Month: May 2003

Yesterday morning, at 4.20am I stumbled out of bed to try and catch a glimpse of the Lunar Eclipse. I got dressed, grabbed my camera and headed off out of the house to the bottom of the street, and saw nothing except a road sweeper out doing an early sweep of Brighton’s streets. And whilst I was out doing this, Richard was sleeping. If I’d headed off down to the seafront, my chances of seeing something would probably have been higher, but it was too early in the morning for me to go on any such adventures… or even thing straight.

Someone who did manage to see it created a time lapsed image of it here. (mind you, he’s in Arizona and so it was a far more reasonable hour over there).

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I keep forgetting to check the BBC Radio 4 Comedy site. They have some great stuff to listen to. Right now I’m listening to Laughing at Dingoes, which is Mark Little’s documentary on Australian humour. Ross Noble goes Global is something else I like, too. There’s lots of stuff there, but you need to check weekly because many of the programmes don’t get archived, presumable because the BBC want to sell them on tape and CD.

If you’re interested in software licensing and copyright… ok, for those of you who are left, take a look at Problems in Open Source Licensing. It makes some useful comments on what you can and can’t do with copyright, and when you do and don’t have a contract. Note, it’s written from an Australian law point of view.

Brighton and Hove Virtual festival now has a shortlist of web sites to vote for. All nominations were considered by a panel of judges, and there are now 5 sites per category going forward for public voting. So, cast your vote here.

As part of the Streets of Brighton section of the Festival, we went to 2 of the free events last Thursday evening. The first was The Constant Soldier, and the second was Sister Sister.

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The Constant Soldier was a bit beyond us, as we didn’t know the original Andersen story but it seemed to be quite well thought out, although I thought that the turn out was a bit poor.

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Sister Sister was really well put together, and very enjoyable (although very hard to take photos of as they didn’t stand still very often). It was a mixture of trapeze, video installation and anarchic circus and a decent crowd turned up to support them.

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As part of the festival, last Wednesday evening we went to hear a talk by Colin Pillinger and Steve Squires about Mars, and the Beagle 2 and Mars rover missions to send rockets there later this year. They talked very well, and in an “everyday” kind of way, so we weren’t baffled by technology (which I thought was quite an achievement).

They talked for about an hour, and then the floor was opened for questions. One of the questions was “How much are the missions costing?”. Colin refused to answer, and only told us what his original budget was (£25m), and not what the current costs where. Steve told us that the Rover project was running at around $800m. So, quite a difference then!

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Here we go again. I guess the fire crew on the pier this morning didn’t quite finish the job: it flamed up again this afternoon.

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