Category: Uncategorized

Orange have finally announced their 3G pricing. It’s not as severe as I’d feared, but neither is it as cheap as I’d hoped. For light users it’s really no cheaper than GPRS. So far as I can tell, it goes (monthly): £10-7Mb-£2/Mb over (not worth piddling around with); £20-65Mb-£1.50 (decent deal – cheaper than GPRS except for the over-bundle charge, which is a nasty sting); £45-400Mb-£1 (rather good if you need it); £75-1Gbish-nada (for the genuinely insane who should just get an office, already).

Back of the envelope, I’d have saved £50 or so going this route over these last six months. But my net access speed would have been dramatically better, which would have been worth a lot. The remaining hassle is that the Ericssony z1010 is, frankly, massive and ugly. What I really want is a small clamshell that does 3G data and standard voice, and pretty much nothing else – certainly, none of that video conference junk. I’ll be interested to see what deals are around when my O2 contract is up.

Reposted press release here; Orange PDF here.

An old friend quoted me this recently, in email:

(2) Where a notice under paragraph (1) specifies emission limit values, the emission limit values required by paragraph (2) of regulation 12 in relation to emissions into water from the installation or mobile plant concerned shall be those specified in that notice or such stricter emission limit values as may be determined by the local authority regulator in accordance with paragraph (6) of that regulation or required by paragraph (7) of that regulation.

Who, exactly, thinks this sort of dreck is a positive contribution to the advancement of mankind?

Sigh. D’you think it’s possible to refactor a legal system?

Give me another week or so, and I really will start blogging again. Much to catch up with. But in the meantime: today saw the first in the new series of The Big Bang go out on ITV. Huge cheers and hearty claps on backs all round, not to mention plenty of champagne and a few sighs of relief. Only nine more to go.

There are some extremely gratifying comments on the series website. Bless ’em, they seem to like it. 🙂

No, not TV: the other sort of shooting. With, like, guns, and everything.

A couple of weekends ago, I found myself with a group of gentlemen (perhaps ‘Gentlemen’), clay pigeon shooting. Now, I’ve never held a gun in my life, except possibly a wonky air rifle at Hull Fair when I was about nine. I’ve certainly never fired a twelve-bore before. So I wasn’t exactly expecting to be any good at hitting small, fast-moving targets.

I decimated the first seven clays. Overall, I hit with twenty-two out of twenty-six shots. This is, apparently, rather good going.

Now, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this. I have something resembling a healthy loathing for what labours under the doubtless-undeserved blanket term ‘gun culture’. Further, I’ve no desire to be any good at shooting anything: It’s not a skill I think I can use on a regular basis. Nor even a sporadic basis. And the process of actually firing a twelve bore is, frankly, dangerous, scary, and painful. I didn’t even have the satisfaction of seeing my clays disintegrate, since I had my eyes shut at those moments. Well, the thing you’re holding goes “BANG!” right next to your head, it seems reasonable.

However, there must be some vestigial competitive aspect to my nature, since I did actually enjoy trouncing the other shooters. Particularly the cocky Aussie. And it’s always a delight to discover novel and unexpected aptitudes, something one assumes occurs less frequently as one ages.

So… clay pigeon shooting? I rock. Apparently.

Back in Glasgow, and therefore with decent bandwidth again: lots to catch up on. Boy, am I looking forward to being unemployed, in only a few short weeks’ time.

First observation: the UK iTunes Music Store might have sold nigh-on half a million tracks in its first week, but there are still some bizarre connections being made by the Amazon-esque (‘Amazonian’?) ‘listeners also bought’ feature. For example, buyers of bleepy-bleepy electronica somebody Nobukazu Takemura apparently also bought Jesus Christ Superstar. And I thought my tastes were eclectic.

Fave find so far: The Kaya Project, Walking Through. Surprises to date: the album artwork is much higher-res than I’d expected, and the ITMS is clever enough to remember what happened if you accidentally disconnected during a download. Classic Apple joined-up thinking, bless ’em.

Meanwhile, I’ve posted the first batch of videos of Notcon’04 sessions, over on my Notcon page. The plan is to upload them to archive.org, so somebody else can worry about bandwidth, but I reckon few enough people read this blog that I needn’t worry. And hey, if I’m wrong, I guess that’s a problem I’d like to have.

LiveType, by the way, absolutely rocks. The standard behaviours are bound to become despicable clichés, but until then it’s absolutely magical.

iChatting to an old chum tonight, it turns out that he’s a Mason. Which rather surprises me, not least because unsaid chum is about as far-removed from the conventional ‘lodge’ image as it’s possible to get. He’s not even white, for heaven’s sake (er… joke, but you knew that).

Subsequent to this Earth-shattering revelation, the chat included phrases like: ‘Oriental 33 is like half peruvians.’ I have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on.

I am, however, in absolute hysterics about the absurdity of it all.

For those not paying attention (ie. everybody outside the UK, and most of those inside), there were elections in Britain this week. For local councils, the European Parliament, that sort of thing. Labour did rather badly; so did democracy in general, given the appalling turn-out.

Standing as Scottish Green Party third candidate in the European bit (ie. far enough down not to have to worry) was Martin. He’s just sent me a link to a lovely story from Glasgwegian thunderer The Herald. Poor sod.

Obligatory political blog entry plug: TheyWorkForYou.com. Stop whining and find out what’s actually going on.

Having been put off by the reviews (both press and peer), I skipped Kill Bill at the cinema. But curiosity got the better of me, and the other night I whipped a copy off the shelf in the local video store, hid it under my jacket with a remarkably deft flick of the wrist, and made it out of the door pausing only to cough up £2.75 rental.

I loved it, the sheer ‘sod ’em’ joy of it. Maybe I watched too much Monkey as a kid, maybe I like Seven Samurai too much, maybe I just fell for the Sonny Chiba scene, I don’t know. But I thoroughly enjoyed the music, the camerawork, the editing, and the spirit of homage. It’s a triumph of style. Over substance? Sure. Like I cared.

What with all the getting-horribly-lost-finding-the-Holloway-Road, the day job, the current moonlighting, the why-did-I-rope-myself-into-this, and the new niece, I’ve not blogged about:

TheyWorkForYou.com. Fan-ruddy-tastic. Scroll down through these notes to find a rough transcript of the launch at NotCon, but basically – go, join, make a difference. In the ten minutes I’ve had to play, this looks like one hell of a tool.

As one of the authors said during the launch: ‘We owe it to those who died on the beaches to make a genuine effort to reconnect with our democracy.’