Rich of March House

I've just rediscovered some photos on my camera-phone that I had forgotten I had taken so I'll do a blog about them. Click'em for biggity.

Last Friday I went out for an evenings fine drinking and gentlemen's discussion with my friend Pete. We took the 'Pink Ferry' from Warsash to Hamble to visit a few pubs. On the way we met a couple of illiterates:

After a couple of pints we succeeded in emptying the pub we were in by arguing about the reasons why the speed of light is finite. Can you have a finite number that is undefined? I'm not sure but if you can then Pete wins the argument. Anyway, after that we had a couple of games of pool. Here is a picture of the state of the table at one point in our first game, where I was playing yellow:

I subsequently lost the game. In the second game, I was playing red and we got to this point:

Again I subsequently lost. I think I need to work on my finishes.

Finally, here's a bonus. A rock-starlet in the making last Saturday:

We thought up a new paradox at work.  It's a bit dull so you can stop reading here if you like.  But it does involve flour.

You have a set of electronic scales to check the weights of bags of flour. Each of these 'should' weigh 1kg but they have a Normal distribution about this value, and you have good estimates of the parameters of this distribution.

However, you also know that the scales have been wired up in a rather shoddy fashion. You expect that once in a while, the scales may be affected by a voltage spike which will introduce an effectively random effect into the weight displayed. You have no idea of the size of this effect, nor of its likely mean: only that such occurrences should be the exception rather than the norm.

The paradox (in sense of counter-intuitive result) is that for a certain range of measurements (along with subjective expectation of the probability of the fluctuation occurring), your confidence that the bag weighs less than 1kg decreases as the shown weight decreases.

I thought I would have a little adventure so I installed Ubuntu Linux on my lovely Vaio laptop, to dual-boot with WinXP.

Amazingly enough, nothing went wrong.  I did all the necessary disk partitioning like the instructions said - setting up partitions for Linux, for a swap file and for a shared Windows/Linux data area.  I then installed Ubuntu and it all worked beautifully.  I was presented with a lovely brown interface thingy.

But I wasn't quite satisfied.  I decided I would uninstall it all and change some of my partitions sizes, and perhaps remove this weird GRUB thingy from my MBR and use the Windows dual booty wotnot instead of the weird GRUBBy thingy.  And that's when it all went wrong.

Does anyone know how to repair a MBR when you don't have the original Windows XP CD (because it was preinstalled on the laptop, not because I'm running anything dodgy) and therefore can't use a Recovery Console?

Yay!  My lovely brother has bought us tickets to see The Police!  In September!  At Twickenham! 

Apparently we've got mid-priced seats which means we'll need binoculars but not astronomical telescopes to see anything.

Cheers Jem!