Nickster’s View

Gambling. I used to love it…so much so that my friend Andy and I used to be known by name at the two Leeds casinos where we were students. I had no money then and still managed to have some fun.
I have no money now but some 13 or 14 years later I’m […]

I’m in the US right now and was watching ‘60 Minutes’ on TV. They had a piece on ‘Power Hour Drinking’, which is when american 21 year olds drink themselves to death in an hour of drinking shots on their 21st birthdays. Video of grieving mothers, shocked friends and family of those with […]

Following on from an earlier post (summary: Google Web Accelerator is crap), I was just at Scroogle and found this amusing paranoid/insightful [delete as necessary] image:

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I know I’m hard on MS, but they leave themselves open to it. Plus I hate the fact that I’m meant to be grateful when things don’t bork.
Today’s case in point…MS Messenger. I use it. I’d prefer to use Trillian, or even just ICQ, but almost everyone I know seems to have […]

Firefox 1.0.4 seems like the flakiest release yet - sorry to say it because I’m a big flag-waving fan - but the truth is, I’m seeing it acting up on both my laptop and desktop. It hates PDFs and it’s a real problem for me, because as a researcher all I do all day […]

…it just gets early too soon. It’s 4.20am and it’s already getting light and my brain only really works under cover of darkness. Damn…gonna have to goto bed
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I’m an unashamed googlephile that uses googletech wherever possible: web, desktop, maps, scholar, images and groups to name a few. Life without these tools would be harder and I’m reliant upon them…and so are you probably. Can you imagine going back to Windows search (with or without indexing) for desktop? Waiting […]

Happy happy joy joy! The Floyd are reforming for the Live 8 gig - Waters and Gilmour back together for the first time in over 20 years.
Apple goes Intel, Floyd reform - hell freezing over has to be next….
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I’ve been researching digital camcorders because I need one for an idea I’ve been incubating. All that I need to ensure is that it has an AV-IN so that the eq I plug into it works. Was looking on eBay but would prefer to buy new. Now it turns out that DV […]

My preferred mode of transport in London is a motorbike (or anything > = 125cc with 2 wheels), but my bike has been out of action for the past week. Today I had to go up to school on the underground and so I strapped my iPod on and inadvertently jacked into the iPod […]

The pictures speak for themselves (taken in a BT old-style phonebox in Hampstead, London). If it can’t run a phone, why would I want to run my life with it?
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I wonder how much BT pays MS to license this stuff? Surely an open source alternative for an embedded app is not only millions […]

There’s a new ubiquitous massively multiplayer realworld game being played out there kids….hadn’t you noticed? It’s called iPod Lemmings and the gameplay goes something like this:
You strap on an iPod, preferably with the stock white headphones just for jollies (my view: white headphones are for thwaites and chav posers) and hit the play button. […]

Boy am I glad I didn’t jump into the Apple waters. Heck, why bother when this mountain came to mohammed. I’m definitely not too mature to laugh out loud at militant Mac users and giggle my little self to sleep each night, for quite a while
All that marketing hype about performance […]

Isn’t it interesting how people behave on IMs? It seems to me, or from the vast majority of people on my contact lists, that people use the “Away” state to represent “Sod off, I’m busy or I want to be invis”, despite there being explicit “Appear Offline (invis)” and “Busy” states. Some people […]

BT have had their third strike, and now they’re out - another 3 day outtage and serial 15 minute call centre holding times, and no one with apparently any clue. One of their WOOSH line tests works, then another doesn’t, then it does, then it doesn’t. It takes days to get a fault […]

Oh deary me. It seems that the problem of ‘noobism’ is causing serious problems in the gaming world. Noobism is where a newbie enters a room and is castigated/ridiculed/thrashed/booted, which isn’t any fun and doesn’t really help the xbox live experience along and excludes new gamers from an established community. I’ve seen […]

There. I said it - but it’s true. Content without presentation is just plain ole dull. It’s great that content and presentation are becoming unentangled all over the information world but just because it’s happening and because it can be done, does it mean that it’s better for me as the end […]