The power of positive thinking . . .
I started yesterday with a bit of a rant . . . it wasn’t my fault, it was the fault of the idiot in the car who turned left in front of my bike and missed taking me out by about 2 inches. Although that wasn’t the first thing that went wrong yesterday. I woke up nearly 2 hours late on account of forgetting to set my alarm.
The train seemed to be a bit slow on the way to London then he tube was packed (because I was in the middle of rush hour) and seemed to crawl the remainder of my journey. Being late into work was particularly annoying because I was supposed to run some system maintenance starting at 8am and now I’ve got to reschedule it. Most of the actual working day ticked along fine until somehow, and this is the first time in 2 years I’ve done it, I got on the wrong train and ended up in Peterborough. Once I got back to Cambridge I discovered I’d got a flat rear tyre on my bike. Read more
Time to take your Tablets?
Tablet PC’s are nothing new. They’ve been kicking around being used by TV presenters for a couple of years but they seem to have been a spectacular failure as far as their uptake from general users so far.
Now the big hype machine of Apple (or I should say the big internet rumour machine and Apples rumour squashing machine) is gearing itself up for the release of the iTablet (or whatever they decide to call it) at MacWorld in January. Pictures of backplates are emerging from suppliers, stories of orders for huge numbers of 10 inch touch screens are being talked about and Apple is saying nothing, as usual. (Google is currently showing 11,000,000 results for a search for Apple Tablet) Read more
What is Google Wave?
Is it really the next-big-thing ™ from the almightily Google or is it actually a useless overhyped piece of crap?? Well the answer to both of these questions is obviously no (although the overhyped claim may be somewhat justified
One of the problems with Google Wave is that it’s new. Google said at one point that the set out to create what email would have been like had it been created now, in the Web 2.0 (tm again?) world. However, it’s also been described as like IM on steroids. Read more
Todays Tweets . . .
- have just blocked and spam reported a dozen accounts that seem to have grabbed hold of theWifes companies conference tag, bastards!! #
- RT @vero:CharityHack at PayPal on 19-20th Sept looks like a great weekend: http://bit.ly/yNtsp Still some 30 tickets going! #
- the 09/09/09 09:09.09 pic for todays #ebethchallenge (been up for 3 hours and I'm not a morning person!!) http://yfrog.com/186o5j #
- oooooooo, ouchie!! http://bit.ly/ZsqgN #
- it's nearly that Apple time again . . . time to put up or shut up, what's happening today? http://tr.im/yfRX #
- have just seen a pigeon inside the tube . . . surprised it doesn't happen more often actually! #
- at Cambridge Geek Nights listening to a talk about Yahoo Pipes #
- hmmm, probably shouldn't have started updating my phone at this time of night! #
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My predictions . . .
It’s time for another Apple event, well, it will be in a couple of hours so I thought I’d put up (because it’s very difficult to shut me up) about what I think is going to be announced.
- New iPod touches with cameras are pretty much a given, particularly after an online store put up pics of it’s new cases a tad early, whoops
- iTunes 9, I think it’s about time Apple did something about helping people to organise their iPhone apps and, rumour has it, they’ve been working for a while on some sort of social integration (presumably to compete with Last.fm and Spotify. It’s probably about time Apple and iTunes got into supporting Blue-Ray discs too
- I’d be very surprised if the Beatles catalogue wasn’t made available on iTunes. Rock Band Beatles and all the new remastered CD’s are out today so why not – having said that and EMI rep earlier said it wasn’t going to happen. Smoke and mirrors??
- a new music format. Something called Cocktail has been kicking around for a while. It’s supposidly a new album format that includes lyrics, artwork and other goodies designed to encourage people to buy whole albums rather than individual tracks. Unfortunately you can probably also expect it to come DRM’d up to the eyeballs
- and they’ll probably bump up the storage on the rest of the iPod range, and maybe the Apple TV too
and what’s not happening,
- The much vaunted Apple Tablet . . . nope, no way no how. It’s just not the right time for Apple to introduce this (and I’m not really convinced they’re particularly useful anyway). I’ll eat my hat if Apple show up with this
- dropping the iPod Classic. Why?? There’s no other iPod with this amount of storage yet. Once the nano gets it’s storage above 100G for a reasonable amount of cash then you’ll see that back of this but not until
- integrated AppleTV/HDTV, lol, don’t make me laugh!
Todays Tweets . . .
- having seen todays 26 degree forecast I'm wearing shorts to work, maybe for the last time this year? #
- (picks up card) huh . . . Advance to Chalfont & Latimer. Do not pass Paddington, do not top-up your Oyster, fair enough #morningtoncrescent #
- #morningtoncrescent hmm, would have gone with West Ruislip but with the Monument/Bank interchange still b0rkd it'll have to be Hatch End
# - coffee or tea . . . that is the question??? #
- RT @eBeth: Ooh – native Flickr app now out for the iPhone.. (must go take a look now!) #
- forgot I'd booked beer and a curry with a colleague over from Amsterdam #pectember #FAIL #
- oopsie . . . diet go bye bye!! http://yfrog.com/0xv8vgj #
- oooooffff . . . have eaten too much, leaving the curry house now
# - goodnight Twitter (facebook) . . . going to bed now to dream that I didn't just totally blow #pectember with that curry #
- yea, ignore the tweet from half an hours ago, had a couple of things to do . . . NOW I'm going to bed! #
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Todays Tweets . . .
- at end of the first week of #pectember I have lost 4lbs!! Have turned the livestrong.com dial to 2lbs a week and have lost 300 calories/day! #
- something weird going on in Cambridge, just been past the Courthouse and there are a bunch of satellite vans round the back??? #
- ah, I guess it's related to this, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/8241723.stm #
- have a couple of free evenings while theWife's away – am spending the first driving my in-laws to Heathrow, M25 'fun' and games approaching #
- in-laws depoited, at South Mimms for a comfort break on the way home, denying myself the usual Burger King motorway treat today #pectember #
- I should really go to bed now – gonna be wrecked at 6am tomorrow morning
#
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Back for good???
I’ve finally got around to upgrading the site to the latest version of WordPress, something I should have done a long while ago but the recent security issues prompted me to finally get it done. I’d heard a variety of horror stories relating to the upgrade process but all went through without incident. Thanks should go out to Vero who I had a quick chat with before hand. Her thirty-second tid-bit, turn off all the plugins and backup, backup, backup . . . good advice at any time but especially so during an upgrade (as my ex-honeymoon photos would attest to).
There’s a lot going on at the moment so I figured I’d start chatting again on here, probably more as an extension of things I Tweet about but there you go. I wonder how long the updates will last this time
The Economic Fiction?
Having just read a post about the process of trying to turn the book into a film, I was searching on amazon.co.uk for ‘Software’ by Rudy Rucker, I guess you can tell from the link that I found it . . . however in the process I came across what I assume is a, somewhat ironically, miscategorised book.
Head over to amazon.co.uk and search for software in the books section. Unless something’s changed you to will end up with a list of 103,616 books, most of which are, fairly reasonably, of a technical nature. Scroll down a little and select the Fiction category (containing a far more reasonable 217 entries).
Sitting there proudly at the top of the list, with the default sorting of ‘by relevance’ is The Ultimate Technical Trading Software: In Search of the Holy Grail . . . erm, what? It does feel about right though. The economy is currently in a state of meltdown due in part to people using software to predict the movement of the markets in order to make more cash . . . then other people using different software to predict the behaviour of the first software and the people using it. Then still more people using software to predit the behavior of the software that’s predicting the behaviour of the software that’s predicting the behaviour of the markets (I think that was right).
At some point people started making money off the behaviour of the software rather than on the behaviour and all of a sudden our financial system is down the rabbit hole or through the looking glass and we are just creating money out of thin air. At some point of course someone took a trick from the The Emperors New Clothes and said “He’s naked!” . . . end result, global recession . . . ho hum
What a day . . .
No posts over the weekend which alternatly involved eating, drinking sleeping, DIY, travelling, eating drinking, sleeping, shopping, cooking, eating and yet more drinking . . .
This morning came as quite a shock, not least because I’d spent most of Sunday somehow thinking it was Saturday – hence the shock at wondering where my weekend had gone. The start to the week wasn’t helped when I awoke at 6am this morning. Tuesday to Friday my alarm is set for 6am in order for me to catch the 6.45 train from Cambridge but on Mondays I work from home and get, at least, an extra 2 hours in bed . . . but not today.
Today I awoke just before 6, lay in bed totally failing to get back to sleep for nearly 20 minutes before giving up the unequal struggle and getting up. Oh well, get a few misc tasks out of the way first thing, have breakfast and start work. Working from home is nice as I actually get more work done due to a lack of interruptions. I can chill out for lunch, watch a bit of TV, jump onto my PS3 or browse abound (and hopefully post a couple of blog items). I also do more work as I tend to work longer hours. It’s a nice way of easing myself into the working week.
I don’t know if not much has come up from my RSS feeds or I’ve just been very busy, I suspect both, but I haven’t even tweeted since I first got up this morning. My plan with the new site was to post at least one item, something, every single day. The weekend blew that one away but I was determined to not skip today – even if I just managed to post some of the reasons why I hadn’t posted (while finishing work)
Tomorrow is likly to be busy too but at least I’ll be able to sort out a few things as I left myself drift during the journeys too and from work . . .
