Author: richard

Jane found SLIMP3, which is a little bit of hardware and some open source software that plays MP3s from our server through our home stereo. It’s great, and we’re not the only ones to think so. I had to add an ethernet to wireless bridge to stream the music wirelessly, but that worked perfectly too. I’m happy.

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Yesterday I was in London for Modular 2003, which I think is fair to summarize as a conference for music geeks to talk shop. The photos are from the “Analog Modular Room Installation”, but I also managed to catch some interesting talks: improvising swarms, artificial music, a demo from Clavia and some whacky ideas for new instruments.

Having recently watched the last (in the series?) of Adam & Joe Go Tokyo, I’ve come to the conclusion that there should be much more Adam and Joe on TV. Mind you, I said pretty much the same thing for Lee and Herring…

Sure, not everyone liked it compared to Adam and Joe’s other shows, but it worked for me. I’ve had a couple of happy seconds playing Gets! (or Get’s), and I’ll be shopping for Plus-Tech Squeeze Box.

On Friday we headed out to see Good bye, Lenin!. A fine and funny film, if you can handle subtitles or speak German, about the fiction a son has to create to keep the fall of the Berlin Wall from his mother. I hadn’t been to the Duke of York’s cinema for about 10 years, but I’ll be back there: the screen felt small (we were at the back of the balcony), but any cinema that’s licensed and sells cake is on to a winning combination in my books.

Afterwards we needed tasty, quick, cheap food in an uncrowded place. I thought we’d maybe get two out of those four on a Friday night, but we found them all in one go at Bombay Aloo. It’s an all-you-can-eat Indian vegetarian buffet. Like other people we’ve walked past it a few times and wondered what it’s like: it’s definitely worth trying. I’d eat there again without a second thought.

Today’s Guardian G2 section was written on the beach here in Brighton, so they could try out the free wireless internet access.

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Jeremy and Kirsty have a guest staying with them at the moment, a small, cute, furry, four legged friend called Freddie. He’s a very enthusiastic cocker spaniel. We met up with them last night to take him for a walk along the beach. Dog walking is fun, but that’s easy for me to say because Jeremy was the one picking up the dog output.

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While I was in San Francisco Goul took me to see Finding Nemo (watch the trailers: they can do water now). It’s a Pixar and Disney thing, and if you liked Toy Story, you’ll like this too. I’m looking forward to going to see it again, but it’s not due in the UK until October.

I’m going to try to get a bunch of geek stuff out of my system in one blog…

I’ve thought that Apple ibooks were more-or-less toys which could just about manage to do a bit of word processing and perhaps surfing. I’ve just finished renting one for a week, to see if I could possibly do my job with a Mac and hopefully shake off my maclust, and my perceptions have changed. I’d now happly recommend or work with an ibook: I was able to do some software development on the machine and it was about the same as working on my Pentium III 800Mhz Linux laptop.

Oh, I rented from Microrent — if you’re looking to rent hardware, these people are great. They initially sent me a machine with the wrong version of Mac OS on it. In fact, the machine I was renting (cheapest possible) wasn’t capable of running the latest and greated OS. So they posted me out the CDs and a nice big chunk of extra memory and talked me through the upgrade. Thanks guys!

You may have guessed by now, but I’m hooked. I’m now the owner of a shiny new powerbook. I’ve switched.

The other geek thing is that I’ve written up some notes on my trip to JavaOne 2003, San Francisco.

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Yesterday we were at the Beach Soccer stadium which
has been temporarily built in Brighton for the Kronenbourg Cup
with the help of 400 tonnes of sand.

The rules are different from the football we’re used to, in that there are three periods of 12 minutes, a blue card which sends players to the sin bin and there must always be a winner, via extra time or penalties.

We saw Italy v. Portugal and France v. England (and yes, Eric Cantona was there for the game).

Entertaining stuff, and I’d certainly go see it again.

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I don’t know what this shark was doing there.

Yesterday we were in a packed house at the Pavilion Theatre to listen to Heather Couper and Nigel Henbest talk about The Red Planet.

The talk was a kind of summary of their book,
Mars: The Inside Story of the Red Planet, and it was entertaining and interesting, as I’m sure the book is. Three things stood out: 1. Heather Couper’s praise of Brighton, and the North Laine in particular, as cool place and a cross of San Francisco and Sydney; 2. Heather’s feelings for why people need to go to Mars (lots of emotions there); 3. They believe life has already been found on Mars.

Regarding life, the interesting question becomes: is the life on Earth and Mars based on the same kind of carbon? If it is, then maybe there’s a common origin. But if it’s not, then life developed independently so maybe there’s life everywhere out there.