My Motley Meanderings

Take 2 minutes to go here and read about a nasty piece of legislation that they want to sneak through the EU TOMORROW and which could cut you off from the Internet forever with no redress, if your ISP says your internet address has been doing naughty things. Then follow the appropriate link to write to your MEP and barrage their inbox for Monday morning.

( Microblog entries )

It's taken a while but the Convention schedule of events is finally in a fit
state to be presented to the world. Now you can not only see what great
events we are putting on but *when*:

http://www.dwcon.org/programme/schedule.php

I don't know how we managed to fit it all in, even with all of the
Procrastinators running at top speed.

And if you've been waiting for this information before booking your meals,
go do *that other thing* now:

http://www.dwcon.org/hotel/MealReservations.php

You may think you have plenty of time but the History Monks have been
borrowing time from all over the place to help us with the Schedule and you
may find they nabbed some of yours.

Bruce
Programme Head

What the brisdesmaid dresses will look like except 1) they'll be more deep lilac and 2) they'll fit

Temporary visitor at my house. Very cool, but I think he likes to travel, and is a tad big for my living room...

Going to watch Who now. Might drive down tomorrow as their is going to be a lot of Stuff at work on Monday.

I hope you all have a wonderful 4th of July weekend. Eat, drink, be merry, and please, try not to blow off your hands with homemade fireworks.

Originally published at JeremiahTolbert.com. You can comment here or there.

Just testing out this Twitter thing so don't expect anything stunningly informed.
Not that you ever did I am sure.

• 07:19 Yikes it is early. And so Whomageddon begins. #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

So, my mum asked me to make a playlist for her wedding; it's only a few people who'll be there, and my mother (as usual) wishes to shake her bootie (I think, knowing my mum, that's about the best term for it).

This is - in theory - easy. I have a vast collection of music, and I did in a past life DJ. So, plan was I'd sit down at the Mac, connect to the EntertainmentMac and throw together a playlist of 70s and 80s (and possibly some 90s) music that my mum could get her groove on to. Yeah.

In the last few days the Router decided, somewhat randomly, that instead of taking the full 128bit insane-o-line-noise like password that we've been using for the past year it would, instead, take only the first 8 characters of it.

This hasn't been too much hastle, it's been annoying, certainly, but not insane amounts of hastle because all I had to do was chop the passwords down on the connecting computers and suddenly network connectivity came back. I'll grant it took me quite a long time to work out why the newly installed G4 laptop wouldn't connect. But once I'd got there it was all fine and dandy. Except I'd forgotten about the evil that lurks upstairs.

See the G5 has no posh apple gidgets to connect wirelessly, instead in has the fairly dismal Buffalo Airstation. It only has this because Nikki and Kate are very lovely and understanding my plight gave me one of their unused ones. I say dismal because while it functions adequately it's certainly got it's quirks and one of it's major quirks is that the default IP address of the one they gave me is not mentioned online or in any manual anywhere. I'm convinced I wrote it down. I put it on a stickie or something. But... I've had to reinstall the mac, the ent mac and the laptop since then and I can't find this vital piece of information.

And Nikki is out.

And so I've spent a frustrating hour going through all the 'default' IP addresses I could find:

192.168.1.1

1.1.1.1

192.168.1.169

192.168.11.1

Trying to find out if I can get it's IP address from it's MAC address (theoretically, yes. Easily? No). Fiddled with resetting it, trying to use the auto-magic-connect-to-a-router (it connected to a neighbours one!). I've wrestled with a strong desire to hurl it from the house, along with all the other shonky pieces of crap that muck up technological equipement. And instead decided to wait, and I'll do the music tomorrow, or whenever I've spoken to Nikki. Assuming she can recall it's default IP address. Otherwise I suppose I can write a little script that cycles through and pings each IP address from 1.1.1.1 to 254.254.254.254, until it finds it. But I fear that might take some time. Why Buffalo did this I don't know. 

At any rate, I'm going to go and spray the car, which while it's not that rewarding (in so far as I'm doing a gash job incredibly quickly) is, at least, something I can actually *do*.

I was looking forward to today ... I even got up early so that I could ge tto the festival early, but I took one look at the heavy grey clouds in the sky and the puddles on the ground and thought better of spending the day in the park. Just once it'd be nice to be wroong about the great british weather... It has brightened up a bit now, and the rest of my family is still going (although mum is waiting for Aisha to bugger off first 'cos the girl can't be trusted not to do as hse pleases while my mum is out.) So here I am in the library at 1Pm instead of 10.30Am liek I had intended. I'll be meeting my fmaily baout 1.30PM, although none of us is being very precise about the exact arrangments. The Amy Winehouse tribute starts about 2.30PM and hte Beatles one at about 5.30Pm ~ i haven't been able to track doen an accurate programme.

To be perfectly honets though, I'd sooenr go straight home after this. I'm tired after get up so ealy this mornign (even though I napped for the better part of an hour last night.) ANd yesterday was just a really annoying day, topped off quite nicely by seeing a magpie in my neighbours front garden as I walked up my garden path *sigh*

Google's Street View technology is coming to the UK. Already the vans are running around the streets of London taking millions of images of places and people. This has got some people concerned.

I like the idea of street-view and I cannot wait until they do Nottingham but the technology does raise privacy concerns that cut to the heart of privacy issues.

In essence the question is "How much privacy do you have when in public?"

Clearly someone walking down a public street cannot complain if someone else looks at them whilst doing it. However everyone has experienced something that is normally kept private whilst in public. E.g. a row with your partner or vomiting due to illness. In these situations, do you have the right to privacy? Is it acceptable behaviour for everyone else in the street to stand around, pointing and laughing at you?

If it is wrong for people to point-and-laugh at others very public misfortune, are we not saying that the unfortunate person has a right to privacy whilst in public?

The situation is compounded by street-view where not can the people actually there at the time point-and-laugh, but billions of people around the world can do it indefinably. This question also affects CCTV. It would be a miracle if the operators of CCTV system did not keep a 'best of' tape of all the bizarre things they see and inevitably these tapes leak out to cheap TV shows and YouTube.

Throughout man's evolution we had effective privacy in public because your misfortune would only be seen by those then and there at the time. Now, your bad luck can be captured for posterity and shared with the entire world. To cope with this we need new laws, new socially acceptable patterns of behaviour and new language to describe the concept of privacy in public.

I am still looking for donations of books - did you know that?
To promote SF at an LX Table.

meanwhile, I wrote about one day in our honeymoon for File 770 and you can see why 3 weeks was amazing. Its about sports though. I also discuss the Fanzine Hugo's with editor MIke Gleyer.
http://efanzines.com/File770/File770-153.pdf

London still excites me and here in Drink Tank I write about a busy pair of saturdays.
http://efanzines.com/DrinkTank/DrinkTank173.pdf

While heading down to Bristol seems very worthwhile, especially if a comic expo is on.

http://efanzines.com/DrinkTank/DrinkTank171.pdf

I wrote about tanith lee for JOhn Coxans procrastinations, but the rest of the zine is very good.
http://efanzines.com/Procrastinations/procrastinations05.pdf

Reveiws to beat the band appeared in prism, the zine of the BFS and I have written some things for the BSFA, so I await the magic that is DTP and HTTP.

was interested to see that an article went from that, to a letter to a discussion at conrunner, seems like Novacon may be about to look at another hotel.

J

This week has been incredibly hard work - mostly due to short staffedness; well, that and doing 1.7 extra shifts. I know it's bad when work call me at home and invite me to come in early,  because I'm about an hour away from work, and if they've reached the stage of calling someone who's going to take an hour to get in, it's going to be bad.

We've actually been short, I think, every day I've been on. Our new method of work requires one extra nurse, and the shifts quite simply aren't being filled. No one wants to do either of the new shifts - the early one is not different enough from an ordinary early, and in fact makes you leave at a worse time. The late shift goes on waaaay too late; meaning that, well, no one wants to do that either.

Which has lead to us really, really struggling. Now I'm qualified to not-triage (we do something simpler and quicker than triage), this has also lead me into a minefield of being annoyed and frustrated. It is the most unrewarding job of all time. One of the most amusing things is that we pick people up who we think are likely to need an xray (mechanism of injury, obvious deformity, etc) and then will inform the doctor that we suspect they'll need an Xray. Quite often they'll listen to the mechanism of injury or the description from us and just order it without seeing the patient. In fact, I think I've only every had one turned down - who was later Xrayed anyway. That certainly doesn't mean I've caught all the people who need X-rays, but means I generally catch the ones who are likely to. But much to my amusement, a poster has appeared at work reminding nurses that we're not allowed to independently order Xrays for patients without our knowledge being assessed. I presume someone has been doing that; but the fact is, the Xrays that get ordered by me, following discussions with the Dr and them writing the card? Well, it's essentially the same thing...

I do, however, want to get a lot more knowledge on proper triage assessment, because I'd like to be better able to assess injuries.

One other thing I'be picked up from a much more experienced nurse is to not say that I'm a nurse. We have a variety of protocols for 'nurse led referrals' - where we can see, assess and refer the patient without involving a doctor. Ear, Nose and Throat; pregnancy and gynae problems can quite often be sent straight to the specialists without wasting the patient's time on two examinations and telling the story several times.

This is a great idea - except that when you say it's a nurse led referal, some docs have a strop and say that they have to be seen by an A&E doc; this is often all the more frustrating as you've spent 10 minutes bleeping them and trying the wards they're on to try and find them. But my new method - which is really the only method I've known, is to say "Hi, this is [my first name] in A&E, I've got a referral for you...". This seems to work much better, although they do still get a little stroppy sometimes...

I've actually though, looked after a lot of really charming and lovely people. People who you feel real full-on good about looking after. You shouldn't have favourites, and I have certain masochistic enjoyment when I'm looking after the stroppy indepentent sort, or the mad-as-a-badger-with-UTI-or-other-infection sort, or indeed the dementia-pissed-off sort. But looking after nice people who are just nice, is really a bit pleasant.

Anyhow, all this work has got in the way of quality snuggling time with Kathryn; which has been quite distressing. We have however made some progress on the wedding and the ceremony in the states. Although they've both ended up being lots bigger than we originally planned. It's funny how these things expand and expand :)

It's also led to slow progress on the DAF. Well, that and the hub puller's frustrating absence from my life. All that's left to do to make it road-worthy (not, you note, finished or anything. But roadworthy) is to reattach the end of the bumper and to unseize the brakes (well, I say 'all', it may be that the brake cylinders are shot). These are potentially trivial jobs, but I can't actually *do* the latter because the hub-puller ordered from e-bay more than a week ago hasn't turned up. The seller's not answered an email yet, either, which is also frustrating.

I've busied myself with prepping (in a very limited sense) and painting the new metalwork. One side's got a coat of Nissan Arctic White on the sills and a bit of the back quarter (which looks a little whiter than the rest of the car, but never mind). It's a gash job, I should, really have spent time with filler and carefully prepped things. But I didn't have time for niceties and I'd rather get paint on there to protect the new metal than worry about getting it looking pretty. It also turns out my wire-wheel has vaporised, which is frustrating. I'll have to go and pick up a new one. because the area by the rear window needs cleaning up before I fill it.

And the side I sprayed (with one coat) and had left all the masking on so I could spray today? Well, it's rained overnight...



....which is terribly annoying. I'm hoping the sun (which has come out now) will dry it out and then later in the day I'll be able to throw another coat of paint on. I've had to take off all the newspaper though, which is quite bothersome.

Hey everyone! Today marks the start of me using LiveJournal as a write-only service, because we are in Los Angeles! It's currently 23:40 PDT and so I'm writing up an account of the day. We stayed in the LAX Hilton last night, after arriving at LAX around two hours behind schedule. The flight was uneventful - we flew with Air New Zealand, who have a superb entertainment system on their planes, and so I watched Cars, St. Trinian's, Run Fatboy Run, The Big Bang Theory, My Family. We got up fairly early and proceeded to eat breakfast at the buffet (God bless America) before climbing into our hire car and driving across Los Angeles to Hollywood, and our hotel, the Magic Castle Hotel.

Upon arrival at the Magic Castle, we left our luggage with the very pretty girl before heading down to Hollywood Blvd to walk around and visit some shops. Ironically, the largest store on Hollywood Blvd is a Virgin Megastore (yay England!) but they have such a cool range of clothing and other merchandise. I wound up buying a baseball cap, which is brilliant - I will take a photograph of me wearing it tomorrow and you can all marvel at how great it is. I also saw The Coolest Wallet Evar, but I have refrained from buying it after my mother hinted that Father Christmas might well be kind to me this year and I may find it in my stocking - so y'all are going to have to wait six months before finding out about how cool it is!

After we'd visited Virgin, we also visited the Hollywood and Highland Centre, which has 'retail and entertainment'. This meant going to Sketchers and buying a couple of pairs of shoes, before visiting Hot Topic, from which I bought a nifty Zelda T-shirt. We also paid a visit to the Stone Cold Creamery, which was awesome but made me feel slightly sick so soon after breakfast. On a down note, however, the box I got The Onion from last time I was in LA has now gone, so it looks like no paper copy for me. When we got back to the hotel, we went for a swim in the pool and then headed up to the Universal Citywalk to do some shopping and eating. It turns out that Billabong's current range of swimshorts, whilst not at all bad, is not worth $58 per pair, whilst the current range of Universal Studios T-shirts available from their shop is really not at all good. Last time I got my Spider-Man T-shirt (the black one with the white and red line drawing on it), which is awesome - this time around, all the shirts were really obvious or had been designed for eleven-year-olds, so I didn't get one. I bought a limited edition copy of the Phantom Hourglass game guide because it had a bookmark in it, and I collect bookmarks (it's also a hardback book with gold-edged pages). We ended up eating at a very nice steak house, and then coming back to the hotel, where I'm typing this. Hope you're all OK!

Something which I don't believe has been mentioned specifically so far is the hotel's reason for the pre-booking of meals.

They have not hosted a Convention of our type for many years, their experience is with Business conferences, which work to a very different business model. The Hotel team have been working extremely hard to educate them and give them confidence in us, while still securing the best possible deal for you, the members. We do now have them on-side, and they are as determined as we are to make this event a success, but when all is said and done they are running a business.

They have told us about an event they hosted in the past where they were asked to provide a special priced menu, they catered for 500, and about 50 people came to eat. Therefore they are understandably nervous about doing the same again without a guarantee that the food will be paid for.

The opening or not of their other restaurants is their operational decision, and something we have no control over at all. Their most recent statement to us is that they are unlikely to open them, but they may change that decision if they have a significant occupancy other than the Convention.

Yes, the room service and bar menus will be available 24 hours, but they are exorbitantly priced and will not be able to deal with volume (their words).

What I'm trying to say is, work with us here, people. We really don't mind if you want to make alternative arrangements. Feel free. We realise that we can't suit everyone. Just, please, let us know via the meal booking form, so we know the message is reaching people.

Thank you, that is all, it's time for bed now.

Regards,

Ian Oldroyd

Vice Chairman
Discworld Convention 2008
www.dwcon.org <http://www.dwcon.org/>

Discworld Convention 2008 is a trading name of Star Turtle Ltd, which is a
not-for-profit organisation,
registered in England and Wales with Company Number 04538796.
Registered Address: 31 Henllys Road, Cyncoed, Cardiff, CF23 6NL.
Please DO NOT use this address for any correspondence relating to
membership, hotel bookings etc.
Details of how to contact the Convention may be found on the above web site.

( Microblog entries )

Ok, have now officially Had Enough.

For about the last eighteen months (since I had a conversation with Woman Who Lives Downstairs about how worried she was that her estranged husband was trying, with the connivance of her incidentally-muslim family, to get into her flat, including 'someone's been trying to get in through the balcony'), we've had various people popping up and saying 'can I leave a key with you, my brother / sister will be here in about an hour' or just ringing our buzzer and saying 'can you let me in, I haven't got a key'. The former, fair enough. The latter has always made me unhappy, because of the husband thing and because hello, if you have a key to her door, why don't you have a key to the main front door...?

I have now had enough: someone just buzzed and asked to be let in, at gone eleven thirty. A minute of so later, I heard our not-our-door (there's a little sort of lobby area between the stairwell and our actual, locking door; the door to that makes a distinctive noise, which is how I often surprise the cleaner and postman) and went to look only to see the same woman: she doesn't even know which bloody flat she's trying to get into. "Oh, we just got off a flight, I haven't been here since it was redecorated" and this stops you remembering which *floor* it's on...? (One flat per floor. It's not hard.)

So. Have written a nice but firm note to Woman Downstairs: "will hold keys, if you come and ask me, but am no longer going to let people in randomly, both for your safety (see: husband) and mine". Went to slip it under the door, and didn't need to go that far: another four people coming up stairs with suitcases. WTF? [sigh]

No more. This post also serves as a notice to Mike, who is, you know, in bloody bed and I hope not woken by all this: we're not doing it any more. Not even if she does keep buying us Christmas chocolates to say thank you.

(I see her quite often, on the way home from picking her little boy up from school, so I will speak to her as well, if only to make sure she gets the note. But really. Enough.)

It's amazing how watching Nicholas Briggs do the Dalek voice at a readthrough just brings this TOTAL SMILE OF GLEE across your face!

Cray kept down an actimel. And an hour later, a tablespoon of plain couscous. So another hour later, he had some plain rice.

Then he asked to go outside. I knew his game - when he's sick he eats grass to make himself vomit - so I supervised him. I thought I'd done a good job.

A minute after coming indoors, he was promptly sick all over the place, and on the top of the pile was a single blade of grass.

So I threw the warm rice over the garden for the birds, and on went laundry load number four. When I took out the clean bedding, on the top was the same very clean blade of grass.

Back to square one in the morning. For now his gums are pink and his skin retracts quickly so I don't think he's dehydrated. He's a bit fed up though - as am I!

He had better recover tomorrow. I have plans to go and visit a friend who isn't particularly well herself.

The Sunday Mercury -- a weekly newspaper with a stretch as far east as Leicester, as far west as the Welsh border, as far north as Stoke, as south as Cheltenham -- has pressganged me to produce a regular beer-based column for its new website.

Please check it out, and do comment, even if to say I do have sparrows in my beard.

Tags: beerhunter, sunday mercury, toby jugg

Fridays are quiet days at work and we decided to cheer ourselves up and also celebrate 4th July by raiding the local supermarket midday for muffins and doughnuts.

This may not be the most appropriate thing to celebrate America's independence but we enjoyed it very much!

I've just ordered one of these beasties to use with any spare SATA drives that I come across. You just drop in a SATA drive (it works with both 3.5" and 2.5" drives), and the drive's ready to test, or you can use it to quickly extract the data you're looking for...



Nice and cheap, too.

It does make me think of more than one TV crime show, though. You could just see Sebastian Stark or Brenda Leigh Johnson sanctioning the use of one to get the data they need to put away the bad guys. And I'm sure Garcia has one or two of them in her office in Quantico...

A beach photo for a summer day.

Moss Landing, California
April 2008

Here's another round-up of links to our blog over at IT Pro (now with a nice shiny redesign). We tend to put a couple of pieces up there a week, and if you want to read them as soon as they're published, it's also syndicated on LJ as itpro_sandm.

Click on the titles to see the full posts, and please make any comments over there. Oh, and rate the posts too, please!

Green if but for the licenses

Getting IT folk to agree is like herding squirrels, but there’s one thing we do seem to agree on, and that’s that virtualisation is a good thing. It saves money, it saves space, and above all, it saves energy. Throw in a bunch of offload processing for complex applications (a Tesla box or some Azul hardware) and you’re well on the way to a shiny green data centre.

With so many companies investing so much in virtualisation you’d think that software companies would be falling over themselves to develop licensing tools to support dynamic, flexible IT infrastructures. It’s surprising then to see that not only are they singularly failing to do so, but they’re also making it hard to justify installing software on a virtualised server. Microsoft has tried to appear to be a poster child for virtualisation licensing, but once you start drilling down into just what you can and can’t do with Hyper-V and the Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition you’re in for an unpleasant surprise. Unless you’re ready to lock yourself into an Oracle-style site license there’s just no way to run your internal IT as a utility.

Intel predicts an all IA future, consigns CUDA to the footnotes

With Intel’s 40th birthday on the horizon (and with it the 40th anniversary of the microprocessor), Intel’s Pat Gelsinger took a few minutes yesterday to ruminate on the past, present and future - and to take a few questions.

Beginning with a look back to the i386, and the shift from 16 to 32-bit computing, Gelsinger pointed to a time of technical and industry transition, much like today. It was the point where Compaq moved ahead of IBM, and Windows and Microsoft began to shape the software industry. We’re in the middle of another shift at the moment, what Gelsinger called the “third era of Moore’s Law”.

O2: business iPhone 3G will sync to Exchange without iTunes

But you’ll still need iTunes on every desktop to install applications. Would you put that in your organization?
We spent Friday with Telefonica at their new headquarters in Madrid, a campus laid out around a lake to deal with the climate; solar panels, vanes that push the heat up, a tower in each corner and wide roofs to add shade plus wireless antenna sprouting in the flowerbeds like candelabra. Telefonica has technology plans for the networks it runs as well, which includes O2.

Even Telefonica can’t actually show off the new iPhone yet: O2’s Steve Alder kept his in his pocket and described it instead. What he did show off was the price: free if you pay £45 or £75 a month for the tariff or £99 if you want the cheapest £30 a month plan. Existing iPhone owners get the same deal, although you have to sign up for the full 18 month contract again. None of the plans let you use the iPhone as a modem with your laptop and the price for international roaming is a hefty £50 for 50MB of data.

Beyond the valley of the CPU

The white heat of technology in the 1980s was focussed on the BBC Micro. Not only was it the heftiest 8-bit machines around, its open bus made it possible to add more processing power. With everything from music machines to Z-80s running CP/M, the BBC Micro could share its keyboard with many different CPUs.

Those days are on their way back.

A nation of snoops and gossips

You have no privacy, Larry Ellison said a few years ago; get over it. Is that because of governments and security agencies keeping track of you - or because of how much personal information you hand out yourself? If you want to break into someone’s bank account, most of the ’secret questions’ used for security are probably answered on their Facebook account. And how about the information you give away when you sign up for a special offer or fill in a survey?

If you don’t remember to go tick the box to say it can’t go to third parties, some marketing companies will happily pass along anything they know about your religious beliefs (one in ten), ethnic background (one in seven) and sexual orientation (one in fourteen). And your mobile phone number and marital status… And if you don’t care who knows that, are you happy that one in four pass along your credit card details? Only 3% would hand over your national ID number if they had it - and they would keep secret your job performance, your biometrics - and possibly in light of the Facebook Beacon debacle, what movies you’ve rented.

The case of the disappearing disk space

Where has 32GB of disk space gone and how do I make Vista give it back, or there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

When we’re on the road at conferences I take a fair few photographs, and I copy a lot of PowerPoints and PDFs onto my notebook, not to mention photographing products I’m reviewing, and then there’s recordings of interviews… It all takes up space, so when I got an 8 megapixel camera the day we drove into Death Valley I did wonder if disk space on my notebook might be a problem.

Join the (beta) community

TechEd is Microsoft’s instant university, a place where developers and IT pros go to get information about the current state of all things Microsoft. It’s not really a place for big announcements - though the odd one sneaks out.

Most of the news from this year’s event has been about software moving from one stage of beta to the next. Whether it’s a new beta (like Silverlight 2) or a long running upgrade saga finally getting close to release (like SQL Server 2008) it’s not like a new release of Windows or a new Visual Studio. If anything we’re quickly moving into a world where the big bang launch is a thing of the past. Apple may be still spinning its “one more thing”, but even Snow Leopard will just be an evolutionary move. Instead public betas and community previews will become the way things get done, and the Web 2.0 perpetual beta will be the way of the rest of the IT business works.

Behind the scenes with the BallmerBot

The BallmerBot joined Bill Gates on stage at his last public keynote here at TechEd 2008 Developers in Orlando earlier this week. Waving an XBox Live lifetime subscription (Bill’s leaving gift from a grateful Microsoft, according to the latest version of the “Bill’s Last Day” video Microsoft first showed at CES), the robot waddled out of the wings looking like a cross between Johnny 5 and a Segway.

U-Bot 5’s new name may not be what the developers expected, but underneath the humour and the hype is a fascinating story of how PC technology and modern developer tools have simplified the development of what until recently would have been a very complex and very expensive piece of hardware.

In and out of the browser - how Microsoft and Google think differently

For years, I’ve been saying that Google would be mad to build its own operating system. It should leave the thankless task to Microsoft and Apple and Linux distributions; you can debate how good a job they do, turn and turn about, but the scale of what a desktop OS needs to do and the range of devices it needs to support is far broader than what you need to do in a browser or on a smartphone. I still don’t think Google has any plans to create its own OS, but it’s pushing beyond the browser as a development platform with Gears and App Engine and the like. Microsoft has a whole range of platforms in the browser, out of the browser and around the browser, from Windows and WPF to Silverlight to SharePoint to Office to SQL Server – to name just a few of the platforms Bill Gates touched on in his last ever keynote at Microsoft TechEd this morning.

So here I am, typing on the Eee. ( Read more... )

This is my second cousin, Denise, from New Zealand. She and her husband came to see us on Wednesday. Her Dad and my Dad were cousins, but she was his child by a first marriage and has only just got back in touch with the family.

I've always thought I belonged genetically more to my maternal grandmother's side of the family, but the similarities between me and Denise are scary scary. We have the same filthy snigger, for a start, rhythm, tone and volume. And the same jaw line.

Do Not Mess with the Smith Gurlz.

There's a few more pictures in the same set, just click on the link.

Posted on from h-dis (the history-of-disability forum), knowing that my flist knows heaps, especially about speculative fiction/tv:

> I’m currently looking for the extact title – as well as the name of
> the director – of the film Henri-Jacques Stiker mentions in the
> introduction to his history of disability (on page 10 in the
> english edition). Stiker himself only mentions that it was “a short
> English film that ran on television some time ago”. It apparantly
> deals with “an everyday world organized and built for human beings
> who are all in wheelchairs. Then the day comes when a man is born,
> able to stand on his own two legs” etc Could anyone help me?


It's got to be better than Blindsight, hasn't it? Please?

Please do pass the question on to others!

I'm watching Dr Who on BBC3 just now. A couple of points spring to mind.( poss spoilers )

I pre-ordered the American hardback edition of a book specifically for the cover art. This is a cover that has been much discussed and often reviled in parts of my friendslist. The author has publicly disclaimed responsibility for the design. I think it is brilliant.

The story (which I'm greatly looking forward to reading) is a homage to a novel by one of science fiction's grand masters that has itself been the subject of a great deal of criticism and controversy over the years. Its cover art is a homage to the cover Michael Whelan designed for possibly the best-known edition of the original book.

Can you guess what it is yet? Here is a big clue. (I dare you to follow that link even if you've already guessed the answer!) ( Answer behind the cut... )

A good many years ago, ExMemSec and I came across a wierd little ten-minute tv programme at which day by day taught one to 'be like a tree'. I found the concept of 'exercise by doing nothing' very attractive. I'm good at doing nothing, and I need to exercise more.

Plus, the idea that exercise could involve resting one's buttocks on imaginary balloons "spoke to me".

Anyway, a few months ago there was tv reportage that tai chi could help type 2 diabetics, and I mentally stuck 'find out about tai chi' on the 'list of things to do when the phd is in'. So I've been looking. It definitely seems like something I'd like to do. And I find that 'be like a tree' is part of tai chi, which is good.

Looking for local classes, I find that the one nearest is 'Hine', whose website does not mention trees.

Do any of you out there know what I'm talking about?

If so, do you think Hine is the way to go (at least for a 10-week beginners course)?