I was thinking today about my favourite anecdote about my Dad, who is very much alive. My Dad, who is now in his seventies, is very into the outdoor life, exercise and generally being healthy. I think that this has something to do with his early career in the Army.
My Dad lives in Ontario, Canada, and is retired. He has always enjoyed anything to do with water having been a keen sailor in the past, and has two windsurfers which he uses on Lake Ontario during the summer. During the winter he tends to X-country ski, snow-shoe and generally keep very active.
About two years ago I got an email out of the blue which said that he was thinking of buying a canoe and described the ‘Indian’ style canoe that he was thinking of getting. I thought, ‘oh, the windsurfing must be getting a bit much’ and emailed back a gentle question to that effect. I got the following reply:
“No, on some days it isn’t windy.”
The Thinking Digital Conference kicked off to a great start on it’s second (and last) day. The comedy of Tom Scott was a fabulous tonic to the rest of the first session which kicked off with an exploration od “Digital Darwin”, climbed considerable heights with data visualisation through an Internet connected presentation by Professor Hans Rosling, had a little dip with a spotlight on segmenting the US population for the recent Presidential elections, and finished with the Tom. Oh, and I almost forgot that there was a great digital piano solo that started the session by Rob Colling.
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Posted in IT, Life
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Tagged linkedin, TDC
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The picture says it all. (Had a twitter failure, this was supposed to be a twitpic …)
making cleaning windows interesting?
Interesting post by Rob Wier about year and date problems in Excel. I’m using OpenOffice instead. They’ve hopefully fixed the problem in Excel by now though?
… has probably been the best thing that has happened to me on my desktop. It started after an update on Intrepid 8.20 which broke Liferea and stopped it from running. The effect has been to stop me reading endless amounts of crap and (along with my new Tracks interest) is helping me to focus on doing things that are important! Expect to see a slightly higher output of blog posts amongst other things!
A, sadly, unsurprising interview that I read at derStandard.at, but alerted from the Boycott Novell blog. de Icaza has been lampooned in the past for his unpopular views on Microsoft, .net, and C#, but this interview really takes the biscuit. The guy comes across as extremely naive, foolish, and also, because of his position, frankly quite dangerous for Free Software.
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This blog post is one of the best reasons why my data isn’t in the cloud:
Suddenly, Nick can’t access his Gmail account, can’t open Google Talk (our office IM app), can’t open Picasa where his family pictures are, can’t use his Google Docs, and oh by the way, he paid for additional storage. So, this is a paying customer with no access to the Google empire.
Nope, my data is safely locked up in my own mail server, my own web-server, my own backups, etc. I’ve always felt slightly uneasy about using Gmail for all my mail. Now I know why.
Posted in IT
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Tagged Cloud
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A couple of weeks ago my wife, Helen, had a business trip to Bristol. So, rather than driving or taking the train, the quickest option was to travel by EasyJet from Newcastle to Bristol. She had to take her passport to be able to get on the plane. It set me thinking; why did she need a passport to travel inside the UK?
After all, you don’t need a passport to take the train to Bristol. Or a coach, for that matter. And I’ve never needed a passport to drive my car to Bristol. This is inside this country. These are internal flights. Next time you travel inside the country and have to show your passport, ask yourself why?
PS I know people are going to say “Because they mix International and Internal passengers.” I don’t care about that; they also check your boarding card and passport at the gate before you get on the plane.
Posted in Life
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Tagged Liberty, Life
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Let’s be clear: this is not a phone (yet) for the masses, but I think it is definitely heading in that direction. It has GPS, accelerometers, GPRS, Bluetooth, WiFi and an open software stack on which practically anything could be developed. I love this phone for what it will be able to do – but it’s not there yet.
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Posted in IT
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Tagged FreeRunner, OpenMoko
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My OpenMoko arrived a few days ago, and comes with the stock OM2007.2 software. I upgraded it with the opkg update command and then tried to use it for a few days at the LUGRADIO Live 2008 event. It didn’t go that well, so I started hunting around to look at the other software stacks. There are three different software stacks for the phone. This is described in some detail here.
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Posted in IT
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Tagged FreeRunner, OpenMoko
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