Is Amy Winehouse a pillock?
Or is that a redundant question?
June 2008
Planet Earth calling
Apparently Mugabe has invited Morgan Tsvangirai to his inauguration ceremony for Zimbabwe president. What planet is Mugabe on? The man must live in a bubble of reality distortion. When is the world going to intervene in Zimbabwe like they did in Iraq? Answer: never, as it was really only the USA and the UK who did that and they don’t have the troops or the will to do it in Zimbabwe.
Anglican church in meltdown
Apparently some of the idiots don’t think the church is discriminating enough against homosexuals and women. But really: Yawn. Irrelevant fools.
New version of Elite due in 2010
It looks there will be a new version of Elite released in 2010. I hope it comes out for the PS3 in HD. It’d be awesome. Elite is the best computer game ever.
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O2 HSDPA 3G coverage for my area
With the iPhone G3 just around the corner, I thought I’d check the O2 3G coverage for my house and area. See map below. My house is just in the covered area near the edge of the purple area. Happy days.
More praise for Hellstrom’s Hive
I finished listening to the audio book version of Frank Herbert’s Hellstrom’s Hive yesterday. God, I love that book. It is so crying out for a sequel. I want to know what happened next, then over the following few years, decades, and centuries. I’m now reading the book again. On my Sony Reader of course. I created a LRF version of the book from a PDF I “found”. I’ve bought two paper copies of the book and an audio version. I’ll buy an authentic eBook version when I can.
I might take some notes and jot down some thoughts of possible sequel ideas in Scrivener as I read it this time…
Switched back to MacBook Pro
I switched back to using my MacBook Pro 17 inch today after a few months using a MacBook Air. I’m not going to be travelling quite so much for a while so don’t need an ultra portable Mac for day to day use. The MacBook Pro is noticeably quicker. Plus the screen is magnificent 🙂
One of my friends is going back to university in Scotland to do a Masters degree in something to do with hearing (she works in this area). She needs a computer for this. I’m telling her to get a Mac with a Windows install in a virtual machine. Best of both worlds. I’m going to set up the MacBook Air this way and lend it to her for a month to see if she likes using a Mac. Then she can buy a Mac or a Windows laptop in an informed decision.
Bought Delicious Library 2
I ranted about the new version of Delicious Library before. There is an update available that fixes the Amazon (null) problem. I also heard from their support dudes that the new window layout isn’t popular and they will be looking at it again for a future version. So I paid my upgrade fee.
More Frank Herbert books on Audible
Just seen that Frank Herbert’s Whipping Star is on Audible as an audio book. Read by Scott Brick. I’m listening to (reading?) Hellstrom’s Hive at the moment. It’s a marvellous book. I’ve read it many times. The audio book version is wonderful. Whipping Star next. Hopefully there will be more of Herbert’s work added in the future.
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The Police & KT Tunstall live in Belfast
Went to see The Police and KT Tunstall at Stormont last night. It was brilliant. KT Tunstall is excellent live. Especially Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, which she does mostly solo using echo loops. The Police were excellent as well. They played several tracks that I didn’t recognise that were really heavy and good. The famous singles that everyone knows were good as well.
Here are some pictures (taken on an iPhone). BTW the concert was on the back cricket square at Stormont. This is shown in this picture from 2005.
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Essential viewing
The USA politics show Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC is essential viewing. It’s very, very good indeed. It takes 5 stories in the news each day and covers them. It is no friend of the Right in the USA. Which is good. You can view online or subscribe to a podcast version for free via iTMS.
Two more Mark Morford home runs
The truly excellent Mark Morford’s latest 2 columns for SFGate are well worth a read. One discusses Apple without Steve Jobs’ and why we seem to notice the loss of visionaries more than others. The other is a smorgasbord of various good news signs about the way things are moving in the world.
More aliens from Spielberg?
In this post about the latest Indy film I asked the question:
What is it with Steven Spielberg and aliens?
It seems he will be producing the upcoming film Cowboys vs. Aliens, set in the wild west that has Apaches and cowboys setting aside their differences to run aliens out of town. This has to be a comedy. Right? Another go at the aliens story.
Film Guardian story here.
Song of the Day: Suspended in Gaffa – Kate Bush
Suspended in Gaffa. One of the best songs ever!
Suddenly my feet are feet of mud
It all goes slowmo…
Trying MarsEdit
The latest beta of Ecto has been doing weird things on me recently, so I’m trying MarsEdit again to see what its like. Nice Mac OS X interface. I’ll probably give the other Mac OS X blogging clients a whirl as well.
UPDATE: Back to Ecto. MarsEdit is nice and a good blog client, but I just like Ecto better and I’m used to it.
iTunes Music Store passes 5 Billion downloads
Announced by Apple today. Also selling or renting 50,000 movies per day. Seems to be a success then…
Northern Ireland Cocoa Developers
Some of us from Northern Ireland, who were at WWDC, are thinking of setting up a local Cocoa developers group to met and discuss development and technologies related to the Mac OS X and iPhone/iPod touch platform. It is envisioned that there will be periodic meetings, a mailing list, a web page, possibly guest speakers, etc. All this is still to be determined. The following 5 domains have been registered for the group to use:
nicocoadev (.org, .net, .com, .co.uk)
nicod.org
If you would be interested in participating in the group then email me using the contact link in the sidebar on the right of this page.
Feel free to pass this information on to anyone else who you think might be interested.
Hellstrom’s Hive on Audible
I’ve written about Frank Herbert’s Hellstrom’s Hive before. More than once in fact. You can now get the book on Audible read by the excellent Scott Brick.
Mars Phoenix lander is Twittering…
This is so cool. Updates from the Mars Phoenix lander via Twitter.
WWDC is nigh
I fly out to SF on Friday for WWDC next week. Schedule is done. Mostly Macs in IT with a smattering of Cocoa and iPhone sessions to break them up. Plus some extracurricular activities. See iCal screen grab below.
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