Month: June 2006

England are playing, and for the first time in this World Cup I’m in England and could therefore, in principle, voice something resembling support for my national team with only a marginal chance of being beaten up (as opposed to a slightly-less-marginal-than-I’d-like chance up in Glasgow). Unfortunately, I’m on a train, speeding to London.

Hence the amusing but somewhat frustrating scene of an entire carriage full of people, all waggling radios around trying to find anything like a stable signal. We have, collectively, no idea of the score at all.

It’s rather delightfully like being back in the Victorian era, when communications consisted of a small boy in a uniform running the length of the country with a slip of paper. It’s also rather discouragingly like the same, as we wait for somebody to board the train at Rugby and dribble us some information. If only I’d caught the GNER train to King’s Cross, I could have coughed up for broadband… and then spent the journey waggling my PowerBook around and cursing the hopelessly inadequate bandwidth. Which doesn’t seem much like progress.

I’m guessing that by the next time this rolls round, in 2010, things will be different. Hopefully?

A heads-up, to see if there’s any interest: I may be about to buy 3 (4?) MacBooks, use them for a month, and then sell them. I’m planning to buy the white model with a DVD±R SuperDrive (2GHz, normal retail £899). I’d be looking to sell them for something like £825/each, I guess. If I can avoid the terrors of eBay, I will.

Any readers interested in buying an only-very-slightly-used MacBook in early August? You’re not going to save a packet, but it’s better than a poke in the eye, and it’ll go a fair way towards that extra RAM you really, really need for these things.

(Then again, I might find another way of doing this that doesn’t wallop my funders with cashflowing a few thousand pounds-worth of hardware. But purchase & resale probably isn’t that loony overall, especially if I have a few believable expressions of interest.)

Stuff those nonsense rabbit things: this is genius on another level!

Tivoli Audio make great kit. I have one of their PAL (now ‘iPAL‘) active speaker/radios, and it’s a wonderful thing. However, their new stereo iPod dock thingy is… well, it’s butt-ugly. On the other hand, it’s apparently called the ‘iYiYi.’

A practical joke, surely?

In no particular order:

• In 2012, Apple still haven’t changed the industrial design of their laptops. I mean, really!
• For that matter, BBC News 24 looks exactly the same. I’m not sure if this is a bigger surprise than that it’s still going.
• The cybermen are coming back! (which is something of a relief, since they felt a bit wasted earlier in the series).
• Yes, we do find out more about Torchwood. Next week. Hurrah!
• They really want us to believe that Billie Piper is bedeaded at the end of the series. Which probably means she isn’t, but there we go.
• Astonishingly, it is possible to use the London 2012 and Olympic logos in a dramatic presentation. I was under the impression that such licenses were either impossible or prohibitively expensive, but evidently not. Or did the BBC manage to negotiate a sufficiently broad license that it covers even Doctor Who? Weird.
• The Doctor was a father? What? When? Conor – you’re needed. Explanation, please.

Much to my disappointment, there doesn’t seem to be a high torque ‘HT’ model of the new Cadillac BLS. A crying shame, because we could spend literally minutes arguing over which vowels had been left out of the name.

Fuel consumption figures, incidentally, are buried in the price list (PDF download – didn’t download properly for me until I threw it at wget). Circa 35mpg isn’t too shabby I suppose (for a car of that size, etc etc), but aren’t they required to have that information displayed alongside the advertising?

Pet hate: websites that don’t work unless you bung a ‘www.’ on the front. Aren’t we past that yet?

The latest offender: virgintrains.co.uk (doesn’t work), www.virgintrains.co.uk (does). Grrr.

Pet hate 2: Pointless flash animations on web pages. Why oh why does the Mac Flash plugin eat 70% CPU and make my fan spin?

I’m feeling a little too busy properly to explore the beautiful wonder that is We Feel Fine (via Kevin Marks).

(I should probably note, however, that the second blibby thing I clicked appeared to be spam. Bastards.)

Coming this summer from the Guardian, apparently – 15-minute refresh, 8-12 pages as PDF. Print it out, read it on the bus on your way to/from work. Genius (via. John Gruber).

(I’m assuming that Ben Hammersley isn’t heavily involved in this particular part of the Guardian’s online work, given that he seems to be spending all his time hanging out in the comments here. [cough])

Extremely useful rule-of-thumb pie-chart breakdown of web design time spend. I have two nits to pick:

1. I think they’ve seriously underestimated the proportion that should be yellow.
2. The best gag of all, of course, is that ‘content’ isn’t even on the pie chart. Don’t think we haven’t noticed.