No TVital in Belfast this year :-(
There won’t be a TVital festival in Belfast this year. Piss!
Internet speed bump
VirginMedia sent me a letter a while back saying that my cable internet connection would be increased to 10Mbps at some stage in over the summer. Looks like it’s been done. I don’t know when it happened but in the last day or so I’ve noticed much faster downloads. I’ve just done a speed test using Speedtest.net. Here are the results:
Yeah. 10Mpbs download and 512kbps upload.
UK NHS 60 years old today
Worth celebrating. Universal health care, free at the point of delivery. An essential part of a civilised country I think. Worth noting, despite the impression given by certain people, that the Conservative Party have been in charge of the service for a lot of that time.
Good riddance
Jesse Helms is dead. Finally acceding to the plea made in the marvellous MC Hawking ditty.
Good fucking riddance. Tip of the hat to Pharyngula.
Journey to the Ants – Hölldobler and Wilson
Just ordered a copy of Journey to the Ants by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson. It’s a book about how ants evolved and how they live in various habitats and colonies. This book seems to be a more accessible study of the subject of ants than their academic focused The Ants. The latter is £116 on Amazon UK! I’m really interested in the topic of social insects and eusocial societies. As witnessed by my posts here on Hellstrom’s Hive and Stephen Baxter’s Destiny’s Children books.
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Sold the iLiad
I sold my Iliad. It was just to small to use for A4 PDFs and too big to use for fiction. Plus the Sony eReader is perfect for fiction and I have that. So the iLiad is off to a new home in sunny England!
Moleskine notebooks
I decided that I needed a small notebook to jot things down in when they occured to me. Things like story ideas, song snippets, general notes; anything really. So I ordered a Moleskine Pocket Plain Notebook after seeing Simon Wolf with one at WWDC. It’s perfect. Fits in the pocket, has a sleeve at the back to store a few items, has a ribbon bookmark and an integrated elastic to hold it closed. Cool. I also ordered a Moleskine Large Plain Notebook for more copious writing and note taking. I liked them so much I’ve just ordered a Moleskine San Francisco City Notebook for use on WWDC and Macworld trips. The city notebook has a map, which gives an overview of the city, along with 36 pages of zone maps, which provide large scale maps of the city centre. A 96 page tab separated personal section allows you to keep hotels, shops, addresses, places of interest and facilities organised. A further 76 blank pages let you jot down thoughts, stories and memories of trips. Excellent. Basically the city notebooks let you build up your own guidebook for cities you visit regularly.
There are editions of the city notebooks for about 20 major cities so far. See the full list at the Moleskine site.
Planet Earth calling
Apparently Mugabe has invited Morgan Tsvangirai to his inauguration ceremony for Zimbabwe president. What planet is Mugabe on? The man must live in a bubble of reality distortion. When is the world going to intervene in Zimbabwe like they did in Iraq? Answer: never, as it was really only the USA and the UK who did that and they don’t have the troops or the will to do it in Zimbabwe.
Anglican church in meltdown
Apparently some of the idiots don’t think the church is discriminating enough against homosexuals and women. But really: Yawn. Irrelevant fools.
New version of Elite due in 2010
It looks there will be a new version of Elite released in 2010. I hope it comes out for the PS3 in HD. It’d be awesome. Elite is the best computer game ever.
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O2 HSDPA 3G coverage for my area
With the iPhone G3 just around the corner, I thought I’d check the O2 3G coverage for my house and area. See map below. My house is just in the covered area near the edge of the purple area. Happy days.
More praise for Hellstrom’s Hive
I finished listening to the audio book version of Frank Herbert’s Hellstrom’s Hive yesterday. God, I love that book. It is so crying out for a sequel. I want to know what happened next, then over the following few years, decades, and centuries. I’m now reading the book again. On my Sony Reader of course. I created a LRF version of the book from a PDF I “found”. I’ve bought two paper copies of the book and an audio version. I’ll buy an authentic eBook version when I can.
I might take some notes and jot down some thoughts of possible sequel ideas in Scrivener as I read it this time…
Switched back to MacBook Pro
I switched back to using my MacBook Pro 17 inch today after a few months using a MacBook Air. I’m not going to be travelling quite so much for a while so don’t need an ultra portable Mac for day to day use. The MacBook Pro is noticeably quicker. Plus the screen is magnificent 🙂
One of my friends is going back to university in Scotland to do a Masters degree in something to do with hearing (she works in this area). She needs a computer for this. I’m telling her to get a Mac with a Windows install in a virtual machine. Best of both worlds. I’m going to set up the MacBook Air this way and lend it to her for a month to see if she likes using a Mac. Then she can buy a Mac or a Windows laptop in an informed decision.
Bought Delicious Library 2
I ranted about the new version of Delicious Library before. There is an update available that fixes the Amazon (null) problem. I also heard from their support dudes that the new window layout isn’t popular and they will be looking at it again for a future version. So I paid my upgrade fee.
More Frank Herbert books on Audible
Just seen that Frank Herbert’s Whipping Star is on Audible as an audio book. Read by Scott Brick. I’m listening to (reading?) Hellstrom’s Hive at the moment. It’s a marvellous book. I’ve read it many times. The audio book version is wonderful. Whipping Star next. Hopefully there will be more of Herbert’s work added in the future.
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The Police & KT Tunstall live in Belfast
Went to see The Police and KT Tunstall at Stormont last night. It was brilliant. KT Tunstall is excellent live. Especially Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, which she does mostly solo using echo loops. The Police were excellent as well. They played several tracks that I didn’t recognise that were really heavy and good. The famous singles that everyone knows were good as well.
Here are some pictures (taken on an iPhone). BTW the concert was on the back cricket square at Stormont. This is shown in this picture from 2005.
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Essential viewing
The USA politics show Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC is essential viewing. It’s very, very good indeed. It takes 5 stories in the news each day and covers them. It is no friend of the Right in the USA. Which is good. You can view online or subscribe to a podcast version for free via iTMS.
Two more Mark Morford home runs
The truly excellent Mark Morford’s latest 2 columns for SFGate are well worth a read. One discusses Apple without Steve Jobs’ and why we seem to notice the loss of visionaries more than others. The other is a smorgasbord of various good news signs about the way things are moving in the world.