Category: Uncategorized

It’s been one of those bright! gloomy! bright! days. The view from the office window changes everytime you look up.

When WAP fell flat on its face in the UK, the idea of using a mobile phone for email and internet access being more popular than PC internet access seemed absurd. They are over two years ahead in Japan and according to this guardian unlimited article email and internet access via mobile phone is becoming more popular than PC internet. When you look at the price of a wireless equipped PC compared to that of a state of the art 3G phone it suddenly makes sense. Sure many people use PCs for more than email and internet, but if you don’t, why go to the trouble of purchasing and looking after a large power hungry unreliable, noisy PC when you can do it all from a phone?

I suppose many people were disappointed by the WAP experience, because they had already used the internet on a PC and the monotone/slow/unreliable/non-existent alternative was a flop. Even the 3G experience may seem lame to regular PC internet users, but the difference in Japan is that many people have only ever used the mobile phone versions, because they are more affordable and convenient than PC’s.

I’ll always have a PC because I need it to make a living, but it still seems absurd that I have at home a noisy, slow old dinosaur of a PC humming and crunching away in the corner which I only really use to check my email and look at the news headlines while I eat my breakfast.

The “Oldest religious icon in America” is clearly a picture of a cat.

this is another shot that doesn’t look like it could have been taken in my garden in March. It’s grey outside now, but what a weekend.

The car park at work isn’t the best place to eat noodles, but on a day like today it was too much to resist spending a peaceful half hour out there listening to Janice Joplins greatest hits.

I can’t help feeling that maybe there are better uses for several hundred quids worth of digital camera, but I have found it invaluable when doing DIY on the house. I’m good at taking things apart, convinced that I can remember how to reassemble them later. At the weekend I took pictures of all the wiring I was about to undo, feed through holes in the ceiling and put back together and it saved me from hours of my usual problems.

Of course in the old days they used paper and pencil…

I took this on an early morning bike ride from the old railway bridge near the create centre in Bristol.

with a backdrop of blue sky and gorgeous sun. in march. in the uk. incredible.

Excellent – the battery in my laptop is now stone dead and I never got more than an hour per charge out of it at the best of times – a new one would cost me over £100 so i’m not going to bother.

According to this news story Toshiba are working on an alcohol powered battery due for release in 2004. Hopefully I can hang on for one of these!

for those of you who don’t know, amphetadesk is a program which allows you to subscribe to the Rich Site Summary (RSS) “feed” or “channel” of a website (if they have one, which they all should!), like the one on this site. It runs on your local machine as a server, periodically downloads local copies of the feeds you specify and generates an HTML web page for you to view the feed locally, or if it’s running on a network or internet node, remotely.

I noticed that my RSS feed isn’t 100% compatible with amphetadesk (and probably other readers) as my links show up as tags because they are encoded, so apologies to anyone seeing them like this via an RSS reader – I didn’t know until just now!