Author: richard

while ago spotted new

A while ago I spotted a new book by Fi Glover in a “2 for £10” offer at a book stop. Given that I liked her previous book (and so did Jane), I figured this would be more of the same and bought it.

”

Last week, I was about to begin a two-and-a-half hour train journey across Ireland. I opened the book and thought “Hmm… this looks familiar”. Turns out the publishers had slapped on some new cover art and changed the title from “I am an oil tanker” to “Travels with my radio”. Other than that, it’s exactly the same book. Bah.

So, when it comes to impulse purchases in book shops, just say no. And when embarking on a long train journey across Ireland, make sure you have a back up book.

was working in Essex

I was working in Essex today, and at lunch time we jumped in the car and headed out. As you might imagine, the roads were busy. At one roundabout a driver had stopped across the roundabout blocking traffic. A breakdown, right? No. She was out of her car chasing a small rabbit back into the grassy central reservation. Isn’t that cute/insane [delete as applicable]

Last night we were

Last night we were at a photo exhibition at the
Gardner Arts Centre called
It’s Wrong to Wish on Space Hardware. The trigger to go was the combination of having a copy of Orbit: NASA Astronauts Photograph the Earth and also loving the Billy Bragg song that the title is taken from (New England).

It was a free exhibition, and it was of a size that occupied us for about 15 minutes.
There was a mix of stuff: official NASA prints (my personal favourites), photos of the Russian space programme (best: a cosmonaut ready to go, but sitting on a nasty 70s sofa in what looked like someone’s living room), plus fake space shots: pictures of pancakes that resembled the moon, and windscreen bug splat that looked like the night sky.

We were bored so

We were bored so we caught up on a back-log of Frasier‘s we had to watch. It’s still good, but it’s not a must watch any more, hence the accumulation. Anyway… one thing that struck me about a couple of the episodes was the terrible, terrible product placement. They had a Segway in one episode and a Aibo in another. They were in the show for no reason at all, and did nothing for the story. I prefer to take my product placement in a more subtile, subliminal way, thanks. For the Segway or an Aibo I’d happily sit and watch a 30 minute infomercial. No need to “sneek” them into a show like Frasier.

Here an interesting article

Here’s an interesting article on how lucky we are to be alive:
Amid the Universe’s Chaos, a Few Habitable Places (spotted on Slashdot). It’s a look at how dangerous the universe is, and how small the window for life is. The conclusion: life (as we know it) may be harder to find that we thought. The other side of the coin is that we should probably make plans to get off this planet. With that in mind, there’s some good news — it’s not Star Gate: SG1 yet, but I’m told that quantum wormholes could carry people.

Tonight we went to

Tonight we went to see The Two Terries (Terry Jones and Terry Pratchett) on stage at The Dome Concert Hall. We didn’t really know what to expect, and given that the Terries had never met before tonight, I guess they didn’t either.

For us, the worst thing it could have been was very very Literary — but it turned out to be mostly anecdote telling followed by questions at the end. There was a host to keep things moving, so all in all it was sort of like a chat show.
An entertaining chat show. For example: Terry Jones telling us about what life in the 14th century would have been like for a food taster to the Pope; or how the restaurant where the Mr Creosote scene from The Meaning of Life was being used the next day for a wedding; or how Terry Pratchett may or may not stumble around hotel rooms at 5am trying to avoid peeing in the wardrobe.

One of the stranger things: Terry Jones showed us the scar he acquired after being in hospital. Apparently the surgeon took a photo of Terry while they were working on or around his intestines…and then emailed him the photo (warning: that link not for the faint hearted or those eating).

The DVD of Monty Python and the Holy Grail sounds good at least for the subtitles for “people who don’t like the movie”, and we’ll have to go check out some of Terry Jones’ books. Jane already has pretty much all of the Pratchett books already.

Oh, brilliant moment: when it came round to time for questions, the first person stood up and said “This is a question for Terry” 🙂

Radios should be more

Radios should be more like TVs. Dials? A limited number of stored stations labelled “1” or “2”? Why not have a bit of a screen, a few logos so I can select a channel and go there, rather than scanning for channels? Anyway…

I have a thing about needing a radio version of TiVo, and today Jane tempted me with a couple of URLs.

TiVo for radio’ set for UK launch is a story in the Guardian… but from 14 Feb 2001. Alas the company in the article, sounds like it’s sort of lost the way. Shame.

The second, Bitbop Tuner is TiVo For Radio is from Jul 27, 2001 sounded better, in that it’s a download for your PC. I go for the download button but the site has an important notice telling me that they’ve “discontinued distribution”.
(Amusing moment: The system requirements list “Minimum Ram: 64MB”, fine, “Processor: Absolutely Necessary” 🙂

So it seems people have tried to make better radios, but there’s no money in it.

know we go on

I know we go on a lot about TiVo, but this impressed me…

We’d notice a problem where TiVo had confused a bunch of channels: what it thought
was BBC4 (say) was actually something like the Parliament channel. This is bad, because when TiVo spots
something good to record, it changes to the wrong channel and records something else. Bah.

On Monday I put a call into TiVO to see what was happening, and they said they’d look into and probably
update our TiVo.
Today, they call back.
The problem, they’d figured out, was actually with our set-top box. TiVo was right, the set-top
box had the channels confused. Now, I’d have expected most companies to say “we’re right, it’s
somebody else’s problem, give them (your now out-of-business set-top box manufacturer) a call”, but the TiVo folk knew what set-top box we have, and gave me the
detailed instructions on what to do to fix it.

TiVo: expensive, but in the end, good value.