Category: Uncategorized

Dana Blankenhorn has posted an good article titled “The Coming Blogging Industry“. I’m not sure I agree with his thesis of an advertising-based business model for blogging, but its an interesting read nevertheless. I subscribe to his A-Clue email newsletter, and I recommend it.

I noticed two things today that will prove once-and-for-all just how sad I am.

First, amazon.co.uk is taking orders Uru, a game I’ve been looking forward to ever since I first heard about it over a year ago. It’s the next game in the Myst sequence from Cyan Worlds and, judging by the stunning screenshots, it looks like its going to be absolutely amazing. Amazon are listing its release date as 31st October, but my order is in now.

Second, Fog Creek have a new version of CityDesk in late beta. Who knew?

(Interesting footnote: judging from this, Cyan Worlds are doing some cross platform development. Linux or MacOS X?)

Our wonderful British climate seems to be doing it again. For most of this week its been unusually hot: 32C yesterday and 30C today, according to the BBC. The week before, it rained almost continuously for days and days. Tomorrow, the forecast is for thunder-storms and sleet. At least I won’t have to water the garden…

Today I started a new job. Since this is my first taste of full-time work in about a year, you can bet its going to be a bit painful. Time no longer stretches before me, looking to be filled. Instead, I have to fill it with other people’s priorities and concerns and problems. This is all looking to be quite a shock…

Today was, predictably, disorientating and knackering, But the people are friendly and the job has a lot of potential to stretch me in new ways. Although I’ll have much less time to spare, I’ll try to keep this blog going. Its quite unlikely, though, that I’ll say much about my work.

Last night I got back from a four-day backpacking trip in the Lake District. The weather was kind of mixed, and some of the days were long and hard, but I had a great time.

Starting at Windermere, I walked along Trout Beck and up onto High Street. I then continued North to camp overnight at Angle Tarn, in the mountains above Patterdale. The weather that day was very changeable, with frequent, hard showers. On High Street I walked into freezing sleet and, for a couple of minutes, snow. Although I passed-by Angle Tarn in March on my last trip to the lakes, the last time I had camped there was sixteen years ago, while walking the Coast to Coast walk. This time around, it was much harder to find dry-ish ground to pitch my tent on. The tarn was as lovely as I remembered it, though, and this time I had it all to myself. I watched two gulls fishing on the water. The sun went down and it was calm and quiet. This is what I go to the mountains for.

The next day was clear and sunny and I descended down to Patterdale. Then down Grisedale and over Great Tongue, Raw Pike, and into Langdale. I then followed the Cumbrian Way path to the National Trust campsite at the end of the valley. This has got to be my favourite place in the whole world, and it didn’t let me down. Over a welcome pint at the Old Dungeon Gyll, I watched the sun light-up the tops of the mountains and the Pikes.

The next day was to have been another long haul to a wild camp near Buttermere. Since I was feeling a bit wiped-out from the previous day, I decided to head for Wasdale Head via Stake Pass and Angle Tarn (the other one!). It was another fine day. From near Esk Hause I watched tiny coloured dots, people, slogging up the corridor route to the summit of Scafell. In the evening, after I’d pitched my tent in the field outside the Wasdale Head Inn, I walked over to the tiny church of St. Olaf. The churchyard has a number of memorials to people who had died in the surrounding mountains over the last hundred years.

The fourth and final day was cold, wet and windy, and I did not want to get out of my sleeping bag. I crossed over into Eskdale via Burnmoor Tarn in blowing rain and mist, then headed West down the valley using the old packhorse trail to emerge, on the coast, at Ravenglass in time to catch the train home. It had rained all day.

I had a great four days. With hindsight, it might have been better to camp wild on the last night – near the river in Wasdale Head, perhaps – but I’m happy with how it went. I feel re-charged and centred again. Perhaps I should start writing-up these trips properly, with better route information and notes.

Lots of tasty news about salsa-flavoured pringles over at snackspot.org. Its a product of the same deranged minds that brought us NTK, apparently.

Raed is still blogging: “Prices of weapons on the market have been going up. At one point you could get a hand grenade for 500 dinars, that?s a quarter of a dollar. A Kalashnikov for $200 and a brand new Uzi for a bit more.” Unreal. #

The Guardian has a page of Steve Bell’s Iraq cartoons. #

(Is it just me, or does six years for this seem a bit lenient?)

I found this rather good introductory-level article on quantum computing in Scientific American. I last mentioned QC a few weeks ago. #

Scary spy-on-your-customers database software from Sybase. Surely you remember Sybase? They used to be big, once.

A couple of articles, here and here, on the impending deregulation of radio in the UK, and its impending take-over by Clear Channel. Basically, listeners get an even narrower range or even more pre-digested, zoo-format pap than they do now. As someone who doesn’t listen to anything except Radio Four, I don’t expect this to affect me, but its depressing anyway. Radio can be such a great medium, but its dying of blandness. #

If you need real random numbers then surf over to the neat-o HotBits site. Some smart guy has wired a net-connected PC to a radioactive decay detector, and is serving-up batches of random numbers to anyone who wants them. This is really nice, at least until CPUs start to ship with random-number generators built-in, but what the site really needs is to be web-service enabled. #

In an ingenious effort to wring more juice out of the “blog thing”, invisiblog.com is offering anonymous weblog publishing. Not much content yet, just a lot of test posts and some stuff in German, but I think the idea has a basic flaw. People read blogs because they feel some connection (trust, emotional, intellectual, whatever) with the blog’s author. You get to know them. If the author is anonymous, the experience lacks the very ingredient that makes blogging interesting. Still, a nice try.

Cool Astronomy Picture of the Day from a couple of weeks ago: London at night, as seen from the International Space Station.

Damn fractals – they always look like something else! In this case, for me, its either what you get when you hit impact-resistant glass with a hammer; or a car headlight seen through a rain-splattered car windscreen.

At last, a company called Scaled Composites appears to be having a serious try at non-government-funded space flight. According to BBC news:

“The event is not about dreams, predictions or mock-ups. We will show actual flight hardware: an aircraft for high-altitude airborne launch, a flight-ready manned spaceship, a new, ground-tested rocket propulsion system and much more.”

Lots of info and photos here. The Proteus launch aircraft looks realy cool.