Some notes on laptops

For the one person reading this who cares: if you’re looking for a laptop, check HP Compaq. Anyone who really cares (by definition, an audience <1) should read on:

My charming host Allan is in need of a new laptop. He currently sports a delightful little (and I do mean ‘little‘) Toshiba libretto thing that’s at least a couple of years old and is starting to get doddery. Worse, his needs are changing, and he could really do with a larger display for client demos and, particularly, development (JSP, SQL Server stuff, lots of things I don’t understand). During yesterday’s stroll through London town we prodded all manner of shiny things on Tottenham Court Road, and between us today we spent an unreasonable amount of time poking around on websites. Some observations:

  • Almost without exception, hardware manufacturers’ websites suck. Dell have three ranges of laptops, with no discernible difference between, say, anything in the D series, and for about two hours I wasn’t even aware of the third range. Panasonic – I gave up. Sony – found the perfect thing in their PDF brochure, but couldn’t track it down anywhere else, and the range on their online store doesn’t tally with the range on their corporate information site (!).0
  • 12″ subnotebooks are really rather lovely, but too small in many circumstances.
  • Basically nobody makes a 13″ or 14″ widescreen laptop. There’s a straight jump between 12″ and 15″.
  • You can’t take Bluetooth for granted. But – to my surprise – it sounds like nobody uses it on Windows anyway.
  • Gigabit ethernet is almost unheard-of in PC laptops.
  • It seems entirely random as to whether a specific model has integrated graphics (ugh!) or a kick-ass Vista-ready GeForce Go card.
  • There’s always a catch.

This last is what really annoyed us. Every single machine seems to have an achilles heel, be it a crap graphics card, or (quite often) being physically much larger than the screen might suggest. Prices are also all over the shop.

In the end Allan found an HP Compaq that looks remarkably good; 15″ 1440×1000 widescreen, fair battery life, gigabit ethernet, bluetooth, decent graphics card: under £1000+VAT, which is genuinely excellent. Peering at the pictures, it may even look half-decent.

Interestingly, though, the 15″ PowerBook is really quite a good buy at the moment. It’s thinner and lighter than most, at least as quick, battery life is OK, it has a few twiddly bits that are curiously lacking elsewhere, and the price is surprisingly competitive. If it could be persuaded to run Windows I suspect Allan would have bought one – but that’s next year’s trick. John Gruber has his usual extra-thorough review.

(FWIW – my own 15″ PowerBook is getting on for two years old now, and I still think it’s wonderful. The only real pain is the hard drive size – I really need 160Gb these days, but it’s just not available. Boo!)

It was a large room, full of people, all kinds

Marking, I think, the first time I’ve headed an entry with a line from Laurie Anderson. Anyway: yesterday, a jolly wander around Londinium. Failed to find any streets paved with gold (drat!), but did finally see the Great Court at the British Museum, which I found most stunning for the acoustics as much as the visuals. As you enter, the background flaffing of your fellow visitors curiously drops to a distant low burble. Somehow the high frequencies are attenuated, but the effect is one of the space opening audibly rather than merely visibly. Quite astonishing, not to mention beautiful.

Over the not-wobbly bridge to Tate Modern, and I regret to report not having had the prescribed ‘woah that’s huge!’ response to the Turbine Hall. I think because I’m unexpectedly a connoisseur of large unobstructed covered spaces, having previously visited:

  1. The turbine hall of a hydro-electric power station in Scotland, the name of which currently escapes me.
  2. The DELPHI hall at CERN, which is roughly the size of a cathedral only 100m underground.
  3. The Millennium Dome central space.
  4. A submarine construction shed at Birkenhead.
  5. The R100/R101 airship hangers at Cardington, purported to be the largest unobstructed covered space in Europe.

These last two are, I believe, the only places in the country one can fly hot air balloons indoors. One might be able to at Tate Modern, but it looks a bit narrow to my eye.

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However, the current installation in the Turbine Hall, Rachel Whiteread’s ‘Embankment,’ I rather liked. Mechanically, it’s just 14,000 polypropylene boxes stacked up. But there’s something rather charming about the arrangement, scale, and sheer lunacy of the endeavour. The majority of people exploring the space sported a dopey sort of half grin, which struck me as a result for the artist even if the audience is self-selecting.

Then there were fireworks care of the Lord Mayor, movies, and… ah, a day as a tourist in London. Champion.

Progress report

A significant turning point in the production today: I discovered the local sushi and bento shop. Thus, lunch consisted of vegetable and mackerel nigiri, teriyaki chicken onigiri, and some odd red bean dumpling thing that I can only liken to sweet stewed fig wrapped in cold ground rice pudding, only that sounds disgusting and this thing wasn’t. All this from a shop that’s staffed by proper Japanese people who bow in a proper Japanese way when you walk in and return your change with both hands. Absolutely ruddy marvelous.

If you haven’t gathered, I’m rather enjoying the whole ‘being in London’ thing. OK, so the public sauna that is the Tube is less than joyous, but I can’t begin to say how exciting it is to have an antique toy shop three doors from the office, and five shops nearby selling only office chairs in the £500-to-don’t-even-ask bracket (oooh! chairs!). Chuck in colleague James’ trip today to a Covent Garden sweet shop, from which he returned with the most disgusting sweets ever (Swedish salt candy – apparently a big hit over there). He also brought back a tin of peanut butter and ginger chews which I think basically everyone’s getting for Christmas this year, since they’re now officially my new Favourite Sweet. Oh, and James has just submitted a funding bid for an expedition he wants to do to Papua New Guinea with the intent of discovering a new species of shark. As one does.

Of course, the flip side of all my giddy excitement is that people in the office laugh at me for being a hick. But I don’t, frankly, care. London rocks. The only downside is that I can’t quite work out where all my cash is going.

In other news…

An odd combination of events this week, besides the whole ‘giddy about London’ thing. On Monday I was in Glasgow; Tuesday I was on a plane before the sun arrived, then in the evening met up with chum Lex. This is, I should point out, something of an honour, since he works ridiculous hours for one of the big merchant banks and thus dinner with him tends to require a license from the Chancellor lest the time out should cause a collapse in GDP. Or something. He’s on top form, anyway, clearly enjoying his terrifying lifestyle and paying careful attention to my detailed lessons in eccentricity. The difference between us, we worked out, is that he’s a fountain pen aficionado while I’m a pencil geek. Which is pretty much a difference of three zeros on the price tag. An excellent meal and better company, anyway.

Wednesday evening involved meeting a guy who is on the verge of setting up a web-based TV channel. It’s not quite clear – probably in a good way – if he’s a genius or plain naïve. ‘In a good way’ because it’s not obvious which would be the most beneficial for what he has planned. Interesting chap, anyway, and I’d be excited to be involved if the project comes to life, though I’m a bit worried that the timing may not work out.

Then tomorrow evening I’m hoping to meet somebody else entirely; tonight, sadly, was a late one in the office while I tried to get my head around lecture four. Ah yes, work – ach, it’s a blast, in both the enjoyment and scary senses. Which is all good fun.

Background

The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures date from 1826 – or at least, I thought they did. Wikipedia lists them as starting in 1825. Mind you, that same page suggests the 2002 lectures were given by Tony Ryan of Ryanair fame, rather than Prof. Anthony Ryan of Sheffield, so perhaps I won’t take it as canonical.

I should probably confess that I haven’t seen the last few series – I pretty much gave up when they invited Kevin Warwick to deliver them – but helpfully for those of us picking up the pieces, Channel 4’s Science site still lists the last three years’ lectures on their front page.

For more about this year’s lectures, the RI have a page which is becoming a little out-of-date; doubtless we’ll update it in due course.

Trouble at t’Parisian suburbs

I’ve been curiously out of touch this last week, I think due to a lack of Radio 4. The immediate fix is to take my mobile phone’s headset, then I can listen to Today on the little blighter (Sony Ericsson K750i – the only thing it’s lacking is a corkscrew), but until then I’ve been trying to catch up online. To whit – the best brief summary I’ve found of what’s going on in Paris is this story in Time.

First Rehearsal

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Yesterday we were in with the lecturer, Sir John Krebs, bashing our way through the scripts and mucking about with a few simple demonstrations. We’re at that curious stage where, frankly, it can all feel a bit naff, like we’re putting on a play in school. But being in the RI’s theatre makes a huge difference, as does the energy and commitment of the team. We’re all, including John, giddily excited about doing the Christmas Lectures, and the sense of being a team working towards a common goal was palpable and somewhat thrilling. Sorry to gush, but that’s how it was.

In the photo, clockwise from the chap standing at the back – that’s Andy, the RI’s lecture theatre technician; Tom the researcher; Richard the producer; Sir John (another Yorkshireman, incidentally – I know that’ll please some readers here); James the Associate Producer; and Emma the production manager.