Not a lot else to say really.

This morning I took the children to do the weekly grocery shopping. We left fairly early to beat the rush, which wasn’t hard seeing that they’d been awake since 6.30 with me following (inevitably) shortly after.

We rocked out to some Kings Of Leon on the way. Later, Ben asked if he could buy the same “music stick” as me when he grew up. I asked him why and he said it was so that it could have cool music like mine on it. Go the Kings!

We drove through the now-characteristic British summer weather — grey skies and light rain — and easily found a spot in the car park. This was when I realised that I’d forgotten the carefully prepared shopping list. Oh well, I thought, I’ll wing it and probably won’t forget too much.

My… god! I hate shopping. Louise normally coordinates our shopping activities. If I’m in attendance, it’s more as mobile child minder and high shelf reacher than as an active shopper.

This time I had to make all the choices myself. Now, if I didn’t care about Issues then this would have been easy. But Fair Trade and Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fernley Bloody Eats-It-All have done too good a job at educating me to the plight of farmers and chickens and the environment in general, so now I have to think about everything I purchase.

Is that chicken from the UK? Is it farm assured? Where have those apples come from? What?! I can’t get apples from the UK? Oh, maybe that’s right: seasonal. So how far have these ones come from? Brazil?! New Zealand?! So, which of those is further? Can you get Fair Trade apples? Argh!

And don’t even get me started on China. Here’s a little challenge: Go into any homeware section of a supermarket and find something made somewhere other than China.

Now that last paragraph might sound a little xenophobic and I would be lying if I said that wasn’t a component of the sentiment — I don’t like the thought of our country being beholden to another entirely alien culture on the other side of the planet. But… is it really right that a large proportion of the goods purchased in this country are shipped from halfway around the world from a country that has such differing standards to us when it comes to environmental concerns and civil liberties? People often ask “how can they make these so cheap?”– there is an explanation but I don’t expect they want to hear it.

So, I’ve managed to spiral this post from something cheery and life-affirming into a bitter rant on the injustices of the world. Perhaps I shouldn’t write at this time of night but it is kind of how I feel right now… I learnt about stagflation today. Yeah, the future’s looking bloody marvelou right now.

On the BitTorrent front, I’m very interested to find out about Mininova from Tim. I’ve been using The Pirate Bay so far but the lack of dodgy adverts at Mininova is appealing. Since iPlayer came out at the top of the year we’ve started using it frequently. Having become accustomed to watching programmes on our laptop, I want to be able to access all TV programmes this way. Downloading them with BitTorrent works very well, especially because we get free overnight bandwidth from the nice folks at PlusNet. But that endorsement can wait for another post.

One tip I’d pass on to Mac and Linux (and *nix) users would be to use Transmission. It takes all the insanity out of BitTorrent downloads and just works.

So, I bit the bullet and bought a new Netgear WG311T, which the nice people at EfficientPC promise will work with Ubuntu. Given that my free time is so precious these days, I find myself much more inclined to buy may way out of problems than ever I was in the past.

With the order placed — which was fulfilled in a very timely and efficient manner — I took a moment to wonder if anyone else out on the intertubes had come across the same problem. A little light googling showed that a few people had issues and it didn’t take long before I came across Jun Sun’s page on how to flash the firmware on the MA311. For the uninitiated, this basically means updating the software that runs on the network card itself. The danger here is that if you get this process wrong you can write off the card.

I had a new card on order, so what was there to loose? I downloaded the appropriate firmware images for the MA311, followed the instructions given on the page and held my breath… Would it work? Would I trash the card?

The network card was still working! Result! I rebooted. It connected first time and continued to work perfectly. I rebooted again and again it connected immediately. Five reboots later and it was still working flawlessly. Years of intermittent behaviour solved in about an hour.

Of course this means I’m now the proud owner of two Netgear wireless network cards but I’ve taken the opportunity to upgrade to the faster 802.11g networking from the slower 802.11b networking supported by the MA311. I’ve picked up a DG834GT wireless router/modem from eBay for just over £20 and I can now safely pass the old MA311 on to friends or family knowing it won’t cause them any problems.

For anyone else using Ubuntu who is experiencing these problems, the following steps should resolve the problem:

1. Download the PK010101.HEX and SF010802.HEX files from Jun Sun’s collection of firware images into your home folder.
2. Open a terminal and enter the following commands:

• sudo apt-get install hostap-utils
• sudo prism2_srec -v -f wlan0 PK010101.HEX SF010802.HEX

Yes, that was Robert Vaughn. Hmmm.

After collecting Jessica from pre-school, Ben, Andrew and I headed off to Pizza Hut where we met a couple of Ben’s friends and their mums for lunch. We then went on to The Mad House, a soft play centre. Because it appeared to be only Ben’s school which was closed that day, the place was nearly deserted apart from a small number of pre-school age children.  It meant that Ben, Jessica, Joseph, Megan and Katie had the place almost to themselves, and the grown-ups, Andrew, Wendy, Claire and myself had free choice of comfy sofas to sit on and watch the children.

All in all it was a pretty nice day, Ben got lots of great presents including a camera, Transformers, Lego, Power rangers Watch and SpiderMan toy, and on the Saturday we had a family tea party complete with birthday cake where he received even more presents like a Power Rangers suit and toy phone, Power Rangers figures, bike stand and more Lego. We are off to Legoland in a couple of weeks, have a feeling his collection will grow some more….

Thus started my Ripathon, wherein I ripped every CD in the house, including all the weird and wonderful discs previously banished to the loft. After several weeks of fitful work I am finished; I am the proud owner of 1400 tracks and Louise has a more impressive 2400. Or in time terms, it would take me four and a half days of continuous play to listen to my collection, or six continuous days for Louise.

I now have the largest playlist of my life to listen to. I’m about 220 tracks in, rating the tracks as they go by. For a long time I resisted the urge to get into the whole “star rating” idea. Being a bit obsessive, I worry about issues such as the difference between two stars and three. And you mean I have to decide this 1400 times?! Why can’t the machine learn what I want to listen to? Oh well, better a half-good playlist today than a magically learning system next year.

Jayne asked me if this all meant that I’d start downloading tracks instead of buying CDs. I’m not entirely sold, mainly because you don’t get entirely the same quality of sound (theoretically) from an MP3 as you do a CD. In addition, I prefer to use Vorbis in place of MP3, which gives you better sound quality compared to an MP3 of the same file size. That said, with the death of DRM, I’m a lot more prepared to court the idea.

All this, of course, doesn’t help me get at the boxes of vinyl stuck up in the loft. Given that I’ve touched these, I think, on one occassion in the last ten years, I’m also wondering if it’s time to sell my 1210s. I’ve held off doing this (if it’s not stating the obvious at this stage) for a long time. For much of this time I’ve considered teaching some of my old skills to Ben or Jessica in a few years from now but the more time passes the more I wonder if the world has moved on…

Update: My postings seem to be exhibiting a certain synchronicity with the news at the moment: Napster is launching a music download service without DRM.

However, over the last two years I’ve slowly slipped into bad portion habits and the “not much” exercise dropped off to “very little”. In a not entirely unpredictable turn of events, as of this weekend I’m back to where I started. So, yesterday morning I got on my trainers and went for a run. This morning I went for a run again. It hurt but I can live with that. The older I get the more inclined I am to get off my flabby arse and do something about it.

The plan is to go running four times a week, before work when necessary. If you see me, ask me how it’s going. The knowledge that I might have to admit failure is going to help me during the 6am starts…