On the weekend we went to a CCO party at Hywel’s place and, it being (nearly) the 5th November, fireworks were involved. Alan had originally planned to bring just a few sparklers along but once he got to the firework shop he couldn’t resist purchasing a small arsenal of rockets, roman candles and something that …
Pictures from the US
I have added pictures from our recent trip to LA, Las Vegas and San Francisco to the gallery. I forgot to mention before that we wandered into the Musee Mechanique at Pier 45 in Fisherman’s Wharf while we were in San Francisco. This is a fascinating place that houses one of the world’s largest collections …
Old Computers
This site has some beautiful images of old computers including an amazing picture of a Cray CDC 6600 that seems to have huge glowing green eyes. This was the world’s fastest computer from 1964 to 1969 and looks like something from the set of Blake’s 7. They also have a picture of the Neiman Marcus …
San Francisco
So, waiting for our delayed flight back to London seems like a good time to post. Leaving the desert heat of Las Vegas to the east we flew to beautiful San Francisco. Actually, leaving Vegas was a little more eventful than usual as after waiting in a long security line the guard took one look …
Vegas
Las Vegas was cool. We stayed at the Bellagio, which was nice. Every casino on the Strip has its “thing”; Caesar’s has statues that come alive and move and talk and wield flaming swords, the Venetian has an indoor/outdoor canal complete with gondola rides under the Rialto Bridge, New York New York has a re-creation …
Los Angeles
Yesterday morning we departed a slightly damp Heathrow airport and approximately ten hours later we landed in sunny southern California. As they say, nobody walks in Los Angeles so we collected our hire car from the massive Hertz lot and headed out onto the famous LA freeways. Once I’d got over that initial weirdness that …
Rube Goldberg
I’ve just got back from the fourth straight (long) day down at the colo and this is about all my brain can handle at the moment:
Napoleon Dynamite
I just watched Napoleon Dynamite. I was expecting the usual crappy teen movie (a genre I kind of like anyway) but it turned out to be a genuinely entertaining film. The film has a plot so thin it’s barely there but the real interest is in the characters. The eponymous Napoleon Dynamite, played by Jon …
Seeqpod
Seeqpod is cool. Basically, it’s a music search engine and flash-based player. Apparently they don’t believe there are any copyright issues as they don’t host the tracks themselves but just link to them. It works really well. For example, I really like the music on this cool Sprint ad, so I loaded up seeqpod and …
Another Austral concert
I’ve decided to put on another Austral Sinfonietta concert. A break of nearly five years must be long enough to dull the memory of the stress and expense these things cause. The concert is on September 6 and I’m at that scary stage where things have been booked, money has been paid but I’m still …