Author: richard

A while ago I read the Longitude book. Maybe I read it too quickly, or missed a bit, but I never really understood how
you’d navigate in the 1700s using the stars and trying to figure out the time in London. Anyway, the other night I was catching up on an episode of The Ship and it all became clear: if you know it’s noon where you are right now, and you know the time back in London, you can figure out how far east or west you are. Simple.

In other TV news, you should have been watching
Scrubs and
Six Feet Under (the title sequence alone should have won awards … oh,hold on, it did: two Emmys).

We’ve just got back from New England. Photos and report later, but for now I’d just like to make a nomination for Worst E-commerce Web Site Ever. The winner is… Boston Duck Tours. They give you lots of warnings about not using your back button. OK, fair enough, but when you do make a mistake you’re dumped to a page that has no links on it: you’re trapped, because you’re not allowed to use your back button. And the mistake I made? Not selecting a “state” when trying to order tickets from the UK (there’s no “outside US” option in the list of US states). I couldn’t fake a US address because the address has to match the credit card number. So there I was, suck on a “you must enter a state” error page, after all ready entering my credit card number. Bah. And they charge you $2 extra for booking online.

No, we didn’t take their tour. Yes, I’ve told them about their web site, but they didn’t bother to reply.

Sorry… I’ll try not to rant in future. Must think calm, happy thoughts.

Too many Long Island Ice Teas results in memory loss.

Jeremy and Kirsty are now on our official “Friends Who Make Dangerous Cocktails” list.

Saturday: we were over at Rob & Sue‘s place for Rob’s 30th birthday party/BBQ. Ace time, great people, and someone bought Rob a Swingball but we headed off back home before it came out of its box. We then got lost trying to drive out of Kingston, but that’s normal: it seems you have to drive around the one-way system a few times until you reach escape velocity.

So it’s not just me who has a terrible problem with socks.

In other news, tonight we ate in the garden and I actually got to use the phrase “throw another prawn on the barbie”. However, I do need to practice my Prawn peeling technique.

I’ve been reading up on the Playstation 3 and in particular how it’s going to be able to call up extra computing power to do…well… whatever it needs to do to make games better.

Some people think this “grid computing” is best for big business and academia, and some people think it’ll let us run weather forecasts for our own back gardens, but I like the idea for games. But still… I’ll believe it when the PS3 ships. I can see how it would help simulations, but I can’t see how it’d work to speed up graphics.

Anyway, that’s just an intro to my current fave on-line cartoon. Before I give you the link, you need to know something about the cartoon Voltron by reading up on
one of the characters and you also need to know that Devastator is a Transformer that’s a “bizarre combination of six Constructicons: Scrapper, Scavenger, Bonecrusher, Hook, Long Haul, and Mixmaster”. Ok, here’s the cartoon.

We live at the end of a no through road. Every day someone will walk up the street, get to the end, sigh, and walk back down again. It’s an easy mistake to make, because all the other roads that run parallel to ours do have an exit.

So I guess it’s no surprise that at 2am on Wednesday a panic-stricken man came running up the street, hoping to escape the people who were chasing him. We can only imagine what went through his mind when he realized there was no exit from the street…

His pursuers caught up with him, and proceeded to smash his head against our car and other cars parked at the end of the road. This was all witnessed by our next-door neighbour. I slept right thought it, but Jane says she woke to hear some screaming.

They ran off, probably when they heard the police sirens.

We were on the beach the other night with Jeremy. ”
It was great to be back in a cool costal breeze after the heat of the day. All good stuff, but
I fell foul of Too Much Lager, and I didn’t feel too great the following morning.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the Ireland trip has pushed me over the edge and I’m on the road to being a ”
Bitter drinker. There is a difference.

Last night we were at ecademy in London to hear a talk by Jason Porter, one of the founders of Friends reunited. He gave us the history, and a few facts: 10,000 people joining the site per day; they built the site in a couple of weeks (“and it shows”, heckled Dave). But nothing really interesting. It would have been a wasted day if we hadn’t also been in town to meet up with some friends.