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Summery Summary
Friday July 28, 2006
So busy am I seemingly getting not enough done and still failing to answer people’s emails that I thought I would pop a little summary of ’tings’ here because I know you are just dying to know!.. ahem.
Return to New York
Yup, the Americans are letting me back into the country and this time it’s personal. I am heading out to New York end of next week and I will be there until September.
I have, thankfully, found a great trick for budgeting my cash in the U.S.: don’t go to the fucking Apple store! Well that and treating a dollar as equal to a pound, I spent just over half the amount I thought I had by applying this trick last time—though I still maxed out my credit card in the Apple store the day before I left… and I’d like to get me a new camera this time… oh shit it, I am gonna max out my card again, I know it!
Your emails
I have been totally shit about replying to mail, I am sorry. If you’ve been waiting for a reply for any length of time it’s probably not coming. I am a shit person and god has killed many kittens because of me. I am probably going to hell.
Professional writing
As some of you know I have been doing some writing for the superbly redesigned .Net magazine. It is an honour to be amongst the mass of new talent in the magazine and the people at .Net have been wonderfully supportive and very tolerant of my inability to get anywhere even close to the deadlines.
But when I got hold of a copy with one of my articles in it, I kinda winced, rather than feeling a rush of pride. I feel like the accidental expert; I never set out to "position myself‚Äù as such. I dunno, I am not sure I am ready for all this just yet; or it could be that I am just too busy with the realign of Buzzvote and working on HTML and CSSing Jon Hicks’ UI for the LifeIO project to be able to focus properly on anything else.
Geek in the park
I was really hoping to go to Geek in the park especially as it is so close by. But alas I am in New York. So I won’t be able to provide a rousing, beer fueled, talkrant on why John C. Dvorak is right and you are all suckers! ;)
Anyway, I wish the event organizers all the very best and hope the weather holds out for all those attending. I’ll be on the look out for the geekinthepark tag on Flickr.
d.Construct
Ticket is booked, hotel is booked, spending money is budgeted. I am coming to d.Construct to see if all this hype about conferences is true; though if the weather is still really good I might say bollocks to it and head down the beach for the day.
See you there, or maybe on the beach.
Fish tank water plus iBook equals oh shit!
A bit of advice. If you manage to break your 25 litre fish tank, thus sending a torrent of water floorwards I do not recommend leaving your iBook, two iSights and Moleskine note book directly in the path of the water.
So far the iSights have dried out nicely and are working and I have faith that the iBook will do the same, though it might take a few weeks.
Fortunately, though, it [the scummy fish water] kind of skimmed over the top of the Moleskine, leaving it unscathed; clearly the water did not feel itself worthy either!
But, don’t feel sorry for me, I was being a total prick at the time and deserved the harsh lesson I got.
And to save you the mail: all the fish survived and are now happily swimming around in a 65 litre tank, which I will be steering clear of, at least when a Mac is near by!
MacBook
On the other hand the MacBook is turning out to be very cool. Well it’s not actually, it’s as hot as hell and would probably fry an egg. But being able to run Windows and Linux via Parallels is a treat.
I am running out of hard drive space, though. Two versions of Windows, OS X, Ubuntu and a library of music soon fills up a 70gb hard drive. A trip to the Apple store may be in order to pick up a 120gb version.
Actually, that reminds me; the latest release of Ubuntu is very cool indeed, it is so easy to install. I don’t know whether it was accidental on my part but the install was initiated from the desktop of Ubunutu. That is to say it booted up via the Live CD ISO I had attached to the Parallels virtual machine and I double clicked the Install icon on the desktop, the rest took care of itself, genius. The UI is also looking much much nicer, too. It has a certain shininess to it. Watch out OS X, watch out Windows, could Ubuntu be the Linux release my Mum has been waiting for?
So there you have it. That’s what I am up to. In between spending time with the kids and promising to mow the lawn some time this month.
