PayPal visit?

We’re planning to go south for the Edinburgh weekend.  The Pope will be in the UK then, so I thought I should check out his itinerary to ensure we weren’t trying to travel to the same place at the same time.  Enter Google:

Papal => PayPal?

Look at the third search result

Not that I can’t see how that result got there, but I think it’s pretty funny anyway.

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Summer Holiday Photographs

We’ve put more pictures on our website, from the summer holidays.

Highlights include Nigel and Linda‘s wedding, Andy and Debbie‘s wedding, flowersEwan’s party (blog post), Grandma and Nana visiting for the day, a trip to East Links Farm Park and Kirsty and Ewan starting school.

The family at Andy and Debbie's wedding

The family at Andy and Debbie's wedding

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Ewan’s first week of school

Ewan has started school, and he’s still very excited about it.  He’s joined Kirsty at Mannafields (their website is old, but will be updated soon).

Ewan before his first day at school

Ewan before his first day at school

He’s been there for a week, so far, and has settled in nicely — his big sister is there to look after him and he’s got a few friends in his year.  Homework, so far, has consisted of picture books to go through and describe.

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Ewan’s birthday

It’s Ewan’s fifth birthday today :).  We celebrated by taking the children to Leith Waterworld — due to restrictions on how many adults you need for children of different ages, today was the first day that Lizzie and I could take all three children by ourselves.  The children all enjoyed themselves (and were much more confident than they were the last time we went).  Off to Luca’s afterwards for lunch; Ewan got a treat:

Ewan with his ice-cream

Ewan with his ice-cream

After lunch, we headed to St. Andrews to visit Mark and Jenny Stirling — wonderful to see them and as an extra bonus, the Bidston family were up for a visit too.

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International Starters

Lizzie and I went to International Starters in Leith with our small group from church–we think it may have been the first time we have all made it to a social. There were eight of us in total.

The restaurant’s USP, as you might guess from the name, is that they only do starters–you choose two or three dishes from their (international) menu and they will bring them to your table. With eight of us, we has more than 20 plates of food in total, served over the course of about an hour.  The food was uniformly delicious and the portions generous.

Lizzie and I finished the meal with the warm chocolate fudge cake, which was also excellent. It was quite a light sponge, which was a relief after eating so much. We ended up spending around £20 per head.

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Similes for Version Control

Developing without using version control is like driving a car with no seats.

I was having a discussion with a friend who is also a developer and discovered that he doesn’t use any version control.  I hunted for a simile and decided that developing without version control is like driving without a seatbelt.  On later reflection, I think it’s more than that: version control is about comfort as much as safely.

How far can we push this?  If version control is to developing what seats (and seatbelts) are to driving:

  • CVS is a bench seat with optional lap belts: not really in use any more, not very comfortable, not very safe (but definitely better than nothing).
  • Subversion is an executive leather seat with a standard three-point seatbelt: it meets safety requirements for almost all purposes and is very comfortable — it integrates nicely with everything else.
  • Git is a bucket seat with a five-point harness: perfect for rallying agile and distributed development, it’s technically superior but lacking in some of the creature comforts and integration points that people like.
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Two weddings and a trip to the zoo

We’ve updated the pictures on our main website, adding photos from the last month.

Highlights include Ellis and Caz’s wedding, a family trip to the zoo and Paul and Judith’s wedding.

An own landing on Andrew's arm, rather than the glove.

Missed.

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Why DAB is different from Freeview

As a country, we’re in the middle of switching from analogue to digital television.  The government wants to switch off analogue radio too, and move everyone to DAB, but I think this is a bad idea — while in broadcast terms the move might be technically similar, differences in the way the media are consumed make the practical effects very different.

Consider: almost all televisions stay in one place.  Even with the ones that are portable, you usually need an external aerial to get good reception.  In contrast, many radios are portable and even those that aren’t often have a built-in (or at least wired-in) aerial — out of the nine radios we have, only one takes a standard external aerial.

For the digital TV transition, older televisions can be upgraded by getting a Freeview box which plugs into the television.  This is easy, as almost all televisions are fixed and almost all have connections to input a video signal: if not SCART or HDMI then an aerial cable.  However, adding an external box to your average radio is a lot more difficult: few will have external connections for audio input and even if they did, having to carry around an extra box with a portable radio would be an inconvenience.  Switching to DAB, then, means replacing our radios.

Also, consider that FM radio is cheap and easy to implement — unlike TV, it’s quite possible to build yourself a radio.  This low price has led to radios being put in many devices — I have an FM radio on my phone.  DAB is a lot more expensive and appears to be a lot less portable; a DAB radio costs several times more than an FM one while a Freeview box is a small fraction of the cost of a television.  FM is so ubiquitous that people have started using it to overcome the lack of other audio input (especially marketed for in-car use).  FM transmitters for audio players cost less than DAB radios.  Nokia include them in their smartphones and I’ve even seen an in-car DAB radio which re-transmits as FM, which just seems wrong.  The only reason it exists is another reason why we don’t want to get rid of FM: most cars have FM radios and many are not trivially replaceable.

From a technical standpoint, DAB sounds good — it has the potential to provide better quality audio than FM.  However, in many environments FM is perfectly adequate and in any case, broadcasters don’t appear to be able to resist using a lower bit-rate so the sound quality isn’t as improved after all.

Two big reasons, then, why we don’t want to switch off FM radio: unlike TVs, most radios can’t be upgraded and unlike Freeview, the extra cost of DAB is significantly more than the base cost of buying an FM radio.

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The Dearings are on the move

Jez and Jo are, sadly, moving on from Niddrie Community Church.  Jez has been our Associate Pastor for more than two and a half years, and they have been our small-group leaders since the start of the year.  They will be moving back to Birmingham to start a new church plant in the north of the city.

I’ve set them up with a new blog, which we’re hoping they will be able to use to keep people up-to-date with what’s happening.

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Games night

We had a games night last night, the first we’ve held this year. Must do that more often…

Heather, John and Stuart turned up and we played Articulate, Pit, Spoons and TransAmerica.

We debated how to split five people into two teams for Articulate: pitting Lizzie and me against the visitors was deemed to give us an unfair advantage, so we went with boys vs. girls.  Looking back on the game, we think that the boys moved around the board at about the normal pace, while Heather and Lizzie flew ’round and beat us by half the board!  A re-match is definitely in order.

Pit was, as usual, rowdy.  I won with all bar two of the hands.  Spoons went to a final between John and Lizzie, which John won, and Stuart won TransAmerica, even though it was the first time he’d played it.

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