| Thursday, December 24th, 2009 |
marypcb
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2:09p |
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marypcb
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8:59p |
Festive lurgy
After a day of last minute shopping in Jersey I started sneezing and sniffling and now have a full-on head cold :( So id's a veddy mebby Chribsmass and a happy due yeurgh to you all. Must find whiskey for a hot toddy... |
sbisson
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6:55a |
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| Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 |
sbisson
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6:55a |
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| Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 |
marypcb
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7:54p |
Fly Be and Gatwick - just say urrrgghhh
The roads are full, the car park has black ice, the gate gets announced as closing when it's not even open and they charge for water on the plane. Thank heavens I checked that priority pass covers the lounge right by security where the chilean merlot is - unlike the rest of the Gatwick experience - better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. |
sbisson
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3:29p |
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marypcb
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5:22a |
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sbisson
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12:00p |
Still (amidst the movement)
Walking through New York the week before last, with the cold wind whipping through the street canyons, we came across a bustling winter market in Bryant Park. In the middle of the market was an ice rink, and I spent some time taking long exposures of people swirling around the white. One came out a little differently, a picture with a skating guard in the middle of the frame, standing still while all the rest was motion. It's not a brilliant picture, as when you blow up to full resolution there's plenty of shake, but I do think it captures something...  New York, New York December 2009 Current Mood:  busy |
sbisson
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6:55a |
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| Monday, December 21st, 2009 |
sbisson
|
9:35p |
Worst security breach ever?
We'd heard a few rumours from sources in the security community that something "really bad" was going down, but it seems that the news is out at last.Someone has leaked Santa's Naughty List to the Internet at large. Arweena, a spokes-elf for Santa Claus, admitted a few hours ago that the database posted at WikiLeaks yesterday is indeed the comprehensive 2009 list of which kids have been naughty, and which were nice. The source of the leak is unclear. It may have come from a renegade reindeer, or it could be the work of a clever programmer in the Ukraine. Either way, it's a terrible black eye for Santa. Arweena promised that in the future, access to this database would be restricted on a “need to know” basis. And you know who that means! So, are you on The List? Current Mood:  amused |
sbisson
|
8:10p |
Quick Burn Notice thought...
If Michael Westin lived on a boat in Fort Lauderdale rather than in a loft in Miami South Beach, and if he drove Rolls Royce pickup rather than a Dodge Charger, and if Sam was called Myers, and was an economist rather than an ex-spy, wouldn't we be watching a Travis McGee series? So close. So close. |
sbisson
|
7:59p |
Crystal Towers
You can't take it with you. Take only photographs, leave as few footprints as possible. That's the message of the National Park Service, especially with regards to the crystal trees of the Petrified Forest. Like the lava of Kilauea, there's a purported curse, and you see letters on the walls of the visitor centre detailing the bad luck that's befallen those who've walked off with pieces of the brightly coloured rocks. Someone still wanted to make their mark on the park, and on the edge of the self-guided hike near the visitor centre we spotted this little cairn.  Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona November 2009 Current Mood: busy |
marypcb
|
12:37p |
Happy birthday Simon
I know the birthday meme has moved across to Facebook but I'm old-fashioned ;-) I'm going to say happy birthday to my sweetie, writing partner and general factotum Simon right here ;-) Watch out for the mini hippos who recently left! |
marypcb
|
12:33p |
Busineses always get a better tax deal than people
The UK is Google's second-biggest search market. But Google doesn't pay any tax here: it's all taxed in Dublin where the tax rate is far lower. There are plenty of complaints floating around saying Google's bending its 'don't be evil' principle by this, but it's common practice in business to place things in countries that give you tax advantages for your business. Google is also incorporated in business-friendly Delaware, where there's a whole separate court track for business. What it says is that Google is a business, not a public service or a warm fuzzy free information provider and we'd do well to remember that when evaluating it... |
| Saturday, December 19th, 2009 |
sbisson
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6:55a |
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| Friday, December 18th, 2009 |
sbisson
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1:27p |
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marypcb
|
12:12p |
Everyone's going motion interactive
First the Eye Toy, then the Wii; eventually Natal and one day - the Magic Wand. Er. Are Sony really calling it the Magic Wand? Really? When Hitachi has a long-established personal massager by the same name? That has the potential to raise a few sniggers... especially if it won't jsut be 'family games'... |
sbisson
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7:07a |
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marypcb
|
1:11a |
Joo Joo booboo?
So I'm confused. Fusion Garage has responded to Crunchpad's toys out of the pram lawsuit with a press release, debating some of the points in the lawsuit. It has a little more detail about their defence than typically goes out before the actual court date, but hey, this one will get tried in the court of public opinion long before anything legal happens, so that's not what's puzzling me. It's this section.
Another example of Fusion Garage “doer status” in bringing the joojoo to market is the Company’s now defunct relationship with ODM Pegatron. Fusion Garage established this relationship after Arrington’s promises of hardware development support proved to be hollow. Fusion Garage is now working with another top tier ODM to develop a completely new board and mechanical layout that is the basis for the joojoo. To state, as the lawsuit and accompanying blog post do, that Fusion Garage’s joojoo is based on any Pegatron IP is false.
So. Arrington said he'd find the hardware guys, but FG found their own hardware guys: points to FG. But then they're not using those hardware guys: does that mean FG didn't find good hardware guys? No points to FG. FG is sending out samples and making pre-sales: points to FG. But the new hardware guys are developing a completely new board and chassis. Either the old board and chassis weren't so hot (I saw Arrington say the Crunchpad could run for 'hours at a time' before crashing; um, that's not good, guys): no points to FG. Or they were good but for some reason FG aren't using them: again, no points to FG. And they're making pre-sales and sending out review units without having the actual product they're going to sell even designed yet? minus several million points to FG for vaporware at this point.
And am I the only person who remembers the Webpad debacle? sheesh...
|
| Thursday, December 17th, 2009 |
sbisson
|
2:18p |
High Desert (with Power Station)
The high desert is a beautiful, empty space. From Flagstaff to Gallup you follow the railway line, from small town to small town, from trading post to trading post (and yes, they still trade there the way they have done for more than a century). As you roll across the plains there's a column of white in the sky, leading you, the modern Moses, across the desert to the promised land. But it's not the hand of God. Not this time. It's Man that's leading you on, with a trail of carbon in the sky. It's a power station. Out there, in the middle of nowhere. Miles past, in the middle of the Petrified Forest National Park, you can still see it, two huge concrete stacks drawing a line on the sunset horizon.  Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona November 2009 Current Mood: busyCurrent Music: The Duckworth Lewis Method - The Duckworth Lewis Method - Jiggery Pokery |
sbisson
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6:55a |
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| Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 |
sbisson
|
6:55a |
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marypcb
|
1:18a |
Google, privacy and Eric Schmidt
I know this has already been done to death but I didn't have time to dig up a link while we were in New York. When Eric Schmidt said the other day that "if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" I thought back to 2005, when CNet used Google to look up Eric Schmidt and (in a companion piece) Live Search to look up Ballmer and Gates and (in CNet's words) "Google representatives instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story". (CNet seems not to have written up the story themselves, but CNN Money had more details). Google's view is presumably that if you publish information on a site or by running a search, it's fair game legally and morally - unless it's about Schmidt? Amused by the fervour of the discussions on a personal Mozilla blog that suggested the Bing privacy policy was better because Microsoft doesn't aggregate information from your Hotmail to your search results a la Google and Gmail; after discussing my personal discomfort over the Gears/HTML 5 team at Google showing a very cavalier attitude to privacy around location at the first Google IO ('we don't want a big dialog box for users to tick - we want [privacy decisions] to just kind of bubble up from user behaviour' was my favourite line, along with 'everything in the browser is inherently safe') with folk from Mozilla, I noticed how the Mozilla location demo at Google IO this year *started* with the privacy settings. I could quote Larry Ellison too. But paraphrasing is quicker. 'You have no privacy' get over it'. Or I could link to the Onion Google Village video... |
| Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 |
marypcb
|
1:33p |
Thoroughly touristy
We went to Rockerfeller Center and saw the lights at Saks 5th Avenue and went to the Cirque du Soleil Wintuk show at Madison Square Gardens and shopped at Bloomingdales and in Little Italy. Balanced by a nice afternoon pottering about with Mr Pride and our work meetings, so we didn't feel too touristy. One of the bumpiest flights home we've had in a long while. |
sbisson
|
6:55a |
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