I thought my trip to South Africa earlier this year was a bit of a mad dash but it has nothing on the traveling I will be doing this December. Here it is in short-form, starting on the 1st of December and ending on the 30th of December:
Waterford (Ireland) - Cork (Ireland) - Hong Kong (China) - Jakarta (Indonesia) - Yogyakarta (Indonesia) - Jakarta (Indonesia) - Hong Kong (China) - Cork (Ireland) - Waterford (Ireland) - Dublin (Ireland) - Cape Town (South Africa) - Johannesburg (South Africa) - Windhoek (Namibia) - Johannesburg (South Africa) - Cape Town (South Africa) - Dublin (Ireland) - Waterford (Ireland)
That is 8 cities and 4 countries across a handful of airlines. The craziest bit will be arriving back from Indonesia on the 7th of December and flying to South Africa the next day.
There are only two things I can say about this past Saturday’s Ireland vs. South Africa Rugby match; I am embarrassed by my team and well done to the Irish for playing so well.
Just been reading two reviews of Microsoft’s Zune player and while it isn’t terrible it isn’t going to convert any iPod users or be an iPod killer in the stores.
The NYT review[^] is a bit biased IMO (I own an iPod too but jeez author, get a life) but it brings up some frankly weird points about the Zune:
The Zune has WiFi, fantastic. Except you can only use it to send songs to other Zunes. You can’t connect to a PC, network or any other WiFi device. WTF?
You can’t use it as an external HD. Sorry folks, no USB drive in Explorer for the Zune. WTF?
The screen is bigger. Except it has the same resolution as an iPod.
Real world testing shows poorer battery life than an equivalent iPod (two hours less.) And yet the Zune is bigger and heavier.
No podcast support from what I can tell. Crikey.
Songs are $0.99 but you have to buy credit bundles of $5 or more.
Songs are listed as costing 79 “points” which sounds cool except 79 points will cost you $0.99. Now that is marketing.
The software media player is seemingly a stripped down Windows Media Player. You can’t use WMP with your Zune.
Getting all your existing music onto a Zune is a long conversion process if it works at all.
Shopper 1: The security guard looked at me as if I were stupid for getting here at 6am, but look, I got here first.
Shopper 2: I didn’t get what I wanted but I’ll buy something anyway… because I have to right? I might even like it. It’s tradition… isn’t it?
Just heard those two quotes as a BBC reporter interviews shoppers outside some high-street fashion store.
I am no saint when it comes to consumerism but, shopper 1, the security guard is right and, shopper 2, no you don’t have to buy anything and no it is not tradition.
Sometimes as a blogger you don’t want to create a new entry just to report an interesting article you found. A much nicer solution is to provide a Reading List of sorts, similar to the point of a blogroll, but at an item level. The ideal Reading List would directly include the content to be read, rather than just a link to it, and be published in Atom or RSS for the convenience of your audience.
In this article I’ll show you how to use Google Reader and FeedBurner to manage a reading list for your audience.
There are two critical problems in this approach though; one, you can’t add your own notes, something I do in my del.icio.us list all the time. Two, you can’t share items that are not from feeds. If a friend emails you a website rather than putting it in their feed you can’t get it into Google Reader and so can’t have it in your reading list.
Until Google Reader allows “manually adding items” and allows for notes or a description to be attached to an item it isn’t a usable trick. A shame really.
Microsoft said on Thursday that it will not limit the number of times that retail customers can transfer their Windows Vista license to a different computer.
That is good news however there is still some way to go before the licensing for Vista is good and fair IMO.
TextMate updated for the second time in a week. The main change is logged as:
[REMOVED] TextMate no longer pays tribute to human sacrifices, rape, nor does it show a picture of the God of the deaths in your dock — ticket 945BEB5D
I can’t find the ticket but that is hilarious. I hope whoever posted the ticket had tongue firmly in cheek.
(And TextMate is working out well for me, a very good text editor. The halloween theme was great.)
In a previous post I showed how to use non-conventional tables in your Rails app. A few days on from that and I have found two ActiveRecord model methods that make it even easier and better; set_primary_key and set_table_name.
This means I don’t even need to use any views as I was previously. Hurrah!
