The Bright Light

The elders used to speak of it.  A strange bright light in the sky.  It brought warmth and joy to the people.  But the light has not been seen for so long now that it's existence has been relegated to myth and heresay.

It was said that the sky turned blue.  That people had to wear dark glass over their eyes to block out the light.  That it even caused people's skin to turn different colours, like they were allergic to it.

But for as long as we can remember the sky has been grey, and we need to turn on lights rather than block them out, and our skin remains ever pale.

Until today.

Today we saw the light!  It's real!  It exists!  It's not a myth.  It was almost blinding.  It almost hurt.

Yes.  Today, we saw this thing they call "sun".

And it brought warmth both to our skin and our hearts.

(For the record...we've had a pretty rubbish, overcast, wet summer.  So a bit of sun today was more than nice)

Cycling Corollorys

My cycling activities seem to be governed by sods law.  Here is a list of how I think the rule applies to cycling.

1. The speed a cyclist attains is inversely proportional to the effort put in.  In the last couple of days I've done three rides.  Monday I flew without even trying.  Tuesday I went for it and was about 40 seconds slower.  Today I took it easy and enjoyed the ride and came in 20 seconds quicker than Tuesday.  How come???
2. The probability of acquiring a puncture increases with the reciprocol of the distance being travelled.  I.e. the further you go the less likely you are to get a flat.  This makes no sense at all but the evidence speaks for itself; my first puncture I got whilst pushing my bike up the garden path; my second on a short errand into town.
3. The chance of rain increases infinitely when you don't have your waterproofs.  Need I say more?
4. Headwind speed increases exponentially with tiredness.
5. Someone always lights a bonfire at the top of a hill about 15 minutes before you arrive at the summit.

I'm sure there are many more.

Grrrr.

The Harvest

We've been harvesting for a while now.  We got:

• a good crop of onions;
• numerous, but quite small, potatoes;
• a few handfuls of tomatoes;
• leeks; 
  
• spring onions;
• peas.

Not very much of each, though, as you can see, the potatoes and onions were pretty good.

We did have quite a big blight problem, which spread from the potatoes to the tomatoes.

The stuff is good.  The onions and spring onions are strong.  The potatoes colourful and good texture.  The tomatoes burst with sweet flavour.

We've done pretty well given the state of the patch when we started, our busy lives, the minimal time and effort we put in towards the end of the season, and the fact that this year was really just learning how to do it.

We approach next year with a better plan, and a better plot! We have experience, tools, less preparation to do, and the encouragement of next years harvest to look forward to!

You alright?

Some will know of my occasional anti-Englishness.  Sometimes our over-politeness causes huge complications.

My classic example being the "Do you want the last ....?" question, which actually means "I want the last .... ?".  Why don't we just say what we mean?

This has been bugging me a bit lately with people who use phrases like "How ya doin'?" and "Alright" as a brief greeting.

Normally this happens in a situation where, by the time you've said "Fine thanks, how are you?", the person you've just passed in the corridor is too far away for a proper conversation to begin.  But if I just say "Fine thanks", I feel that I've not taken an interest in how the other person is doing.  They've asked me, it would be polite to ask them back?

Answering "Alright?" with "Alright?" doesn't seem to make much sense. But if we're treating the initial "Alright?" as a greeting then I guess that's...for want of a better word...alright?

I prefer to use peoples' names.  "Hello" by itself doesn't work for me.  But "Hi James" or "Morning Paul" has a higher value - it implies that you know something about them, even if it's just their name.  It shows that I know who they are!  And it encourages me to learn people's names.

OK, OK, maybe I just think too much.  But I think this is important.  We can take a little piece of communication and use it for something more useful.  What if I don't just know someone's name, but I know that they're little baby girl is in hospital.  Then my "Hi James" can become compassionate: "Hey James, how's your girl?".  Then suddenly we're having a real conversation.

That would be more than alright with me!

Google Chrome

The Internet (and, indeed, the press in general) has been alive with talk of Google Chrome.  As always, I won't have much to add to the masses of stuff that's already been written, but here's how Chrome has been for me.

Hearing about it

Heck, it was only yesterday but it seems so long ago!  I guess I originally heard about it from my desktop alerts, or on one of the Blogs I follow on Google reader.  It all started when a 38-page cartoon explaining how Chrome came about and some of the design philosophy behind it (quite techie stuff!) was "accidentally" released before its scheduled time.

I confess, I put off reading this until it was all over the internet, at which point I thought...oh, well, go on then.

I was quite impressed with the ideas they were putting forward!  And started to get excited about an imminent download!

First Impressions

I got to download quite late on Tuesday, so didn't get to play much.  A second look on Wednesday has left me actually very impressed!

1) It's fast.

There have been numerous benchmarks put forward but I use the global-standard, what-does-Ross-think test, and it rates as fast.  Seriously, my qualitative opinion is that it's quicker then IE and Firefox for most of what I do.

The only real test I've done is where I have a page with a very large table that's basically a dump of an entire database.  This took around 7 seconds on Firefox 3.  Chrome rendered it in less than 3 seconds!  Wow!

2) It's neat.

Like most Google stuff, it just works!  Even version 0.2 works with pretty much everything I've thrown it at.  I just had some struggles with the "New" Faceboook, but that's about it.  Flash, Javascript, Java, it all just seems to work.  Not bad for an early Beta.

There's some really neat features that will please everyone, like the drag-and-drop tabs, the smart location bar, the quick dial.  OK, you can get some of these with Opera or with Extensions to Firefox, but they're here and they're nice.

There's also stuff to appeal to techies.  A separate process viewer, ability to kill individual tabs' processes, DOM inspector and JavaScript debugger.  All pretty neat.

3) It's simple

The UI is typically Google - clean and clever.  I like it.

Things it doesn't have that I like?

I immediately missed mouse gestures, that Opera invented and that are copied with Firefox extensions.

I miss my Twitter client plug in "Twitterfox" - there are other Twitter clients, but running this inside my broswer keeps everything in one place.

And I was immediately baffled as to why Google's browser didn't make use of my online Google bookmarks.

But that's about it!

Privacy Issues

I noticed this myself before I spotted it circulating on the Internet.  The original EULA (User Agreement) contained a section which basically gave Google the right to use whatever you looked at or uploaded using Chrome.  It said this:

"You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services."

Scary!  I stopped using it at that point and questioned my commitment to Google's services.

Fortunately, common sense has prevailed.  When I got to downloading it at home tonight the same section of the EULA simply said:

"You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services."

A quick and interesting about turn.

Reading comments from Bloggers on this did get me thinking about how much data I trust Google with.  Some think we shouldn't be paranoid about it, they just use it for targetting adverts at you.  Others think that we're doing a mis-service to mankind as a whole when we give Google anything.

I'm not quite sure where I stand on this.  I give a lot of data to Google because I find their services REALLY useful (and growing more so by the week!).  If someone else develops a better integrated set of apps I'll go use that, but, to my knowledge, they haven't.

Sainsbury's get a lot of data from me because I like shopping there.  Is that a bad thing?

I'm actually quite precious about security, especially online, and being a techie who's aware of the risks makes me more so, but I'm also educated enough to know how to stop bad things happening...I think.

Anyone care to correct my view of privacy?  I'm open to hearing why Google are "evil"?

Summary

This is an early v0.2 Beta.

Wow!

Gimme the real thing soon please.  I like it a lot!