Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity is 100 years old today. It was published in a paper entitled “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” on June 30, 1905.
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Posted at 17:08 on 30 June 2005.
I needed to set up the web shop on one of the computers in our resources department this morning. This involved transferring a backup file from my laptop to their computer. Unfortunately I didn’t have any means of doing so. I used to have a USB memory stick but I mislaid that a while ago. Besides it was only a 32 megabyte one, so I decided that I ought to price another.
Fifteen minutes and a short car journey later I was in a shop in the middle of town. Lo and behold, they had exactly what I was looking for. 512 megabytes for £70 or so, or 2GB for £160. Not being particularly in a spendthrift mood, I decided to settle for the former.
I took the memory stick back to the resources offices and spent about five minutes in the car wrestling with the packaging, which consisted of two pieces of clear plastic that one would think would just snap together. At first glance it looked like it would be fairly easy to get into it, but the two pieces of plastic were so thoroughly and impenetrably welded together that five minutes of attack with first bare hands and then keys failed to yield any results. So in I head, get hold of a pair of scissors, and launch an attack on the thing. A few more minutes of wrestling finally managed to penetrate the packaging, which is now fit only for the rubbish bin.
But that wasn’t all. The memory stick comes with a little ring that you can use to attach it to your keyring or a chain or something. Fine. Only problem, the ring was not attached to the memory stick. I had to do that myself, and given the size of the little ring (about 5mm across) and the slot that you had to thread it onto, this meant another twenty to thirty minutes of wrestling with the thing and turning my fingernails to pulp.
It’s very puzzling though. A lot of other products have packaging that is easy to open and re-use if necessary. So why do some manufacturers seem to find it necessary to wrap up their offerings in such a way that you need an assortment of machine tools and nuclear warheads just to get into them?
Posted at 13:30 on 28 June 2005.
Listen carefully to the second last song “In You I Stand” on Hillsong Church London’s CD “Shout God’s Fame”. Towards the end you can hear somebody’s digital watch beeping…
Posted at 12:15 on 19 June 2005.
I’ve just sent off the latest e-newsletter for The Way of the Spirit this afternoon, which is being delivered even now as I speak, and has successfully reached my Gmail inbox, so at least I know the system is still working. I’m sure you’ll all wish Richard George well in his next step. Quite what it all means for yours truly remains to be seen — you’ll just have to watch this space. Plug my blog’s RSS feed into a news reader program (I use SharpReader) if you want to be the first to know.
Posted at 18:11 on 17 June 2005.
The new Kingdom Faith website is about to go live, once the DNS transfer percolates its way round the Internet. This is a process that usually takes 24 hours or so, though it was a lot quicker than that with jamesmckay.net a few weeks ago. I’m holding my breath and hoping and praying that it all works as well as the beta site.
My next task is to get the web shop up and running by the end of this month…
Update 20/6/2005: The site has finally gone live now. Sorry for the delay — it seems one of my e-mails went missing!
Posted at 16:41 on 15 June 2005.
It’s all change round here. I’ve finally taken the plunge and installed some new blogging software on the server. This should give me more control over my blog, and of course it means I can get rid of the Blogger bar at the top, which I do not particularly like. I particularly dislike the “next blog” button. It takes you to someone else’s blog completely at random, and since some of these are rather dubious to say the least, it’s not the kind of thing I want to have on my web pages. Please bear with me while I import my old Blogger entries this evening. (Update: all done! Unfortunately I haven’t managed to import the comments – sorry about that…)
I’m also planning to start up a second blog at some stage, when I get a bit of spare time. I say “when I get a bit of spare time” because it will be much more technical in nature — computer programming, web development, science, technology, maths, that kind of thing — and is likely to be over the top of the heads of some of my friends and family, for whom this blog is particularly intended. As such, the entries are likely to require more careful preparation, so it will be more time consuming, and not so much a case of a quick five minute entry in my lunch break.
One other thing. All comments on this blog will be moderated, so don’t be too upset if yours doesn’t show up immediately. I won’t reject them unduly, though the rule of thumb here is that I’m not letting anything past that I wouldn’t want my youngest relatives to read.
Posted at 22:52 on 13 June 2005.
Well I’ve just filled the car up with petrol again, and here are the figures after six days of motoring. I put in 19.8 litres of petrol at £17.02 after having driven 122.1 miles, most of it town driving. That works out at about 28 miles to the gallon, or more than 1½ times better than the old car, which was only managing a measly 17. Talking of which, it’s a long shot, but does anyone want a 1993 Renault Safrane 2.0 Automatic with no MOT, no tax, and a dying gearbox? (Sits back and waits for someone to post a comment saying, “What’s a Renault Safrane?”)
Posted at 14:04 on 13 June 2005.
I got so sick of telemarketing calls and so on that I signed up for anonymous caller reject on our home phone number and the Telephone Preference Service’s do not call list a couple of months back, and so far it’s proven to be quite effective. However, this makes me almost wish I hadn’t–it could be rather entertaining to try it out:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~egbg/counterscript.html
Posted at 17:23 on 9 June 2005.
Praise the Lord! We now have a car again. Thanks to my uncle Alex for his generosity, and thanks to everyone who has given us lifts over the past few months. It’s a green Peugeot 406, and much to my delight it is manual transmission. I’ve been driving automatics for years and was thoroughly sick of them.
I also bought a couple of domain names yesterday — completely on impulse — jammycakes.com and jammycakes.net, which, much to my surprise and delight, were both up for grabs. Not quite sure yet what I’ll do with them though. On the one hand they could be worth a bit of dosh (any offers?), but on the other hand I use jammycakes in various places as a kind of Internet alias, so I may just hang onto them. Why jammycakes, I hear you ask? Simple. It’s an anagram of my name 
Posted at 09:46 on 7 June 2005.
Welcome to my blog. My name is James McKay, I live here, I work here, I write computer code, and you can find out more about me here.
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