The Boffin Blog

“If you would know how a man treats his wife and his children, see how he treats his books.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Indeed, I collect vast numbers of wives and children, to be stored on shelves in no particular order. Occasionally, I lend them to friends...

that you watch these videos and enjoy them with the utmost seriousness.

Public Safety Warnings:
1) Jim is in his undercrackers and ONLY his undercrackers. The Alphabet Business Concern would like to remind you that forewarned is forearmed.
2) Tim curses at a barking dog.
3) Babba makes strange facial expressions whilst drumming.
4) Kavus' footwear, whilst not visible is worthy of note.

Once again Jim shows us what he's made of, in myriad ways.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=_AC8Z9uGe0A

Jibber and Twtch: This song is approx 25 years old. IT still sounds as shiny and new as when it was first cast from the molten brain juices of Tim.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=OxhuQWKwbqY

Cold as can be in an English Sea: Delicious classic.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=N5QYijFfOaQ

There was enough thought provoking posts in Daring Fireball today for me the put a note in the journal.

It has been noted on occasion that I am an Apple fan, well, before that I was a 68k fan and the Amiga had the best OS and the best processors (and also the best price). Then Amiga died and I still thought Intel produced inelegant parts, but I ended up x86+Windows for a while. So Mac it was, even though it was the underdog at that stage. The OS was a bit meh compared to the Amiga but it wasn't the wrestling match that Windows was. So Jobs returned and revitalised the company.

Apple now has a larger market capital than IBM (but IBM is a dying withering beast) and is eclipsing all others like HP and Dell. Many accuse Apple on not capitalising on the failure of Vista but I think Apple has and the move to strike started years ago.

All of this is a preamble to the fact that Apple are still doing a lot wrong even though they are doing a lot right. A conversation with Niall last night brought a terrifying fact home that reveals a core Apple problem. Registered developers will get their copy of the new OS after the retail release. More here;
http://stevenf.com/2007/10/indies_roll_the_dice_on_final_leopard.php

Apple doesn't listen to developers and customers. Not listening to your customers can be a good thing and it's working for Apple, but there are some nasty nasty points being overlooked.

The Mac Pro isn't as good as it should be. (it is fast, but in the wrong way, those guts should be in the XServe, and the Pro should have Core2 duos)
The OS has persisting problems (the Dock is still awful)
Because the Mac Pro isn't as good as it should be, the gap between iMac and Mac Pro now appears to be bigger than ever with constant calls for a stopgap machine.

I bought an iMac because the Pro and the Mini didn't cut it, so Apple still got a sale, I'm hopelessly addicted to the OS.

"A wave of selling from nervous investors dragged the FTSE 100 Index into the red on Monday, 20 years on from 1987's Black Monday stock market collapse"

So there, I told you the stock market would react unfavorably to the Dumbledore=ghey thing. Just bear in mind that it could have been so much worse.

I gave the Helgate:London demo a shot. It's rather buggy, probably the buggiest demo I've played in quite a while. It actually made the mac bluescreen, which was a touch traumatic, since I haven't had a kernel panic since I installed bad RAM in my old graphite G4.

That said, the game has that Diablo feel that I so enjoyed all those years ago. All they need to do now is a ton of optimizations and bug fixes in the 2 or 3 days left before master. Unless of course the demo uses a much older code base.....

These are the demo's I've played in the last couple of years.
Doom3
Bioshock
Hellgate
All apart from Hellgate were reasonably polished. It leaves me wondering.

Any cheese that has to advertise the fact that it contains "no fillers" is not fit for human consumption.

Make some melba toast so that it's utterly dessicated and crunchy, but not burnt. If you can do this with a nice wholegrain bread the nuttyness of the grains works beautifully.

Melt some nutella in a bain-marie and pretend the nutella is the tomato sauce and the toast is the sheets of pasta. Chop a load of hazelnuts and almonts and toast them yourself in a dry pan. There is nothing like freshly toasted almonds. Put the nuts on the top or in every layer.

It's gooey and messy, but a nice way to spend 30 mins in the kitchen and give yourself diabetes all at once.

I made a meatloaf for the first time today. I've never even had one before. I'd heard it referred to before on many occasions on American TV. It is an iconic dish, although I'm not sure I understood the significance until recently.

I suppose it's a Leftover Makeover, or a way to stretch beef if you are on a budget. Budget food in my house was always a stew.

I did it on a budget today. €5 for the beef and €? for misc veg I had lying around. I followed this recipe:
http://www.forkyou.tv/2007/10/16/fork-you-1-part-meat-2-parts-veg-national-meatloaf-appreciation-day-edition/
That I spotted on slashfood:
http://www.slashfood.com/2007/10/18/my-national-meatloaf-appreciation-day-offerings/

It turned out quite yummy, and I made it pretty much the way they made it in the above video. Next time, I'm going to add loads of minced roast peppers and fresh basil or coriander.

Speaking of stews, I had a bit of a complex regarding stews. Ireland in the 80's was in a terrible state and times were hard for the middle classes (that's all I have experience of). So, budget food was stews. Both my parents had completely different approaches to stews. Mother = thick sludgy stews full of veg. Father = watery stews, more like a consommé. Both methods seemed to excel in avoiding possible deliciousness. I hated both recipies. So I studiously avoided stews for years. Little did I realise that proper methods could produce excellent results.

The next project is a nice proper chicken or beef stew that is real comfort food and not laden with the memories of having to sit at the table until the plate is cleaned.

This is the kind of announcement that could destroy the entire blog-o-tubes.

I'd love to see the LJ and Google metrics for the Dumbleodre Revelations. It's probably a good thing that the news broke on a Friday afternoon (in America). I can't say it'd do the stock markets any good in the chaotic state they are in at the moment. I can imagine the newscasts, "The DOW and FTSE fell over 23% in a matter of hours today after a shock announcement by the author of the successful Harry Potter Trilogy...". However, the world has a few days to absorb the news, so the traders won't be so panicy on Monday.

Besides, nearly everybody I know has been says the Harry Potter books are ghey (that's gay in the 9 year old schoolboy putdown sense, not the adult homosexual sense), so its merely an irony the author confirms this.

and his name is Brian....enough said.

I do so love how the SCO story keeps getting more and more delicious.

If only this evidence regarding Novell owning nearly all of what SCO was selling had have been discovered earlier on it wouldn't be such a big mess.

Still, a beautiful result, and strangely enough, I've read very little from the outspoken Darl McBride.

Fascinating reading....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Memphis_Three
http://www.wm3.org/live/thewm3/index.php

I don't like the way I didn't get my OS upgrade vouchers, like I did with all my other macs.
My G4 was purchased not long before OS 9 was released.

My mini had vouchers for the 10.3 to 10.4 thing.

Bah.

Also, got a look at 10.5 recently. Totally hating it cosmetically, it's confused, inconsistent and a managers reaction to Vista.

I got's me new iMac. It is the bomb. It doesn't work very well in this windows-centric environment. (I know it should, but they added extra suck to the network)

The bastion of yellow journalism and jingoism, The Mail on Sunday gave away 2.8 million copies of Prince's new album.

They paid Prince £250,000 for the deal.

*Speculation Corner*
Now, I'm no expert on royalty payments, but according to a documentary I seen on TV once, a common figure per sale is (was) £0.05.

So, if Prince sold 2.8 million copies of his album through normal channels, he'd earn about £140,000, maybe more as he would be in a position to negotiate better terms than many artists, maybe less, as the recording industry is notorious for deducting cash from artists royalties for frivolous reasons.

Is it any wonder Prince did what he did? Is it any wonder the entire recording industry is in serious trouble?

Strangled by their own greed, that's what I say.

And don't get me started in the homogenisation of music...

So, Francis Bacon is allowed an iPhone eh?
This sets all sort of alarm bells off, but whatever it is that is alarming, I still haven't figured out yet. Obviously a deliberate mistake/secret clue to set the cogs turning, and one of the reasons I love reading FakeSteve.

http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/07/hey-apple-retail-which-part-of-no.html#links

I am dismayed I didn't get to see Thewlis and Oldman 'interact' in the latest Harry Potter film.

We got a whole 30seconds of it in one of the other films, it felt like it was the only proper acting in the whole thing. The acting is much better in this one though.

I had a jorb interview today. I wasn't asked a single technical question, but it was all management. Specifically, what was my vision for the technical services of the Faculty of Science & Health. Berlimey. I was totally unprepared, but I'm also totally underexperienced.

So chalk this one up to experience. I glad I went for it, despite not fancying my chances, sure it'd look bad if I didn't.

I see where I am in a few more years.

1-18-08 is Slusho is Gojira!

It was noted that although Alan Rickman suffers from Hollywood typecasting, into that of the role of the villain, he does do it extremely well.

Gruber (Die Hard), DeValera (Michael Collins), Snape (Potter)) and The Sheriff of Nottingham (Robin Hood). Classic film baddies all.

We are entering an age of ignorance, brought on by the continuing rise of entertainment culture. Boredom is temporarily suspended by low quality entertainment (intentionally designed that way), the spectre of Adorno moans "I told you so'. The suspension of boredom leads to the suspension of work.

The internet has effected me this way, it has facilitated my tendency to procrastinate by providing entertainment, through the same pipeline which delivers the information which is so essential to my work (o teh irny).

For my own thoughts, to look back on in years to come, via The Observer, via MeFi an excerpt from an interview with James Watson.

"When I had recovered a little of my composure with James Watson, back in Cold Spring Harbor, I asked him how he thought the climate of scientific research had changed since he made his fateful discovery of the structure of life in 1953. As ever, he came at the question from an unusual angle. He doubted, he said, that in today's world, he and Francis Crick would ever have had their Eureka moment.

'I recently went to my staircase at Clare College, Cambridge and there were women there!' he said, with an enormous measure of retrospective sexual frustration. 'There have been a lot of convincing studies recently about the loss of productivity in the Western male. It may be that entertainment culture now is so engaging that it keeps people satisfied. We didn't have that. Science was much more fun than listening to the radio. When you are 16 or 17 and in that inherently semi-lonely period when you are deciding whether to be an intellectual, many now don't bother.'

Watson raised an eyebrow, fixed me again with a look. 'What you have instead are characters out of Nick Hornby's very funny books, who channel their intellect in pop culture. The hopeless male.'"

*Afterthought*
That probably explains why Russian scientists were so good at solving problems with highly limited resources during the Cold War, there was nothing else to do.

Are the rumors true? Are impeachment proceedings being made against Cheny?

Why isn't this all over the news? Hopefully the crooks and liars will be tried as crooks and liars.