Silent Night

silence is golden

the sound of silence

Simon Elvins, a London artist, has produced a fantastic picture, depicting the noise and therefore silence around London.

the Art of Noise

I wish I lived in one of the non-white areas - ah well - I do at least have bacon butties on the door step and proper coffee.

Siesta justification 17

 

The register's note on the natural low point for people was interesting, personally I have know this for ages, or maybe that should be suffered from this "dead zone" for ages. Not sure Tea helps me mid afternoon, fresh air being the best cure I have found for the mid-afternoon yawns - well that and leaving the 6 hours meeting I might have found myself in.

Now how does it change by timezone? Is this a daylight thing?

From The Register...

Brits hit rock bottom at 2.16pm

Low water mark for joie de vivre

The average Brit loses his or her va-va-voom at precisely 2.16pm, a poll sponsored by tea outfit Typhoo has revealed.…

future now...

an interesting challenge, and of course one that if we had the chance would make us all gadzillionaires and multi-nobel prize winners.

Earlier today I was asked for my top-10 list of solutions needed by large companies over the next 6-36months. 6 Months was easy, it is pretty much the same as today, but 3 years! A lot happens in three years.

As a technologist, it is very easy to come up with the big picture - at least the big picture according to me - but that is the problem, would my Mum want seemless communications anywhere in the world with data, video and voice available across a number of devices yet sharing content and billing? Probably not, in fact definitely not :)

Bearing in mind there are more people like my Mum in the world, that would make my prediction and big picture pretty irrelevant. Coupled with this desire to make money, and the fact that the majority of the world's population earn less than 100 dollars a month.

Therefore the question of what do we need to start building today for our future is so very dependant on the customer/market or in fact the customer's customer/market.

That means I need to go back to the drawing board - leave my ideal dream (the big picture future above) on a piece of paper and try to get my head around my customers' customers --- something, as a consumer, I wish more companies tried to do.

Bad day

Well I guess once every ten years isn't bad ...
Just wish it wasn't my SLR every time.

Roll on the red tape and the insurance claim.

Meanwhile from the inside, my front door now has braces of steel.

Gap year

not sure I have any excuses - but I think this was my blog's gap year :)
I'll try to be a little more verbose from now on

so a quick summary of the year from July 2005;

• I made 2 different vintages of wine


• I completed the media centre project, including water cooling the CPU & GPU


• I restarted working on the car - a 10 year project that has a slim chance of being realised this year


• I'll see if I can find some pictures of it


• I was keynote speaker at enterprise architects summit, which was pretty cool


• I went from being "regional" to being "global" but in reality it just meant I had a shed load more work to do, and spent more time in an airport


• and of course, I got older.

We are not afraid

In what is a pretty global response to the bombs in London on 7th July a website demonstrating the effect and impact on everybody has summarised it nicely.

We're not afraid


Some personal favourites include;

Le Mans 2005 

Alfie & Uncle Marc 

How do you publish your digital photos with some control over them?

Picasa image software gives the google touch to managing your digital photos even helping you publish them as part of a blog

http://picasa.google.com/index.html

Security - the good and the bad

I think we all know that having security is a good thing. I am also of the opinion that very few of us do anything about it.
Well I finally looked into securing my gateway - very little personal information is on it, but I'd prefer my information stayed as mine. Unfortunately I used to host my blog there, and of course what happened was posting messages became a royal pain in the backside.

Now, taking advantage of blogspot, I shall start a fresh here :)

Security - glad I have, just wish it was a little more user-friendly.

Woof Woof - Fido bag

fake or not, Gizmodo found this ... unusual case from Samsung. personally I think it is a must for everybody :)


http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/fidobag-024519.php

road trip on speed

I was kind of expecting a very boring clip of clouds from above - this is a road trip on speed; LA->NY in 4 mins

Lacquer

Something for the weekend??

Found via B3ta and well worth the click...
Something Silly

Gravity Lamp

Ooooo you know this is near the top of the Xmas list :)
Shame I'll have to redecorate



Found at http://funfurde.blogspot.com/2004/09/gravity.html, via Engadget

False Domain renewal notice

So 10 days after I renewed BIAS.COM for another 8 years I received a simple (plain) invoice similar to this one from;
Domain Registry Services
Office 6, 154 Church End
Cambridge, CB1 3LD
UK.
0870 950 0369

I found it strange that they didn't accept CC's or direct transfer, relying on just cheques as a form of payment.
Then it dawned on me, Yes, I was a target by this lowlife organisation who try to extort money by getting you to pay renewal fees to them rather than your proper ISP

being slightly more clued up, [a] I checked with whois [b] rang the ISP who holds my domain registration and [c] then looked into ways of signing this organisation up for way too much spam and grief by talking about them here. Believe me when I find it, theirs will be the ONLY real email address on this site and it will occur a lot.



here is what some others talked about;
Domain Registration scam
Who lists some neat suggestions to help;
"Here's what you can do to help shut down these and similar rogue traders:

Forward the original letter to:
Alison Adams
Nominet UK
Sandford Gate
Sandy Lane West
Oxford
OX4 5LB

Included a letter-headed statement containing the following:

1. What you thought the document meant and if you thought it was real
2. If you thought the sender was an official body
3. Whether Nominet can confirm your details to the Trading Standards or the Office of Fair Trading
4. A closing statement — I believe the above statement to be true.

Oh ... and it may be an idea to seal and pop the empty supplied addressed (but not stamped) envelope in the post. Guess who pays ..."

The register also caught up with this "artist"
The Register on Domain Registry Services
Nominet:Nominet UK warns of new Internet invoicing scam

Call for help #2

Following on my request for help re; backups. I am curious if anybody knows how to track configuration files used by each and every application. You can guess why I am asking - I am having to go through remembering passwords, usernames to forums that I know I belong to.

Grrr

Backups... who needs 'em?

It never rains when you take an umbrella. While it might feel like it is true we all know that is a crock. So we all back up the important documents & Pictures don't we? Hard Disks don't fail do they?

Well, I have spent the last 5 days recovering a 160GB disk. I hadn't changed anything, no new components or software. just stopped turning round quietly.

On it, were all my photos (from the wedding you can see I just got back from) most of which was unbacked up. In fact my last backup was July AND it worked! JULY! Wow thats ages ago. Well at least I have a backup!
It is normally something I do quarterly. And right about now I am considering that is wrong.

So I have got most of it back, enough that I could bored O&M with photos of their wedding if I tried. But it doesn't answer the question of HOW DO YOU BACK UP LARGE AMOUNTS of data.
What is more annoying is just after the wedding O and I came up with a plan for backing up data across our machines, taking advantage of the unlimited data of the internet connections we have and just doing disk to disk back ups where the disks were separated by a very large distance. Boy I wish their honeymoon was shorter.

So please do tell me. Please email me any suggestions you have for backing up a large amount of data. (For information sakes, 50Gb most of which doesn't change - excluding applications)

In fact as I put on my raincoat and grab my umbrella before heading out in to the sunny afternoon I really do think I should start a backup before I go

Kill Bill

Vol 1 - ASCII version

Where would we be without people spending all their free time doing some really strange things in the name of ... ummm ... entertainment? nature? free will??

Anyhow ... enjoy the abridged ascii version of Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol 1

A good fit

An advert that if it was any other company would bring tears to the eyes... this did eventually, as I laughed so much!  Does make me worry about the mind of the marketing fraternity.

From Boing Boing
"A good fit BB pal Vann Hall points us to this brilliant KY Jelly advertisement that, unfortunately, is not officially sanctioned by Johnson & Johnson. It should be though! Link (via Adrants) "

 

White Wedding
What a fantastic day - brilliant best man's speech (of course) and even the weather didn't stop everybody having fun. Of course that is probably because the Brits and the Washington locals were all used to the rain.