Month: June 2001

We got talking in the office today about Daleks, those Dr Who nasties who used to have me hiding behing the sofa (I was only about 5 at the time), and I remembered seeing a few web sites dedicated to building a Dalek last year when the shop opposite our old office had a Dalek for sale. We tried to get our company to buy one for the office reception, but it didn’t happen. Here are a couple of links which might be of interest:

• How to Build a Dalek
• Dalek Builder’s Club

Jono sent me a link to 300 Miles High — a collection of NASA images
taken from orbit. He knew I’d like it because I have a collection of similar images in my copy of
Orbit: NASA Astronauts Photograph the Earth.

The good thing about the book is that it has the captions to go with the images, explaining what you’re looking at (“The Trans-Siberian Railroad draws a line through the April snow east of the Ural Mountains”…. or “Each of these green circles is 200 acres of farmland”… or “…this is a rare clear view of Tokyo — 30 million people compressed into the ancient Japanese heartland, the Edo Plain of Honshu”… etc, etc, only the descriptions are typically two or three paragraphs, not one sentence). Shame the web site doesn’t have the captions.

”

The photo above is of an in-flight information screen on a flight from the UK. Notice anything wrong
with that picture? It’s difficult to make out but the aircraft in the middle of the screen is stuck on
route into the UK. Notice also the system crash log text at the top of the image. Not very reassuring, but
as we were already at 30,000ft or something, there wasn’t much point worrying about it.

Just noticed a link off the blogger front page about blogging for charity. The page reads :

“About a year ago, I blogged for 24 hours straight. It was fun, but did little more than get attention. When I decided to do it again this year, I knew it had to mean something. So I’m blogging for a cause–and so are some other folks. Here’s how it works:
The show starts on Saturday, July 28, High Noon (Pacific time). We’ll go until noon on Sunday, July 29.
Participants agree to make an entry on their personal page at least once every 30 minutes for 24 hours. Sponsors fork out for every hour the blogger manages to keep going, 24 hours max, or they decide on a flat fee instead. Each participant has chosen a favorite charity and provided a link. At the end of the marathon, sponsors make a donation to the appropriate charity.”

To find out more visit 24 Hour Blogathon, and sign up to blog, or to be a sponsor.

It’s sometimes interesting to see what people read on the tube in a morning. This morning there were 2 people reading Metro (the free London newspaper), one guy reading one of the broadsheet newspapers, a guy reading Nick Hornby’s “About a Boy”, a guy reading a biography about Tony Hancock (When the wind changed, The life and death of Tony Hancock by Cliff Goodwin), one reading a Java book (J2EE Technology in Practice) and one lady filling in London Underground refund forms (2 or 3 of them).

Every now and again, there are some more unusual books to be seen, like the Tony Hancock example this morning. A few months ago now I saw a guy reading “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler. It was a big book, much bigger than I’d expected (694 pages according to amazon). I knew the book existed – we’d learnt about it at school in history (that upset my Dad as what I called history, he remembered), but I’d expected it to be some short propaganda booklet, not a 3inch think paperback.

I was planning to blog lots while I was in San Francisco, but Blogger doesn’t work very well on Netscape running on Sun hardware. So if I can remember anything, I’m going to try to blog a few things over the next few days.

I flew with Virgin Atlantic, which was OK. Good selection of films on the flight, oh-so-tempting option to make phone calls, and a selection of early 90s games to play. Shame my game controller didn’t work on the flight out or the flight back.

Caught up on some movies on the flights: Antitrust (fun, glad I didn’t bother seeing it at the cinema), Miss Congeniality (ditto) and Disney’s Tarzan (excellent). In San Fran I saw Shrek, which you should go and see if you like Toy Story-style movies.

I also got to see a film called Extreme in the IMAX. Being towed out to surf 20-60 foot waves… snow boarders with a death wish… climbing frozen waterfalls with no ropes. Mmmm.

It’s a general election day in the UK today, and I’ve still not fully decided who to vote for yet. I will vote, but will probably decide as I walk to the polling station on my way to work. Even the Who Do I Vote For website couldn’t help me decide who I should vote for as it told me 2 of them were of equal relevance to me. I could always try and get tactical with my voting (Tactical Voter) but for my area they have no recomendation as it is a “safe” labour seat. So, if I want to vote for someone other than Labour, my vote won’t really count for much (we don’t have proportional representation in the UK yet – sign this petition). The major parties just don’t see that different any more, there aren’t huge gaps between them at the moment.

So I’ve been in San Francisco for JavaOne for three or four days now. Lots of fun stuff, techy stuff… but I do like the circus elements:
a bunch of 20 or 30 bikers on Harleys circling the conference centre on the first day; the guy on a unicycle teaching the crowd how to juggle; the biplanes flying over with vendor messages; having t-shirts shot at us; watching my first ice hokey game (didn’t understand a thing); keynote talks that start with comedy sketches based on Survivor; song and some dance; keynote speaches that start with half an hour of Taiko drumming (Taiko drumming twice in five days.. pretty good, eh?); the opportunity to tell vendors that you hate their product… you get the idea.

The free beer is good, too

Richard is in San Francisco this week at the JavaOne conference. I spoke to him this morning and he said that the first day had gone well, although he’d forgotten how intense it all was. There are 20,000 geeks there this year, and amazingly enough he bumped into one of the guys I used to work with at Speedwing Logica many years ago. The conference lasts all week, and there are loads of different talks and events to go too.