June 2004 Entries
Double-edged swords from classic obituaries
On Aleister Crowley
Circumstances indicate that the intellectual capabilities of a mate weighed more heavily with most men than they ever did with Crowley, who committed sodomy with a range of partners including a goat and two graduates of Trinity College, Cambridge.
On the third Lord Moynihan
The Third Lord Moynihan, who has died in Manila, aged 55, provided, through his character and career, ample ammuntion for critics of the hereditary principle. His chief occupations were bongo-drummer, confidence trickster, brothel-keeper, drug-smuggler and police informer...
Villagers choose to keep town name. Here
Bruce Lee remixer. Here
The 10 worst album covers of all time. Here
A new radio series of Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy begins in September. Here
Missing the metric system. Here, here and here
Drum machine. Here
It's been a long time coming since the first alphas were released privately back in September last year, but the first public beta of .NET 2.0 is finally upon us. At last we've got a fairly stable build that we can openly talk about with anyone who's got the bandwidth to download it. For me, the best part of this beta 1 release are the Express variations of Visual Studio .NET and SQL Server. There’s also a replacement for betapalce as well in the shape of the MSDN Product Development Center. Sara Williams’ blog has a nice piece on shipping...
As a guitar player for nearly eighteen years now, it's not a surprise that I am quite fond of Joe Satriani and Steve Vai as music makers and guitar players. True virtuosos of their chosen instrument, it’s fascinating to see the difference in the styles of playing and performance such as Joe's regular G3 tours afford. For those of you who haven't heard of G3, Joe invites two other well known guitarists to play sets and then they all jam on a handful of songs together. Last night (June 26) saw Joe, Steve and Robert Fripp - he of King...
A few months ago, I got myself a new PDA\Camera\Phone. It ran Pocket PC 2004 upon which I duly installed the .NET Compact Framework and sure enough, things ran.
ActiveSync was OK even if it wasn't as configurable as I'd like and it was fun to run Digger and Tetris with a stylus. The integrated camera was great - it produced pictures better than my first digital camera and with 128MB available, stored more than the original did. The video camera, MP3 player and audio recorder were great bonuses too. But its primary purpose is a phone and in that respect,...
iTunes launched its UK service today, its release probably pushed forward because Napster stole a march on them not so long ago and OD2 has been doing a nice trade with its music merchandising engine for quite some time now thank you very much. It brought up an interesting conversation on breakfast TV this morning as to whether or not the advent of legal MP3 stores signals the beginning of the death of CDs. Of course it doesn't. It's true that vinyl stores are now few and far between but vinyl is still with us twenty years after the launch...