What’s the difference between Wikipedia and h2g2? Reading up on the thinking behind the creation of h2g2 makes it sounds
rather more exciting than those behind Wikipedia (even though someone has provided a mobile interface for Wikipedia now).
Of course you can lookup the Wikipedia entry for h2g2, and visa versa. But only h2g2 has an entry comparing both.
Cathy T was kind enough to pass on the URL for 10×10. It’s not without it’s problems, but it’s cute. Much cuter than that thing I did a while back.
Due to a combination of a small hardware failure and a large amount of user error, I ended up in a situation where our home server RAID5 disk array was hosed and our backup disk was failing to respond. It was looking like we’d have to go back to month old CD backups… but it didn’t turn out that way. So thanks to:
BTW, if you decide to have an off-site back up disk in your car, check the disk tolerance before you leave the disk in a car park in Heathrow during double-digit negative temperatures. At one point I looked into professional data recovery services to get the data off this disk. We didn’t need the service in the end, but Data Recovery UK were fast and friendly and quoted me £85 to perform an initial investigation on this 120G IDE backup drive. It’d then cost £350 – £900 to recover the data. Which I thought was fair enough, assuming you value the data.
A few years ago, the guy who throws bottles off the pier would probably have received venture capital investment for his web site.
In less than a month we’ve gone from once-in-a-decade snow on the beach weather to t-shirt weather:
Pictures grabbed from BBC Southern Counties Webcams.
2005-12-21 00:00:01, Brighton: first gay marriages in the UK. Interesting to note that the Civil Partnership Act also allows for divorce, so there’s an opportunity for another first there for any couple interested in getting into the record books.
It’ll probably never happen, which is a shame: “The holiday resort, named Pleasure Island, would be based two thirds of a mile off the coast of Brighton, between the city’s two piers”.
Does anyone else mentally picture a man in a white suit greeting guests: “Welcome to Pleasure Island“
“An area of the development would also be set aside for low cost housing and flats” which I can only assume is designed to be the equivalent of a factory town for anyone working on this luxury resort.
Productivity thought: I was just writing an email, and I wasn’t sure about the spelling of a word. It was all over in a few milliseconds, but what I found my fingers doing was to start typing the first few letters of the word and then I pressed CTRL+Space. If you use an IDE which has “code completion”, you’ll will know where I’m going here… I was expecting a list of matching words to appear, from which I could pick the one I intended to use. Of course, it didn’t. I think it’d be a good feature to have, and would really mean that I never have to learn how to spell.
I was reading in the paper yesterday that The Labour Party are shunning seaside towns. In 2006 they’re holding their conference in Manchester. I think one guy hit the nail on the head when discussing Blackpool: “It amazes me that the Labour party, which is a working-class party, doesn’t want to come to the main working-class resort in the country”. Yeah, that’s right, it probably is an image thing.
“Unlike other seaside destinations, Brighton has always been popular with delegates, and Labour signed a two-year deal to stage the 2004 and 2005 conferences on the Sussex coast”.
By coincidence 2006 is when the council plan to start the demolition of the conference centre (huzzah!). It’s going to be replaced with a new combined conference and concert venue. So, basically, the same thing only less ugly, presumably.
From what I can gather, the area under development is pretty big, and by 2008 could include flats, an extra floor on top of the Churchill Square shopping centre, and the planning options I’ve seen use words like “bold”, “holistic” and “landmark” — but they would, wouldn’t they.
The new conference/gig venue will be smaller (under 2,000 seats compared to the current 5,500) but “state of the art”. Which sounds a little odd until you realize that the International Ice Arena at Black Rock, near the marina, will be an 11,000 seat venue. That’s scheduled to open in 2007, assuming it’s even started. I’m guessing the ice part can be covered over, because the prospect of filling an 11,000 seater stadium for some ice skating sounds… challenging.
It also raises the question of why the council would allow something that size there, but not a 22,000 seater football stadium in Falmer. But that’s a whole other story.