Welcome back my friends.....

.....to the show that never ends.

In a spectacle, at which even P T Barnum would have taken a step back in admiration, the world will beging watching the Michael Jackson freakshow which officially begins today in California.

As a clear sign of what we can look forward to, Jacko himself opened the media circus in a televised plea for a fair hearing. If I were Judge Melville I would find the inference that it I were going to conduct anything other a fair hearing as downright insulting.

Some people might suggest that we could be about to witness an OJ-Simpson-stylee whitewash, but looking at the latest pictures of Mr Jackson would seem to suggest that has been done already.

I am not prepared to comment on the case, or predict the likely outcome, but I will lay bets on sales of Jackson's music and videos experiencing a significant boost during the coming days and weeks.

Its Better Manually

I am sitting here waiting for DHL to deliver my IBM Laptop back to me after its third visit to the IBM Service Centre in two months.

I had a call on Friday afternoon telling me that they had now definitely found and fixed the problem and that the machine was passing all diagnostic tests. Well, excuse me for being sceptical but that is almost the same thing as was said on the two previous occasions. This time, however, I do have a spark of confidence that the job has been done well this time. Mainly because an extremely customer focussed expert, called Mark, was giving me regular updates and sprinkled our conversations with handy hints and tips on computing in general and how best to navigate the laberynthine structure of IBM. Well done him, he deserves an employee of the month award.

So, just to recap, since 10th December my laptop has had a new motherboard, new memory and a new hard disk. A little like the woodsman's axe (when head and handle are both replaced many times but it is still the same axe) except for the screen and keyboard it is now virtually a new PC. Fortunately this has not cost me a penny as all the work and parts are covered by the warranty.

The real problem this time is that wth a new disc I have the daunting task of installing XP (1 hour), downloading and installing XP Service Pack 2 (2 hours), installing Microsoft Office (30 mins), installing all the upgrades and Service Packs (2 hours), installing and configuring all my other applications including Firefox, Adobe Acrobat, iTunes, Photoshop etc, (3 hours) before recovering all my data (yes I do have excellent backups!). That is more than a business day of work to be completed before I can even begin to be productive.

Now, given that the last time I got the laptop back it had been restored to its factory default position, it will be the second time in a month I have had to do all this. That is two full man days, plus the average of 4 days lost each time my machine has been in for repair, that is a total of 14 days of productivity "lost" in the past 40 working days!

Fortunately the impact has not been quite that bad as I have been able to fall back on my handy Psion Series 7 for mobile working and my trusty but senescent tower system for the office. All the same, the failure of a personal computer can have a severe impact on the smooth running of an office, especially a paperless office like mine.

Housing for All

I think I may have worked out how the Labour party plans to help 80,000 families onto the property ladder by 2010.

Of course those units would only be for city dwellers. For those living in the country there are probably more rustic plans afoot with an option for urban folk who are well-heeled enough to also have a little something in the shires.

And once allocated, or having purchased, one of these micro-habitats, new "home" owners will be wanting some guidance as to how it should be furnished.

If Tony Blair really wants to kill two birds with one stone he could provide cost effective housing and help the UK meet its Kyoto obligations by funding the contruction of F10 housing. However, I suspect all the serious housing engineers will have been watching the development of this celebrity dwelling with keen interest.

While we are on the topic of housing, how would you like to find out exactly how much your new neighbours paid for their house? It would certainly be a useful thing to know, because it would give you an idea of how much you could get for your property. Using information sourced directly from the Land Registry this is only one of a number of sites which will be giving home owners access to such sensitive information. I have been looking at the data for my street and right now I have a warm glow inside knowing how much more the new owners of numbers 5 a 7 paid for their houses compared with me only 9 months before.

Sick PC

My laptop is sick, again! For the third time in 5 weeks it is going back to IBM for repairs. Acording to the engineer I spoke to on the phone today it needs a new motherboard. Well, I won't disagree with him, but it was supposed to have been fitted with a brand new one in December.

Luckily it is still in the warranty period but perhaps if it continues to prove faulty I should just bite the bullet and buy something other than a wintel machine.

This time at least I am confident I have not lost any data. I have been performing daily backups since it failed the second time earlier this month. The real pain is having to make the 2 hour round trip to drop it off, and then pick it up again, at the IBM service centre in Hounslow.

Blogging may be infrequent again for the next few days while I get this sorted out.

Global Warming - really?

Having spent the past 10 days wrapping up warm against temperatures of -9 degrees celcius, and digging the car out of snow before we could set off each morning, I am inclined to think that the latest report on global warming may be a tad alarmist.

We could certainly have done with a Whovel last week, although the size does concern me a little - storing something like this during the summer months could be a real pain!

Berg Bash 2005

I am now back from my travels in Austria. Just as I expected there were no WiFi hotspots at the resort and so blogging about the event is all backed up in my biological memory banks - to be seeped out over the next few days.

We did take lots of pictures, and a small selection of the best (limited by flickr's monthly upload limit) are now available for viewing.

Away (and up up!)

I am off to the Austrian Alps for a few days to do some ballooning in and over the mountains.

The team and I will be leaving at about 6pm this evening and we are driving the car and trailer all the way. Autoroute tells me that it is a journey of some 893 miles (1438 km) and we should arrive in Schladming around lunchtime on Saturday.

Although I will be taking my newly repaired and recovered laptop, I have no idea what sort of connectivity I am likely to find at a ski resort and so I may not get much blogging done for the next week.

On the plus side, I have just checked the weather forecast for the next 10 days and conditions look to be absolutely perfect for ballooning. So, be ready for lots of pictures like the one on the right when I get back, if not before.

One question for you to ponder while I am away... One of the ski areas we will be visiting is called the Hochwurzen. My German is not good, but does that mean "high sausage"? Leave your answer in the comments.

Where in the World?

A couple of weeks ago I added a new feature to my blog which displays a map of the world overlaid with markers to show the geographic location of visitors to this site. It works by translating the IP address of the page requester into geographical coordinates which are then stored in a database. Once a day, the HitMaps map images (the thumbnail image and the rest of maps it links to) is updated according to the database.

This is really great because instead of looking at the dry data displayed in text form I can see the clusters of visitors, and also look for new dots to appear in parts of the world as people land here.

Of course the problem is that the map is a beautiful photograph but does not have any political or national boundaries overlaid, so I have to be really good at geography to identify the locations.

Well, I thought my geography was good, until I tried the Geography Olympics. This is an international quiz which tests your knowledge of the location of countries. To make it even more fun, you declare your home country before you start and then your score contributes to a grand total of the results of others in your country. The geography skills of each country are then ranked and listed. Currently the best geographers in the world are the Italians, closely followed by the people of Hong Kong, the Finnish and Canadians.

I am embarrassed to say that the British are way down the ranking table at number 54, but at least my score increased our average by .004%. If you think you are likely to do well you can really make an improvement to your country's aggregate score. If you think you are pretty bad, then you can always say you are from a different country and help drive their score into the ground.

Wot, no Spam?

Three cheers to those nice people at Enetation who have manage to expunge the curse of Spam from their comments system. No longer will my readers have to plough their way through reams of stuff about online casinos, potency enhancing pharmaceuticals, finance corporations and video downloads.

The rest of you, please do feel free to leave a comment on any of my posts. I really enjoy reading them, and besides, it makes me feel almost wanted.

What's the Word?

No matter how rich one's vocabulary, it is always useful to have a dictionary to hand to check the meaning, spelling and appropriateness of a word. Book based dictionaries are all very fine, but the internet has spawned a whole range of variations on the theme.

The first one I came across was the Rap Dictionary which claims to be "the oldest and ultimate resource for looking up hip-hop slang". As anyone who has listened to Rap music will appreciate, much of the content of this dictionary is given over to alternative names for criminal acts and weaponry. Here are a few of the new words and phrases which have recently been added.

Catch a case, B-coat, the Rucker, street sweeper, crunk juice, Vancity, 250, hill city, slanguage, hit a lick, Rom-Town, D.E.C., The Game, tipsy, cop, run with, joint, deep cover, wiz, contact, QC.

How many did you know?

After browsing through the pages, making frequent use of the "Random Page" button, I now understand lots more of the songs I have heard over the years.

The second Dictionary I found recently is the OEDILF or Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form which has the added fun that every word listed must feature prominently in one of the poetic verses made famous by Edward Lear.

The best thing about both dictionaries is that they rely upon public submissions. If you think you know a great bit of street slang which is missing from the Rap Dictionary, or if you have been yearning to share one of your best limericks with the world, here is your chance to creatively add to the public lexicon.

Happy New Year

Ok, I realise that I am a tad late with my new year greetings, but I do have two very good reasons for being delayed. - Honest!

Firstly, on Boxing Day evening (that the 26th December for non-British readers) I went down with the most appalling bout of flu which had me confined to bed for most of the week. I even had to forego my planned New Year celebrations I was so ill - much to the displeasure of my friends.

Secondly, I had a total disk crash on my laptop and it has been away at IBM for a few days having its innards poked, replaced and tested. I just got it back today and spent most of the afternoon and evening re-installing all the software, watching Service Packs and updates download and finally recovering the backups of my data onto the new disk.

So, now we are both fit again, my computer and I will be diving back into the blogosphere with reslish. Stay tuned dear readers, and thanks for bearing with my during the intermission.

Resolutions

In the year 2005 I resolve to: Spend my summer vacation in cyberspace. Get your resolution here