My good friend William went to Eastern Canada for a few months. He visited Toronto and sent me this postcard:
It’s okay, William. Sooner or later, we all miss the mountains. Melbn, like Toronto, is flat like an out-of-tune singer.
As suggested in The Cheeseblog, I told someone that her camo pants weren’t working because “I can so totally see you.” It brightened my day, let me tell you.
I always like to be on top of the most recent alcohol-related health news. Cancer-prevention, normally the domain of red wine, has been taken over a bit by the beer camp. Apparently, hops contain a completely unpronounceable compound that helps prevent cancer! Combine that with all the iron in Guinness, and it’s looking to be as healthy as a wheat germ smoothie.
“We can’t say that drinking beer will help prevent cancer,” [Fred Stevens, a researcher with OSU’s Linus Pauling Institute and an assistant professor of medicinal chemistry in the College of Pharmacy] said. ”[But] the only way people are getting any of it right now is through beer consumption.”
While you’re reading the source article about the beer thing, be sure to catch the one about the singing mice. I think those researchers have been helping out the beer guys…
Only in Japan.
Thank you, Fujitsu, for taking the blame for a massive cockup. The Tokyo Stock Exchange was down and out for nearly a full day about a month ago, and the problem was traced back to Fujitu’s software. Tsk tsk. At least they reacted well, cutting the President’s salary in half for six months, and further reductions down the line. This isn’t something you’d see in many other cultures.
Hot on the heels of my terabyte announcement, vendors have been feverishly working on products to fill my need for huge amounts of data storage. Advancements in traditional hard drive storage have been slowing down, so InPhase (part of Lucent) and Maxell have been working on holographic storage. When this was announced, most of the world said “yeah right” and went back to buying big hard drives.
Maxell has announced that they’ll be actually shipping this stuff in late 2006! Initial offerings will fit 300gb on a single removable disk, but the technology should be able to achieve 1.6tb. At 20Mb/s, the initial transfer speed isn’t as good as a modern hard drive, but they say it can scale upwards to 120Mb/s. Still, it probably won’t replace hard drive technology, but if it’s cheap enough, the sheer amount of data capacity there will be very appealing for backups.
This Sydney vs Melbn rivalry is getting ridiculous. The back-story is that there were a bunch of arrests last week in co-ordinated raids in both Sydney and Melbn, designed to catch some allegedly home-grown alleged terrorist maybe baddies.
This week, Carl Scully, the NSW Head Of Police And Stuff made a fuss and announced that he’ll be spending $20 million on more police and stuff. Why? Well everyone knows that Sydney is the best city in Australia, and therefore it will be blown up first.
“If you had to name one city in Australia more likely to be subject to a terror threat or actually having a threat carried out, I think it would have to be Sydney,” Mr Scully said.
He went on to say “Neah neeeaaaah neeeaaahhh poo on you, Melbn, you smelly dirty little armpit of a hick town. You’re not worth blowing up! Brisbane? Don’t make me giggle like a little girly. Perth? Where’s that?” No. I’m making that part up.
The other side of the story happened right after the arrest spree last week. A spokesperson for the Victoria Police And Drug Distribution Commission said something along the lines of “Melbn has to be very careful, our terror cell is better than Sydney’s, and with the Commonwealth Games coming up, we’ll be blown up first for sure. Take that, Sydney.” So the gauntlet had been thrown.
Isn’t it a bit twisted that the traditional Melbn vs Sydney rivalry extends into this “we’ll be blown up first” thing? And why are they wasting their time with Australia anyway?
I like to think that Apple is quietly working on a phone of their own, using Motorola’s experiences with the iTunes phone as a kind of testbed. If an Apple mobile is even half as good as anything else that’s out there, they will sell billions of them. I’m sure there’s enough room inside my first-generation iPod to fit the guts of a GSM phone.
There are currently four buttons under the click wheel. What’s stopping Apple from increasing that to the 12 needed on phones? Especially so now that Apple’s designing them in-house. Use OLED display technology (like Sony uses on their cool new MP3 Walkman devices) to change the buttons depending on the function the user is accessing.
[I grabbed this image from The Register ]
I now have an obscene amount of digital storage.
Due to the ever-increasing demands of the jurgen dot ca digital empire, I went out and bought myself another big hard drive. With this purchase, I’m now running Western Digital drives for all my external primary (non-backup) drives. This marks the end of the road for the last of my lousy Maxtor drives. Mark my words: I will never buy another Maxtor again. I’m surprised that the one I’m retiring today has lasted as long as it has. Of my three complete hard drive failures, all three have been Maxtors.
So, I counted my storage, and here’s what happens:
I’ve broken the terabyte barrier.
Once the amount of data on the new 320gb gets too big to be backed up onto a 250gb disk, I’ll get another 320 and make the 250 the Video drive.
All this shovelling around of data and backups in general is made possible by Shirt Pocket Software’s excellent SuperDuper hard drive replication utility. I used to be too lazy to do backups, mostly because they were “too hard”. With SuperDuper, all I have to do is plug in a hard drive and click a button. It’s very very cool. And the best part is that if you’re cloning a startup disk, you can actually start up off it. Very handy if your main hard drive fails. Simply do a swap, and you’re in business right away, from your backup. SuperDuper saved my arse about a year ago, and I’ve been loyal ever since.
Right. So that was really incredibly geeky. Moving on to something more interesting soon. Thanks for the indulgence, gentle reader.
You know, I didn’t think I’d ever type that. So I’m told there’s this big thing in the US now called “Intelligent Design”. Basically it says that the Bible is a scientific document, and should be taught alongside the theory of evolution in schools. The wacky right-wing fundamentalists in the US are behind this one, for sure. Looks like the whole God hates fags thing is getting boring.
Anyway, so the Vatican (the freekin Vatican!) had a press conference the other day, in which they basically said Don’t be silly. The Bible is a religious document (“artefact”, if you will), and not a science textbook.
“The fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim,” he said at a Vatican press conference. He said the real message in Genesis was that “the universe didn’t make itself and had a creator”.
So there. Thpfft. Take your “Intelligent Design” and shove it up your fundamentalist butts. Or is that too gay for you?
The Independent has a well written article about Steve Jobs, everyone’s favourite rock star CEO. It pretty much covers stuff I already knew, but it ends with a great little vignette about buying a bike:
So then finally, what is the last piece of technology that he acquired – not made by Apple – that really delighted him? He pauses for long seconds, looks down, puts his hands on his knees, looks away. “I actually bought a bicycle recently. It’s just … wonderful.”
And that’s it. His private life remains private. But there he is, a billionaire on a bike. I wonder if he bought it at Eben’s Bikes?
