Pither.com

I could write lots about the madness of the recent complaint explosion against Russell Brand and Jonathon Ross, but thankfully several other people have done it for me.

I certainly think it would be interesting if Ofcom went with Charlie Brooker's suggestion of a counter-complaint system.

Ubuntu released Intrepid Ibex earlier this afternoon, just as scheduled. It comes with lots of new features. While new versions of all the key software is certainly good, a convenient encrypted directory is handy and the VM builder is very convenient, it's actually a couple of very small additions that I'm enjoying the most.

Hamster

Until I switched to Intrepid and discovered this excellent application about a month ago I had been tracking my time with GnoTime. This worked, but it has lots of options that I really don't need, the interface is clunky and the provided reports just don't provide what I want.

So for the last month I've been tracking my time with Hamster, and it's been a very welcome change. It lives quietly in a panel at the side of my desktop, I can jump to it with a hot key and quickly type a new description and there I am, tracked. Hamster has a lovely report screen with plenty of information and even graphs. Which aren't actually very useful! However there is also a "Generate Report" button which creates a simple HTML table document with all the viewed data in it. Nice and easy to copy/paste/convert to a spreadsheet and process.

Tasque

This is following the same theme of a small, dedicated application that just does one thing in a very simple way. In this case it's managing to-do lists.

Tasque in Intrepid does install and does work and provides a number of storage locations for your to-do data. However the one that I chose to use - Evolution (due to a vaguely recent to-do listing attempt already being based there), is not currently working!

Thankfully it didn't take much to rebuild evolution-sharp with a later version and then update the requirements in tasque and rebuild that too.

So now I'm happily tracking the time I'm spending filling up my to-do list!

Sort of! It boots most of the time (via HaRET) and produces a desktop with some menus that can be navigated and applications that can be launched. The controls on the front of the phone seem to do useful things and the slide out keyboard works . The touchscreen however is far from right with touches causing random things to happen!

There's also the minor point that it can't actually make calls, send SMSs or connect to the Internet! It does look pretty though!

It's also significantly faster to interact with than the default Windows OS of the phone.

You can get Android for the HTC Kaiser/T-Mobile MDA-III. There is also a very long xda-developers thread about it. It's still using an early version of Android and there are numerous extra bits that need to be sorted out to port it to the phone I have, but it looks very hopeful for a few months time.

And we don't intend to do it again for a very long while!

Two interesting things we've learnt...

• when a van rental company suggests a van "big enough for a three bed house", get a bigger one if you intend to move from a two bed house.
• if you visit a new house the afternoon before completion and the builder still has teams (must have been 10-20 people) working on it, the chances of it being finished the following day are slim.

We got confirmation from our solicitor that we had legally completed at about 11:30am. The builders (Bellway) weren't ready to give us our keys until about 4pm!

Needless to say, this meant we were still moving late into the evening (thank you very much to all our helpers!). Thankfully Bellway hadn't sold Liz's house (which we part exchanged) yet, so they were happy for us to hold on to the keys until the following day. Which also allowed us to finish cleaning there.

Onto our new house...

So far our snag list is 115 items long! About 40% of them are paint related and the builders concluded that there were enough bad bits that it would be easiest just to entirely repaint the inside of the house!

The repaint started around the middle of last week with them patching and filling tens of dents, holes and missing bits throughout the house. Since then they've painted all the ceilings (some twice to get a good covering), all the walls and most of the woodwork! They finished this morning.

Some other bits, like the gap for the washing machine being blocked by spare bits of wood, missing turf, no garden shed and a lack of external cabling for a BT line (it took them over a week to fix that!!) have also been sorted out. But we still have a list of well over 50 snags awaiting attention! Hopefully now the painters are done, they will get on with some of the others!

It was over a year ago that we put down the first holding deposit for a new home. At that point is was nothing more than a fenced off muddy bit at the back of the development.

Since then we've watched it grow steadily, if rather slowly...

July 2007:

September 2007:

October 2007:

February 2008:

March 2008:

April 2008:

June 2008:

July 2008 (less than 4 weeks to completion):

It was about this time that the builders (Bellway) contacted us and said that they wanted to fix a completion date for 31st July.

We were very excited and pleased to finally know when we would be moving. Then we thought about it a bit. A few days later we phoned them back and asked them if they were sure! Apparently they were, despite the apparent lack of windows and such. So we've been busy booking vans, packing and telling people our new address. :-)

When we saw it last weekend (1.5 weeks before the completion date set by the builder) it was still missing:-

• some bits of the double height bay
• kitchen wall units and appliances
• paint
• flooring (except partial tiling in the kitchen)
• patio
• turf
• garden gate, fence and shed
• a gas connection
• a vent on the boiler
• an outside tap
• some guttering
• probably other things that we couldn't tell as we couldn't get in to really see!

The builders assure us they will be ready, yet when arranging our pre-occupancy briefing today they asked if we could do it on the day we complete (they are normally done 7-10 days before!). Then they went on to enquire whether we were planning on staying the night on the day of completion!!

We're not worried, no, not at all!

It would appear that the sleepless nights, stress and hard work haven't taught Liz and me anything!

I'm proud (and scared, again) to announce that Liz and I are expecting our second baby around the middle of January. :-)

The first scan was a couple of weeks ago and everything seems to be fine. Although I think the baby's going to be another stubborn one. After quite a few minutes and various approaches to getting the baby into the right position to be seen, we got sent off to have some sugar and take a walk around the hospital! Thankfully that did do the trick, at least just about for long enough to get the information required!

With my RX8 lease ending I had to find myself a new car. I actually found this quite tricky, given our list of requirements...

• automatic, so that Liz could use it to learn
• manual look-a-like, so I can pretend I'm not driving an automatic!
• five doors, for easy access with Edward and to the boot for all of his stuff
• reasonable size boot, for all of Edward's stuff
• within budget
• "nice", to drive and look at
• keyless/hands free entry and driving

After much browsing and pondering I got around to test driving a couple of cars.

First was the Toyota Auris, which was OK but nothing exciting. The automatic/manual gearbox also wasn't great, generally giving rough changes, although they could be smoothed out a bit once you knew when they were coming.

Second was the Honda Civic. This was much more impressive - fantastic looking dashboard, amazing internal space, although fairly small back doors. Sadly still fairly rough gear changes (although better than the Auris). I couldn't decide if I like the external look either.

After finally deciding to go for the Civic, I found that it didn't actually meet the budget requirement. Generally speaking most cars that sell for about 20k can be leased for about £300/month (or hopefully slightly less). But the best I could find the Civic for was around £350/month. :-(

So back to the drawing board.

At this point I decided to drop my desire to have a (pretend) manual gearbox, as I didn't really need it and it narrowed the options a lot. Having looked at the huge key that you get with the Auris to provide hands free entry I also gave up on my hope of avoiding keys (as a lump the size of the Auris key wouldn't fit anywhere more convenient than a normal key anyway).

After some more browsing, pondering and running out of time, I test drove a Toyota Prius.

This had the advantage of not only being leasable at quite a good price (£260/month) but also coming with the promise of saving on fuel bills (being a hybrid and all). It's not perfect on looks, but at least it does come with a touch screen display that shows which engine you're using (petrol or electric)!

It's also stupidly easy to drive. It literally has two gears, forwards and reverse (hmm, and parked), it doesn't even have 1st/2nd like most automatics. Plus as a bonus the "key" is actually a small lump that you insert into the dashboard before pressing the on switch. Not quite hands free, but a good step in the right direction.

So with an acceptable choice and no more time to look, I now have a shiny Toyota Prius...