Off to India in 2 weeks.

Barbara finagled a grant from the Lilly Foundation that covers travel for her and her nearest and dearest (that includes me ;-) to India. In her case the travels will be for 3 months, in my case just for the first 3 weeks of that period.
We'll be in northern India, after she leaves me she'll be travelling down the east coast to southern India where she'll be visiting ashrams and doing a variety of spiritually-related stuff

It's nearly over.....

Music.

If you like Leonard Cohen, you'll probably love this.

Stumbleupon.com

Had some time free today, and finally decided to explore the amazing resource that stumbleupon.com provides. Here's just a few images.

And now for something completely different....

Not for the squeamish...

Now, THATS where the cell phone disappeared to...

First computer hard drive.

September 4, 1956: The launch of the IBM 305 RAMAC

Ramac The first hard drive arrived in the 305 RAMAC, meaning that the computer could store data digitally. Not much data, though – the one-ton machine seen in an archive photograph being loaded into an aircraft on a forklift truck, could store a little less than 5MB of information. Thumb-sized USB drives will now store more than a thousand times that quantity of data.

- From the Times Archive, 1958: IBM announces the RAMAC’s first visit to the UK in 1958

Computing

A pic of my three favorite computing devices.

The little guy on the left is a Nokia n810, which is sitting on the keyboard of a 15" HP laptop (that I used to make this entry), and the little guy on the right-hand side of the keyboard is my trusty Sharp Zaurus sl-c1000.

Ritchey Commando, circa 1987, Deore XT.

Purchased from an ebay seller a few years ago. The photo's were very bad, the sellers feedback was perfect, I took a small chance that paid off. When I got the bike I couldn't believe the amazing, time capsule condition it was (still is) in !! All XT, except for a few nice Ritchey components.

circa 1991 Goat with night-sky camo, eclectic components.

Built this as a tourer as soon as I had it made for me by the guys at Chico. It has done many thousands of miles. Sharp-eyed individuals may note that the 6 speed shifters actually drive 7 cogs on the rear, which are 6 speed spaced!! I custom made the 2 largest cogs on the Shimano Dura-Ace *freewheel* to achieve the effect. At one time I had a Quad Ring adapter up front as well, giving me a range from 16 through 46 up front, and 13 through 28 in the back. I actually needed that super low gear just once, when climbing a hill near Dartmoor, England. That was about 6 years ago, when doing the End to End, loaded touring.

Perfect gibberish......

Finally, after an eight year run as Champion of the World at speaking perfect gibberish, #43 has finally met his match. Witness Palins' triple whammy. Who will be next to wear the crown (that surely no-one wants to wear)??

"It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where—where do they go?"

"I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people."

"Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced [sic] your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let's look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I'm glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? ... My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here's a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School , you get extra credit for watching the debate."

Sad and ashamed.....

Just a couple of reasons to be disgusted with what's happened (mainly) during the last administration.

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A03EFDC1031F936A35755C0A9629C8B63&scp=1&sq=kristof+sean+baker&st=nyt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition_by_the_United_States

The Norman Chroniclers...

I was walking around the lake today, multi-tasking by listening to a podcast: in this case an episode of the excellent "In our time" by Melvyn Bragg of BBC fame.
In this episode, Bragg was interviewing a group of British historians about the life and times of England during the 11th century. There were references to "Chroniclers", and the way they were described reminded me very much of todays Bloggers. The scale's not so grand of course, with respect to todays Bloggers, but you get the idea.

Vista SP1, great improvement.....

I only have Vista (Home Premium) on one machine: a HP Athlon 64 laptop with 2GB RAM, and I have tweaked and prodded the OS to deliver the best performance possible. Truth be told, it was running very nicely, fast, and very stable, with no sundry Vista issues.
Anyway, I tracked down the download of SP1 and installed it today, then did my usual Registry cleanup and defrag (which I do after most software changes). Now the laptop is significantly faster!!
Only issue was that the sound driver got "forgotten" in the update, but that was a simple fix in the Device manager.
Kudo's to Microsoft, it's a significant improvement.

Ebay screws up.....

Ebay used to be a success story. A part of Web folklore, if such a description can truly be meaningful.
It seems they have gone from being a company with meteoric growth and almost unlimited prospects, to now being a company in the dire position of ticking off their customer base: all the people who sell online with them.
Bear in mind that they make no money at all from Buyers, then read the article linked at the head of this post.