Remote Island

In the County Press this week, we were given a break from the usual drivel of Charlotte Hofton by the self-styled, red squirrel teaser that is Alex Dyke, an Isle of Wight Radio DJ. One of his side bar snippets contained a quick article referencing the Isle of Wight Festival and the ‘Freeloaders’ who gather the other side of the River Medina to listen to the Festival.

It appears the rumours may be true and the Isle of Wight Council are proposing to close down the public right of way by the river over the festival period. This means the Freeloaders won’t be setting up camp and allegedly trashing the place as Alex describes it. I was planning to pop down to the river this year as I hadn’t bothered to get a ticket for 2008. The atmosphere down by the river is relaxed and cheerful and I think it’s great for families too – last year in Seaclose Park I had to explain to my teenage daughter what the guy in front of us was sticking up his nose just before Muse played their set.

Alex stated that Council Tax payers’ money is used to tidy up the desecration caused by the Freeloaders. I find that a little hard to believe, the site down by the river on the Monday following the weekend Festival was clear – most people tidy up after them and there were a number of people making the site tidy and restoring it to it’s former glory as the following photo proves.

As for Freeloaders, I wonder if Alex forked out from his own pocket for his ticket this year.

If I could ever book a Fantasy Festival, it would probably look something similar to last year’s splendid effort by Solo. Headliners included The Prodigy on Friday Night, Foo Fighters on Saturday, and Coldplay rounding up events nicely on Sunday evening. News on the 2007 festival has been rather scarce of late. Around this time of year we usually have an initial announcement of who is going to attend. So, to get the ball rolling, here are my three headliner predictions. This goes on the usual IoW festival theme of a dancey Friday night, a rock fuelled Saturday evening, and a more mainstream event on Sunday to finish.

Fri: Kylie (doubtful), Leftfield - I really struggled for a dance act here, it’s difficult to find something better than the Prodigy, although Kylie is a rather obtuse choice compare to those guys
Sat: Muse, Red Hot Chili Peppers - these guys have to come to the Isle of Wight at some stage.
Sun: Snow Patrol - please, please, back again for the 2nd time, did an absolutely splendid job first time round so I was told.

Who would you want to see?

Before Sunday of last week, I was the owner of a wonderful Sony Ericsson K750i phone.  I would say it was the best phone I had ever owned – it was a great unit, perfectly sized, with a decent camera bundled in.  Shame it wasn’t waterproof.  It didn’t make it through the ‘E’ cycle of our washing machine over the weekend.  I don’t have insurance for the phone, I’m on a contract with 3 months left and I don’t have a phone to carry me through to the end of the contract.  Until my daughter found an old Sony Ericsson T68i of mine that is.

I’m starting to like going back to the ‘retro’ side of things.  It’s even prompted me to go looking for a Sony Z7 on eBay (I owned a Z5 previously).  Too many times in my life I’ve gone chasing after the latest and greatest gadget.  I’ve had PDAs, Treos, Graphics Cards, Processors, and Camera Phones and I’ve spent far too much time and money trying to get a new toy.  I use a phone for making the occasional call and receiving an SMS now and again.  I think I could do without the camera, web browser, video camera, mp3 player etc built into one unit.  I’m going back to basics and I’ll use a phone for what it was designed for.  Making and receiving calls.  That E61 will have to wait for now

The cartoon strip ‘Dilbert’ never fails to amuse me. Scott Adams has just started a series about the PHB employing a more senior member of staff, and continues to patronise him not understanding that he is bringing a great deal of experience into the team. Today’s strip was typical, “Mature Employee – I was a chip designer in my old job. PHB – Really? Chocolate or Poker?”. This isn’t far from the truth in organisations today from what I’ve read on the ‘net lately. On the BBC News website a week or two back, there was a piece about the impending doom or crisis for the UK IT job market. It seems that we don’t have enough skilled people out there to fill the vacant positions. But reading many comments on the message boards that accompanied news article, it appears that ageism is prevalent throughout the UK IT industry.

I’ve decided to move away from the Rails powered blog engine Typo. I’ve been happy with Typo, it’s had some teething problems, but I wanted to give Wordpress a go. So far, the experience has been a great deal richer from an ‘bloggers’ point of view. Only time will tell.

I’ve been running Ubuntu Linux for some time now. It’s great for a development environment if you can’t afford one of those shiny MacBook Pros. I’ve had one BSOD on my Dell box this week - I’ve never had a crash in the past 5 months running Ubuntu.

The thing that put me off Linux in the past was the support for wireless. I can understand why it’s difficult to support such a thing with different chipsets and firmware. It seems in Ubuntu 6.06, this problem went away. I was running a WMP54G v4.1 card (the one with the Ralink RT2561/RT61 chipset) with no problems using a native driver. However, when I went to test Edgy (6.10), my card was no longer recognized and it tried to force me to use ndiswrapper - this doesn’t seem to work using this particular version of the card.

After reading some threads on the Ubuntu forums, it appears that I’m not alone and it bought to light something I didn’t know. Dapper (6.06) appears to be the stable release, Edgy (6.10) is more of a bleeding ‘edge’ release that contains lots of software that may be in a ‘beta’ state.

I’m going to roll back to using Dapper this weekend and leave Edgy alone for a while. I can live with a slightly slower boot up time for now.

After a hard days drive back from meetings on the mainland, I visited my local Sainsburys in Newport to stock on the essential items such as milk and bread, plus a few treats for the wife. When I came to the checkout, I was offered by the assistant to pack my bags, which I always answer no (why can’t you remember that?). When it came to paying, the assistant told me that I needed to swipe my own Nectar card (awards cards for those who don’t know) and then my debit card. Now I usually use this time to catch up packing my own bags whilst my debit card goes through the system, printing of the receipt etc. but now I don’t have this time because I now have two things to worry about – scanning my Nectar card (should I really bother doing that next time I ask myself? Sainburys probably don’t want to know my spending habits anyway) and entering my card, removing it from the machine because it didn’t work first time, entering my pin whilst still worrying about the unpacked shopping and the queue of people behind? I only had three bags of shopping but felt the eyes of customers on the back of my skull whilst I carried on catching up packing my shopping with them waiting.

Sainburys has taken away (in my opinion) one of the important iterations between itself and the customer. Why try to fix something when it’s not broken in the first place? It doesn’t speed things up at the checkout, it only slows things down and gets the customer into a flustered mess. Fools.

(rant over)