The Daily Grind

Bob Ainsworth, Minister of State for the Armed Forces, (mis?)quoted in Hansard for saying something entirely unparliamentary last week.

It’s apparently possible that the official record may be corrected, since Ainsworth refutes this version of the debate. The story is developing as I type; it was squeezed in towards the end of PM tonight, moments ago.

[update, 15th Jan: Hansard has been amended, and TheyWorkForYou.com along with it. Boo!]

I love Amazon’s customer proximity scan system, where they tell you that other people who’ve bought that have also bought this. Genius. But then sometimes:

Greetings from Amazon.co.uk,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated music by Blue Man Group have also purchased Billy the Hits by Billy Joel. For this reason, you might like to know that Billy the Hits is now available. You can order yours for just £19.99 by following the link below.

(Blue Man Group) ∩ (Billy Joel)? Really?

Right now, I own four iPods. This is curious, since I don’t actually like listening to music on the move. But then, I didn’t intend to own any of these things. Here’s the litany:

iPod 1: 15Gb ‘3G’ iPod
The ugly one with the separate buttons. Bought in lieu of rent for a chum, only he didn’t like it so I ended up buying him a telly instead. This beasty has actually been quite useful, in that it’s full of music and when plugged into a Tivoli PAL it’s been a perfectly good portable sound system when I’m working away from home (London, Dublin). The battery has always lied about its charge, but since I only ever use it hooked up to the speaker that doesn’t matter.

iPod 2: 2Gb ‘1G’ nano
The svelte black plastic one. At one point Apple were flogging these off as refurbs for a crazy low price. I bought one for Flossie and mis-clicked; couldn’t be bothered to send one back when two turned up. When I was commuting to Dublin this was set up to hold podcasts (mostly Melvyn Bragg, geek that I am), and I loved it… but I haven’t used it since. I’d intended it to be plugged into a car stereo, but then I gave up the car.

iPod 3: Touch
Bought very quickly last week, while trying to debug podcast video formats. It’s a brilliant piece of kit – amazing screen, and Mobile Safari is just lovely – but it skips too many of the useful bits of an iPhone for me to really love it. Worst of all, it exhibits different video format quirks to the iPod Classic and (3G) Nano, so it’s more-or-less useless to me for its intended purpose.

iPod 4: ‘2G’ nano
The tall silver metal one, not the new squat video one. I’ve just found out that I’ve won one of these for filling in a science careers project brand consultation exercise. The poor project manager has been trying to get rid of them for months but so many people have failed to respond to her emails, she’s worked her way down the list to… er… me. By complete coincidence, we met each other at the ASE conference last week. So it’s completely legit, even if it feels dodgy as heck. “Give it to the next person on the list,” I suggested. “Oh, please take it,” the poor lass groaned, “You’re the first person in ages to respond.”

So: four iPods, none of which are used for listening to music on the move, and I can’t use any of them to test… er… iPod video. Next Wednesday I have an appointment with the local Apple Store to try to debug my compression settings. I’ll be taking the Touch, and most likely returning it for a video-capable 3G nano.

Except… Tuesday is Jobs’ keynote at MacWorld, so…

I’m going to end up with five iPods, aren’t I?

Shit.

Windows Movie Maker’s speckle dissolve: what were they thinking?

It’s a completely pathological case for video compression. Heck, the official Mac WMV playback component throws a CPU spike on playback and drops to 5fps. It’s that bad.

Madness. And you should see what it looks like after going DV→WMV→MPEG2→DV→H264, too. Yowch.

I’ve bought a bunch of domains in my time, including a few that currently aren’t doing anything but maybe just maybe we might do that thing we thought of when we were a bit giddy that made us laugh so much we bought the domain. I’ve even been accused of domain squatting on one occasion, by someone with a weird surname who thought I was going after just him when in fact I’d bought the domain as a wedding pressie to somebody else I knew of the same name. The people involved were, in fact, related. Oh, how we laughed.

Anyway, there used to be a worry that if you looked up a domain to see it was available, somebody might notice you doing that, jump in, reserve the domain before you, then charge you to buy it off them. This was all soundly poo-poohed as implausible and paranoid.

Turns out it’s exactly what’s happening, and the perpetrators are… Network Solutions. Yes, one of the larger domain registrars is doing just this: great summary article here.

My vote: 123-reg.co.uk, who are mostly nice people, especially now they’ve stopped splashing David Hasselhoff over their websites. Just be careful not to omit the dash and visit the .com – that’s a different company entirely, and they’re much more expensive.

Last night, I made something resembling this. And damn, it was good.

Mmm. Roasted butternut squash risotto. Mmmmmmmmmm.

Allow me to geek for a moment: There are new Mac Pro models. Nothing surprising, really – eight cores, faster front-side bus, and all that. The baseline price has gone up a hair to £1749, however, which coupled with the announcement a week before MacWorld has led some to start going all doo-lally about the possibility of an ‘xMac.’ The argument is that the Mac Pro is a workstation-class machine, and there should be a monitor-less ‘mainstream’ desktop between it and the iMac.

I think this is rot, for several reasons. Firstly, I think that ‘mainstream’ desktop is an iMac with a second monitor, if we’re being picky. But more specifically, the headline price increase in the Mac Pro masks a practical price drop.

See, you can spec a Pro with just four processor cores for £320 less than the baseline price. The resulting £1429 slots in neatly below the 2.8GHz 24″ iMac at £1459, for a machine bursting with drive bays and RAM slots, packing twice as many processors, but having no monitor. Which… is what people wanted to see from an xMac, frankly. OK, so they wanted it for £1000, but tough, this is Apple, you don’t get that lucky.

The thing that really narks me in all this is that I’m betting the people clamouring for an xMac are the same individuals who clamoured for a ‘Pro’ Mac with lots of expansion slots. Which, of course, almost nobody ever actually uses. Durr.

One final observation: the Refurb Store is offering the previous-generation 4-core Mac Pro. This is a machine with slower CPUs (though possibly more per-core bandwidth, which might factor), less RAM, a cruddy graphics card, etc etc. The discounted price? £1419. Wow. A whole tenner less than the new equivalent.

See, I told you the price had come down really.

You know it’s been a busy day when you reach 5:30pm and wonder why your Mac is taking a while to switch between applications. So you check the virtual memory and notice that it’s paging six gigs. Then you spot that the icons in your dock (along the bottom of a 20″ widescreen) are too small to recognise, and nearly all of them have little blue lights underneath.

How did I come to be running 27 applications in two different operating systems again?

Neeeeed … moooooore … raaaaaam …

I’m fairly bland in my choice of desktop picture, preferring something abstract and smooth that doesn’t get in the way nor prove too distracting. My dad, on the other hand, is a big fan of Astronomy Picture of the Day, to the extent that he has his desktop set to refresh from it.

So while I’m not using these myself, you, dear reader, might find some happy desktop joy in this collection from photographer Steve Paxton.

Christmas: done. New year: done. Meeting lots of family: done. Apologising to Flossie’s parents that dinner with them was the one family connection we didn’t manage to fit in: pending. Science teachers’ conference: done.

I’m back. Hope you all had a good one.

Every now and then I re-read my own blog, trying to work out what it’s for. It’s never going to be one of those sharply-focussed blogs that acquires a large, well-defined, and advertiser-friendly audience, but that’s never been the point of it anyway. I blog because I enjoy writing, and the restrictions of the format are interesting. The ideal blog post is an awkward length, and it’s a challenge to be correctly pithy.

So, my apologies to those of you for whom a third of this stuff is obscurely technical gibberish. My hope is that such an apology applies to basically everyone reading, but that the group of posts constituting the ‘third’ changes from individual to individual.

Musings aside: Chairman Gruber links to this delightful New York Times article on the joys of writing sans Microsoft Word. I only use Word for format conversions these days; I write mostly in TextMate, using Markdown.

In the unlikely event that I get around to writing the novel about my solution to the world’s energy problems, I might well do the legwork with Scrivener. We’ll see.