Category: Uncategorized

1. Tax Demand.
2. Server Outage.
3. Backup Failure.
4. Reached End of Moleskine Notebook.
5. Dirty Lenscloth.
6. Smacked Self in Face With Juggling Club.
7. Royal Mail Special Delivery Failure.
8. Accidental Television Series Commission.
9. Surplus-to-Requirements iPod.
10. Returning Home to Find Burglary in Progress.
    (For the avoidance of doubt: one of these is hypothetical, and another turned out to be somebody else’s. The rest happened, mostly but not necessarily recently.)

Why is Masterchef over-exposed? It looks like it’s been shot on a Z1 and graded with no awareness that the food’s all on white plates. We can’t see any of it. Crazy.

When I see things like this set-up (AJA Io HD, Sonnet Fusion F2 SATA array), and Sony’s new Z7 camera, I start to fret about how easy I’d find it to drop a year’s pay on gear right now.

Bother.

My chum Vinay points me towards this article, which scores a selection of science fiction stories against the prototypical hero’s journey.

Personally, I think the genuinely informative parts of that post are the first few comments. It’s more that the Hero’s Journey is an abstraction of a satisfying story structure, vis: there’s a protagonist who advances the story and serves as our proxy; shit happens to him, by definition; some form of conflict occurs; conflict is resolved, leaving the world in a different state.

I’m slowly wading my way through Christopher Booker’s “Seven Basic Plots”, which is terrific. There’s a lovely section where, in two pages, he compares Gilgamesh – the oldest known story, we have a written version from something insane like 5,000 years ago – and Dr. No. Basically the same story. Genius.

What I think is interesting isn’t that many sf stories are basically similar, but that:

1. There are so few fundamental narratives.
2. None of these appear to be ‘new’ – ie. enabled by technological advance.
3. Despite these limits and repetition, we still find stories satisfying.

I think one is gently pushed towards a position where stories are less about individual expression and creativity, and more about discerning how one relates to the world, and judging oneself against others.

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.