chrisbramm.co.uk

Grand Canyon

wiz — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 04:20:21 +0000

One of the main features of the holiday was the trip to the grand canyon and to be honest I cannot really do the pictures justice so I will just leave you with the pictures.

Vegas Day One

wiz — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 01:09:01 +0000

Woke up on the first day and had breakfast in the room then ventured out on to the Las Vegas strip, camera in hand. I got numerous photos and here are the best ones.

After viewing the Belagio fountains we then went inside to find a conservatory garden with many sculptures made out of flowers.

Getting to Vegas

wiz — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:22:10 +0000

We got to the airport to find that the flight that we were meant to be on had not in fact taken off from Philadelphia and so the first hour of the journey was stood in a queue in Manchester airport waiting for the flight to take off. Once it had taken off and we knew the plane was coming we were allowed to check in and go through security. Even though the plane was delayed about 7 hours, it allowed us time to relax in the airport, read magazines etc and we eventually boarded the plane at around 4:30pm BST. We then had to wait in the aeroplane for a fuel truck to come and refuel the plane which added about 40 minutes to the flight time which when the flight had been delayed for 7 hours Manchester airport really should have had sorted, ready and waiting. Still, we got into the air and had a good flight, little turbulence and good film selection for the headset TVs, Sherlock Holmes is well worth a watch and Finding Nemo is always nice to watch when you want something to pass the time
We always knew that with the delayed transatlantic flight it would be an incredibly tight connection to the flight to Vegas, especially having to go through immigration, pick up the luggage and go through customs but even so it doesn’t excuse the fact that Philadelphia airport did not in one bit try to speed our passage through the airport. Alright there were at least 300 other people on the plane all likely with connections of their own but when you only have an hour in an airport even small delays count. First off was baggage, we were stood round for 5 minutes before they told us which carousel the bags were coming out of and then another 5 minutes waiting for the first bags to arrive. Then customs added to the delays and finally we had to go back through security.
This however was a vastly different experience to security at Manchester. At Manchester, a lot of money has been spent making the process as efficient as possible and I accept that at Manchester when we went through security it was 9am compared to 8:30pm local time in Philadelphia, but even so, the airport knew the plane was delayed and there would be many people trying to get connections. But in the face of all that there was only one scanner open for business when there are in fact 8. Add to that TSA rules about what you need to put where i.e. you have to remove footwear yet didn’t at Manchester. But the woman in charge was from another world, rather than trying to help us through swiftly, everything we did was not right. Katy and I, both carrying passports and boarding passes had put them in one of the trays with my shoes and belt. Then she said she wouldn’t let us through without our boarding cards/passports and so we had to spend 5 minutes arguing with this woman that we had put our passports/boarding cards through the scanner rather than holding them. We all came away with the overall feeling that the staff at Phili where the most unhelpful.
Still we made the plane to Vegas which was noisy but quite empty and so everyone could spread out to sleep. With it being a night flight all the lights were off and so that made the flight seem quite long with others sleep. We got into Vegas at about 11pm PDT and eventually got to the hotel at about 00:30. The hotel is absolutely huge and as a result took us half an hour to find our own room after being directed to the wrong elevators.
That is all for now, I’ll put another post up later with pictures of the strip.

Link Dump – iPhone aerials and long tennis matches

wiz — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:36:14 +0000

Here I a link dump of stuff I recomend you to read

Tesco’s iPhone Prices
Canvas Given the go ahead
Iplayer on Android 2.2 and flash 10.1
Swype Review
You’re Holding your iPhone Wrong
Estimated Android Market payouts
Why I am Skeptical of iAds
Thankyou Part 1
Thank you Part 2
UK West Ham of Broadband
Longest Tennis Match Records
Youtube wins Viacom case
Why the ipad is not good for content creation
Iphone tarrif comparision spreadsheet
Pandorica opens iPlayer image
Cheap Tablet doesn\’t match up to the ipad
Open source making traction in enterprise
ICANN gives nod to .xxx
Why the iphone\’s aerial isn\’t good
Journalists unite to stop DEA
Examining BT\’s FTTP

Hope you enjoy reading them

Moving on

wiz — Thu, 27 May 2010 19:10:25 +0000

And so, with the last day of college, another chapter of my life is over.

I started winstanley college in the September of 2008 and in the past 2 years I have cemented old friendships and made many more. There have been bad times what with exams and also arguments between friends. But they have been far outweighedby the good times, far too numerous to mention.

Tomorrow is the leavers do which I and many others are looking forward to and then to times beyond that.

A new chapter begins in September when I hopefully start university. But I go in the hope of keeping in contact with the many friends I have made at winstanley.

A time for reflection

wiz — Wed, 19 May 2010 15:32:51 +0000

It is a year, almost to the minute since Nana passed away and a lot of things have happened since then. Therefore a time for reflection.
The day after the funeral saw mum begin 4 weeks of radio therapy to cure a small breast cancer. Almost a year on since the treatment she is well and healthy having started back at work full time in September.
September also saw dad being re-employed back in to the fire service working on a part time LLAR contract which now means when he goes to work, he works for at least 24 hours at a time. It is bearable but I do have to admit I do miss him especially when he does 3 or 4 shifts back to back.
Katy received stunning GCSE results in August and is now studying hard for this years GCSEs. She hopes to to go winstanley to further her studies. I am proud of her and will miss her when I go to uni in September.
And that turns the subject to me. I turned 18 in September and celebrated at my house with mates. Since then I have been out on many nights out, notably and by far the best was boxing day. This year has also seen me apply to university and I now hold a firm off of AAB for civil engineering at Sheffield uni.

So what does the future hold? Who knows but while 2009 was a hard year for all of us we have emerged from it stronger and closer together. We go to California on holiday in the summer and then to relatives in Tennessee. I will hopefully begin a new chapter of my life at uni and Katy will also hopefully start college

Reloading tabs

wiz — Sun, 02 May 2010 17:04:45 +0000

Having just had to restart my computer it meant I had to close chrome and then reopen it which in itself isn’t a problem as I have it set to open up all the tabs that were previously open.
But that is itself the problem. It had to open all the tabs again and so chrome’s blistering speed was reduced to a snails pace. And that got me thinking of an idea for a plugin which would act as as session manager.

I must confess here I have minimal coding skills (nor do I have a tin hat ). I do not know how feasible this is and how you would go about doing it. Anyway here is the idea

The user upon installing the extension can specify a list of 4 -5 five sites that, when the browser restarts, will be loaded in order of preference (preferred priority list). Any other tabs/pages rather than reloading the page display a simple large refresh button that the user can press when they want to load that tab.
Therefore when the browser restarts, in my preferences would open
1. Plurk
2. Facebook
3. The Student Room (Homepage but not individual threads which I usually have open in tabs. Could possibly be done by using some sort of wild cards.
4. Reader

The main disruption to work flow is, not when I boot my computer up first thing and my first point of call would be them above sites, but when I am busy doing something. So to get round this problem the user could then right click on the tab and assign it a priority of between 1 and 3, for reference sake lets call this quick priority. Then when the browser is restarted it looks at the list of tabs in the quick priority list and loads them and then loads your preferred list. Upon closing that particular tab it is removed from the quick priority list and if there is nothing in the quick priority list then it will dive straight in and open up the tabs in the order specified in your preferred list.

And so having just had to restart my computer it would have meant that I didn’t have to wait for 16 tabs to load, half of which are articles that I am going to read another time.

Ted Talks Builder

wiz — Sat, 01 May 2010 22:47:02 +0000

So after watching that I went on to the ted talk builder here (http://get-tedpad.com/) and this is the result. Masterpiece.

How many of you could think this way? It would be a good choice that requires great imagination. (Applause.) Thank you very much. I think that a mirror for the world would help. For every single one of us, I would like to compare our brain to recognize the exact way it’s supposed to think et cetera, et cetera. It is like French phrases such as “et cetera, et cetera”. But I should be more specific when referring to a milky weak coffee that is quite nuanced in the same way that our neurons are. Efficient trimming causes the brain to tell you that it needs to rest a little. But I would like to use the underlying data to create beautiful statistics. All of a sudden, people noticed that in the middle of voyages, there are often beautiful places that you miss. I would like to compare this to a patient who was very comfortable with himself. If you look at the science behind it, happiness is to go along where life takes you.

Lake District – April 2010

wiz — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:20:00 +0000

I went to the lake district in the second half of easter and here are the photos I took

Lake District Summer 2009

wiz — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:43:23 +0000

I went to the lake district last summer and took quite a few pictures and have never got round to posting them on here and so now i am doing it.