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.

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.

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.

KT Tunstall on screen ThePoliceBelfast1.JPG Click Pictures for larger view

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.

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.

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.

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.

IRWWDC.png Click picture for larger view

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