Year: 2004

Richard, Harro, Alan – this is for you lot.

The availability of relatively cheap video cameras has led to the mass production of two sorts of movies. Firstly, of peoples’ babies and toddlers being cute. Secondly, of people plain mucking around and playing up to the camera, often with whatever props are to hand. We’re in the latter situation here, with nutters who would appear to be French, bless ’em. They’re in a desert somewhere. The props they’re goofing around with are Mirage F1 jets.

Quicktime video here.

Remember, kids: 200ft minimum, gear up after you’ve established positive rate of climb.

My bed has arrived. As of tonight, I shall no longer be attempting to find the least uncomfortable angle between the broken slats of my once-glorious-but-lately-too-squashed-to-be-any-good futon. No. I shall be reclining in the glorious accommodations of a gigantic mattress, with pocketed springs and all mod cons, on a slatted base, on a terribly fashionable pale oak frame, supported by oh-so-modern little chromed legs. It will, I think, be the first time since I left America last year that I’ve slept in a bed longer than me.

I’ve some serious recreational sleeping ahead of me.

Just as one might have thought American politics couldn’t get much more surreal, Bush has been endorsed by a major tabloid newspaper. The paper? Bild. Um… right.

At least there’s a flash of sanity: the editor felt he had to assert that his paper’s support wasn’t a joke. Because, you know, we might all have thought those whacky Germans were having a laugh again.

The Radio Times‘ website has, in my humble, been the best TV listings site in the UK for some time now, long periods of flaky server availability notwithstanding. However, the competition has been so dire that I still didn’t think it was up to much. It did mostly work, and the design was at least reasonably clean, but that was about all one could say of it.

They’ve now unveiled a sparkling new redesign, and the site is genuinely prettier, with a neat little hover-box telling you exactly when the show you’re pointing to starts and ends (a basic problem with the previous version). All well and good. But… will they go the extra mile and provide us all with customised RSS feeds of programme times? Because then we could, you know, do really cool things with keyword extraction, scheduling systems, capture cards, and so on. Roll-your-own-Tivo would be a darned sight easier if listings were so readily available. It’s possible that The Radio Times might now allow this, but as I write the link to their ‘services’ page (mobile phones and PDAs mentioned) goes here… which is ‘not found.’

Meanwhile… why is scheduling information so hard to find? Surely it’s in the best interests of the broadcasters themselves to make the data as widely-available as possible? Or do they provide the raw data to publications like the Radio Times as a commercial venture? That is, is the schedule itself a revenue stream?

I’m just asking.

John Peel has died. Story covered everywhere, of course. I shall treasure the recording I have of him quoting something I penned in an email to friends, on Home Truths; I’ll see if I can’t post it here tonight.

No joy for me in the Children’s BAFTA nominations, again. Surprise! It’s a somewhat odd year all told, I reckon: Dick & Dom are set to stir up some controversy, what with OFCOM’s formal comment that Parent Bogies is not the sort of thing the BBC should be doing. Props to the Jungle Run team for securing another nomination, and I’m glad Globo Loco is there again – it gets neither the credit nor the audience I think it deserves.

One of the things I’ve forgotten to post here, that came out of my London jaunt, was that my chum Jem had finished his stint on Scrapheap Challenge and had picked up a jolly little gig making film props. For a Kevin Bacon film.

At which revelation, Alom* and I immediately started petitioning the poor chap to the effect that, if he wanted to remain our friend, he quite simply had to contrive a cameo in said film. Why? Because both Alom and I have been on screen with Jem, so Jem appearing in a Kevin Bacon film would give each of us a Bacon Number of 2. 2! How cool would that be?

Also, I entertain the vague possibility that I might actually have an Erdös number; my only real scientific paper listed a couple of authors who must, at some point, have co-authored with mathematicians (computational chemistry was our game), so it’s just about feasible that I have an Erdös number of maybe seven or so. Which would give me a Bacon-Erdös number of around 10, but hey – at least I’d have one!

Unfortunately, Jem finished the props and immediately took a job at Screenhouse. Which is, one suspects, the end of the endeavour. I’m never speaking to him again.

• I think I first met Alom Shaha, briefly, when I put him up for interview for The Big Bang about six years ago. We didn’t meet again until the other week, despite our paths crossing on more than one occasion – we tended to interleave at places like Screenhouse. Anyway, we bumped into each other at a bash at Imperial. Seriously nice guy: one of those people I very much hope I manage to work with sometime.

Tonight (I do like the drop-cap ‘T’ – apologies again for non-Mac-viewers), the first emailshot from the Virgin Galactic folks. The mail is signed ‘Stephen Attenborough, Head of Astronaut Liaison.’ Now that’s a cool title to have on one’s business card.

(and yes, of course I signed up for their mailing list. Durrr. Oh, and I wonder if it’s the same Steven Attenborough as the one who’s interested in traction engines?)

The last time I did this, Anil noticed, so I figure it’s worth another try: Movable Type v3.12 is out. Anil comments that the update “should be fairly straightforward to upload on top of your current … installation.” What does ‘fairly straightforward’ mean? Is there reason to believe it won’t be entirely straightforward?

‘No problem,’ I think, ‘I’ll check the upgrade docs.’ Only, they don’t cover upgrading from a version any later than 3.01D, as I noted in a bug report six weeks ago.

Yes, I’m being prissy, but this is the sort of lack-of-joined-up-thinking that I was having a dig about a while back (see comments). People who live and breathe MT will guess that one simply uploads the new files, pausing briefly to consider any personal hacks that may have been applied to the old versions. The rest of us… actually, I still don’t have a clear picture of an ‘average’ Movable Type ‘user.’ ‘Developer,’ yes, but ‘user’… that’s tricky.

One good thing: the MT2.6 templates and stylesheets have reappeared on the appropriate page.

Dubai: a property developer is building a collection of 300 artificial islands in the shape of a world map. Is this for real, or has somebody taken Neal Stephenson too literally again?

Via kottke.org.