Blogging at Breakfast Sunday morning.

Blogging at Breakfast

Sunday morning. Papers haven't come and no rush and everybody else out (just) so a good excuse to wi-fi from the kitchen and read the BBC news. Finally finished Dead Air by Ian Banks last night. Probably the worst Ian Banks novel so far, nowhere near as good as the early stuff, or even the later things like The Business and Complicity. Not the worst Iain Banks though.

Up side is I can finally start reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Like Banks I've read everythings he's ever done, as he's done it, having picked up on Neuromancer soon after it came out. PR looks really good but I'm only 30 pages in. Will certainly force me to get around to reading No Logo. Gibson's blog is a great companion to the reading, as is the discussion board - which almost out fetish's fetish:footage:forum in what it reads into his work.

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The Battle of the Blogs

The Battle of the Blogs

For some reason this week has all be about blogs. Started using Blogger for this and the Headcrash blog. At week spent a lot of time playing with Geeklog. Geeklog is an open source blogger/portal builder. Very powerful but appallingly documented - have to hunt all over the Geeklog site and other places and still can't find the info! Then started looking at Movable Type. More corporate than Geeklog, just got a VC funding round and has a paid licence for corporate use. On the plus side the documentation is all there, the site is nice and clean and its written in Perl, which is my language of choice ( getting Java development/hosting space is just too complex. Will look at setting Movable Type up if I can get the MySQL database sorted out, and then use that for a project and decide which of the three ways to go for my own stuff. All three have major new versions about to be released so too early for a decision anyway.

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Web Pads

Web Pads

A running theme of this blog (for the next few years at least) is likely to be the search for the perfect domestic wireless web device. I'm currently writiing this sat in the garden on a very hot day using my IBM Thinkpad laptop over a Wi-Fi link to our broadband connection. But the laptop is a very intrusive form factor. What I really want is an A4 "slate", just a display, a stylus and the w-fi card (oh and the ability to handle streaming media and plug-ins, but no other local storage. At the moment these devices are £1000 plus, and too heavy and too short on battery life (in fact I've just had to retreat in doors to a power point to finish this post. We'll see how I get on.

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Current Anime and Manga Currently

Current Anime and Manga

Currently trying to get hold of the episodes of Serial Experiments: Lain, an excellent contemporary cyber adventure anime. No giant robots or anything like that, just a school girl searching for a dead friend who appears to have ended up in the net.

Also reading the Manga version of Masamune Shirow's Ghost in the Shell. Not as good as the movie, and the style is very cartoony in places.

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Headcrash Started I've started building

Headcrash Started

I've started building a blog for Headcrash, probably the best radio play that the BBC ever did - possibly including The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (and as someone who herad HHGTTG the vey first time it was broadcast I ought to know :-)) Since that's a very structured blog I thought I'd set this up for a more random collection of observations - a true blog..

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Mulanje Massif

Deb and I had a wonderful time hiking on the Mulanje Massif in Malawi and climbing Sapitaw, the just short of 10,000 ft peak at its centre. The Massif was also the setting for Laurens Van Der Posts' Venture into the Interior. He lost a man descending the same trail we did - but he had storms, we didn't. A lovely place richly scented with Mulanje Cedar and hardly another living person.

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Hyatt - San Francisco

The Hyatt Regency and Embarcadero Centre in San Franscisco from GoogleEarth.

I fell in love with the Hyatt when I first went to San Francisco when I was back-packing around the US in 1981. The huge pyramidal atrium lobby, the revolving restaurant with canyon like views down (Market?) street. Wonderful.

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