Dean Sas's Weblog

Married

// November 20th, 2010 // 5 Comments » // General, p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

At 3pm on the seventh of October I married the ~~gullible~~ gorgeous Sara-Kate Smith at Ringwood Hall, Chesterfield.

The whole day was just amazing, so many of our friends and family all came to share in our day. We had a “small” (40 people) wedding and I still feel bad that I didn’t spend enough time with everyone. How those people that have a hundred guests or more cope I don’t know.

Spacehoppers

The whole day was just amazing, I’m still savouring the experience, looking through photos, mentally replaying moments and talking about it. The eager anticipation building inside me all morning, the inevitable last minute panics, the first sight of Sara walking up the aisle, being cheered by our family & friends, the emotions in the room during the speeches and the really bad dancing.

A couple of days later we flew off to Barcelona for our honeymoon, more of which later. In the meantime I’d just like to say thank you again to our guests and we hope that you enjoyed the day, we certainly did!

Photography by Lloyd Bunting

Kindle

// September 5th, 2010 // 10 Comments » // General, p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

It was my birthday on Monday, and on Friday I finally received my present, Sara, Lemon and my parents had bought me, a Kindle 3G. I’ve been using it for a few hours (finished reading Bram Stokers’ Dracula this morning) and I’m pretty impressed. I’ve not had or even played with an ebook reader before.

The stand out thing is the screen, it just doesn’t look real, more like those fake screens that are sometimes on display handsets in mobile phone shops. I have sat and tried to read an ebook at my computer before, staring at a bright light at an uncomfortable desk or contorting my self trying to lay down and read from a laptop gave me both neck ache and made my eyes not feel quite right. In contrast I have quite happily sat and read on the Kindle for hours, just as I could a paper book. The display isn’t lit, the contrast is perfect, it works by some kind of magic.

So far I’ve preferred holding the Kindle in two hands in landscape mode to read, one hand to hold and another to keep pushing the next page button. It seems very comfortable and not too heavy. I usually read whilst laying down alternating between laying the book down and holding it with one and to read the opposite page. The Kindle supports this posture very well too, though you don’t need to keep moving to read the opposite page or struggling to keep the book whilst holding it down with one hand.

The shop integration works well, it’s pretty fast over wifi or if you’re somewhere with a decent 3g signal. You have the usual “amazon reccomends” and bestsellers lists, as well as being able to drill-down through hundreds of thousands of books sorted by genre. Once you’ve found a book you like you click buy and it’s downloaded and ready to read within seconds. Instant gratification. I’ve downloaded several free out of copyright books through it, to buy books you have to set-up a card for one-click ordering, I imagine it may prove expensive! Combined with Project Gutenbug this may prove the beginning of the end for penguin classics.

Another big reason for getting the Kindle is the free 3g access and the built in web browser, which is surprisingly capable, it does javascript and cookies but not java or flash. Even javascript heavy pages such as Facebook loads and seems to work reasonably well. Gmail fails to work at all though with a message saying “Web Browser is unable to display this web page”, which is a shame as that could have been handy in a pinch. The web browser is mainly intended for reading text heavy pages such as wikipedia. The browser’s article mode tries to reflow the main page text and hide the frills to make it more book-like to read, this works really well for wikipedia,. In some ways reading specific articles on wikipedia using the Kindle article mode is more pleasurable than using my desktop, the browser is not best suited for those rambling wikipedia browses where you end up with dozens of tabs open though.

XKCD is right, the browser and wikipedia does turn it into the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy. It’s a slight shame the text to speech function doesn’t work on the web just to round the effect off.

I think the kindle is going to change my life in a few ways, I’ll probably read more now I can read project gutenburg books in a sane way. To Sara’s happiness, the big cupboard full of books will probably stop expanding. Also to Sara’s happiness, our suitcases won’t be full of books whenever we go on holiday, I’m not one to spend a whole week sat at the side of a pool reading for a whole week but I usually finish two or three books while in the airport and flying as well as the time I spend reading during any downtime.

[Update]
One downside is the way books are organised, currently they are organised by collections (tags), however you have to enter all of this metadata yourself, and enter it on the Kindle. It would be nice if Amazon marked-up their ebooks into collections, so downloading “Rendezvous with Rama” straight to the kindle would automatically create and ‘fiction’ and ‘scifi’ collections and add the book into them. Also for ebooks I transfer over usb to use the directory name for the collections it should be in. So NonFiction/Travel/foo would be in the NonFiction and Travel collections.

It would also be nice to have a ‘read’ and ‘unread’ collection that the Kindle populated automatically.

Student loans cost increase

// May 20th, 2009 // 5 Comments » // General, p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

The Student Loans Company have just announced that they are to increase the real cost of post 1998 student loans.

Student loans are supposed to be linked to the lower of the retail prices index (RPI, a measure of inflation) and the Bank of England base interest rate +1%. The idea being that inflation does not erode the cost of the loan and so you pay back in real terms exactly what you borrowed. Thus the only cost to the government for the loan facility which encourages thousands of young people into higher education, is that of administration and of opportunity cost, and over the life term of the loan there is effectively no cost to students.

Unexpectedly, since this system came into place we’ve had a bit of a recession and now the RPI is at -0.4%. The government has decided to lower the student loan interest rate to 0%, which is 0.4% higher than the cost of living, meaning that students are now paying more for their loan than they have borrowed. This isn’t lots of money, about £40-£50 per year but government forecasts expect RPI to hit -3% by the end of the year, which is more like £300-£400 extra per year. This breaks the understanding that I think many of us had when taking out the loans.

If you feel strongly about this then please sign the petition or better yet, write to your MP. You can use my letter to Paul Holmes as an idea of what to write but please do not copy it word for word – MPs get that many copy and pasted identical letters that they don’t tend to pay them much attention.

Dear Paul Holmes,

I’m writing to you about the recent decision to lower the interest rate
of post 1998 student loans to 0% between 1st September 2009 and 31st
August 2010.

As you may know, student loans are linked to the lower of the Retail
Price Index (RPI) and Bank of England base rate plus one percent. The
aim of this arrangement was to keep student loans in-line with the cost
of living so that students will payback the same as they loaned in real
terms.

With recent figures showing that RPI is -0.4% and the government
setting student loans at 0% interest, students are now paying back more
than they loaned in real terms. It is only a small amount but the
forecast in the last Budget was for RPI to fall to -3%, which would
then cost students and graduates hundreds of pounds each year.

Given your record of voting against top-up fees I hope that you will do
what you can to oppose this.

Yours sincerely,
Dean Sas

Internets 1 Parliament 0

// January 21st, 2009 // 3 Comments » // General, p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

MP’s plans to make their expenses exempt from FOI requests have collapsed. It’s a humiliating U turn for the Labour party, who were planning to enforce a three line whip. The Conservatives seem to have received slightly better publicity by changing their minds about it sooner and insisting they were against the idea from the beginning. The turn around came after a largely internet-driven campaign against the plan began, and finished within a couple of days.

The MySociety blog has some interesting statistics on public participation of this campaign

QUOTD 04/12/2008

// December 4th, 2008 // No Comments » // General

“we must be the only nation on earth whose constitution is distributed, only partly canonical, of unclear ownership, not necessarily maintained, and poorly documented. It’s an open-source project!” – Alex on an interesting and humourous thread describing Westminster style parliaments in computing terms. Via Brian Burger