Idle State

I was doing some random net reading (the articles are a few years old now) and found that aeroplanes use fibre optic gyroscopes - no moving parts - instead a few lasers and a bunch of optic fibre in a loop / coil. This was news to me. I was thinking that they still used a bunch of motors turning flywheels holding some accelerometers still in a sort of - don't bump that, we may end up landing in Uzbekistan* - way.

http://www.pprune.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-9344.html

Fibre optic gyroscopes compare the time taken for light to travel around the loop in one direction vs the time for the light to travel in the other direction. If the loop is rotating in one direction, the light travels a shorter distance one way than it travels in the other direction. (Even though it is in a 5km loop of optic fibre - the light travels more than 5km in one direction and less than 5km in the other direction). Weird.

Not to be outdone, in the bid to adopt quantum technology, some guys are thinking that they could put quantum gyroscopes in aeroplanes.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2526

First Officer: Sir, we may or may not be in the South Pacific.
Captain: Well, did the cat drink the vial of poison or not?

Back to the beach.

* There's nothing wrong with landing in Uzbekistan - it's just that my boarding pass said Dubai.

Technorati Tags:
Flying, Idleness, Amusement, Random

Online SCRABBLE® is the greatest thing since the internet, dishwashers, Sudoku, automatic garage doors and Pianolas*. (These are all fantastic ways to be idle or ways to save time so that you have more time to be idle).

Benefits of idly playing SCRABBLE® are:

• Increase your word power
  
• Increase your friend's word power
  
• Thrash the pants of someone with a poor vocabulary
  
• Learn the meaning of the word Qi
  

If you play SCRABBLE®, you should aim to get more than 300 in any game - especially if you play me. Less than that, let's face it, is downright embarrassing. (English not your first language, then?)

Speaking of which, you can now play SCRABBLE® في العربية (in Arabic) which has 104 undecipherable tiles. It seems it would be quite hard to play, since none of the letters would actually join up to the other letters. And I don't read or write Arabic. ("For the last time, Mīm - Bā- Bā - Wāw - Alif does not mean anything!?!")

The benefit of playing online is that you can, of course, be in different countries and different timezones. [You don't have to be in different countries: for instance, you may wish to play online with someone who lives in the same house if they were ugly and you don't want to look at them]. What's more, it keeps you up to date with your friend's comings and goings. It's a dead giveaway that your friend has been out all night drinking because at 5 am their time they take their turn and try to spell "TROLLEYED" with one L, no Y and a P.

I regularly play several games online at http://thepixiepit.co.uk/scrabble/ and it's a perfect way to idly use up a hour or so each day. At US $10 per year it's an absolute bargain and the administrator is always really helpful if you run into problems. (Unfortunately, not problems like "what can I do with VVWIIIO?") You can also send little notes to the other players when you make a play (eg "Did you turn the gas off?", "Hi Mum, I'm still alive. Can you pay my parking fines for me?" or "I hate you and every thing you stand for and for taking that triple word score.")

Unfortunately, kwyjibo** isn't in any of the official SCRABBLE® dictionaries yet - but apparently is allowed if you play The Simpsons' version of the game. Can't wait for the online version of that!

Back to the beach.

* Pianola (aka Player Piano). For those born after 1980, you can find out more here. The pianola was superceded by the iPod.

** See "Bart The Genius". See The Simpsons Episode 7G02

Neo is my name. Sleep. Eat. Run. Baths really blow. Tennis balls are fun.

Neo is a very clever dog. Not only does he pretend to write Haiku (ok - so he really just walks over my keyboard), he's also very photogenic.

He also likes to play fetch. It goes thus:

Wag tail. Human throws ball.
Run after ball.
Jump several times own height vaguely near ball. [I'm such a show off.]
Run into fence while looking for ball.
Fetch ball when ball stops bouncing.
Retreat underneath tree.
Attempt to kill ball.
Ball dead. Put ball in dog bowl with biscuits.
Eat biscuits.
Take ball to human but don't let them have it.
Human loses interest. Drop ball on their foot.
Growl until human throws ball.
[Repeat ad infinitum]

If you want to spend time idly, a Yorkie will play this game with you for a very very very long time.

Anyway - Neo's owner found this amusing quote for me from Frank and Ernest Comic Strip - since I'm now the resident ball-thrower:

If you don't mind throwing tennis balls for eternity, I do have an opening in doggie heaven for you.

Cute.

Neo loves the beach. We took him there last week. Except that when he's wet he starts to look a bit like a rat version of Davros with a docked tail.

Believe it or not, Neo has an artificial hip. He was hit by a car when he was a puppy and instead of a life with his back legs attached to a two wheeled trolley (?!?) he had some plates put in in place of part of his hips. My theory is that he also got a head injury which might explain his bizarre ball fetish. Plus the biting on the feet whenever I arrive home. Oh, and the funny noises he makes when he's asleep. Anyhoo.

Back to the beach.

It's true. Believe it or not. Our dog (Afghan puppy named Dylan) managed to render my GPS completely useless by attempting to eat it.

I blame Garmin. Really. If they hadn't made the leather carry case quite so inviting with it's fresh leather "this smells like it probably has lots of tasty flesh inside it" odour then it might not have been subject to the oversized-puppy equivalent of a ram raid.

Either that - or Dylan took exception to the strange small box that kept speaking with a female American accent and very sloppy diction - which is perfectly understandable.

I did a quick web search and found some guy who's cockatoo had eaten his GPS... so it's not the first time animals have viewed GPS' as tasty morsels.

So my month old Garmin Nüvi 310 ended up with a cracked touch screen - the cracks starting in the bottom corner, from where it was incised by a canine tooth, radiating pretty much across the entire screen. Now you need the touch screen (which is normally excellent, by the way) to do virtually everything on this unit which left it, as I said, completely useless.

Needless to say, I was reasonably annoyed about having almost brand new but non functioning GPS. Particularly in Qatar where navigation is a challenge at the best of times, streetnames and numbers are not well used even when they do exist and it's easy to get trapped in one-way hell.

BTW - the Nüvi 310 is a great little addition to my Jeep - I'm very impressed with it. It's great value for money. Along with standard GPS stuff, it has a bunch of other features - like:

• Bluetooth handsfree for your mobile.
• MP3 player
• Flash card slot
• Clocks, calculators, unit converters etc

Here are details of the box from Garmin's Web Site.

Stuff I do and don't like about the Nüvi 310...

Menu navigation is very responsive and the touch screen is accurate. However, the actual navigation is crap. I have to back out of menus and into others to achieve stuff. (I should be able to get to a map from any screen since this is the primary function of the unit.) Sometimes extra options are provided on another screen. For instance, when making a phone call - why not just put all the call controls together on one screen? The positions of the "Back" and "Done" buttons are not consistent. Some options are not easy to find (setting the time zone, for example).

Volume Control The audible navigation, hands free phone and MP3 player all need independent volume controls. For fairly obvious reasons.

MP3 Player is pretty good. It doesn't seem to respect volume settings embedded in the MP3 file itself though. The volume control needs to be on the MP3 controls page rather than another "click" away.

Suction Cup Mount Why do people make these? They don't work. Find a better way.

Petrol Stations It knows where the closest Petrol Station is. Golf Courses as well. All very cool stuff.

Garmin Support is achingly slow. It took several weeks for them to respond to me despite the web site saying they would respond within 3 days. The knowledge base is half hearted at best - I had to ask a question which really should have been on the knowledge base and then wait two weeks for the answer. The trouble ticket system doesn't play well with Firefox.

Product Documentation is pretty weak - in the fashion of Apple Documentation. The font is lovely but the content is thin on the ground. The manual, for instance, refers you to the web site for more detailed specs. The web site content isn't that much more comprehensive than the manual specs though. Try finding out the maximum size for the removable flash memory... (it's 2GB on the 310, by the way).

How to repair a GPS that your dog has tried to eat.

Originally, I sent a request to Garmin asking for the price to replace the screen. A couple of weeks later, Garmin replied to me, asking me what the problem was, when I had purchased the unit, what the damage was and so on. They also suggested recalibrating the screen. Some of the information requested seemed a little redundant since the already supplied serial number was registered with most of this information. Nevertheless, I duly replied and then received what must be the stupidest technical support response ever:

Dear Campbell,

Try a hard reset, that should cure the problem. Follow the prompts on the attachment.

Thank you for contacting Garmin(Europe)Ltd.

Kind regards

Garmin (Europe) Ltd
______________________________________________________________

Original Message Follows: ------------------------
Hi,

The touch part of the screen is cracked so it is not a recalibration issue.  The LCD proper and backlight work fine...

Sigh.

Fortunately, Al-Lingawi, the local Garmin reseller here in Qatar were completely on the ball. They said that the unit could be replaced for a cost of about 40% of the new purchase price. I turned up at the shop, paid the money, and was given a completely new unit - all in the space of about 15 minutes. So I'm happy again.

Kudos Lingawi. By the way - if you're in Qatar and looking for a GPS unit (or fishing tackle, for that matter) the guys at Al-Lingawi are always really helpful.

So the moral of the story... If you're going to buy Garmin, make sure that the guys you are buying from have got the support base covered. And keep your dog away from it.

Back to 25° 41' 37.75" N 51° 30' 33.16" E.

Getup are raising money to put their advertisements on during the Australian AFL Grand Final and hopefully some time slots after that. Their ads are to help "to neutralise harmful Government advertising emissions!".

Here's the ad:

Here's a great link if you've got a spare moment to look:

Virgil

Also on the site is BooksThatMakeYouDumb.

There's not a lot of point to Virgil's site, but that's why it sort of appeals to me in an Idle kind of way. So I thought I'd give it a bit of link love.

Oh yeah - Happy New Year. I was considering doing a top-ten things list but they've been done to death over the last few weeks - and all in all they are pretty uninteresting - so I'm not going to.

It's too cold for the beach at the moment - so it's back to the kitchen where I'm making Lentil soup. Brilliant Lentil and Chickpea Soup recipe may be found on Recipezaar (since I'm boycotting Epicurious after the Facebook-Beacon thing). The soup recipe actually has cinamon as an ingredient - strange, and I wanted to leave it out - but if you make it do include the cinamon because it makes for a great taste.

Found this while randomly surfing, It's cute:

Well I'm now relocated to Dubai - more or less - in the fantastic suburb of Greens in Apartment 1304. Not being a superstitious type at all - living on the thirteenth floor and all... Couldn't help noticing this in the lift though:

I can't help but to imagine some giant cartoon spring attached to the bottom of the lift - that Wyle E. Coyote might buy from Acme.

I can't recall ever having seen a notice like this before... I'm wondering if there is a higher incidence of free-falling lifts in the UAE. Should I be worried?

Been meaning to take photos of this for quite a while now (several years, in fact) and actually had my camera with me yesterday.

One of the Apple Dealer's in Qatar clearly didn't receive the memo from 1998 when the logo changed...

When I went to bed last night, I was surprised to find Boris on a pillow, in this position:

He always was a little zen-like so I guess it's not so surprising.

Found the best doormat for my new apartment.

Close up...

The neighbours have already tried to steal it twice - replacing it with their boringly-average grey doormat. They're not real smart it seems - because we tend to notice right away.

Was playing with my camera last night on a tripod. The view is from the balcony over the north end of Dubai Marina. Since I'm on the sixth floor, the camera was tilted up slightly which is why the buildings seem to lean into the photo.

Just logged onto Facebook and inexplicably received this message:

It's confusing and nondescript. As a user who logs in daily - sends a few birthday greetings, gets a message or two a week and pokes a few friends overseas now and then (basically - keeping up with my friends!) I'm at a complete loss as to why I should receive this.