Girl on the train yesterday evening, reading "(How To) Make Love Like A Porn Star" by Jenna Jameson (who can, I rather suspect, write with authority on the subject).

Speaking of books, Lulu.com decided there was something wrong with some of the pictures in my epic cricket club tome, so I had to carefully extract every single bloody one and resize it while setting it to exactly 300dpi (there were hundreds - a soul-destroying fortnight of tedium). Once resubmitted, they kept me on tenterhooks four days longer than the quoted 6-8 business days, but the things actually turned up yesterday. It was probably a blessing in disguise: I spotted a few formatting and other errors which I was able to correct for the Second Edition and the saddoes who have been whinging about the non-appearance (OK, so with hindsight it was probably unfortunate that I waved a single copy around at the Dinner/Dance almost 2 months ago) will have a happy holiday season seeking out typos and other inaccuracies. I'll make a note of all such for the next volume in 2019.

Current Mood: grumpy

Via J-Walk blog, North Carolina can be proud that someone's standing up for what he stands up for.

The single most insanely great web page I've seen all year.

I've just figured out that "Obama-Nation" doesn't hvae the same positive connotation as Nelson Mandela's "Rainbow Nation". Duh.

Current Mood: grumpy

The battery in my aging Nokia 62-something having degraded to the point of 5 minutes of talk time per day (even for a phone-phobe that was becoming annoying) I finally managed to navigate the confusion that is Vodafone's upgrade page and order myself a replacement.

I've been largely unmoved by the smartphone thing until now. I've resisted comfortably the iPhone since launch, not least from a lingering sense that Apple may be further (in a bad way) along the good-evil spectrum than Microsoft these days. Windows Mobile? Sorry, I don't think so: 6.5 looks and feels uncomfortably similar to the old CE/PocketPC of my brief dot-com millionaire (failed) phase. I'd have hoped MS would have managed to make more progress than that in almost a decade.

That left Symbian, Android and the proprietaries (Samsung was the candidate). I opted for a Googley one: the HTC Magic, which appeared yesterday. I'm still uncertain where to put Google, vis a vis the good-evil thing, but I 'd guess they'd be somewhere in the middling, mid-grey area, which wouldn't be too bad. I almost stayed with Nokia (I watched a presentation from a Finn last week and was rather drawn to his "Sooombian" pronunciation) but I fancied a change after 8 years and four phones. The Samsung phone on offer had a fabulous technical spec, but their own OS, which rather killed the app notion.

First impressions are good - screen's nice, GUI is more responsive and more attractive than WinMob, iPhone-esque to a degree, though lacking some touches that Apple can do better with a locked-in hardware platform. G3 connection speed seems acceptable, it connected without quibble to our WiFi router (I'll try it at Starbucks later), the general feel of the UI is pretty consistent throughout (are you reading, Microsoft?) and it charges through USB. I believe our American cousins have an expression, "For The Win", which may apply here. Or I may completely have missed the point.

Oh, and we have GPS, which was the killer feature this time round - I played golf a few weeks back with someone who had a little GPS-enabled course map thingummy - no faffing around without guessing yardage, this thing guessed it for you. Within acceptable bounds of accuracy for bad golfers at least: whatever its error margin it was less than our own with club and ball. I wanted one. Now I just have to figure out which to get. I may just have to get them all.

Current Mood: grumpy

Does anyone know of a photo-sharing site that allows multiple individuals to post pictures to an album, preferably with an option to remain anonymous? I'm looking for the best/easiest way to make it possible for people to post pictures from the imminent Cricket Club 60-Year Dinner/Dance for others to see.

If exactly what I want doesn't exist (and I can think of a number of reasons why it wouldn't), what would be the best alternative solution?

Flickr? Zooomr? PicasaWeb? How easy is gallery/tag/whatever creation/application?

A print-on-demand service wouldn't be a bad idea, either.

On the night I want to be able to give people (those with cameras at least) simple printed instructions that have at least a better-than-even change of being comprehensible to the less technical when they sit in front of their PCs. I can always offer a fall-back of telling them to email a few pics to me, I suppose.

Any ideas gratefully received...

---

* I finally managed to de-privatise the book listing (Lulu was telling me it was already a "general access" listing, but they were fibbing). It now appears to be visible, even when I'm not logged in as the author.

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/played-on/7665300

Current Mood: grumpy

My copy of the 60-Year history of the little cricket club for whom I've played since 1989 arrived from Lulu.com today. This is the book what I wrote.

And it is TOTALLY FRICKIN' AWESOME!

OK, the content is a bit on the niche side, and the writing is largely by me, and there's 50-odd pages of statistics that probably aren't even interesting to the people documented, but the production standard is excellent, the layout and graphic design is almost perfect (found three errors so far - all mine) and I'm frankly chuffed to bits.

Now I'm just hoping the 100 copies for the membership arrive before the dinner/dance on the 3rd. The space on the front page for our guest speaker (BBC Cricket Correspondent Jonathan Agnew) to sign will look a bit sad if we dont' actually have them present to be signed. Apart from my one, of course. I suppose I could get a rubber stamp made.

Current Mood: accomplished

I have four checkpoints when I swim - I need short-term incentives to stop me from giving up out of boredom. So I check distance covered before first stationary gasping moment, time to 500m distance covered in 20 min and total distance. As an extra incentive, if I beat a record, I get a chocolate bar on the way back to my desk. Beat more than one and I get two chocolate bars (this is not a weight-reduction program).

Snickers and a Twix today, for 3.5/4. I only equalled the total distance record.



Target for the year: 50km. Distance so far: 37.6km Estimated completion date: 06-Nov.

I'm starting to sound like Hime with his mortgage. But with a chart.

Current Mood: grumpy

I'm watching the Discovery Channel, currently showing "World War II in HD". I have a HD-ready TV but no HD-capable receiver.

As regards the HD-ness, there's colour, but much of it has a rather watercoloury quality. I'm guessing some kind of frame-by-frame image enhancement.

Still doesn't address the fact that my 8 year-old Sky box has never heard of HD, though.

Current Mood: grumpy

I've probably put over half a million pounds across various credit cards over the last three decades: this month it looks like I finally got my first "iffy" statement items. Four payments between £119 and £174 (staying below some enhanced checking minimum?) on three dates remain unrecognised to me. The credit card company were surprisingly matter-of-fact about it all, from which I infer that it's extremely commonplace and that I should not therefore be questioning the reason for their annual interest rates remaining in excess of 20%, albeit only slightly.

The rest of the family having decamped Up North for three days last weekend on a grandparental visiting trip, I was finally able to sit down an hammer away on the Cricket Club 60-Year History & Stats book (to be more catchily named shortly) which is supposed to be available at the Dinner/Dance a month from today. The text is mostly done, the stats likewise (thank God most of the work was done for the last book 10 years ago) and another couple of days of formatting and assembly should get it done. In '99 I took the whole thing to a copy bureau, hand-collating and binding 100 copies with one of those gluey-spine things. This time I'm thinking about PDF and Lulu.com. Anyone have any experience with Lulu (I have bought books from them but not tried it from the publishing p-o-v)?

With the children finally back at school, I may now be able to reclaim enough of my evenings to finish the thing by next week. Cutting it probably too fine, but there you go.

Having spent much of the summer re-reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle*, I moved further back in time to Cryptonomicon. With the more recent three books still relatively fresh in my mind it's apparent that more than just family lines (Waterhouse, Shaftoe, Comstock, Goto et al) and Geography (Qwghlm, Kinakuta) are shared; there are significant items from the stories set earlier but published later that turn up, suggesting that either the sequence in which the books were written is not that in which they were published (possible, Cryptonomicon is perhaps more accessible) or that NS at least had a good part of the four-volume storyline mapped out from a long way back. He seems to say not, however, in which case he did a marvellous job of cooking up the back-story. Anyway, it makes me wonder if there's more to come in, say the 19th century? I would have thought the Industrial Revolution to be a fairly fertile period and he's already made heavy Victorian references in The Diamond Age (which I also re-read this summer, come to think).



* I've read other stuff too, you understand, but 3000+ pages of fairly dense NS prose takes a bit of reading.

Current Mood: grumpy

Programming IQ Test

Current Mood: grumpy

Four days of frantic post-holiday effort seem to have mostly got the most urgent work-type things more-or-less cleared. The things that there wasn't time to do before, that were passed to someone else who didn't get them done, that kind of thing. Tomorrow should be more like what passes for "normal".

While away, I resolved to finally deal with my venerable NetGear ADSL modem/WiFi router, which has given sterling service but hasn't really ever been the same since Pam accidentally plugged the phone charger into it. It still works, but signal strength, even from a few inches, has never gone above 2/5 bars. While I was browsing the options this evening I remembered that I had a "BT Home Hub" sent a few years back sitting in a cupboard. Turns out it works. Five bars. Only took me an hour, 55 minutes of which was finding the ISP account password.

I think I have the new personal trainer started on the breaking-in process: two sessions this week both left me in a moderate amount of pain. A hulking brute of a rugby player still looks like an aesthetically inferior option by comparison with the fit female previous incumbent. To my jaundiced old eyes at least.

Current Mood: grumpy