Nickster’s View

Was reading the Guardian article “100 Scientific Things To Do Before You Die” and came across this at the bottom:
Become a diamond. LifeGem of Chicago, Illinois, the book reveals, will take a few grains of your cremated remains, subject them to high pressure and temperature, and you will emerge from the process, 18 weeks later, […]

Was up in Stanmore meeting Deb outside a bakery at lunchtime today. I went up on the bike and she in her car, so naturally I got there 20 minutes before her. It was pretty cold today and hanging around outside wasn’t much of an option so I jumped into the bookies next […]

MTV aired on Wednesday night the first episode of “Top Buzzer“, apparently the “world’s first dope opera”. I watched it and found it both funny and a real sign of the times that someone as mainstream as MTV, the so-called voice of a generation, is broadcasting something that pretty much openly condones the use […]

Fuel Cell Works Supplemental News Page
Samsung in South Korea have hydrogen engine technology that could provide an alternative to oil based combustion. They have a scooter that runs on a hydrogen fuel derived from sodium borate. The only downside, or ultimate irony, is that there’s only 300 million tonnes of it, and mostly […]

…you have to open a browser just to light the desk in front of you to see what you’re doing at 3am in a darkened spodcave
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4033231.stm

The wallpaper “locks many of the 7610’s functions ”
and Symbian’s response?
“Symbian said that it was not sure if the damage Skulls does was intentional or simply a result of bad programming”
Ummm…perhaps it’s a vulnerability in the OS? Why not acknowledge it and get it patched rather than even considering “bad programming”. […]

Some of the most hard hitting photography I’ve ever seen, and most certainly some of the best. Truly reinforces my belief that a camera is one life’s most important tools and in the right hands a weapon for truth.
http://www.jamesnachtwey.com/
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Updated my fonepix (aka visual blog) and found this in there:

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Someone invited me into LinkedIn today so I checked it out and signed up. Thinking it was a pretty cool idea I mailed some invites to friends, only to find out that most of them are already signed up. So very Freemason. Maybe there’s some kind of secret handshake too?
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from Yahoo : Court Steers Clear of Cockfighting Case
Favourite quote :
All birds fight by nature
Yes Mr Oliver, but they don’t don razor tipped apparel first.
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Every time I try to enter a personal blog entry I realise that I don’t want the entire world reading my most personal of edits. The whole point of my personal diary on mono is so that I can write freely without having to censor or sanitize my thoughts and words. The public […]

from Slashdot :
Warezed SoundForge Files In Windows Media Player
Posted by timothy on Friday November 12, @07:43PM
from the let-the-bsa-sort-it-out dept.
An anonymous reader writes “German PC-Welt magazine reports that Microsoft used an illegal copy of SoundForge 4.5 (Google translation) for editing Wave files shipped with Windows Media Player. You can check that yourself by opening any file […]

After all the hype and all the expectations, after all the exclusives and after all the screenshots. Halo 2. Contender numero uno in the fight for game of 2004 (and all time by all current bests) is here in the UK.
I’ve seen plenty of my people on my friends list alerts popping up […]

There are two, possibly three ‘biggest games of the year’ : Halo 2, Half Life 2 and Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas. Halo 2 was released in the USA yesterday 9th November but we in the UK and probably the rest of the world have to wait until tomorrow, 11th November.
Why?
Why hype the […]

Perfectly placed to take a chunk of the landgrab. Who do they sign with? Apple and MS no doubt want exclusivity and I’m guessing that they want to remain independent and take a pass through commission but effectively aggregate the music download sites. I bet the lawyers are racking up the billable […]

I’m dead from the limbic system outwards. My brain is operating an emergency life support policy and I think only my core cognitive functions are online. I managed to dope myself into sleeping about 2am and the alarm went off at 4.15am. I slept a little on the plane but not nearly […]

I’m off tomorrow to Eindhoven for the day to demonstrate ProSkin at the European Symposium for Ambient Intelligence (EUSAI). This means getting a 6.30am flight from Stansted Airport (about an hour from my place) which means leaving here at about 4.30am. It’s now 12.08am and I’m not even close to being tired. […]

My friend Neil said to me that this blog is very ranty and negative. It’s true, it is. He challenged me to write something nice and inspiring for every negative thought posted and to think of it as karmic accounting, which in itself is a lovely thought.
I’ve been keeping an online diary since […]

Got a reply from Vue this morning :
Vue are aware that there are currently problems with the capacity of our online system when dealing with peak traffic. Since taking over the running of the Warner circuit in May 2003, Vue have upgraded the hardware infrastructure twice by adding additional servers. However the growth in transactions […]

It’s Saturday, it’s late afternoon/early evening (5.36pm) and I’m trying to book cinema tickets for tonight. I imagine that Fri/Sat/Sun are the busiest days of the week, and this time of the day on a Saturday night is predictably highly traffic.
So why is it that their site is so overwhelmed that it’s dropping sessions […]