After the success of last summer’s World Cup fantasy football league in the office, Adam organised this years league. And I won it. So I’m very pleased indeed.
In the New Scientist league, on the same site, with the same team I came 6th out of 11 (I beat Richard tho ;-))
Well, it is festival time again here in Brighton, and so today I headed off in search of the Streets of Brighton, open houses and more of the 41 places installations.
Despite having lived in Brighton for 5 festivals, I’d never ventured into an open house until today – and I’m converted. I visited 3 and found them all to be of a really high standard. The first was Rod Clark.
The second and third were both down Tidy Street. They were Shadow Box and SQ1.
I will be visiting more of them.
I managed to catch a few different street performances, the Deep Sea Jivers performed by Swervy World and Eco Pirates performed by Desperate Men.
The MOO people put on a great party. So, happy 1st birthday to them. Great location, great bar, great deco, great people… yay. I have more photos but you really want to see the photos everyone else took, which were much better.
I’m back in San Francisco for the JavaOne conference. I think it’s either the 4th or 5th visit to the city. The trip over is something like 10 or 11 hours, and I don’t have a great time on such long flights. Towards the end I was wondering why I put myself through this, but then I snapped out of it and realized what a very lucky boy am I to have the opportunity to go fun places. It’s just a pisser being away from Jane for a week.
Ever since I left the house I’ve had a nagging “I’ve forgotten something” feeling. Somewhere above Canada I realized that it was the snowboards. All the other flights I’ve been on recently have been to snowy places, lugging lots of kit around and it just seems weird to land in a city and not immediately head towards a mountain.
The conference starts tomorrow, so today covered all the usual things such as saying “my body doesn’t work” or “I don’t remember San Fran being this warm” and trying to figure out when to eat and drink to try to flip into the time zone as fast as possible. We’ll be just about right by the time we fly back out.
We’ve picked up all the registration stuff, and had a bit of time shopping. Looking at lobsters (fun), checking out the Sony Reader (impressive screen, but unusable device), wondering who, exactly, needed shark cartilage as a dietary supplement (answer: nobody), and being overly happy about ordering noodles and being given 42 as our order number.
Last night we went to Cafe Scientifque and heard Bob Nichol talking about cosmology.
It was quite a complex subject to talk about but Bob Nichol was excellent, very engaging, enthusiastic and able to explain things to those of us who haven’t studied science in over 20 years. I’m still too baffled to consider either the supernova that will cause earth to vapourise, or the fact that there might be 11 dimensions. It was also the biggest crowd I’ve seen at a Cafe Sci since it moved to the Branch Tavern from the Terraces.
We popped into Fabrica yesterday to see what was on display at the moment and found Beneath the Stride of Giants by Brian Griffiths. It is a wooden boat, made from other people’s junk.
Fabrica is such a lovely place to stop, it’s always peaceful and cool and its often hard to remember it is in such a busy location.
It may be fake, but this weekend The Guardian printed
an article on global warming (Sat 4 April, p. 26) which I like very much. Of course, liking it doesn’t make it right….
The gist of the article is this: there’s a lot of worry about global warming, and the cause, but “Earth’s resources are finite; the planet is doomed to die […] and the solution is clear: we must seek other planets to colonise. Earth may be good for 10,000 years or so; then it will be time to find a new home, or homes—a literal New World.”
Original? No. I first heard this from the mouth of Bart Simpson: ” Aw, recycling’s useless Lis. Once the Sun burns out, this planet is doomed. You’re just making sure we spend our last days using inferior products.”
Anyway, the thing about new worlds that troubles me is this: pretty much any planet that’s habitable is going to be inhabited, because life’s like that. So any new world we colonize is going to be one of those SF moves here the aliens come to take over the Earth, except, we’re the bad aliens. More funding for terraforming, I say.
I’ve just been catching up on some BNM posts from ages ago and Mat posted a link to a Mac Genius job opportunity in Churchill Square, Brighton
A bit of careful googling finds the following image, taken from the Apple Store (United Kingdom) page
I am going to have to hide Richard’s credit cards!!!
Here’s an example of why I like the writing in 2600 magazine: “We all love 2600 for its highfalutin articles on port knocking, Caller ID spoofing, Walmart self-checkout hacks, etc., but sometimes we lose sight of the obvious stuff. Sooner or later, the North Koreans or Iranians are going to bomb us. When that happens, how are you going to pay for doughnuts and beer from the 7-11?” (from the Winter 2007 issue, which goes on to describe how to hide things inside a cut out book).
Two thumbs up to Robert Harding Computers. My MacBook battery was going all wrong and had started to swell, and I was getting nowhere with AppleCare. Robert Harding gave me the clues and phone numbers which has resulted in a new battery arriving 24 hours later. They’re goooooood.
