drplokta

If you're planning, or hoping, to come to <plokta.con> but haven't joined yet, perhaps you could let us know, as it makes life easier when choosing programme participants.

There are still rooms available (phone 01344 634395 and quote "Plokta"; the location is Sunningdale Park), and we'll be selling memberships on the door for £30.

I got lucky in the draw for Dreamwidth invites, so I'm now http://drplokta.dreamwidth.org/.

Just got a letter asking me to take part in UK Biobank, which is apparently the largest long-term longitudinal study of health outcomes. Since they're trying to sign up 500,000 people between 40 and 69, which is probably around 1 in 40 of that total age group, it's quite likely that one or two of my friends list will get similar letter.

I have to go along for a 90 minute assessment in June (on a Saturday, how sensible of them), when they'll ask some questions and do some basic measurements (height, weight, waist size, bone density, blood pressure and lung function) and take blood and urine samples. Should be interesting, and this kind of study will eventually be immensely helpful in working out things like whether or not obesity really is bad for your health.

I've been cataloguing the books (and DVDs and computer games), using the mostly wonderful (but see below) Delicious Library 2 (Mac only, I'm afraid). In theory, it uses the MacBook Pro's built-in iSight camera to scan the barcode and retrieve the details from Amazon, which can save a lot of data entry.

The results to date can be seen here. (Warning: the page on this link contains all the books, and so has over 2000 images. If it breaks your web browser, you get to keep the pieces.) That's having done all of the DVDs, graphic novels, computer games and large-format fiction, and the small-format fiction up to Ellison (plus random other unfiled books). Still got to do the rest of the small-format fiction and all of the non-fiction. Cover images are the correct one for the edition we've got, as far as is humanly possible, but are mostly not scans of the actual physical copy on the shelves. 1,984 books done so far, and I think probably 1,200-1,500 to go.

The cunning plan behind this is to make it easier to sell a thousand or so books on Amazon and make some more room on the shelves. But I've not yet tried out that part of Delicious Library's functionality.

For anyone doing the same, here are a few random notes and tips based on the experience so far. ( Behind the cut. )

To the best of our knowledge, there are plenty of rooms left, but some people are reporting problems with the De Vere Venues web booking saying there are no rooms available. We recommend that you phone 01344 634395 (and quote Plokta) to book a room -- the location that you want is Sunningdale Park. The con room rates apply for the Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights (the nights of 22-25 May), but the actual con programme will run from late morning Saturday to late afternoon Monday.

Due to an upgrade, I've got a spare TomTom Go 510 GPS unit. Similar ones are going for £80-£100 on eBay -- anyone want it for £50? Comes with the windscreen mount, power cable and PC dock. It has the UK & Ireland map on it, about 2½ years old. There's one scratch on the screen which looks a bit nasty when it's turned off, but isn't really noticeable in use -- apart from that, it's in good condition.

bohemiancoast requests that I post this photo from her 5K run.

( It's behind the cut. )

Thanks to RaFi, who posted a comment with a link to a Microsoft Knowledge Base article that was posted a week after my rant about Vista and RFC3484. It confirms that they've changed the default back to the normal behaviour for Windows 7 (And also Window Server 2008 R2).

The closed-down Zavvi store on Oxford Street now has a Virgin Megastore poster in its window saying "Re-opening soon". Can't find anything about this online -- anyone know if Virgin has bought back that store?

I discover from Google's automated translation from Polish that "Płotka" is the plural of the name of a fish of the Cyprinid family.

Or in other words: Waah, we're carp.