While I was on paternity leave from the blog a couple of weeks ago a lady called Dolores contacted me. She does graphic design and particularly favours politically stroppy animals, hence the penguin link.

She asked if she could send me some and I was more than happy to take a look. They’re good and deserve to be in the public domain so from time to time I’ll be posting up some of her work and hopefully she’ll be getting her own site in the not too distant future because work like this deserves to be out there.

There is a side note. Most readers will know my position regarding usage of graphical images on this site. As far as I’m normally concerned all images are free to use and distribute although accreditation and a link back is always appreciated and this remains the case unless otherwise stipulated.

In this case these images remain the sole property of Delores and she retains full copyright. Please respect this and if you wish to use these images for any other purpose then I’m more than happy to put you in touch with her so that you can discuss it.

Without further ado, I have to admit this one is my favourite. I don’t normally go down with profanity on this site but in this case I’ll make the exception because it is truly funny.

That personal thing I mentioned.

Regular readers and friends will know that the Penguin household is expecting the pitter patter of little flippers in the near future. The second instance of this in our case and an arrival date being the hideously inconvenient date (for someone actively involved in politics) of May 1st (being polling day for this year’s local elections).

Pretty much everything was sorted, people who I know would be looking for my campaigning help had been informed that Mrs Penguin would kill me if I went out knocking doors on the day she was due to go into labour so that along with going to any counts had all been canceled.

Then last Thursday we went for what should have been our last scan and no going into details, there are a few problems. These have meant that some time in the very near future Mrs Penguin will have to spend some time in hospital along with the new arrival, I’ll have to take care of Little Penguin on my own for a week or two, or maybe longer alongside doing all the stuff that pays the bills and making daily visits to the hospital.

There’s a lot I’d like to write about, in particular how things are going with this whole Phorm thing but if anything, the last week has focused my mind on what’s truly important in life and much as I love it, this blog comes much lower in the order of priorities than other things right now.

I’m not off for good but if I don’t post anything after tonight for a month or so then you’ll know why.

Tata for now.

Note:

I’m actually going to post something tonight to try and clear up a few things I meant to do if I get the time, if not, well, see you all sometime in the future.

were there just some earth tremors in the Black Country?

Possibly a better description might be desperate but just for some light amusement I was having a little wander through the stats to see how people are arriving at the site from particular search terms on Google and two from the last couple of hours stood out.

First up is:

“fuck partys in dudley”

Which thankfully I’m down at 11th place on Google, safely on the second page and:

“women in willenhall wanting to fuck someone at any age”

which is probably more alarming that I’m first on a Google search for such an eloquent use of wording.

The mind boggles sometimes.

At the risk of being labeled a miserable old sod, especially being critical of something where children are involved but I’m a bit perplexed by this little competition being run by the Express and Star, well known local purveyor of quality journalism.

It starts like this. It’s the 50 year anniversary of the creation of arguably the most enduring children’s toy; Lego. Something to be celebrated in my humble opinion having given endless hours of playtime to both myself and now my own son.

The good old Express and Star is running a competition to win some Lego and encouraging people to send in pictures of their ‘creations’. Note the word creation in there and also in the same article ‘unique’.

Now move on over to the actual pictures sent in but a quick look through any catalogue or the online Lego Shop will reveal that six out of the twelve pictures of ‘unique’ ‘creations’ are in fact, off the shelf sets that anyone could knock up.

It’s hard to be critical when kids are involved and indeed the other six pictures contain some really good original and ‘unique’ Lego models, personally I like the first one most in terms of creativity but that’s just my humble opinion.

I do hope the old Express and Star does a bit of homework before they award the prize. Could be a tad embarrassing awarding it to someone who’s built a straight out of the box with instructions model.

Blog’s been quiet for a few weeks. The culmination of being abroad with limited broadband access and suffering from a truly awful cough and cold that just wouldn’t shift hasn’t exactly put me in the right frame of mood for writing but barring lots of other increasing commitments, hopefully I can get some regular posting back up and running.

Regular readers will notice that the blog structure changed a bit before Christmas and the ‘recent comments’ section is still a bit screwy, as in the links to individual posts don’t work. There’s a bit of PHP scripting that needs sorting out which I’ll try to get round to when I have half an hour free.

New year’s are a good time for changes and fresh beginnings but pretty much this blog will carry on much as it has always done apart from one thing. I have a distinct desire to do more techie related posting. Partly impartial reviews of systems, software and hardware, but also as is evident the way in which technology affects and interrelates with both personal and public life.

Happy new year everyone.

Merry Christmas everyone, have a lovely time over the festive period.

Another one of those posts that I’ve really been meaning to do but other things have got in the way.

A little while back Toshiba loaned me a Tecra A8 to do an appraisal of for their TalkToshiba site. Incidentally, it’s a very good idea from Toshiba in terms of getting exposure and feedback from bloggers and if anyone else would like to send me something to trial, I’m more than happy, although things of a technical nature are preferred.

I will declare an interest. Up until then I had only ever actually purchased one laptop in my life and it was a Toshiba (Pentium MMX with 64Mb Ram if memory serves me correctly) and I loved it until the motherboard eventually gave up but I couldn’t complain, it had been everywhere with me and I’d used it constantly.

So with that in mind and fond memories I was looking forward to the Tecra. It was on paper a great spec. I nice little Dual Core Intel processor. A gig of ram, a 256mb ATI graphics card and I was up for putting it through its paces.

On looks:

Well, it’s a laptop, it’s black and there’s not much more to say. I appreciate that Mac has done well in stylising it’s laptops and if that’s your cup of tea then good on you but the vast majority of laptops are black or grey slabs and that’s what the Tecra A8 is. That isn’t a criticism because, at least from my perspective it’s performance, what the machine can do and functionality that’s important.

On performance:

With anticipation of playing around with a computer with a specification that blows all my other machines out of the water I eagerly booted it up, incidentally it came pre-installed with Windows XP. Now I am going to state that yes I do know there are much more accurate ways to bench test hardware but I thought a more layman’s perspective would be better because after all that’s what your end user notices so I decided to test performance through boot-up times/shut down times and graphics through games.

The first thing that struck me when I booted the machine was how slow it was. In terms of boot-up to usable desktop, my Celeron D 3.4Ghz with 256Mb of Ram outperformed it. It also only marginally outperformed my ancient Packard Bell laptop P3 800Mhz with 128Mb of Ram. However, once up and running it was decidedly faster and graphics wise was very good. I might note that the slowness of booting, because it really did under-perform could well have been due to a poorly installed OS because there really shouldn’t be any reason for the slowness I encountered.

With this in mind I decided to cross compare it with a Linux OS. My personal choice was Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn and the performance at boot time was staggering in comparison. It easily out-performed everything else I’ve got and despite ATI graphics cards sometimes being a bit of a pain on Linux due to unavailable proprietary drivers I had a 3D Beryl cube desktop up and running in minutes. It also performed well running games graphics wise even through Wine which is a Windows emulator for Linux. It did however have a problem rendering video while spinning the cube desktop which my other PC with a very old Nvidia card in has no problems doing. I will however put this down to the drivers and not the actual hardware.

All in all it was quite impressive. I personally liked the robust nature of the design, it felt strong and well built with good segmentation of hardware for upgrade and maintenance. I know it’s only a small touch but I really liked the volume switch which simply moved the volume up or down by pushing it one way or the other, none of this trying to scroll it round like mad. However I didn’t like the touchpad. Not out of any kind of unresponsiveness but more that the edged were raised by about 1.5mm above the pad and I kept hitting my finger on them and losing the cursors position.

Would I buy one?

Well, much as I really liked the build quality and I really appreciate well built things, I’d have to say no. The touchpad would drive me mad after a while and user functionality is very important to me. Although the model is discontinued I did look over the price range of what you get from Toshiba for your money and for an independent who has to buy things directly out of what he earns then I felt them to be a little pricey. I could get better spec for less money if I hunted around a bit but it’s obvious that I’m not the core focus of Toshiba.

I also couldn’t get the speakers working with Linux, headphones were fine, just no speaker sound. I’m sure I could have come up with a fix but I was too busy and after all it was just a loaned laptop, if it had been mine then I’d have put in the extra effort. This of course does highlight one important factor. Dell in many ways have stolen a march on other PC manufacturers in that they’ve started selling PC’s with Linux pre-installed. Not that I’d buy one because for some strange reason it costs more, but it does tell me as a Linux user that I could buy their machine and know my OS definitely works with all the hardware which is something I couldn’t be sure of with other makes.

Who’s this laptop for?

Well, it’s a workhorse. It’s not pretty but it’s well built and designed for people on the move. It’s a salesmans/company execs laptop and these are usually purchased in bulk by organisations or companies where price is not necessarily the determining factor. For that market it’s perfect but for the independent and Linux user such as myself, price factors and compatibility are of greater importance so unfortunately it wouldn’t be my first choice for a laptop.

Unless I’ve completely missed something and the West Midlands County has been abolished then can someone tell me who at the Sun newspaper (I use the term guardedly) thinks that Sandwell is in Worcestershire?

Either that or they’re working on very old maps down there.

I’m not sure if it’s something to do with fatherhood, work, or that we usually only watch German TV at home but this is the first Rugby World that I haven’t watched a single match.

That said I caught the last couple of minutes of the England-France semi-final and all I can say, is come on England, I may well even break a habit and go down the same pub I watched England win the last world cup to watch it if Mrs Penguin lets me out.