwise the picture was too blocky, but now it stayed HD for just about all the time - and smoothly scaled down as appropriate.
This was much better, and the Mets even won for once!
