Who’s Captain Kirk?

For Father’s Day I received a box set of the original Star Trek season one. It looks fantastic because even though it was filmed years ago they used proper 35MM film. I started watching the first ever broadcast episode (The “Man Trap”) last night. When I saw this the first time it gave me nightmares for ages. It is not quite as scary now, but still darned good fun.

If you’ve not seen it before (although I find this hard to believe) you are in for a treat. If you have, it is still worth a look because of the way that they have redone the shots of the Enterprise. It now looks really good.

My New Book is in the shops

A man from UPS dropped of a big box today. In it were 10 copies of my latest book. One of the many nice things about writing for Microsoft Press is that they give you 10 free ones.

I’ve been through the text and not found any mistakes so far, which is rather nice.

Oh, and for the student who won the Super Geek Word search at the Summer Bash, your prize has now arrived……

Paul Moves On

Paul Chapman left us today. He did is degree at Hull a while back, went off and did a lot of Seabed Visualisation (that is what is PhD is about), came back to Hull, taught a bunch of courses, did a lot of work on the Venus project and even found time to play some music. And jump out of planes. And build the world’s first paragliding simulator. And then buy his own motorised paraglider and fly it over the university taking pictures.

Paul is taking up a position at Glasgow. They are very lucky to have him, and we are very sorry to lose him.

Neil Young

I’ve not been to a rock concert for ages. I’ve never been to one where the headline act is 64 years old. But today I found myself in Nottingham Arena, surrounded by lots of people of a certain age, waiting for Neil Young to come and play his guitar at us.

By gum he was good though. I’ve not been a huge fan of his in the past, but I can see I’ve been missing out.  I knew quite a few of the songs because they are standards, and they were all delivered with a gusto and energy that belied both the age of the performer and the fact that he must have played them many times before. It must be particularly strange for him to sing songs he wrote ages ago about being 24, but he did it all very well.

I took a camera and was a bit worried about taking pictures, but I knew I was OK when the security folk started ducking so that they would not be in my line of sight.

The support act were very good too. I’m afraid I didn’t catch their name though.

Great night out. I enjoyed it so much I even bought a T shirt…

Windows 7 is a Dog

I mean this as a compliment. I’m finding that I can treat it like a dog and it remains utterly faithful. By this I mean I can close and open my laptop lid, plug and unplug monitors and devices and generally use the machine exactly how I want and it just comes back for more. It has not failed me once.

I’m pretty sure that most of this behaviour is down to the fact that the hardware driver writers have got their collective acts together and Microsoft is being more mean to them to make things work. At least, I hope so. I had some horrid times with Vista at the hands of certain hardware vendors whose idea of making a machine “Vista Capable” was to slap a sticker on the box. But those days seem to be long gone.

I’m also rather liking the way that I can find things more quickly, and that switching between windows, and moving them around on the screen is easier. I’ve not really explored many of the proper new features of the platform, but every now and then I’ll stumble across something that is now suddenly easier, like connecting a monitor for a presentation or opening a document from the program menu.

Roll on the full release I say.