The Eric Wroolie Blog

Overpass Experiences

The Cornbury Festival 2010

by Leave a Comment

2010-07-03 002

Last weekend I took my family to the Cornbury Music Festival near Witney in Oxfordshire.  It was my first music festival—there weren’t many (I don’t know if there were any) near San Diego when I was growing up.  There are loads of festivals in England—they call this the festival season.  We saw some great bands like Squeeze, the Blockheads, Joshua Radin, etc.  I get the impression it’s a festival for the older crowds (30s and 40s), but there were some younger crowds too.

Cornbury was recommended as one of the most family-friendly festivals there are.  It has three stages.  This is only the 7th year, but they’ve had some big names play it.  This year the headliners were Jackson Browne and David Gray.  The kids loved it.  This was their first camping experience.

One of the highlights was watching Charly Coombes & The New Breed on the Riverside Stage (the small stage).  I had never heard of them before and there was only a small crowd watching.  They are obviously a pretty new band, but I’m sure we will be seeing more of them.  I’ve already bought their album on Amazon.  Here’s a video I found on YouTube:

 

It was a great festival and the weather was reasonably nice.  It was very cool to bring some blankets and a football into the Arena where we could watch the bands while kids could play football off the side if they were bored.  I highly recommend it—especially if you have small children.

Baseball Ambassador

by 2 Comments

On Tuesday I gave a talk at the primary school to a bunch of six-year-olds.  Each class year was learning about specific country for the entire week.  The year 1 one classes  (first graders) were learning about America.  So, I went in and gave them a little introduction to my favourite sport—baseball.

I loaded up a gym bag with a few bats, some bases, a couple of gloves, and some balls from my baseball collection.  I gave a short little presentation on what I liked to do at their age.  When I was little, my hero wasn’t Wayne Rooney—it was Tony Gwynn.  We didn’t play football, we played baseball.  I told them about my little league team.  I let them each hold a baseball and feel what the gloves and bats felt like.  I showed them my special foul ball I caught at a Padre game in 1996 after years of taking my glove to the ballpark (still in a protective case). 

Then we went outside to hit balls and run the basis.  I used wiffle balls and a foam bat.  We set the bases out in a small diamond and had all the kids stand in a semi-circle in the outfield.  Each child came up to the plate to hit the ball while the others cheered them on.  I threw underhand and most of them were able to hit it and run the bases.  It was a great time.

Most people in England don’t know very much about baseball (the same way most people in the States don’t know much about Cricket).  It was one of the things I missed the most when I moved here 12 years ago.  No baseball. 

Baseball is such a big part of American life. Even if you are not a fan, you have a general idea how the game works.  It’s woven into our culture.  Television programmes make occasional references to baseball.  We use baseball terms in common speech.  So, when kids over here watch American TV programmes, they don’t always understand when there is a baseball reference.  I was watching Arthur (the cartoon—not the Dudley Moore movie) with my kids and they were playing baseball on the show.  My kids are familiar with baseball, but many of their friends are not.

But kids here love football (okay, soccer).  Even at six-years-old, they knew a lot about the World Cup.

Surprisingly, the classes I spoke to knew a little bit about baseball from Wii Sports.  That was their exposure to it.  At the end of playing with one of the classes, a little girl who hit the ball pretty well said to me “I never hit the ball on the Wii, but I hit the ball today.”  She had a big smile on her face. 

I’ve done my part as ambassador.

Fixed my iPod Nano

by 1 Comment

Four years ago, my colleagues at BNP Paribas gave me an iPod Nano as a leaving gift.  It worked great and I use it all 2010-07-01 003the time for running.  I have a big iPod Classic too, but this little 1Gb gadget is perfect for my runs (since it has the flash memory and I find it easy to navigate the music while running than I did when running with an iPhone.

The problem is that a few years ago, after running with it through the rain, the click wheel stopped working properly.  It works eventually but you have to fiddle with it.  For example, the menu button wouldn’t work until you clicked it about 5 times.  It was annoying, but I learned to live with it.  I thought about replacing it, but it hardly I couldn’t really justify the expense to myself to get a new one.

So the other day, I stumbled upon some videos on how to fix various problems with iPods, iPhones, etc.  Since my Nano was probably way outside any warranty anyway, I decided to fix it myself.  Around my house, I’m known for fixing things and making them worse (like flooding my own kitchen or making a small leaky tap to a large leaky tap), so it went against my better judgement—but I tried it anyway..

I bought a new click wheel for £3.99 from http://www.appleiphoneparts.co.uk/.  It was tiny and it came in an envelope the next day.  They have loads of parts  I also bought a iPhone toolkit from E-Cell on ebay (http://stores.ebay.co.uk/E-Cell-Global) for £2.95.

I then watched a video made by  DigiExpress in the US (http://www.digiexpress.us/) which walks through how to replace it:

 

I had to pause this video loads of times at each step, but I got it to work.  It took me about 20 minutes.  My 4-year-old Nano is just like new. When the battery goes out on it, I will be able to replace that too.  I’m chuffed about saving some money by fixing myself, but I’m more pleased that I didn’t have to add yet one more piece of technology to a landfill somewhere.