Microsoft and Internet Explorer

Dvorak has some interesting things to say about The Great Microsoft Blunder

Apple kernels

Some interesting speculation on where Apple might be heading - a native Win32 API implementation in a new kernel? One can sure see how this would piss off Microsoft. Customers would be delighted, of course.

Lisa E8

Lisa Rands recently climbed 'Gaia' (E8), Johnny Dawes' Black Rocks grit masterpiece. You may recall the heart-stopping opening sequence from the film 'Hard Grit', where JMTT falls from the top of it and is very lucky to walk away reasonably unscathed. That's Lisa's second E8 after the other JD masterpiece, 'End of the Affair' at Curbar. She's the only woman in the world operating at this level on God's own rock.

Chris & Nana

St Anton 05 042
Originally uploaded by hvs.

Vara vanner Chris och Nana ska gifta sig! Chris tog modet till sig och friade pa ett Walesiskt berg under en MTB-tripp. Vi ar overlyckliga for dem - vara varmaste gratulationer!

Manchester Passion

Tim Booth as Jesus doing Joy Division's 'Love Will Tear Us Apart'? Brilliant. Followed by Smith's 'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now'. Genius.

The Gospel According to Madchester.

Ship to billing address only

For some incomprehensible reason, certain on-line retailers appear to have started to only ship to the billing address. This is supposedly due to some security concerns. To me, this makes on-line shipping worse than useless. If I have to take a day off work, hypothetically speaking, to sit and wait for a delivery specified as 'between 8am and 6pm' the cost to me can easily double, and negates the convenience of on-line shopping. If I can't take the time off, I have to go to some central depot to collect the item myself.

If that's the case, I'd rather take the day off, go to town and visit actual shops, handle the merchandise and shop the traditional way. The attraction of on-line shopping is that one can have the product sent to wherever one happens to be.

Look, eXpansys, Dabs, Watford Electronics etc etc -- can you really afford to reject custom like this?

EFR

Today we completed an EFR course - Emergency First Response. This is a jazzed up (or dumbed down, depending on your viewpoint) first aid qualification, designed by PADI primarily to be able to do their own first aid courses which form a prerequisite for certain dive qualifications. We intend to take the Rescue Diver course whilst we're out in Sweden for six months.

I've done first aid courses before, notably through my 'military' service many, many years ago. Just like with any other skill you don't maintain or use, it fades quickly. CPR has been simplified a lot from back in those days. Many people, even those who are trained to give CPR, frequently hesitate in a sharp situation, afraid that they will not get it right and make the situation worse, rather than better. Our instructor reinforced the point that if someone's suffering a cardiac arrest, they're tecnically dead, or 'in the worst possible state of health'. Whatever you do, you can only make the situation better. You can't be deader than dead. Imperfect CPR is infinitely better than perfect CPR witheld.

Lafaille

The Observer recently published an excellent article on the life and death of Jean-Christoph Lafaille.

A truly inspirational character, and the mountaineering world is a lesser place without him.

Jump

Just witnessed Paul Anka do a 'swing' version of Van Halen's 'Jump' on Parkinson.

Very disturbing. Aren't there laws against this sort of thing?

Walk like an Egyptian

Saw the nice people at Fracture Clinic again yesterday. The consesus is that my leg wasn't broken. Probably. Either way, I'm free to walk, if I can. Basically, the general idea is that if it hurts when I do 'this', don't do it. I can sort of walk without crutches, in a slow, hobbling kind of way, and the doctor guesstimated that it would probably be at least a month before I can start trying to run again. Nevermind.

I got a new laptop, by the way. As a die-hard Microsoft free Zone, I've taken the plunge and got a wintel machine. Why? Well, after a few days of aquainting myself with the machine, I ask myself the same question. Don't get me wrong, the machine itself is a model of lovliness as all Sonys tend to be, but compared to the sleek, good looking efficiency of Apple's OS/X, or the industrial bullet-proofness of Solaris or the clean minimalist lines of FreeBSD, Microsoft's latest OS is just dire. Just dreadful. Why do people accept such brokenness in software that they would never dream of accepting in other engineering disciplins? Of course, I used windows at work for a long time, as a developer when I was forced to, but I had hoped that as a home machine it would be acceptable, but it just isn't.

I can live with its ugliness. I can probably learn to cope with its long-windedness in getting anything set up, and the constant reboots (why in this day and age of modular kernels do people accept this?). Possibly, I can overlook the constant 'handholding', the 'are you sure' and 'do you know what you are doing' pop-ups. What I can't live with are the little broken details, how things just not quite want to play together. Why do I need a mega-application (Norton Internet Security came pre-installed) just to stop the box from getting hacked, 0wn3d or overrun by spyware? Well, *I* don't, as I know how to secure a machine, primarily by not using any application written by Microsoft, ever. Why should one trust a software company that expects you to run a 'live update' such that they can install a constant stream of patches to correct bugs and software insecurities?

I'm itching to put a proper OS on this box.