My car passed its MOT, requiring only a change of oil, brake fluid and washer water. No nasty surprises or anything. I took it in at 10am, and it was ready at 4pm. Much better than when I lived in the Lake District and it could take three days before the bloke even bothered to look at it.

The front tyres will need replacing at some point, as will the exhaust system. The large thing in the image is the rear silencer on my car. It’s a metal box approximately the size of a shoebox. The large flake of rust is about the size of a credit card. Other, smaller bits of rust fell off when I gave the whole thing a prod with my carkeys.

And yet it passed the MOT, with the advisory notice that the rear exhaust system has corrosion.

Taking my car in was easy, I dropped it off and planned to catch the bus home. I first had to stop at the post office to collect a parcel (which turned out to be my printed and bound copy of the Apple Obective-C programming language). I didn’t really know when the busses were leaving to go to my house, so I ambled through town towards the bus station, into the station and straight onto the bus as it was about to leave.

Getting back to my car was slightly less relaxing. I had planned to just get the bus back in again, but when the garage rang at 4pm to tell me the car was ready they also said they shut at 5pm, not 6pm like they’d told me before. Great, an hour to get to the garage by public transport. Not possible, the next bus wasn’t until 4:45pm. I had two options - wait until tomorrow, or bike it.

I dragged my bike out the cellar, reinflated the tyres, reattached the brakes, gave the rear gear changer a kick and hurtled off at warp 9. I had half an hour to cycle through busy rush hour traffic in a journey that takes 15 minutes by car. And I made it too, in 14 minutes. In rush hour, bikes are quicker than cars. Cars make handy shields when going around roundabouts too, as I successfully negotiated the big, busy roundabout in town without ending up under someone’s car. It took longer to fold the thing up and secure it in the back of my car.

I think I’ll be making a trip to the bike shop soon though. I need a new back wheel, a total replacement of my brake system from the cables right down to the mechanisms and blocks, the rear gear changer needs soaking in de-greaser and probably stripping, and I think the front forks are loose. It’s so good that bikes don’t need MOTs like cars do, mine would probably be classed as dangerous and not given back to me. I need a new bike helmet too. The frame is OK though.

I need to get out and do more cycling, the steep hill between me and town was a bit too steep and I had to stop part way up it for a rest, which was a bit crap. I used to cycle up much steeper things daily in previous jobs, and I think that’s the point really. It didn’t help that my bike got stuck in a fairly high gear either.

There’s something very satisfying about cycling to a place though. The speed I cycle at has a direct relation to how quickly I get to my destination. There are no variables beyond my control that would otherwise slow down a car journey. Traffic lights don’t apply - you can get off and use the crossings (or ignore them and slip through if you want to be naughty), and empty pavements are handy too.

Today I have spent most of my time sat in a car. In the morning I went off into Marlborough again to do some more expensive food shopping to stock Amy’s grandma up for a while. Then we had to drive home. To make the trip a bit more interesting I plotted a less motorway-intensive drive towards the M1, going via Cirencester, Stow-in-the-Wold and Warwick, then up the M40, M42 and after a bit of zooming down the A42, the M1.

Much nicer driving through the countryside on a sunny day than rocketing up the motorway sealed away in the car. Even if I did spend quite a lot of time stuck behind a tractor, low-loader carrying a grass cutter, two vans and a truck. The truck was from a contract bed hire company for the hotel trade. It was brand new, with an 08 plate and a pleasing blue colour. That’s how long I got to stare at it. All the way from Cirencester to the turning to Stratford-upon-Avon. I used the grindingly steep hills to my advantage and had some food and stared out the windows a bit.

It was a much more civilised drive back. I’m normally racing against time to be back at a decent time because I have something Important to do the day after. Not this time though. My car’s due an MOT and service tomorrow and that’s about it.

We made it back to sunny Scunthorpe for 5pm, taking about 4 hours in total. Then, after a brief rest at Amy’s I shuttled back to Wakefield, stopping at her local Tescos to do some shopping of my own. A bit of a step down from the weekend’s parading around Waitrose, but I did get a bargain on some organic eggs (and in a fit of irony some cheap chicken). My cupboards are now full and look like I live there

This game has both obsessed and frustrated me for years. I have memories of wandering around town asking computer shop owners (back when there was such thing as an independant computer store) if they had Chuckie Egg for the Spectrum or Atari ST. I encountered the game when I was at school, it was on our BBC Micro along with Granny’s Garden and some other educational crap that nobody looked at. Learn multiplication tables or try and collect eggs? Hmm… tricky choice, and probably one contributing reason to my poor maths skills.

Chuckie egg, like Tetris is a very simple game; collect the eggs, don’t fall down holes or get grabbed by the weird cyan coloured birds. It has a really nice and fluid control system that makes it a joy to play. There also isn’t much reliance on performing pixel-perfect jumps.

The only thing that hampered my game surrounded the lifts in the game. I just couldn’t time it correctly and would end up jumping into the void from which the lifts emerged. The only irritating part of Chuckie Egg is the twonky death music, and I got to hear it lots.

And so it continued, I’d get to level 3 and die hideously, every time. And unlike most games, they didn’t become easier as I got older.

So today I had a challenge, there not being much else to do beyond read or sleep in a hot tent, could I not only complete level 3, but could I become quite happy negotiating lifts? Well it took about half an hour and a bit of swearing at my DS, but I managed to crack it

The problem, that had been stumping me for all these years? It seems I was trying to be too precise for the game. There is no split-second timing required to make the yellow man jump just as a platform appears out the hole. Just jump when there’s one vaguely near the bloke’s feet, and no higher than his middle and you’ll land on it. Even if your feet clearly go through it.

All this thanks to a Spectrum emulator and my DS

(There’s no Internet in Wiltshire and barely any phone signal either. This post will get sent when I get back home).

Wiltshire is very pretty, lots of greenery and flowers, fields and all the nice stuff you expect in the countryside. It’s also got very old and very expensive houses full of rich people swanning around in their open top cars. You know you’re in a posh part of the country when the cheapest supermarket in the town (Marlborough) is a Waitrose.

A nice change to usual was driving down the night before in daylight, it only getting dark as I left the motorway and started going through the twisty roads and lanes around Amy’s grandma’s village. I like driving down single-track roads in the dark, it reminds me of living in the Lake District.

We were given some money by Amy’s mum to go and buy food for the weekend. I was given a list and set about buying food - from Waitrose. It was a uniquely bizarre experience shopping for someone else with their money, but also buying stuff for yourself with it. Normally I scour the shelves for cheap things and almost-out-of-date food. This time I was instructed to buy the good stuff.

The good stuff tastes good, but you don’t get much of it. Me and Amy and her dog went for a walk around Marlborough in the sun and I managed to buy two books:

I’m currently making my way through the weighty Redemption Ark and it seems like a good read so far. It has Space, Sci-Fi and enough of a storyline to keep me reading.

School has finished for the summer. That’s one year I’ve completed, and since I passed my NQT year I am now considered a “normal” teacher. I will use part of the summer holiday to sort out next year, so that it works a bit more smoothly.

This year has been pretty difficult, but I’ve learnt a lot and have plans for the new term. I’m going to approach things differently and make my year 7s pee with fright Well, I won’t; I will train them to do certain things at the start of lessons though.

I now get to apply for my “golden hello”; a wodge of money the government gives you, probably as a bribe, if you manage to stick out your first year of teaching. They should call it the “golden carrot”, if anything I orginally lost my application form, filing it away somewhere safe after making a copy of it. I suspect I filed it away in my recycling bin by mistake. A replacement has been posted to me and I just need to get it signed by the deputy head.

I’m now off to Wiltshire for the weekend with Amy to visit her grandma. We’re camping in her grandma’s garden in Amy’s giant six-person tent.

The stereo in my car has no external input, making it difficult to listen to music on my Nokia N810. I have to resort to a slightly fuzzy FM transmitter that dangles around in the passenger footwell and occasionally needs retuning if I go for long drives through the country. I have a spare car stereo from a previous car, but because my car’s OEM stereo is an odd shape I’ll need a replacement fascia.

Thinking I could get a replacement I hit eBay…

That seems a sensible search term, I own a 2005 Panda and need a stereo fascia. Let’s see what comes up…

Well that’s fantastic! It found 39 items. Right, must be a bargain in here…

Wait, something is wrong…

Look at the search string, it’s been modified. And if you squint at the tiny bit of writing you see some curious search logic being applied. It turns out that if eBay can’t find results for your search query, they modify it and search for that instead, and then modify what you typed into the search box. How they modify the search is unknown. All we know is that they are now giving us results for something we didn’t ask for. I don’t want a new stereo for my car, I want a fascia for my car, but that vital, important, required keyword has been stripped off!

This is a fine example of a system second-guessing its users and getting it totally wrong. There is no way a search engine can guess what I mean, the best it can do is give me alternates that are likely, or let me set the context and narrow the searches down, which is what eBay is trying to do. Unfortunately it also then decides to totally erase my previous search leading to confusion. I bet like me you look in the search box to double-check your search criteria if the search doesn’t work.

If you do a similar search on Google and it spell checks or thinks you mean something else, a much better display is presented to the user:

As you can see, Google thinks it knows better, but rather than totally obliterating your mental map of what to expect, it notifies you of its suggestion but then gives you what you asked for. It’s up to the user to use the alternate.

And that’s the way eBay should work. Rather than second guessing me and giving me pages of cars, it should tell me the search failed and then offer a suggestion for me to click on. The clicking on part is important - it links an action to a consequence and is vital to preventing your users from becoming confused. Since don’t forget, confused users often get irritated and angry and then feel the need to tell the world about this using their blogs

A Modchip installed inside an XBox

I’ve finally got around to writing up my experience chipping my XBox. Despite my troubles, chipping an XBox is an easy task that shouldn’t take more than half an hour. I was hampered by a damaged modchip and all the associated testing and trouble-shooting it took to diagnose this - although having to flex the chip to make it power up was a major hint something was not right.

Follow the story on my main website by visting my main website, or by clicking on the image. I’ve not written yet another “How to install an XBox modchip” document since what’s the point? The XBox is dead, chipping them isn’t the big novelty it used to be. Instead this is my experience chipping my XBox and how I trouble-shooted it. I learnt quite a bit and it was fun

Here’s the result of some more graphical hacking. I quite accidentally discovered the nice patterns caused by rotating a shape around a midpoint. It’s a bit like those overly complicated spyrograph toys we used to have, only without the pens, cogs and irritating scoring pen line where the cog slipped, sending your pen skating across the paper.

Spyrofern

I’ve registered on the Context Free website, and since the app itself has a handy upload feature, I can put things on it easily

Here we go… just a few days left, then Summer Holiday.

I have set up a picture gallery on my photos website, as an easy way to show off the images I’m creating. I can’t include the code there as there’s no way to do that, but one of the things my new main website will have is a section for these pictures and their associated code.

Creating these images is really good fun. Usually programming is a process that has a definite aim - I’m going to create a new website, I’m going to make a program to catalogue my music, etc. From that aim the program is structured and then code written. It’s a well documented process. It’s comparable to traditional art, with the artists creating their own interpretations of real world objects or scenes, or through their imagination creating a scene that could be a real place.

There’s another style of art though which is more abstract. The artist being more interested in experimenting with form, colours or whatever else they can think of. Context Free is the programmer equivalent of that. I can sit down and for half an hour mash out some code that draws something pretty. If I don’t like it, I can modify the rules until it looks better. Often it will accidentally produce something I had no intention of creating.

It’s also fast and immediate. The only code I can write is rule definitions that describe how circles and squares are drawn. There are no loops, no variables and no boilerplate setup code.