October 2004 Blog Posts
The broadcaster, John Peel, was the champion of British rock music. For nearly 40 years, his late-night Radio 1 programme led the way in promoting new acts, from David Bowie, through Joy Division to Lamacq. He died this morning of a heart attack.
One of my earliest memories is listening to Peel playing the three Deaths on his show - Death, Napalm Death and Lawnmower Deth - and later and more memorably probably the worst single ever recorded - Boing by the Rotterdam Termination Squad - to win a bet from one of his listeners. Like the great hollywood artists, he...
The Windows IT Magazine website now have Chapter 6 of Beginning ASP.NET 1.1 Databases: From Novice to Professional online at http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Content/1205/06/toc.html
SP2 is big. We all know this. But is it cumbersome. According to this benchmark comparison test, not especially no, but nor is it any faster. If you're finding it too slow for you meanwhile, Black Viper is rewriting his Services guide for SP2 so you can switch off the ones you don't use.
Bit late, but there you are
Honeydew is top boffin : here
Olympic pigeon found in Romania : here
Novel 9/11 tribute : here
Sharron's tits up : here
Is this your snowmobile sir? : here
Overzealous Romanian Priest : here
...
Three new editions for you to watch out. The collected Sandman Library paperbacks are now available in shiny new covers as are the first six discworld novels by Terry Pratchett to celebrate the 21st anniversary of The Color of Magic. Oh yes, and then there's the VB .NET edition of Beginning C# Databases that I'm working on at the moment. Expect it in January. Maybe February depending on how the holiday season affects printing. No, Peter Wright isn't writing it regardless of what the Apress site says
Spent most of last week working as a grip on location for a short film called Warped, which is part of Screen West Midland's Digital Shorts programme. It was your typical story: hitman kills priest, hitman gets caught in time warp, hitman kills himself. How many times have we seen that story before, eh? Lots of nice stories from the set - a simply stunning church and old manor house out in the countryside where it stayed fine while we shot exteriors and then pissed down once the camera went indoors. Everyone got a stinking cold but we did all stay...
Britain's longest serving and most charismatic weatherman Michael Fish retired yesterday. His last forecast was just after the ten o'clock news. I'll remember him for saying there would be no hurricane back in October 1987 and then listening to the roof tiles get blown off my house and the trees fall on the neighbour's car the following night. Even though he was only a weatherman he was definitely part of popular culture as this Rowan Atkinson routine demonstrates. Another hero rides off into the sunset. Alas alack.
Saturday
Actually Day 6 as was, but one of the cast members had a family emergency so it was cancelled. Today is the first weekend we're working Saturday and Sunday and thus the first day in front of the cameras for our male lead David who plays a Seth-like (no explanations given) character called Jimmy. David is based in London so he's only around during our 'double-headers'. Like everyone else on Day 1, he gets lost finding the location. We're due a spout of gales and rain this weekend so there's a wet schedule and a dry schedule. A short shower...
Interesting post by Charlie Kindel on the fallacies of using an external HD for anything other than non-critical data back-up. Having almost all the bits and pieces for my Whidbey 64bit comp in place now, I had thought of using a firewire HD to hold my music collection, VPC images and installer files for easy access. Everything else is on a RAID1 HD. So my idea seems to coincide with his, but there's one thing. I can back up my really critical data onto a handful of DVDs (and will), but its a hell of an arse to re-burn every...
Jeff Prosise ably demonstrates why books are written to pre-empt the questions.
When I proposed to Jane back in February, I was living fifty miles from her and neither of us had an idea where we would be living at the time of our wedding next April. It seemed logical then to set the location at some place constant, so we chose our parents in Kent on the south coast. Now we're settled in Birmingham, the 200 mile journey to Kent isn't a problem, nor are the majority of the arrangements - the phone and the internet are wonderful things - with the exception of the legal paperwork. From both a legal...
Nokia's new phone, the 7610, comes with new software called Lifeblog. From its homepage, "Nokia Lifeblog is a personal diary of all your mobile data that's simple to search and fun to share -whether it's the pictures and videos you've taken, the notes you've written, or those great MMS's your friends have sent you. And Nokia Lifeblog's horizontal-scroll navigation is highly intuitive to use." If I recall, the last horizontal based interface I came across that wasn't one of my web site designs was MS Offiec Journal app and I make doubly certain I switch that off as soon as...