General

TVital ’07 Belfast

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The 2-day TVital concert in Belfast this year will be on 21st and 22nd August. Acts confirmed so far are The Killers, Manic Street Preachers, Razorlight, and Kasabian. Just watching The Killers live at Glastonbury 2007 on the BBC at present. Marvellous 🙂 I’ll definitely be there for at least The Killers on 22nd August. Probably go on the 21st as well.

I didn’t make it to TVital last year. The 2004 concert was excellent (The Darkness headlined and were brilliant). In 2005 Scissor Sisters headlined the night I was there, but Franz Ferdinand blew them off!

WWDC 2007

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Well, that’s WWDC 2007 done and dusted. It was a week of evolution rather than revolution. All the stuff outside of the Keynote is NDA’d of course, but the whole week was a refinement of what was presented at WWDC 2006. For me the most interesting day was the Friday. Amongst others I attended a brilliant session given by Sal Soghoian on scripting MacOS X, and the improvements to scripting technologies in Leopard. Sal is a very engaging presenter. If you ever have the chance to attend one of his talks then definitely take it. The MacOS X and Aqua feed back session on Friday was also very good. It was basically 1.5 hours of Q&A to 4 senior Apple execs (including Scott Forstall and John Geleynse) about the user experience in Leopard. Some very interesting discussions about the direction of the new interface 🙂 The presentation on the Leopard user interface methodology given by John Geleynse earlier in the week was excellent as well.

There were lots of other interesting and really informative sessions during the week. I learned heaps of stuff that’ll be useful, both in my job as an ICT consultant in the Education world (Podcast Producer! Oh my god!) and, as a hobbyist MacOS X programmer (Xcode 3 Tools). See you all at WWDC 2008 🙂

Spectacular Venus

| | General, Science

Venus is very prominent in the sky at present. It was spectacular in San Francisco last night. See pictures below.

Venusoversfsmall 800 x 600 pixel version Venusoversflarge 3072 x 2304 pixel version

Click pictures for larger views

The frozen north

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What does north Canada, near Hudson Bay, look like from 38000 feet in June? Like this:

Frozennorth1 Frozennorth2 Click Pictures for larger view
Burrrr.. Looks a bit chilly down there!

Sunny Heathrow

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I like Heathrow. For an airport anyway. For all the ones I’ve been in Heathrow pisses me off the least 🙂 Sitting there at present. An hour to go to the flight to San Francisco for WWDC 2007. Much happiness. I didn’t get bumped up to Business Class at check-in. Maybe at the gate. Coming back last year I was upgraded and only found out at the gate. Even if I don’t I’ve got a good seat in Premium Economy. Lots of leg room!

Carbon Footprint

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I haven’t been very good for the environment this week. Monday I flew to Manchester in the morning and back to Belfast in the evening. Tuesday morning I flew to Nottingham, then back to Belfast tonight. On Saturday I fly to London and then on to San Francisco in the afternoon. Maybe I should plant a few trees? Or get that Honda Hybrid car to offset my emissions?

American Doll Posse – Tori Amos

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Yeah! New Tori Amos album and tour. Bought the album from iTMS this morning. On first listen I really love some of the tracks. Especially Big Wheel (the new single), Body and Soul and Programmable Soda. There are 24 tracks on the album! Will take a while to dissect the package. There is a whole back story with 5 different characters (the American Doll Posse) associated with the album. See the web site. I like Clyde best 🙂 There are blogs for each character and a MySpace page where you can listen to some of the tracks. All good stuff.

Santa Clyde Americandollposse Click Pictures for larger view

Update: I’ve listened to the new album a few times now. I like it a lot. Not sure if it is better then The Beekeeper. Time will tell.

Car choices

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It’s getting towards the time when I need to start thinking about the next car I will get. Need to order it about September time to collect in February 2008. At present I drive a Renault Laguna that I rent from a leasing company on a 3 year contract. Basically a company car but rather than the company managing it I deal directly with the leasing company. I like this way to finance a car. There is no deposit, no final payment. Just 36 payments over 3 years and then the car goes back to the leasing company. Plus the contract is a full service agreement that covers all parts and labour plus tyres, wipers etc. In other words no risk. For the next car I’ve been looking at:

The Hyundai was ruled out when I sat in one. Even with the seat fully back it was still a bit to small for me (I’m about 183 cm tall). The Honda would be good for the environment etc. but I don’t like the body shape. So that leaves the Mazda and the Renault. I really like the current Laguna. I’ve been driving the current models for the last 5 years (I had the same model as a company car before the current leased one). When researching the options I found out that there is a new Laguna due to be announced on June 4th. There is a teaser web site available. Some artist impressions on the 4-door and new 2-door coupe versions have appeared as well:
Laguna1 Laguna2 Laguna3
Click pictures for larger views

Wow. Really nice. The Coupe especially, but even the 4-door model. Rumour has it the Coupe is not going to be available until August 2008. which means that it’ll be too late for me this time. I can live with the standard 4 door one. So, if the impressions above turn out to be accurate it’ll be another Laguna for me! The RX-8 is nice but it drinks petrol and oil like it’s going out of fashion apparently. I don’t want to have to nursemaid an engine by constantly having to check the oil. History tells me I won’t do it.

Cricket World Cup Final

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What a shambles! Surely the world cup final should have 50 overs per side? Even if it has to be played over 2 days! The end of the rain affected final over the weekend was a farce.

Having said that , Adam Gilchrist’s 149 from 102 balls was stunning. Put the fielders in the stands to save time when he is in that sort of mood.

Life, the Universe and…

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Most people know my view about life and the Universe. We’ll all be dead a long time and therefore we should do what we want during our lives to make ourselves happy (as long as it doesn’t adversely effect others). Steve Jobs articulated this view well in his Commencement Speech to Stanford University graduates in 2005. You can read the whole speech at the link above or watch it via YouTube (see below). I quote the following from it:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

For the last while I’ve been using a similar process myself in relation to my job. At the start of the year I switched jobs. I think that my answer to the question posed in Jobs’ speech above has been No far too many times recently. I’ll need to rectify that…

Toys for the boys

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Finally stepped into the High Definition television age. I got a Sony Bravia KDL-40W2000 LCD television and a Sony Playstation 3. The TV has a 1080p HD display and the PS3 has a Blu-Ray HD drive in it. As a bonus I get a games console in the Blu-Ray player for free 🙂 Here is a picture of the beasts in situ. The image on the screen is from a Mac mini that I use as my music centre with iTunes.

The quality of Blu-Ray movies via the PS3 and the TV is stunning. Very, very happy. I had to take the first PS3 back as the fans would come on and once they got to a high speed, whilst playing a game for example, they would stay at the high speed until the unit was switched off. This was irrespective of what the PS3 was doing after the fans speeded up. So if I left it idling the fans would never slow down again. This was annoying when using it to watch movies when in a quiet part of a film. You could hear the fans over the film sound. The replacement PS3 seems to be quieter but I’ve still to test it fully.

The game MotorStorm is stunning on the PS3. Really, really good fun as well. It outputs at 720p resolution and looks excellent on the Bravia. Here is a picture of a bike from the game. It has a bit of motion blur.

So I’ve cast my die into the Blu-Ray camp in the great HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray face off. Hopefully Apple will go down the Blu-Ray route with their HD optical drives in Macintosh machines. A Mac mini with a Blu-Ray drive and a version of DVD Player that allowed playback of Blu-Ray movie discs would make a very nice media hub indeed. It’d need to output 1080p via HDMI cable though.

Song of the day

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I’ve got an iPod nano in my car that I listen to via a Kensington FM Transmitter. Now the iPod in question only has about 850 tracks on it, and as I hand picked them all, they are some of my favourite pieces of music. So it shouldn’t really be surprising when on random play the iPod throws up a song that I really, really like. Today it threw up Machinery of the Gods from The Franklin-Neumann Project. Been playing it a few times since then. Marvellous stuff.

Motg

Unbelievable

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This post was going to be about Ireland beating Pakistan in the Cricket World Cup. That is still unbelievable. Unfortunately it has been overshadowed by the news of the death of Bob Woolmer. Very sad news indeed. Bob Woolmer was one of the fixtures in the English cricket team when was growing up. I was shocked when I called up the BBC Sport page to see if England had beaten Canada and the headline was Woolmer’s death.

Boy racers…

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Why is it that in about 99% of cases were you get overtaken by other drivers, when you are going at the relevant speed limit for the road in question, that the car in question is either a –

1. Volkswagen Golf
2. Some model of BMW
3. A small hatchback with a really big stupid looking exhaust

Boy racers? I expect that the BMW drivers used to be Golf drivers and that the silly exhaust hatchback owners will be Golf and BMW drivers as they get older and get some disposable cash. Twats.

Scrivener – author project management application

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Scrivener is a stunning piece of software. It is designed to help mange ideas, notes, writings research and other items related to a writing project. This could be a book, a short story, a project report, a piece of scientific research, whatever. If it’s a piece of writing then Scrivener can be used to organise the interim drafts and stuff.

It uses a really nice cork board metaphor with notes and ideas pinned to it. Folders can be used to organise the notes. This is only one way of looking at a project. There are other views as well. The interface and attention to detail is very, very good. Take a look at the Scrivener site for more info. If you use a Mac and do any writing then prepare yourself to stump up the cash for this excellent piece of Mac OS software. I did a few days ago 🙂

WWDC 2007 dates confirmed

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As rumoured, WWDC 2007 will be held from 11th to 15th June. Happy days. There is a good chance that the iPhone will ship during WWDC and probably Leopard as well. Looking forward to it. Last year was fun.

Travel Checklist To Do:

Buy WWDC e-Ticket ✔
Book flight from Belfast to Heathrow ✔
Book flight from Heathrow to San Francisco ✔
Reserve hotel room ✔
Book time off from work ✔

All done. That’s me sorted. Now I just have to wait 🙂

WWDC 2007 – June 10th to 15th??

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UPDATE: AAUC have removed the entry referenced below from their June 2007 calendar.

Apple WWDC was very late in the year in 2006. August in fact. Hopefully this years will be earlier. Just seen that the Australian Apple University Consortium have an event calendar that has WWDC 2007 as running from Sunday June 10th to Friday June 15th 2007. They even have a deadline for their members to take advantage of a special rate for the San Francisco Courtyard Marriott hotel.

Nothing in the Moscone Center event calendar for those dates yet. But that’s not unusual. I hope the AUC are right as June would suit me. Hopefully Apple will confirm the dates soon so I can get flights and hotel booked. Yeah. Summer in San Francisco.

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