Thursday, December 20, 2007 at 11:14PM I got the front matter stuff for the book back from for approval today. I'd contrived to get the name of the commissioning editor wrong and misspell Acknowledgements. Ho hum.
XNA Wednesday, December 19, 2007 at 11:25PM I think I'm getting bored with movies packed with magic and mystery. I've seen too many bits where one character looks at another and asks in awe "You mean that this might be the chosen one?" And later someone says "..but no one must ever know..". And then we get a "..and took away my rightful throne...".
Well, The Golden Compass is all that and more, you even get a "..Luke, I am your father" moment towards the end. And you end up thinking "Meh. So what?".
Everyone plays their part quite proficiently. There are good goodies and bad baddies and baddies who might be goodies and I'm sure if they ever get to make the other two in the series we'll find goodies who are turned to the bad side by something or other. The special effects are pretty good, apart from a few "video game" moments in the fight scenes. Nicole Kidman, who must have been sponsored by a detergent company judging by the amount of white she wears, plays her part very well and even the child with awesome powers carries off her role with a certain amount of verve, even if her accent slides around a bit from scene to scene.
It is based on a book that I've not read, but it stands up well enough on its own if you like that sort of thing. And the problem for me is that there has been a lot of that sort of thing over the last few years.
Monday, December 17, 2007 at 10:30PM Went to a party today. We had our "office do" at Fudge in Hull. Very nice it was too. Great food, great company, great times.
And no photographs. (I forgot).
Then it was back to Paul's, where he strapped a propeller on his back and tried not to fly around his garden. No. Really. Paul is a recent convert to paragliding, having just helped to create the world's first paraglider simulator. He wanted to show us his new rig and was offering drinks and sweeties, so we were all round there like a shot. So it was that, drinks in hand, we watched as he fired up his machine and tried to use it to blow cast iron garden furniture around. Now this I did get a picture of.
Fan man
When Paul bought his house, it came with a collection of plates. Including this one.
I'm not sure if it is dishwasher safe, but it does have a unique style.
After the party we wandered back to the office for some gaming. I had to zoom off early and do some other bits and bobs, but I did manage to win at Wii tennis (although Warren beat me at Guitar Hero).
Life, pictures, restaurant Sunday, December 16, 2007 at 10:55PM I really must stop doing this. Whenever I come into some money (in this case some modest royalties for a CD-ROM I wrote some time back with number one son) I spend it on a computer.
This time though I've got a little peach. It is an Asus EeePC. I'd heard these were hard to get hold of. That's like a red rag to a bull where I'm concerned. If you want one, and they are really neat, I'd recommend trying your nearest Toys'R'Us, where I managed to pick one up, after considerable agonising, yesterday. They cost around 220 pounds. For your money you get a tiny laptop with a little 7 inch display. Of course you can get "proper" laptops for only a few pounds more, but the EeePC is interesting for a number of reasons.
For a start it really is small. If you want a proper laptop as small as the Asus you would be hard pushed to get one for less than seven or eight hundred pounds, and it has a battery life of over three hours, which is again very promising for the price and size. It also has no moving parts to break, unless you count a little fan and the keys, and uses an internal 4GB solid state drive for storage. There is an SD slot for additional memory, three USB slots for external devices, WIFI, a webcam, a wired network connection and even an external monitor socket. It feels very robust and is powered by an Intel Celeron processor tied to 512Mb of memory.
It can run Windows XP, but it is supplied running a variant of Linux which contains all the bundled applications that you would need to make the machine useful, including Open Office 2.0, Firefox for web browsing, a collection of Picture, Music and Media utilities, some teaching applications and a few games. The user experience is very like Windows, with just a few rough edges here and there. It booted up, connected to our WIFI and worked a treat. The only scary bit was getting it to print, which involved compiling a printer driver and installing it (good job that Number One Son was around to do that bit).
If you want a tiny PC to take with you on trips, and would like something that won't break the bank and you won't fret about too much, then I strongly recommend it. If you are thinking of getting your kids a notebook PC, but are worried about their fragility and price(the notebook that is, not the kids), I'd recommend it very strongly. It is also a hackers delight. It is essentially a PC platform, but small and cheap and very easy to develop for. I'm going to put Mono on mine so I can keep writing C# goodness. Number one son wants to put one on a robot. There are stories of an Eeepc that has been made to run Vista (quite well so they say) and an XP version will be available in 2008 which will be very interesting.
What I want to do next is couple it up to the SkypePhone so that I've got a portable, high performance, network terminal. If I put XP on it I could do this tomorrow. The machine is supplied with a set of XP driver disks and I really am tempted to do this.
Gadgets 
