When I was in Greece last summer my bag was stolen because I stupidly left it on the back of my chair and didn’t watch it closely enough. The loss of my wallet, credit cards, camera and a small amount of cash wasn’t nearly as annoying as the loss of the photos that were stored on the memory card in the camera. So I’ve been looking around for devices that will ensure that this doesn’t happen again. And, yes, I’ll try to keep my bag where I can see it too…
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February 5th, 2007
The Global Cool Foundation is taking donations towards buying up carbon credits and other climate change projects. And, of course, giving celebrities and musicians the chance to showboat. I guess its a pretty obvious idea that everyone thinks of sooner or later.
February 3rd, 2007
Steve infected me with a post 5 things that people don’t know about you meme. Ordinarily I wouldn’t go in for this sort of pyramid scheme, but maybe this would be sort-of fun.
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January 5th, 2007
Well, its 2007… Please excuse me if I’m being cynical and pessimistic, but to paraphrase The Who:
Meet the new year,
same as the old year.
Maybe this year will be different. I’m not making any new year’s resolutions, because I never keep them anyway. Instead, I’ll just put some things that I might want to do here and hope that their continued presence will shame me into doing them. Or, at least, making up some good reasons why I couldn’t.
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January 1st, 2007
I got a Fuji FinePix F30 for Christmas (Thanks Mum & Dad!) and a GorillaPod tripod-type-thing (Thanks, bro!) to hold it up. Its really cool and a very good replacement for the camera I had, which was stolen earlier this year. Here’s a picture of the F30 and GorillaPod.
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December 26th, 2006
The Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) allows carbon dioxide emissions, by the tonne, to be bought and sold like shares. At the current price of about €8 / tonne (I think… there are very few free sources) and given that a transatlantic flight emits about 1.2 tonnes, you can purchase back your own CO2 for less than £7. Sadly, I don’t know if ETS even allows public trading and I couldn’t find a site on the web that does it either.
The total EU budget for carbon dioxide is about 245,430,000 tonnes per year, but there are about 456,953,258 people in the EU. Even if only one in 100 bought carbon we’d only have to spend about £30 / year to buy up the whole carbon budget – forcing everyone to become carbon-neutral. The companies would probably just pass the costs straight back to us, but its an interesting idea nevertheless.
December 1st, 2006
Watching Last night’s Question Time discussion of bed & breakfast owners’ rights, or lack thereof, to refuse entry to homosexual couples was very disturbing. The opinion of a sizeable portion of the panel and audience seemed to be that the rights of homosexuals was infringing on “the rights of Christians” who believe that same-sex relationships are wrong. They seem to be suggesting that, because of their religious views, they have the “right” to discriminate against others on the basis of their sexuality. From the number of comments on the QT site, they’re not alone. Did I miss the announcement that its now OK to be a bigot?
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December 1st, 2006
Just back from this year’s SuperComputing conference, which wasn’t as good as last year’s, but was still pretty good. Also, I thought I’d blog about being horribly jet-lagged and how unbearable it is to travel by plane, but after re-reading last year’s post, I really don’t have anything new to add!
So, instead, I’ll just make some short observations about Tampa, FL.
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November 21st, 2006
Well, its been over a year since my first post, but I didn’t notice. Never mind, there’s always next year 
November 6th, 2006
The BBC have posted yet another “silent aircraft” article with some improved pictures and buzzwords from the one they posted more than two years ago. I wonder why the guys at Boeing and Airbus haven’t tried this yet? Lets take a more detailed look at the claims.
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November 6th, 2006
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