Sunday: Bikes and Punk; Alan

Alan

I've tried to write about this before, but it's difficult.

Alan is my maternal uncle, and we've always got along well. He's very gregarious and always well dressed: I've never seen him wear jeans or trainers, always good slacks and leather shoes, a shirt.

About fifteen years ago he had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalised. He recovered and has been okay since until about six weeks ago when he started behaving oddly, the old problems coming back, and he was hospitalised again about two weeks ago. I've been spending the last two weeks zipping up and down the M11 and M6 to go and see him. He's in a pleasant enough ward, low security, and seems to be recovering slowly, three steps forward, two steps back.

Hollywood Doll at the NCC Custom Bike Show

On a lighter note, I went to see Keith (a.k.a. K.T. Glitz) and his band, Hollywood Doll, at the NCC Custom Bike Show. It always seems a bit weird to use the phrases "old-fashioned" and "punk band" together, but that's what came to mind, and jolly good they were too, playing with gusto and skill. It reminded me a bit of the B52's.

I took some photo's of the event, and some of the rather classy bikes on display.

Mad Men

I've been watching back-to-back episodes of the first three seasons of AMC's Mad Men, all about advertising executives in 1960's New York. It's surprisingly engaging and deservedly won umpteen Emmy's and Golden Globe's.

Saturday: GMail and Sodastream

Saturday is a day in.

Sodastream

For my birthday, my sister bought me a Sodastream. Everything seems to be going late 1970's, with a coalition government, a flourishing music scene (Private Trousers, Hollywood Doll, One Day Elliot, Wet Dog), rising unemployment and, to cap it all, Sodastream gets re-launched. I bought a sample box and some basic flavours from Lakeland and have been going through the samples the last few days.

• Cola tastes like a superior own-brand Cola;
• The Cranberry and Raspberry doesn't seem to taste of anything really: not unpleasant, just undefinable;
• The Ginger Ale was about the worst, so far: didn't even taste of ginger;
• Lemon and Lime tasted of, well, lemonade but not lime;
• Zero Cola isn't bad considering it uses a sugar substitute;
• Apple tastes of apple, but with a slight aftertaste.

The most interesting seems to be XTreme, which is their Red Bull copy. Not bad, and tastes a bit better than the original. A good mixer with vodka, apparently. Worth getting a Sodastream for that alone.

PopTray & GMail

I've also been looking at how to connect to GMail programmatically. I wanted a small email notifier, something that just sits in the system tray on the PC and checks my email every so often. I found PopTray:

PopTray

This is quite a nice little program which works fine but has some limitations, e.g. it won't work with the VPN I sometimes use. It's also open source and written in Delphi, although a later version than I have. It also has a GMail extension, which I couldn't get working. I've downloaded the source and have been tinkering with it the last few days, becoming gradually more frustrated. There doesn't seem to be an open API or web service for GMail, which would be handy and the GMail plugin source is all HTTP Gets and Posts, very crude. I've even resorted to looking at the source of a Python application which does the same thing.