Bill Gates at Shoe Circus

You can say what you like about Microsoft, but I don't think you would find many other people at the level of Bill Gates doing things like this. And I find it genuinely funny.

Zune Power

I've been playing with XNA on Zune, porting a little sprite toolikt from StarLight onto it. For those of you who haven't played with the Zune, it is basically an ipod that you can run XNA on. I managed to get 400 sprites with transparency bouncing around quite happily. I'll post the code on VerySillyGames when I've finished, but this means that you can get quite complex displays on the tiny platform with no problems at all.

So Much for the Weather

Today was the day of number one daughter's abseil for money. She was doing the jump for Marie Curie Cancer Care (you can still sponsor her here). The venue was Guy's Hospital at London Bridge in, er, London.

We turned up nice and early, daughter went off in the lift to practice on the top of the building and we waited with the other anxious observers.

The building is very tall. You can just see one of the earlier arrivals making their way down the building in the middle of the picture.

The folks next to us had real style, cheering as their friends came down and even uncorking champagne.  We just waited. And waited. Then the jumps were put on hold for while, then further weather checks were made. Then daughter re-appeared at the bottom, still in her harness and wearing a safety hat with the word Cheese on it (something which was never satisfactorily explained).  Then the wind and rain got worse and they were forced to abandon abseiling for the day.

I was kind of relieved, but very sorry for daughter, who had got all the way to the top, done the training, been pretty much the next person to go and then been told "Not today". It is just one of those things, it is nice to know that they take safety very, very seriously, and they will be rescheduling for later this month.

But we did have a great trip to London, and I got some nice photographs.

HMS Belfast, and Tower Bridge

"The Gherkin", and friends

Clever Cameras

I've been taking pictures of business cards and sending them to Evernote. This works really well because the system does optical character recognition on the text on the cards, and makes it searchable. Very impressive, all the more so because it actually works.

For the best results I used a setting on the camera which is specially for taking pictures of text. Out of interest I pointed the camera at myself and took a picture. I got an image with the word "Rob" on it.

E Reader from Sony

Bought yet another gadget today. It is the new Sony e-reader. Sony have actually got around to launching the device in the UK, in conjunction with Waterstones bookstore. What made it particularly attractive to me was the way that it ships with 100 classic books on CD-ROM. I actually got the device for number one wife, who really likes the idea of having every book by Jane Austen with her at all times.

It is really nice, very shiny and the screen is lovely to read. It is based on an ink based technology which requires no power at all to retain the display. This means that battery consumption can be measured in page turns, rather than hours. The book says it is good for over 6000, which equates to quite a lot of reading.

Number one wife (and I) really like the device. I've loaded it up with pretty much everything that came with it (You can get around 120 books into the 120M ram of the device and you can also add an SD card if you want to carry a really  huge number of volumes)

The only annoyance is that the Waterstones ebook site, where you can buy DRM versions of new books, has a rather limited range of content at the moment. Also the prices are just stupid. I would expect an ebook, which has no resale value once you have bought it and costs nearly nothing to produce and distribute, to be quite a bit cheaper than the paper version. Savings of 3 quid on a sixteen pound book just don't cut it for me, particularly as these are against the advertised full price of the publication, which nobody pays anyway.  If they don't get their act together on these issues then I can see them killing off the new device before it even gets started.

Some reviews have been very sniffy, saying things like "It will never take the place of a real book.". These people are missing the point. It is not a replacement for a physical tome. I expect our shelves at home to be groaning under the weight of volumes for some time to come. What it does do though is make it much easier to have a big chunk of your library with you at all times, which is really useful. And for trips away it would be terribly good. And if they get their pricing sorted out it would be a great way to buy and read all those books that you don't really want to have in physical form. 

The device will also show monochrome pictures that actually look quite cute. And it can play audio as well, which is nice.

So nice that I got one for me as well, but you had already guessed that.