Formula 1

I like the look of this. Looks like practice for the Grand prix is going to be shown on the red button. Sweet.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/7755219.stm#schedule

Updates

Managed to completely forget about pancake day on Tuesday. The wider world seems to pass me by nowadays... I must make more of an effort....

Last Friday, while still in a dreamlike state, I went on a quick drive to see Coberley Mill. It is WAAAAAAAY out of my league but its only a 5 minute drive from work so I thought I would go and see what I would buy should the numbers come up on Friday. See it here

Also played QuakeLive online for the first time yesterday. Still in BETA stage at the mo and still very busy so it takes time to get on but once playing it is solid.

Scored 60 the other day in skittles... not bad, not good enough to boost my average....

Poker. What if.....?

Watching the poker channel a few weeks back I was rocked by a really obvious thought process that, for some reason, has never occurred to me. I can only assume that when playing poker people get into a rut where they believe there are only a few options open pre flop. Call, Raise or Fold. Of course, this is true but the thought process makes you think a hell of a lot more about it than I ever did before. Here is the simple example and the questions to ask.

----Situation----
Blinds are £1/£2.
You get dealt a marginal hand e.g. Q,8 suited. You are sat in early position and move to call the big blind.

Questions to ask pre-flop:

Why are you calling?
Will you fold if somebody raises you £4,£5,£6,£7? etc...
How much are the cards in your hand really worth to you?

Chances are, if your hand is worth a call pre-flop it is probably worth a small raise pre-flop (especially in early position IMO) as this will get rid of other marginal hands and may even win the pot without seeing a card. If you think a Q,8 suited is worth £4 in a "I will call this up to £4 or I'm folding" kind of way then surely the better move is to put the £4 raise in yourself rather than calling for £2 and possibly facing off against more people post flop. Also, chances are that somebody else in later position will raise pre-flop if you don't where they may only call your raise. This gives you the appearance of strength whether it exists or not but probably puts you in an advantage mentally post-flop should a king or ace come out...

The same questions and mentality can be taken into account post-flop too. Obviously, you have already invested in the hand and before too many cards come out, you want to work out where you stand. You can now see 5 cards and you can pretty much work out your pot odds of getting a winning hand. Is your hand still marginal? Is your hand still worth anything. Are you still thinking of calling to a certain amount..?

Repeat on turn. Repeat on river. Questioning what you are going to do later in the hand should help you work out how you act now.

Think on.....

SEO Stuff

So I have been looking into SEO....

http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php
http://www.robotstxt.org/faq/bestlisting.html
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40318&cbid=1wk284xnuk2c5&src=cb&lev=answer
http://www.seoconsultants.com/meta-tags/
http://www.seocompany.ca/seo/seo-techniques.html

So. Time to have some fun, put some work in and try to get grillymonk baby geek t-shirts towards the top of the searches!

I will report back soon....

Stunted by meetings

I am never going to complain about my job. I love it. I love doing what I do. The more I stay in this job though, naturally, the more I am becoming responsible for a lot more systems. As a result, I find myself in a lot more meetings. Which is counter productive - if you ask me - as it means I cannot be working at my desk. Today, for example, I am in 2 back to back meetings from 10:30-14:30 and then I might get some lunch...

p.s. Some people wonder why jeans are a good thing....

nuff said

Pictures that make me want to kill

Awww. Look at the sweet underage couple playing on the PS3. So hang on. You boy, you're 12. And you, overdeveloped one. Your not 16 either... Why haven't the social services taken your illegal baby away? Why, instead, have they given you..YOU! a games console that I cannot afford!?

Good weekend

Valentines day is such a minefield for most people, single, a couple, married alike. Single? Do you go out and try to find someone? If you are a couple, what do you do? A meal? Just a card? Do you need to buy a present? I heard this one lady text into a radio show saying how unloved she felt as she had only received a card from her husband. I felt like finding her address and giving her a slap. If you are getting a present, who much do you spend!!? Its not like the anniversary/birthday/Christmas presents don't rinse enough out of you. Valentines day is a crock no matter how you look at it.

Which brings me to why I enjoyed my valentines day so much. Legs is a bit like me. Cynical to the last about over hyped annual guilt fests like valentines day. Soph got me a card which was nice and she got a card in return which she very much liked. We cooked a meal together in the evening and set the table in the dining room. The nice thing was taking 2 hours over dinner and a couple of glasses of wine.

I still can't get over the silly bint on the radio. I hope her husband went out and got mercilessly drunk that night.

Sunday was pretty cool too. Chris, Sarah and the kids came over and we had a Sunday roast followed by a nice constitutional down to Gloucester docks. Good times indeed. In the evening, I watched 'Hitman' which is pretty cool albeit a little predictable. In fact my weekend included several films. On Saturday morning I watched American Pie - Beta house while is essentially (very) soft porn. In the afternoon I started watching 'AdultHood' too so I might finish that some time later this week....

Keeping my powder dry!

Went skittling lasts night. Got 72. This was more of a relief than anything after last week. Keeps my average above 64 which is great although I also discovered that I am only second in the averages. Neil, the leader of the pack has an average of over 66.... something to aim for next season maybe.

cracking youtube HD

One thing has stopped me from putting technical demos onto youtube and that is that no matter how big the original video you upload it looks crap when you play it back. See this short video for example...



With this in mind I went in search of the answers... there is always more than one. To start with, there is always a high-quality version of the video you upload but to see it you need to be a little deft and add '&fmt=18' to the end of the URL in the address bar. You will notice that this now makes it almost legible at full screen...



But there is always the crystal clear way and this is it. To start with I must record my videos at 1290x720. This is no biggie. I just set camtasia accordingly. The trick comes in the export. The below movie was exported to a MOV file using MPEG4 encoding, automatic bitrate and exported at 1290x720 HD. The resulting movie file is at least 10 times the size of the 2 shows above but I think you will agree that it is blatently worth it as the result are lovely and clear.



The trick to embedding it, by the way, is to add '&ap=%2526fmt%3D22' to the end of the embedded video source URL...

Brilliant Guinness commercial

The mighty hath fallen - 55 scored...

On Wednesday I scored 55 in the skittles which is frankly pathetic looking back over the season. My average is still 63.75 which is OK but I was certainly hoping for more. That 82 feels like a long time ago....

The Snow

So last night as normal we went to bed and this morning we woke up to a covered land. My work is now confined to the office where I have a good view over the back garden (below)

Of course, I could have driven to work, it is only a couple of miles away, but with broadband on tap and mobile phones and blackberries in hand there is no need to risk it. Anyway, I would have to find the car first....


p.s. The answer to yesterdays blog is that reading a textfilestream line by line is far far quicker than reading the whole text file into a string and then goiing through that line by line. Who knew...? Either way, I now have my websites interacting with live logs faster than the perl script that it was replacing. Awesome.

asp.net grep?

Does anybody know the best (fastest) way to read down a text file in asp.net

Current example:
If I have a text file with 3000 lines in it and I want to pick out every line with the word HELP in it I can use a System.io.streamreader to read the text file into a string, use the split function to break it into an array and the loop through the array looking for the HELP string....
This, as you can imagine, is slow. Not tragic, but slow enough. I am trying to get somewhere near the performance of the PHP Perl page I am replacing which seems unfeasably good at reading text files and grepping them for pattern matches.

Any ideas of how to get some better performance from asp.net here?

View my developerfusion forum post here

Monotony and the old school

Working days are all the same. Work my ass off and go home with a longer 'to do' list. It is lucky I love my job otherwise things could be really depressing. Once home the evening has a very relaxed yet rigid structure to it. Playing, feeding, bathing, cleaning, feeding and putting to sleep are all done pretty much to the minute as one step outside safe routine boundaries is bound to cause distress to Alfie and by association on to us... wouldn't have it any other way mind.

Things are looking good for some poker action around my house in a couple of weeks time. Just awaiting final confirmation of numbers from Oxford way and the local invite will go out. Should be awesome.



As for the old-school part of the title. This is referring to the music I find myself listening to today. I have Kruder and Dorfmeister in my ears right now. This morning I was listening to Insane Clown Posse - my mind flies back to a cracking gig night with Ash - and in a minute I will be switching to listen to the Cranberries. All very nice.

so very tired...

Looking after a baby is a pleasure and a joy all the way up until they do something unexpected at which point the stress levels go through the roof. Alfie the young know-it-all decided that sleep wasn't an option tonight at bed time. Instead, crying and generally being unplacatable was the order of the day. The worst thing is that, as a parent, you go through this mental checklist... Is he dry/clean... check. Is he tired? Hell yes. Is he warm and snuggly? Check Is he hungry? Nope. The checklist is short but pretty all encompassing. If none of the above works, as tonight, then you must simply sit there, watching the monitor wail, waiting for silence... And then you spend the next few hours on a knife-edge waiting for the miracle sleep to break and for damned reality to set in. Of course, relaxing on evenings like this is damn near impossible and so I have two online games to thank this evening. Chess and Poker. Here, for example, is the knot I have tied myself in against my good friend Simon. I am playing black. He is a very good chess player and will, no doubt, kick my ass. There are so many pieces blocking or counter threatening that I have lost track and now I have made my flippant knight move the end is surely nigh. hmmm.





In my other stress relief game, poker, I am not doing too bad. I am sitting on 36000 chips which is fair. Sitting 3rd out of my mates, just got to catch Q bar and Dave.

I can't believe it is only Monday. Bad times indeed!

lifehacker birthday post - great links.

Lifehacker is a great blog and it has been going around for years. Here is a link to its birthday post which lists its best posts from it's time on the web. My favourites include How to set up a web server at home and the top 10 geek pranks...

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/ozVvbAxcac8/happy-birthday-lifehacker-our-best-posts-from-2005-to-2009

In personal news. Little Alfie is not so well today. He was up most of the night coughing and spluttering which means, of course, so were me and Soph. Now all I need is a nice calm day at work...

A few last things to do...

There are a couple of last things I need to do before I am happy with the new page - http://ajax.kruelintent.com/ - I need to finish tweaking the blogfeed.aspx page so that the rss feed doesn't get affected to much by all this. I still want to use my own rss as my code behind cuts out the email footers from my work and hotmail email which just makes it better to read. Once that is done I can rest for a while and let the blog settle for a bit, sort out any teething issues etc and then I can embelish the facebook and twitter integration to be a bit more proactive rather than just showing a few links.

In other news from this week. To follow on from the 82 last week I got a 69 in skittles on Friday (Not like that) and so my average continues to go up. As things stand it is 64.28.

Beginning a new blog

A new day has dawned on ajax.kruelintent.com. The main difference is that I am no longer blogging here. Oh, you can still read my blog here but I am not blogging here. I am taking advantage of the future (finally). If you are reading this on kruelintent.com then you are in fact just reading a feed from my actual blog. The fact is that I have too many social things to keep up to date and although it was cool to have my own blog engine, it is better to just have my own website that shows the blog and let the blogging engine do the cool stuff like posting updates to twitter etc. The nice thing about it being a blogspot blog now is that I can email in my posts. This is old news to the likes of Ash but new to me and I find it very cool indeed that I can send an email and it will update my blog nicely and update my twitter. Blogging will never be the same again!

I can do all sorts too, posting images and embedding videos the same way as before but now it is all done remotely. It is a pleasure to bring you the new ajax.kruelintent.com. The rounded corner layout has been tested against IE7, Firefox and Chrome. There is javascript in place too so it even looks acceptable in shitty IE6! It is all done using css so there is no AJAX on there to confuse non Microsoft browsers.

The nice thing about being able to email posts in is that I can create an email over the course of a fair amount of time so each post will be a good read rather than just a sentance. At least, that is what I am saying now but then I am writing this on a nice calm Sunday morning...

Anyway, intorductions to the blog over. I watched 'The break up' last night which was a god awful film but it did have Jennifer Aniston in it and she is a babe so here is a picture.