Author: richard

Jono sent me a link to 300 Miles High — a collection of NASA images
taken from orbit. He knew I’d like it because I have a collection of similar images in my copy of
Orbit: NASA Astronauts Photograph the Earth.

The good thing about the book is that it has the captions to go with the images, explaining what you’re looking at (“The Trans-Siberian Railroad draws a line through the April snow east of the Ural Mountains”…. or “Each of these green circles is 200 acres of farmland”… or “…this is a rare clear view of Tokyo — 30 million people compressed into the ancient Japanese heartland, the Edo Plain of Honshu”… etc, etc, only the descriptions are typically two or three paragraphs, not one sentence). Shame the web site doesn’t have the captions.

I was planning to blog lots while I was in San Francisco, but Blogger doesn’t work very well on Netscape running on Sun hardware. So if I can remember anything, I’m going to try to blog a few things over the next few days.

I flew with Virgin Atlantic, which was OK. Good selection of films on the flight, oh-so-tempting option to make phone calls, and a selection of early 90s games to play. Shame my game controller didn’t work on the flight out or the flight back.

Caught up on some movies on the flights: Antitrust (fun, glad I didn’t bother seeing it at the cinema), Miss Congeniality (ditto) and Disney’s Tarzan (excellent). In San Fran I saw Shrek, which you should go and see if you like Toy Story-style movies.

I also got to see a film called Extreme in the IMAX. Being towed out to surf 20-60 foot waves… snow boarders with a death wish… climbing frozen waterfalls with no ropes. Mmmm.

So I’ve been in San Francisco for JavaOne for three or four days now. Lots of fun stuff, techy stuff… but I do like the circus elements:
a bunch of 20 or 30 bikers on Harleys circling the conference centre on the first day; the guy on a unicycle teaching the crowd how to juggle; the biplanes flying over with vendor messages; having t-shirts shot at us; watching my first ice hokey game (didn’t understand a thing); keynote talks that start with comedy sketches based on Survivor; song and some dance; keynote speaches that start with half an hour of Taiko drumming (Taiko drumming twice in five days.. pretty good, eh?); the opportunity to tell vendors that you hate their product… you get the idea.

The free beer is good, too

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Saturday, Ealing, London: a day out in the park on what must be close
to the hottest day of the year so far.

The excuse: a free extreme day organized by the
local government, where we could try out various extreme sports. It turned out to be dominated by kids, but hey… we invited the New Scientist web team over,
we had fun and discovered that Cathy rules
at shooting because she was taught to shoot at school in France.

The end of the day was spent drinking, chatting, and playing football in
another park, followed by great tapas at La Siesta. Mmmm… great tapas,
and enough veggie options to keep Ash happy.

As you’d expect, there are eyemodule photos.

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[oh, BTW, this blog is late because we’ve come to rely on
JPEG Wizard to trim the fat from our images, and the
site was down for a day or two]

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This weekend I purchased some helium from Balloon
works (Kew, UK) to inflate the Flying Saucer that the New Sci people gave me as a leaving gift (see blog#3307474).”

Under the balloon hangs the turbofan unit: two fans you power forward or back independently with a remote control. You add putty to the fan unit to give the saucer neutral buoyancy (or as close to it as you can get).

The first instinct is to go full throttle and send the saucer across the room as fast as possible, and then send it into a high speed spin. After that it’s more interesting… you use small bursts of fan power
and then watch how the saucer reacts, another small burst of power to adjust the saucer.. and so on… until it reaches some goal (buzzing the dog, trying to get the saucer round a slalom course, etc etc).

It’s fun. More pictures to follow.

Fingers crossed, we’re off to Brighton (coastal UK town),
so our flat in London is for sale.

I’ve put the full estate agent’s details on-line (direct from Word, so sorry for the layout).

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Yesterday I completed my notice period and left my job at New Scientist. I’ve been working with them since the site launched on 5 October 1995. So, it’s going to be odd, but I needed to find something else to do and move out of London. Not sure what that will be. Hopefully I won’t miss the people, because I’m going to try to stay in touch 🙂

Thanks for the send off guys! And the geek toys! There are more photos.

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It’s always disappointing when you see a different road sign, but then don’t see the thing
you’re being warned against — rock slide, flood, falling rocks… or tank crossing signs like this one, taken someplace around Salisbury Plain.
Still it’s good that we have the signs because if you were driving down a country road and turned a corner to find, without warning, a tank in the middle of the road you’d probably be surprised.

A few minutes ago I was trying to get to my bank in
Soho Square
and I saw the Queen (of England) and Prince Phillip.

There was a crowd of people and lots of police and it looked like someone
was visiting the Tucan pub. Then I spotted the Royal Standard flying on a car, and realized
it was the Queen and she was visiting something opposite the pub.

I was trying to make my way through the crowd and she stepped out
from a building, waved, there was some clapping and cheering, then
she got into a car and was driven away. Show over.