Day: 26 November 2023

Weeknotes #44: nutrition analysis

Week commencing Monday, 20 November 2023

Raynes Park Christmas tree before they turned on the lights

Quantified Self

  • This week: Stand 7/7; Exercise 5/7 and Move 7/7. (90%). Morning walks: 3/5 (days in the office don’t count). Office days 0/5. Total steps: 66,809

Life

  • A while ago, I purchased Zoe, the personalised nutrition program, but there was a problem with the glucose monitor. Monday, I tried again. Now, I’m obsessed with looking at the graph. The muffins were dry.
  • Tuesday, the boiler was serviced. No issues. I need to arrange for all the other house fixes.
  • The Christmas Tree arrived in Raynes Park (pictured), but they didn’t turn it on until later in the week, and I wasn’t there to see it. Not sure there was any ceremony.
  • Let’s face it: young people can’t understand the value of long-term friendships. Which is why I loved my Thursday drinks. Cheers, Jules. Cheers, James.
  • To Shrewsbury on Friday afternoon. Difficult to have a conference call on a busy commuter train, but I managed it.
  • Related: Saturday lunch, sat one table away from their MP. Heard complaining that the venue can’t get staff.
  • Probably related: the aforementioned MP almost always voted against a right to remain for EU nationals living in the UK pre-Brexit.
  • Friends round on Saturday evening meant a quiet Sunday watching Doctor Who (see below). Many LOLs with Sooz Kempner in the evening.

Media

Archive

To save the links getting lost in the future I checked the Internet Archive to see what they had saved for the posts linked here. YouTube links don’t seem to archive well so I don’t list them. If the source above no longer works, these should.

Tower of Technology, London

After years of walking past the BT Tower, I finally got to the top. It was as incredible as I’d expected.

BT Tower (previously the Post Office Tower) was once the tallest building in the UK. Officially opened in October 1965, it was built to provide London with microwave communication links to the rest of the country.

Interestingly, this icon of the London Skyline was apparently an Official Secret in its early life. In theory, you couldn’t admit it existed. It originally opened with a rotating restaurant operated by the Butlins holiday company. I wonder how you made a booking if you couldn’t say where it was? For security reasons, public access, including the restaurant, closed in the early 1980s.

BT Tower: Broadcast Hub

View of the BT Tower from Charlotte Street, London
View of the BT Tower from Charlotte Street, London

In the mid-1990s, when I worked for the audio distribution company SMS, we had audio circuits connecting our satellite network to ‘Tower’ so we could send and receive audio from BT’s broadcast network.  We were based only a 9-minute walk away from the tower with a perfect line of sight (if we leaned out the front door). We didn’t use the circuits very often but there was always a little excitement when we called BT to arrange a connection.

Years later, I was back in the Euston Tower for work, which provided a bird’s-eye view of the rotating screens. By then, many of the dish-shaped aerials had been removed for safety reasons, but the Tower remained at the heart of the UK’s broadcast network, even as signals migrated to underground fibre cables.  And even now, at least until we move offices at the start of December, I walk along Tottenham Court Road every morning past Maple Street, the Tower’s official address, with a daily view of whatever message is set to appear on the big screen 167m (548 ft) up in the London sky.

Rotating View

I’ve been to the top of many buildings with a bird’s-eye view of London, but until last week, I’d never been to the top of the Tower. The charity RedR arranged an evening of visits as a fundraising activity, so I got to look back at my former and current workplaces.

While at the top of The Tower, they turned on the rotation for a full sweep of the London skyline, which, at night, is very impressive.  As we are in the season of Christmas lights, there were some spectacular views of the lights along Tottenham Court Road, at Regent’s Place and of the Hyde Park Winter Wonderland. The experience was as incredible as I’d expected it to be.

According to the London Landmarks site, the Tower is the “only building in the country which is allowed to be evacuated by lift (an oddity which required Parliamentary legislation to be passed)”. Fortunately, an evacuation was not required this evening.

A few more pictures from the visit to BT Tower on Flickr.

#SOLS

#SOLS is the project to have something written on this site on the last Sunday of every month.  I covered topics such as a visit to Japan, the state of the trains and why we change the clocks. I have one more expected in 2017 at the end of the year.  I wonder what that will cover? Follow the sequence with the handy sols tag.

Thanksgiving 2004

Happy Thanksgiving to those passing by.

I trust all my American friends and colleagues enjoyed their Thanksgiving. In previous years, I have looked at what Thanksgiving is really about (see here), but this year I wanted to see how you were all celebrating by checking the Flickr tags. All the tags representing Thanksgiving seem to be about food or family, which I think seems like a pretty good notion to me.

Does Remote Storage Work

Is it possible to have the things I use regularly available on remote servers and never need to care about them myself?

Like many people, I signed up for all the free web-based email accounts (RocketMail – now Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Hotmail, etc.), but I never really used them. Over time, I let most of them lapse and only really use Yahoo and – now –Gmail, but I do not use any of them as my main mail account. I didn’t use them primarily because I didn’t want to pay to be connected to the web to read my mail (my POP accounts were better), and I wanted to maintain addresses at my own domain, and – at the time – none of those interfaces allowed you to be seen as another mail address. Yahoo, of course, also provides photo storage, address books and calendars.

My web hosting company allows me to use my space as a virtual hard drive (if I work out how to configure it) and, as I have noted, Flickr is becoming my personal choice for photographs (even though I could try to manage it myself on my own servers) while I use Bloglines for feed aggregation. So, the question is, can I now run my life using storage space away from my own computer?

Here are some of my considerations:

  • Outside of work (which I am not proposing to move) I have precious few documents so I don’t need masses of file space for them (I suspect my Yahoo account would happily cope).
  • Photos: I can’t get away from the lack of storage (even at Flickr) for them but I suspect it will cope with all the photographs I care about (the rest would only be archived to CD anyway).
  • Music: This is the difficult one, since I upload music to my Treo’s MP3 player, so I don’t carry it all around with me all the time (like an iPod). Perhaps it is time to readdress that issue.
  • Mail: I have mail archives in Mozilla Mail format. What I think I need is Mozilla’s roaming profiles, but I have no idea how they work.
  • Bookmarks: Ditto (but in the meantime, Yahoo Companion bar and Yahoo Bookmarks should work).

Do you have any tips? Will it work? If it works, I only need a reasonable internet connection to have my whole life on tap. What I really need is a proper method for synchronisation – but I’ve ranted about that before.

At A Newsagent Near You

Attitude Magazine named Coronation Street’s Todd Grimshaw ‘Queer of the Year’ and The Hours ‘Film of the Year’.

the gay kiss in coronation street

Attitude Magazine has voted Coronation Street’s Todd Grimshaw as ‘Queer of the Year’ – which is interesting considering he’s a fictional character. At last Coronation Street has acknowledged gay people’s part in a society – although I don’t consider it a breakthrough in making the programme ‘representative’ or ‘real’. I believe that there was a great deal of publicity about this kiss which really concerned a pretty small element of the storylines in the programme (admittedly, I only watched for the few weeks around this kiss). If stories that Todd’s boyfriend is being cast are true, then it might get more interesting. Of course, the real crunch is what the regular viewers think. Perhaps I’ll get an idea when I see my gran over Christmas.

the cover of attitide magazine december 2003

Attitude also voted The Hours as ‘Film of the Year ‘, which I am not sure about, and ‘Event of the Year’ was the scrapping of Section 28– which, of course, is a great step forward. The magazine has also chosen ‘Sexiest Man of the Year’ and, let’s just say, that one of the top choices is a previous Man of the Moment. The other, I imagine, will be very soon! Oh, if you’re thinking of heading to the newsagent, it’s the December issue I’ve been reading.