Month: August 2004

Chris Hoy.

Bloody hell.

Go on, lad!

It’s been positively days since I posted anything seriously geeklike here: a situation which clearly cannot be allowed to continue.

Thanks to El Reg for making me laugh:

“Alienware still regards high-end gaming PCs as being a core market but it also became apparent that other types of users are willing to pay for good looking high-performance computer systems,” Alienware said.

Indeed. They’re called ‘Mac users’.

On the other hand – and much as I respect Alienware kit, from what little I know of it it’s really rather good – one has to be concerned when they’re promoting PCI-Express as being exactly what high-def video editors need. Er… really? We’re talking a top-end of a hundred Mb/sec or so; there’s ample capacity in even bog-standard AGP to push several such streams through for video card compositing, if such a thing is possible.

Sure, bandwidth is a Good Thing; 10Gigabit Ethernet is just around the corner, FiberChannel SAN systems are the very dog’s kahones, and all that jazz. And yes, I’ll likely hold off replacing my glorious tank of a desktop until PCI-Express is standard on multiprocessor G5s. But purr-lease, let’s be reasonable here.

“We’ve no idea what Owain Glyn Dwr looked like, but here’s an extremely detailed three-dimensional model of a completely random Welshman anyway.”

Actually, I’m rather enjoying The Battle for Wales. There are far too many easy sniping targets for criticism, mostly centred on the direction – just how many different contemporary styles are they trying to hit? And unless they failed to see Brass Eye, what makes them think the ‘walk/talk/head turn/shot change/final line’ device is anything other than naff? But despite all that, it’s rather good fun, isn’t it?

Tell you what, though – by throwing the kitchen sink of production styles at the subject matter, they must have spent a monumental amount of money. Even if the mass engagement animation tech is built on the same platform as that Eddie Mair Time Commanders thing, costume re-enactments don’t come cheap.

But that isn’t a criticism, either. Watching forty archers let fly is enthralling, isn’t it? More lavish history, I say.

Oh, happy day. I finally toddled down the road to a tea house that opened whilst I was in Leeds. It’s a new branch of a Glasgow West-end institution, Tchai-Ovna, about which chum Martin has been raving for years but I never quite managed to track down.

A few hours later, I’m Keemun’d out and have a belly full of excellent dahl, having been remarkably productive with a pad and pen whilst perched on a cushion. They claim around eighty types of tea: this could take me a while to verify, but I’m going to try.

One of the things I’d forgotten I was going to write was about cameras. I have recently not bought a camera. This surprises me, since I really really really really want a digital camera. Also, you’d think, what with the whole ‘geek’ thing, that I’d have had one for years already. Oddly, no. Why?

Compact cameras suck, basically. Years ago, I bought one of the original Canon Ixus models. It’s absolutely beautiful, and apart from the fact that APS as a concept was a distinctly bad idea, it’s about as good as non-zoom compacts get. And guess what? I’ve practically never used it, since it’s only any good for taking snapshots, and I very rarely want to do that. I’ll still, very occasionally, shove it in my pocket when I’m going somewhere, but that’s about it.

I’d use a digital compact more, of course, but… no, I’m going to wait a little while longer. Because the chances are, my next mobile phone will be just about good enough for snapshot use. By the one after that, I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing ‘Sony Ericsson Nikon’ units: it’s one of the few bits of digital convergence that actually makes sense.

Besides, what I really want is a digital SLR. And I’ve just spent that money on furniture.

I have, it turns out, very odd tastes in furniture. Take wardrobes, for example: having wandered around a good many stores, I find that I like one company’s interpretation of ‘simple traditional,’ but nothing else in the store. Whereas no other ‘simple traditional’ will tickle my fancy. As a rule, I thoroughly dislike slab-front modern wardrobes… but today one design leapt out and charmed me. In one store, I’ll espy one fine-looking wardrobe, and find it’s (natch) the most expensive thing in the shop. Elsewhere, I’ll only like the rock-bottom cheapest. No, really, that happened yesterday. In the local bargain-basement pine store, of all places.

So this afternoon, I found myself choosing between half a dozen pieces, ranging in style from positively Elizabethan through to up-to-the-minute funk, and in price by a factor of six. What I’ve ended up buying surprises the heck out of me, and I sincerely hope I still like it when I get the thing home: it’s (don’t laugh) a faux-‘Mexican Hacienda’ pine number from (again, don’t laugh) The Pier. Who, I should note, were an utter disaster to do business with. Extremely smug, condescending, unforthcoming, and inefficient – one of those shopping experiences where one begins to understand the implications of the casual discrimination faced daily by people from ethnic minorities. Like, oh, I don’t know, women. Ugh. I’d have walked away on the deal, except that they were flogging me a £670 (again, don’t laugh) ‘armoire’ for £230.

I also bought a chest of drawers and a couple of trunks from the same range – storage! hurrah! – … and a chrome and glass table from John Lewis. Er… well, you know. they’re for opposite ends of the flat. Nobody will notice the clashing styles. Or something.

And as for beds… oh, don’t get me started.

The BBC expend considerable effort in collecting references on people working for them; curious in an industry where most people either pick up the phone and call a common chum, or got in touch that way in the first place. No, Auntie’s HR flacks invariably call, their tone varying on a scale from charming to abrupt, to request an email address so they can send a ‘very simple’ ‘one-page’ form that will ‘take moments’ to complete.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve no objection to giving references. However, there are a few things I’ve added to my ‘given the chance, do this better’ rolling list:

1. Don’t pretend it’s urgent to collect a reference when I’m quite likely to know the person in question has been in post for a good while already.
2. …especially when I’m likely to know that the contract is only a couple of weeks long. That’s just rude.
3. If you’re going to send a form out via email and expect it to be returned as such, please make sure it works in that context. Word table cells with seemingly-random and certainly inconsistent formatting, for example, are confusing. ‘Signature’, in this context, means what, precisely? Do you really want a PGP hex key?

Small mercies, however: the most recent HR bod to call was polite, and has filled in the personal details bit of the form, which is the most confusingly-set part of Word template. It’s just that I can’t help thinking that the whole thing would be more worthwhile if somebody picked up the phone and called me for five minutes. Unless it’s just an exercise in paper pushing, of course. Ahem.

From this morning’s Guardian:

Groundsmen at Devizes Cricket Club in Wiltshire were startled when they lit a paraffin-soaked bonfire and a rabbit shoot out with its tail ablaze. They did not see where it went, but 30 minutes later their nearby shed went up in flames, causing £60,000 worth of damage.

What I love most about these stories is their sparseness.

Years ago, on some other website, I planned to introduce a ‘potato of the month’ feature. It made sense in context, what can I say?

Sadly, two crushing disappointments crippled my tuberous endeavours. Firstly, Sainsbury’s, despicable toads of shameless appropriation that they are, started doing the same thing. Only, with, like, real potatoes. Bastards. Secondly, the not-quite-mentioned website upped and popped its little SQL clogs.

However, whilst clearing out old OmniWeb bookmarks, I did stumble across what was to be the source of my spudesque knowledge. Dear reader, I give you: The Colorado Potato Administrative Committee’s Potato Variety Image Bank.

This, I submit, is what the World Wide Web is for.

Oh, the simple joys. ClipboardSharing does something I’ve wanted for many months; runs the Mac OS X clipboard as a cloud shared between Macs on the local network. So… I copy a URL from OmniWeb on my PowerBook, open a new OmniWeb window on the desktop Mac, paste… done. Very neat, lots of well-phrased options. I’ll test it for a little while longer before I completely succumb, but I sense a PayPal donation coming on. VNC and Apple Remote Desktop are all well and good, but this works much more smoothly when the machines are physically in the same place.

Speaking of OmniWeb: v5.0 is finally out in a formal release version. I’ve been using the betas for a few weeks, watching with glee as some fairly nasty crashers have been eradicated. It’s… well, it’s the best web browser I’ve used, and I’ve used all the major ones, most of the minor ones, and some that would best be described as ‘esoteric.’ Just make sure you read the manual, since there’s lots of stuff that’s easy to overlook but staring-us-all-in-the-face obvious once you’ve seen it. Bookmark sync rocks, of course… why no Workspace syncing, hmm? 😉

Whatever was screwing up with blogging client Ecto the last time I toyed with it seems to have gone away now. I like it, but I’m still… hmm, maybe I’m just waiting to see what Brent has in store for us in NetNewsWire 2.0. Perhaps I should sign up for his beta test?

Finally, HistoryHound looks for all the world like Serac’s iRemember. Which is a good thing. I’m currently testing. The default 60-day index expiry has me worried, though – iRemember’s strength was in finding things you’d seen waaaay further back than that.