Sony can work together

January 21st, 2007

Finally got round to seeing the ‘new’ (Sony Pictures) Bond film, Casino Royale, last night. It was pretty good, although I couldn’t help thinking that when it gets released on DVD, it’ll make a great drinking game. Drink every time a Sony product makes it’s way into a scene, and you’ll have a fun evening.

Not just in the most obvious ways, either: like every character in the film having a Sony Ericsson phone, or all computers being Vaio laptops, or pictures taken with Sony digital cameras. Even opportunities you think they might have missed were used for a bit of Sony product placement – like security guards recording CCTV footage onto Sony-branded blank CD media.

I guess we should be impressed – nice to see that the different bits of Sony can work together!

Posted in tech | 2 Comments »

Finding out what young people want

January 20th, 2007

I’ve been having a look through some results of the Hampshire LPSA survey conducted at the end of last year. LPSA stands for ‘Local Public Service Agreement‘, and are voluntary agreements negotiated between a local authority – in this case, Hampshire County Council, and the Government. The idea is to improve local public services by focusing on targeted outcomes from Government.

In order to measure progress on the targets in these agreements, Hampshire County Council gets MORI to conduct surveys and research. A lot of this is public information, available on the web, which makes it very useful to charities like us, who can’t afford to carry out such large scale research.

It means that not only do we get the raw statistics, but also the benefit of statistical analysis included with the published figures. Reports often also include comparisons with surveys conducted by MORI for other authorities in recent years, “intended to act as a context in which to place findings for Hampshire and to aid in the interpretation of results”. This makes them a valuable resource when developing and evaluating the projects we provide for our local community.

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Making the interface that works best for you

January 18th, 2007

I’ve mentioned several times before how easy Visual Studio makes it to knock up mobile applications. This is one of my favourite aspects of Windows Mobile. Why put up with an interface that doesn’t work for you? If you’ve got a spare hour, make a customized interface that gets your phone to work in way that suits you better. You can create a new interface (a ‘form’) without knowing any code – just drag-and-drop to put buttons, pictures and text where you want them. Then fill in the empty methods to get the buttons to do stuff – most of the core applications expose an API that let you drive them from your own forms.

In this post, I’ll go through an example – what I didn’t like about the WM interface, why it didn’t work well for me, and how I hacked together a new interface this evening.

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Wii is region-locked

January 16th, 2007

My copy of Elebits for the Wii arrived today. I’ve been looking forward to it arriving for ages, as it looks amazing. But, it doesn’t work.

I ordered it from MovieTyme, and what I didn’t realise is that Wii’s are region-locked and cannot play imported games. 🙁

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I need to learn First Aid

January 14th, 2007

Scary moment this evening – Grace choked on a banana.

She’s fine now, although I guess that’s kinda obvious. If she wasn’t, writing a blog post about it wouldn’t have been high on my list of priorities!

I’d given her a banana, a big chunk of which she shoved in her gob and swallowed without chewing. It got stuck, and she couldn’t breathe. She panicked: tried to spit it out but couldn’t; tried to cry but couldn’t.

We managed to get it free by holding her pointing downwards. After what felt like a lifetime (but was probably only a few seconds) out came a solid lump of unchewed banana.

The little monster aged me 20 years tonight! A basic First Aid and Resuscitation course was included in the antenatal classes we went on before she was born, but to be honest, I didn’t feel all that confident or in control when it came to it this evening – that 40 minute introduction a couple of years ago felt very distant.

So I’m thinking that I need to learn what to do if this happens again. St John Ambulance run a course which looks like the sort of thing that I want, but not near me. I’ll keep looking…

Posted in misc | 4 Comments »

How to drive a minibus

January 11th, 2007

I spent about three hours this morning doing the first half of my MiDAS refresher training. Today was theory – next week will be the practical.

I occasionally drive the minibuses for some of the youth activities that we run in SYA (although this has become increasingly less frequent as we have grown… which is a shame, really).

I wont reproduce the training here, but I will pick out some of the bits that I found interesting…

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It’s possible to sound too sincere

January 11th, 2007

I’ve mentioned before that I used to work as a volunteer for Chris Huhne – my local MP. So I was pleased to see this story:

Chris Huhne shortlisted for top award:

Eastleigh MP Chris Huhne has been shortlisted for the Opposition Politician of the Year award in the 2007 Channel 4 Political awards.

This is the top award exclusively for Opposition politicians at the network’s annual political prize-giving…

…MPs will soon receive their ballot papers for a secret ballot of all MPs conducted by the Electoral Reform Society.

Well done, Chris – and good luck.

But, it was the rest of the story that really caught my eye.

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Maternity Leave in small businesses

January 10th, 2007

In April 2007, changes made in the Employment Rights Act 1996 start taking effect, which improve the entitlements for employees who become pregnant. I’ve been reading a bit about what these entitlements will become.

I started by reading up on what expectant mothers are entitled to…

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