mind cats
door open.
mind cats.
This was the message in ichat sent to me Saturday night. I know what he meant. Just it took me off someplace else.
I've always thought those cats were up to no good. I mean all that purring.
But actually it was all spent on perfecting telekinesis. This new breed of mind cats can open doors from a distance. I mean is there no end to their powers? I think we should be told.
One Year Later...
Well having had a long hiatus from blogging I thought I'd resurrect this blog.
Originally it was as a kind of diary for keeping track of life but these days not much is happening.
But there are some things I want to talk about such as the state of technology and stuff so maybe this will be the place for that.
Stay Tuned.
Damn! This needed a T-Shirt!
Don't you love it when things go horribly wrong?
Well a Microsoft demo went horribly wrong yesterday.
So I've Cafe Pressed a T-Shirt.
You can get it here:
http://www.cafepress.com/jgpshirts
And Then There Were Three...
Well. That was harsh.
7 AM in the UK or thereabouts my brother, Martin, died. He was 43. He would have been 44 in September. That's probably quite a lot in dog years. But he wasn't a dog he was a person.
Truth is he was never happy and there was certainly a side of him that was self-destructive. He died of liver failure. He had been told not to drink and probably continued to do so right up until it was too late.
I did my main grieving last week when the doctor reported to my sister that he "had days rather than weeks". The situation was also coloured by the fact that last week my father, who has not been well for a while, fell and broke his hip. So a family crisis ensued with my sisters gathering in the town of our birth, Hemel Hempstead, to help as best they could. My parents emigrated to Australia around 18 years ago so dad's drama is being played out in their adopted city of Perth.
I say my sisters gathering but in truth, Kay has lived there for some time and Nicola, who took her family to Scotland, was the only one who actually gathered.
It has been a stressful time for my mother who didn't really handle it well as one could understand. It must be especially difficult to lose a child even if that child is in his forties and has children of his own. But as dad is not well and also in intensive care it must be hard to know which way to turn.
It is going to be hard for his children they are still very young and no one should lose a father at that age.
I have tried to think back to a time where we were friends and we had fun... but I really can't think of any. I do remember him at my youngest sister's wedding where he decided to interject at the reception with some loud and very bitter barbs. I do seem to think that he was very bitter.
In his later years he re-found the religion he was christened to, the catholic faith, and on Friday, I believe, he was given the last rites. So hopefully he sees the situation as the start of the next great journey and not the end of everything.
My sisters have asked me to track some stuff down for the funeral. One of which is this poem by Christina Rosetti:
Remember Me
Remember Me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thought that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
Christina Rosetti 1830-1894
Martin Noel James Molloy 1962-2006
Enderle at it again...
Oh dear! Rob Enderle is at it again. Mac baiting.
I won't favour him here with a link to the article but you can find it over at TechNewsWorld. This weeks nonsense includes this little gem:
"There was little mention of the Mac OS at the conference, yet, given the success of Linux against Unix (the Mac OS has Unix at its core) you would think that platform might make a better first target for Linux than Windows would."
Like Mac Users would go Linux? Get a Clue Mr E. Why would we give up our Macintosh goodness for Linux?
Don't get me wrong - in the dying days of OS9 I rescued an old Mac (from the dark days of when all the machines had different names but were basically the same - Performa 6300 - I think) and shoved Yellow Dog linux on it and it worked wonderfully well as a web development server. But in these heady days of OSX Tiger my localhost does everything I need to test for my hosting company.
"No one seems to talk much about Apple Leopard, the next version of the Mac OS."
He does go on to say that this is because Apple is keeping tight-lipped about it itself. But this is actually because Apple doesn't actually start hyping things until they are ready to sell. Unlike the bizarre wish list that is Vista... Microsoft offering the OS of your dreams and then pulling features out of it until it actually is appearing to be Windows XP service pack 3... with what even
Paul Thorrot is now complaining is a broken interface - check out the "Glass Windows" section which may mean those who rip off a copy of XP3 will actually have a BETTER system than those authorised users with AERO enabled will have!
I despair at the following:
"This OS [leopard] was largely modeled after what Vista was going to be."
I think you may find that VISTA is doing the actual following TBH.
"Based on comments by Apple chief Steve Jobs it was slated to roll out about the same time as Vista originally was, but if what I'm reading is right, it too has run into problems and won't show up until late 2007."
OK so Mr Enderle I'm counting. If Leopard doesn't ship January 2007 (which is HARDLY
late 2007) then I will be very surprised.
One last comment. If you are going to talk bollocks try and use a less trite sentence than:
"There is potential for 2008 to be a year of change, both positive and negative, for Microsoft, Apple and Linux. This is history in the making for all three entities and we are getting a chance to witness it."
I think the war will be fought in 2007. Gentlemen start your engines.
Sunday Mornin' 8:52
Slept badly.
There is too much going on.
Hey it's Easter! Kettle is on. Coffee on it's way.
Well partly I blame Apple. For my tiredness I mean.
I got a new new machine week before last. My new machine was an iMac G5. My new new machine was what is now called an iMac which is Apple's branding solution for the core duo machines.
NOW is anyone of the same opinion as me? All the early Peter Gabriel albums were eclectic, interesting and thoroughly enjoyable. AND the all had the same name. Then when he started giving the albums titles they all sounded the same. I think generally I will stick with the former.
So perhaps Apple are working on the same principle... Actually after the mess they got into in the middle of the 80's when they had so many different models with little or no differentiation and complete confusion - including amongst themselves - they did have a set of machines that had the CX and CI nomenclature which generally described the higher and lower spec - but at the height of this madness they actually released a machine where these badges were reversed thereby leaving Mac users unable to deduce what was actually going on.
I can foresee actually that Apple may actually stumble into a similar trap - the differentiation issue - even with his Steveness in charge. I can't as yet see what is going to differentiate MacBooks from MacBookPro machines for example. Mind you having had to purchase some products from Dell recently they obviously suffer from the same feature creep differentiation issues Apple had in the 80's. Quite why anyone would buy from them without their credit facilities I would have no idea.
Anyroad, Apple released BootCamp and so we hurtled up to COMPUSA and bought the iMac - two reasons -
One is that the software I am working with is only useable on a PC - this despite the specific promise from a large photocopying company that it would work cross platform - it is a web-based ordering system and it is so tied into IE that it is unreal. Well MS have since pulled the plug on that program on the Mac - their argument was that Apple had released Safari and therefore they would take their ball away - actually I think that there is more going on.
Having just read Revolution in the Valley by Andy Hertzfeld and the fantastic tales of duplicity MS have pulled on Apple over the years - I would suggest there was more to this - perhaps MS trying to wrestle back the Internet from all those open source people. This software is a fine example of this trend. My favourite story - well most frustrating really coz I saw this from the other side - had to do with Basic programming on the Mac. When the Mac was released I was kind of interested in programming it - but couldn't get all the dev tools and wanted to just try stuff so a Mac Basic would have been really cool - Apple were working on it but never heard anything about it - then MS released a pile of crap programming language for the Mac - what was all THAT about? ... Well it turns out that Donn Denman put considerable effort along with Randy Wiggington on getting BASIC working on the Mac BUT the license for Applesoft Basic which MS supplied for the Apple II machines was due to expire in September 1985. So as a condition of the renewal of the licence is that Apple sold their BASIC to Microsoft for one dollar which they then buried. oh and to add insult to injury this was also the fantastic John Sculley deal that effectively gave MS perpetual use of the Macintosh User Interface. Go figure.
The second reason is that I wanted to play games. For a start I could finally do an A B comparison of WOW on a PC and a Mac and see which was best. But I could also get a couple of the games people were raving about currently and see what all the fuss was about.
So I purchased Oblivion which Ratty was playing on his 360 just before I left the UK and 1/2 Life 2 - because the "the graphics were amazing"
Oblivion is very good and plays well. Plot line is intricate and involved and I still don't know what is happening. Just starting the Vampire quests... should be interesting.
1/2 life 2 is pretty good - atmospherically very dark and quite paranoid inducing. But graphics were OK - this is not an issue with the Mac - just perhaps I hadn't realised what State of the Art meant. OK Outside areas are very nice and the close up faces are also very nice - but the details on the rubbish floating about in the game I feel are a bit cartoonish. Also doing head shots on the attacking troupers seems a little harsh - can't we all just be friends?
Actually with all these games I play them as tourists - I am very interested in the following things:
How these artificial landscapes are evolving and how people are perceiving them.
How does an experience in a game world differ from an experience in the real world and in terms of memory how the brain sorts the information.
Talking of which... I've been having strange dreams again.
Things to do in England...
Hey the sun is shining!
First sun I've seen since leaving Orlando like last Thursday. Am stuck on a PC in a cold bedroom in darkest Staffordshire trying to keep this blog thing up to date.
So, you may ask, what have I been up to?
Well seeing a lot of the kids which is very nice - I think Art has missed me on my transatlantic jaunt and so I am doing my best to try and keep him entertained - John however - while he probably has missed me is in that Im 18 and up to my neck in exams and am too tired to do anything but sleep phase of his life. However we have had some fun moments.
John bought some movies that we have sat and watched. Monday night we watched Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang which was rated 15. Now this movie has caught my attention. It opened in the UK about 5-6 months ago to rave reviews in all the press and then actually made it into likee 4 cinemas. Certainly nothing within driving distance of the-house-where-we-lived. It was written and direted by Shane Black a Holiwood hot-shot responsible for some fantastic scripts. The original Lethal Weapon movie and another great but underated movie The Long Kiss Goodnight - actually checking IMDB he appears to have credits for all the Lethal Weapon movies and The Last Boy Scout.
But I digress. It also had the slight hurdle of have not only Robert Downey Jr but also Val Kilmer - who haven't exactly shone in movies recently - but they were fantastic. The script is great and the plot twists and turns like a twisty turny thing. I won't say anything else as I don't want to spoil it for anyone but it is a GREAT movie.
I have things to do - book flights back to the US - is one. But I also have to liase with the crew over at the Sondheim Society as I have voluntered to set the magazine for them. This I am doing and then sending over the finished PDF or putting it up on our server for them to download. I think this is what the meeting is about - to decide how we accomplish this.
I also have to see my accountant. Sign things and things. So that's on the list.
Want to go visit my sister and go see Rog and Caroline. And have to arrange a visit with David Morley to give him some of his stuff I have been keeping for him and there are a pile of 8 inch disks for his Fairlight that he needs to gather up at some point too.
OK gonna go rock...
