No sense nonsense

My hateful vacuum cleaner decided to stop working for me this morning. The ‘bag full’ light is staying on which indicates to me that there is some kind of blockage somewhere. The bag is most definitely NOT full, the filter is clean and there’s no visible clump of debris anywhere screwing up the works.

It wasn’t sucking though. And my carpet was decidedly unclean. And I have friends coming for lunch. Sigh.

I took a deep breath to stave off the desire to throw the horrible thing across the room and instead I performed some rudimentary diagnostics. I ascertained that it is the hose causing the problem; there’s suction into the machine with the hose off and therefore logic tells me the problem is the hose. I ran another hose (the garden one actually) through the vacuum hose to dislodge whatever offending material was stuck in there but…nothing; there is no blockage.

Arrgghh!

By now I was feeling increasingly frustrated and though I should have been preparing lunch, I loaded the contraption into the wagon and headed to the local vacuum cleaner ‘experts’ who have confirmed my diagnosis. The problem is the hose. We hooked up my vacuum with their hose and it sucks like (insert whichever grubby euphemism works for you) so they checked my hose for a blockage using their industrial sized sucker/blower machine but…nothing.

Again.

They’ve ordered me a new hose and were kind enough to give me a loaner until the new hose arrives at the end of the week, but I’m still completely mystified – a hose is surely a piece of corrugated plastic wrapped around air; what the f**k can actually go wrong with that? Is there something technical about hoses that I don’t know?

Anyway.

I have now vacuumed the house with the little loaner machine and it did a pretty good job I must say. I have made the salads for lunch and put a pitcher of margarita in the refrigerator to chill. I’m about to start skewering the marinated chicken and vegetable kebabs for the barbecue and am hoping that the rest of the day will go to plan. I still need to squeeze in a shower before my guests arrive in an hour so I better get moving.

What have you got planned for Sunday in your house?

More hip marketing from Microsoft

Has anyone been watching the ‘party’ marketing plan for Windows 7 which is due for launch later this month?

This instructional video is so bad I initially thought it must be a spoof but apparently not. It is long but you’ll get enough of the picture in the first minute or two so there’s no need to inflict the whole revoltingly perky thing on yourself. There’s a lot of talk of ‘activities’ and lots of over-acting.

Is it for real? Have any of you American bloggers who read here signed up to host a Windows 7 party? I see there’s free promotional material and gifts etc supplied to hosts. You too could have all your friends over and do activities with them until they beg for mercy.

Fly Your Ideas

I’ve been awaiting news about the finalists and their ideas for the ‘Airbus Fly Your Ideas Challenge’.  It’s a global competition designed to encourage innovative thinkers to develop ideas around the future of aviation and reduction in the industry’s impact on the environment.

As a twice weekly air commuter and someone who cringes at the impact on the environment of those flights, I was fascinated when I read about this competition late last year.

The Airbus Fly Your Ideas Challenge was open to university students from around the world at an undergraduate, Masters or PhD level in any academic discipline. The winning teams will be those whose ideas demonstrate the greatest potential to reduce the impact of the aviation industry on the environment.

Check out the Airbus News where it announces the teams that made the finals. Some of the ideas are really out there.

-- The University of Queensland team, who call themselves COz, have made the top 5.  Their proposal is on the use of bio composite cabin materials made from castor plant natural fibres. Anyone fancy flying in a plane made of ‘flax’?

-- The Stanford University team also made the finals for their proposal on inverted V formation flight, building on the model of migrating birds to reduce energy consumption. Don’t know how that would work – wouldn’t all the planes have to leave at the same time and be going to the same place? The finalists now have to develop a presentation about their project before presenting the proposals in a live final in Paris in June 2009. It will be judged by a panel of Airbus experts, industry leaders and eco-efficiency experts.

€30,000 is at stake for first place.

Good luck to team COz.

Wolfram Alpha

Everyone is talking about this revolutionary new search engine which is launching later this month. I understand it will be smarter than anything we’ve seen yet. They say it will work out what information you want and will accurately source it rather than deliver a long list of possible sites to check like ‘traditional’ search engines (e.g Google) do. The new system, Wolfram Alpha, by British inventor Dr Stephen Wolfram, was showcased at Harvard University in the US last week. It is billed as a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does. I see the home page calls itself a ‘computational knowledge engine’.

Tom Simpson on his blog The Convergence of Everything asks “could Wolfram Alpha be as important as Google? Possibly. But what are the wider implications of  Wolfram Alpha exactly? A new paradigm for using computers and the web? Probably. Emerging artificial intelligence and a step towards a self-organising internet? Possibly.”

I am intrigued. What do you know about it?

Tweet bloody tweet

OK twitter review coming for any of you who are even slower than me at looking at such developments. Please note this post may contain spoilers so continue reading at your own risk.

I have spent the day signing up, creating a profile, finding a couple of people to follow and another couple to follow me. I have linked twitter to my blog, I have figured out how to correspond privately with people I know, how to update publicly and how to get twitter to update my Facebook status at the same time.

Overall it seems kind of cool in a fairly unsophisticated way. Cute design backgrounds etc but I’m just not sure that’s it’s actually something that I need.  Most people who I’d want to update on my doings throughout each day are on Facebook anyway and anyone else doesn’t need to know. In fact no-one needs that much detail surely? Not of my life anyway as nowhere near enough happens.

I have serious reservations if you want to use twitter to hold private back and forth conversations. It’s cumbersome having to link your comment to your addressee every single time. It feels precarious if you know what I mean. Like something could go wrong and my ‘private’ comment could be inadvertently sent to my blog sidebar and to the top of my Facebook wall. It feels slightly uncomfortable.Perhaps that IM type conversation is not really what twitter is meant for? I don’t know. Who does?

I’m not yet sure if  the record of the private conversation(s) will automatically trash when I log off later or whether I’ll need to manually delete as I go, I might have to try and find some info about that somewhere too – lots to learn. Boring. 

I’m not sure I’ve ‘gotten’ the point of twitter but I’ll see if it sticks over the next couple of weeks. If not it’ll be gone.  My life is cluttered enough.