Archive for December, 2006
Published by kyle on 25 Dec 2006
After many unsuccessful, or just plain disastrous, flights of my new R/C Helicopter, I have finally decided that building, owning, or using a model aircraft will never be for me. I had a glider once, and it crashed spectacularly and often, always after launch, usually resulting in the central wing ribs shattering in many different and hard to fix ways. The R/C car that I have is fun, but noisy and prone to damage upon impact with, say, kerbs. Hence why I’m building a boat. The speed freak in me is still present though, and to satiate it’s inner desire, I’m going to order up the plans for an Ekranoplan. The bestest, geekiest, greatest boat of them all 
Aeroplanes, Boat, Cool things, Modelling
Published by kyle on 25 Dec 2006
A petition has been set up to try and persuade the government to rethink its position on the proposed road pricing and vehicle taxation scheme. In their proposed world, all vehicles will have a tracking device fitted, which will report back to them on where the vehicle has been and consequently how much is owed. Privacy implications notwithstanding, this is a horrendous extra tax on a system that is already in place and already rakes in £4.8 billion a year for our governments big black pot of money for spending on anything they feel like. Continue Reading »
Cars, Things that annoy Kyle, United Kingdom
Published by kyle on 22 Dec 2006
With great trepidation I turned up Glasgow Airport to speak to some nice people at BA following the mayhem at Heathrow. I ‘d previously been on the phone to several people throughout the day, all of which gave me the “Oooh, not looking good for tomorrow” treatment, followed by the “You’ll have to wait and see” answer… great. The girl at the BA desk offered either to fly us to Gatwick instead, and bus us to Heathrow, or to refund our tickets if we get a flight elsewhere. Cue BMI. 20 minutes later, and 600 quid lighter, I have two tickets to fly direct from Glasgow to Copenhagen, avoiding Heathrow completely. Tomorrow is looking good, much less stressful, much more expensive, much less pain… but hey - it’s Christmas 
Flights, Holidays, Travel
Published by kyle on 18 Dec 2006
It’s be lounging on my drive for a while now, and I’ve finally transcoded it into something useful. It’s a short clip of my Roomba going about its duties in the flat, as I tromp about in front of it trying to guide it to somewhere useful.
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Home, Technology
Published by kyle on 18 Dec 2006
It’s about time I made some progress on my model boat, and in the process of looking for some bits for it I stumbled across this homebrew electronic speed controller. It’s tempting to build it for the boat, but I get the feeling that I’d procrastinate even more and never do it. Time will tell and the results will be published here
Boat, Modelling
Published by kyle on 18 Dec 2006
That’s 2 years of old blog posts imported from my crufty old blog, courtesy of Wordpress’s RSS import mechanism. It even imported the photo links that I’d somehow written into the posts. Superb stuff
Lodge
Published by kyle on 18 Dec 2006
Friday was the day of the Network Team Meeting. Got into work as usual at around 8am (there’s nothing like getting a lift in every morning to make sure you don’t bend flexitime all the way to 10am), did the morning duties and headed over to Central Quay. Meeting ensued, lunch followed and then we were in the pub by 3pm. It’s all a blur, but I do remember drunkenly asking Fearghas many work related things, which somehow ended up in a request for lingerie freebies for his wife from Charlotte… Yep, still really enjoying NES :-p
Friends, Pub, Work
Published by kyle on 17 Dec 2006
Recently I had the misfortune to use Asdas self service checkout. After double-bagging an item due to the bag tearing, I was told “Unexpected item in bagging area. Wait for assistance”. I waited for an eternity… well, about 5 seconds - before accelerating a 3.8l bag of cat litter onto the scanning surface. The assembly bounced an impressive distance out of the casing, before settling back in after a few rebounds. The screen then informed me that the bagging area was ok and to continue scanning.
Modern technology, best dealt with brute force and ignorance.
Shopping, Technology, Things that annoy Kyle
Published by kyle on 16 Dec 2006
The other day, Andrew told me about a really cool expanding table that could be made. After a bit of hunting, it’s finally been found here
Cool things
Published by kyle on 14 Dec 2006
The Soap is an item out of Microsoft Research, but they’ve put up the information on how to build one yourself. It looks like a really useful piece of kit, and I don’t think it’ll be long before we see commercial manufacturers of this sort of thing.
Computers, Technology
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