London in the Snow

As much of the world's press has reported - London suffered from a minor dumping of snow this week - admittedly more than I have ever seen in London - and quite obviously more than the infrastructure was ready for ... Quite why the UNDERground was forced off the rails I'll never know.

I did manage to capture a few great sites early the first morning and you can see these over on Picasa or a slightly different set at Flickr

April Fool ...

The BBC has always invested in their April Fool's story - from the spaghetti tree in 1957 ago to this years special


Too Funny

Dark Knight

In keeping with the Lego theme ... I found this great video on Boing Boing


It is particularly well done when you look at the actual trailer http://thedarkknight.warnerbros.com or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkT1wdRePco

Such a shame it will serve as a reminder of Heath Ledger's death - and the loss of a great actor.

Tea and Cake or Death

As an avid fan of Eddie Izzard, I couldn't resist these little Lego versions of some of his sketches on You-Tube
While Darth Vadar in the death star canteen in brilliant, I think tea n cake or death is my favourite

Enjoy - thank you for flying Church of England, Cake or Death

Where's Wally? ^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSanta?

This great story, posted on The First Post, is a must for all you folks with Children.

Geek tracking of Santa with Google Earth


It's free, fun, educational, and can be downloaded from earth.google.com. On Christmas Eve, visit the Norad website at norasanta.org, where you'll be able to download a tiny file to add live Santa-tracking technology to your copy of Google Earth.


Now to see if I can get it projected onto the wall :)

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?storyID=10320

South Africa/Cape Town road trip

I finally got around to posting some of my photos from my trip to Cape Town earlier this year - using Picasa makes it all very easy...

There is absolutely no bubble in technology

I just had to share this brilliantly done video on YouTube.

While I am not an avid YouTube watcher a good friend pointed me to this one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi4fzvQ6I-o

Blog even if you're wrong ---
Won't you blog about this song?

Ouch

I have no idea if this is some piece of magic, but when I went to a Metallica concert recently this woman caught my eye - or rather her back did.

I was fascinated in part because I thought it looked cool, and in part because I thought "hell that must have hurt". Since she was happily putting a sweatshirt on and taking it off as the weather changed seemingly without any worry about the laces getting unstuck (assuming they were glued) I guess that this was either well attached or as real as it looked.

Unfortunately I never managed to catch up to her and her boyfriend to find out more --- I guess I'll have to make it up


The concert Rocked! It was in the new Wembley Stadium here in London. Awesome sound, and a really cool venue. Can't wait for them to come back again.

Mooo or Mooooo

Scone or Scone
Glass or Glass

Regional accents have divided countries for centuries and it seems that it is not just humans.
While I am sure this is just ripe for comedy sketches the idea of a Georgie cow trying to speak to a cow from the deep south is just something that tickles me.

Next we'll find out that they have a different language in each country ... I wonder what "parlez-vous Anglais?" is in Cow?

BBC NEWS | UK | Cows also have regional accents

a reason to go to the gym ... or not

Gym's always have music - sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes catchy in a mad mad mad way.

4 people who are obviously not taking their exercise seriously, in a mad mad mad way

Follow on

YouTube Jon exposes Senator Stevens on neutrality

Worth watching to the end
:)

Scared yet

I realise there has been an awful lot of talk about Net Neutrality lately - driven by a telecommunications bill going through the American Senate at the moment. There is a provision being proposed for Net Neurtrality, that as I understand it, is about inserting some basic net neutrality provisions into the bill. The provisions restrict a provider from handling their content/traffic at a higher priority than similar content/traffic provider by another source. For instance the provisions would not prohibit an ISP from handling VOIP faster than email or FTP traffic, but would have made it illegal for the ISP to handle its own traffic faster than a competitor provider's traffic.

What scares me, is the person who is leading the defence. Senator Ted Stevens (alaska) in a recent speech, demonstrated his knowledge of all things Internet - NOT - in fact it showed to me that he is the front man for the telcos who are concerned about excessive unplanned usage of their cables. Unplanned - because the telcos didn't think anybody would be using more than a telephone over the cables when most of the infrastructure went into the ground - here they are with people demanding 8+Mb/s in both directions... and guess what? The infrastructure is creaking.

At least the net neutrality bill can be proposed again... it is just disappointing that we have moved one step nearer to the silo'd protected world of the revenue-paranoid telcos.



Wired (the 27BStroke6 blog) has a transcript of the speech, but it really is worth listening to.

Thanks to Public Knowledge who have hosted the MP3
As scared as me??? go to www.savetheinternet.com

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