A Long Way Up

I recently went on a short holiday to the Isle of Man (specifically, Ramsey), and I decide to travel using public transport. The journey involved a bus from Minehead to Taunton, a train from Taunton to Lancaster, another train from Lancaster to Heysham, a ferry from Heysham to Douglas and finally a bus from Douglas to Ramsey. The entire journey takes around 13 hours. Now, I don't really mind that journey time, as I am used to it and I just spend the time reading, watching movies and playing games on my laptop, but when you take into consideration that for the same price I can get a flight from Bristol to somewhere in the south of Spain in a third of the time I feel that I'm being let down a bit.

Now, true I could get a flight from Bristol or Exeter to the island, which would take just under an hour, plus a couple of hours on a bus or 2, but then the price goes up from £105 return to £340 return including the buses and trains to get me to the train station and from the airport to Ramsey. Is there any real reason why the cost is so high? It isn't like they run the planes empty or anything, they are nearly always full.

However, as I have already said, I do use the time to some advantage - this time I caught up on some reading.

For the journey I usually pack a couple of books, else I end up finishing one and spending too much money on train food and this time was no different. My first read was a brilliant novel by the contemporary author Nick Hornby, entitled 'A Long Way Down'. This novel is simply superb, drawing you in to the sad, painful and eventually happy (well, happier) world of a group of suicidal Londoners. Not many books have made me feel happy, sad and also made me laugh and cry, but this one did. If you haven't already read it, you should go out and buy it (and all Nick Hornby's other books too, as they are all similarly excellent).

The other book I took was one I have read time and time again, and never gets old. It was the Red Dwarf Omnibus. Humorous and dark, it keeps you reading for hours, regardless of how many times you have read it before. Perfect for a long journey too, as it is 2 books in one and people don't think you are weird for reading it.

Well, that was a random post, but the main point is that if you don't have those books in your library, get them!

Bourne Free? or should that be Bourne again?

So, after having watched the concluding part of the Bourne Trilogy, I feel I am finally in a position to comment on it. So here it is:

When viewing most trilogies, I usually feel disappointed by the third installment. They always start out so strong, so full of life, action, ingenious new techniques and really suck you in, but slowly but surely the plot becomes boring, the 'new ' techniques become old hat and I end up feeling like they should have just stuck with one movie. An example of such a trilogy would be The Matrix or even The Fast and The Furious. The first of both are excellent and good (in that order, as I can honestly say that TF&TF was ok), but then you watch as the action becomes over the top in order to cover poor acting, poor scripting and too much emphasis on big effects.

However, when watching the Bourne trilogy, you don't get any of that. The storyline remains entrancing, the acting remains top notch and the directing gets the most out of each scene.

The storyline is based around Jason Bourne, an ex-CIA black-ops assassin who is suffering from amnesia following a botched operation. The story follow his struggle to regain his past. This monumental task is strewn with gun fights, explosions, car chases, love and loss.

I won't go into detail on the storyline of the movie, as you can simply go and watch it, but I will say that even if you don't normally go to the cinema, you should go and see this. The crystal clear sound effects, realistic special effects and adrenaline rush creating hand to hand combat should definitely be experienced on a big screen, with big speakers.

My only criticism of the entire trilogy is the overuse of contemporary camerashots more commonly seen in low budget Sky One feature length mini-series'. I would say this to any director or director of photography - steadicam was invented for a reason, as were dollies and tripods. Camera shake can be used effectively (just look at any good metal or rock music video) but using it in 80% of your scenes can be a bit much.

So, to conclude; America got this one right. I might even go so far as to say that I would look forward to more in the series, if the quality can be maintained.

From Sleek to Geek

I have finally got around to selling my iMac G5 which I bought in Nov 05. Although it still served its purpose and wasn't causing any problems with speed, I couldn't wait any longer else the value of it would have dropped too much and would have made it pointless to sell it.

So, instead of selling an olde computer for £150, I sold a reasonable computer for £450. It was snapped up on ebay for the Buy It Now price, much to my suprise - maybe it had something to do with me including a USB TV tuner and Command and Conquer Generals also. But anyway, I digress.

To replace this icon of stability I have decided that I am not paid enough to buy a new mac and am buying a PC instead. The ability to chop and change the generic parts makes it perfect, as I can upgrade it as I go, depending on my monthly financial situation.

My new box is now ordered and for the princely sum of £435 inc P&P I have grabbed myself an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300, with 1GB DDR2 667 RAM, a 250GB 7200RPM SATA2 HDD, in a stylish (but not annoyingly gamerfied) case, onboard Intel GMA 950 graphics (upgradable via PCI-E), an 18X DL Multiformat DVD writer and a 19" Widescreen HDTV/TFT screen. Not bad at all. Oh, and it comes with a 3 Year RTB warranty!

The next thing I shall be buying will be a new graphics card so I can play the new Command and Conquer game, followed by more RAM so I can experiment with Vista.

Now, if you'll notice, I have paid less for my new computer than I sold my old one for. Amazing isn't it? It is a shame that Apple machines still demand such a premium in the home market, because if they didn't, they would be unstoppable in my opinion. (eg. I didn't re-install OS X once in the 18 months I had my Mac, it crashed maybe once every couple of months and I had one hardware issue - with the mouse scroll ball).

technorati tags:PC, Mac, New, Price, Stability, Ebay

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Losing some of the weight!

It looks more and more like we will be moving forward with at least one room of thin clients at the school. The main product we like the look of is the Jack PC from ChipPC, an Israeli company that specialises in Thin Clients and their management. The management package for the JackPC's is called 'XCalibur' and it looks excellent compared to many.

In the mean time, before a decision is made, I have been tasked with creating a test setup using one of lesser used servers (moving its various programs to the other servers and dedicating it as a Terminal Server) and using 2X ThinServer to create a thin client network on our existing, aging, fat clients.

Once we have this set up and running it will be thrown at the kids to try out and we will then be able to tweak and play to see how it goes.

Fingers crossed eh?

And all that could have BeEN

I've been having a nose at the various 'BeOS' clones, redevelopements and spin off projects and wondering what we would have now on Mac's if Be had accepted the $200 million dollar offer for their OS? Of if Apple had bought Be?

OK, Steve Jobs might not be back at the helm of Apple but we'd still have a variation of BeOS!

However, things are looking up for fans of that quaint little OS as the various projects are steaming along and creating brilliant new ideas and bringing BeOS back to life.

If you fancy paying for a fully working (ish) modern version of the OS, head over to Zeta or if you fancy taking a look at a community driven open source copy, have a look at Haiku. Both are excellent and with a bit more work either will be ready for a general userbase.

This (rather young) BeOS fan can't wait!

Dealing with Geriatric computers

I was recently brought in an old laptop to fix for one of the school's staff - as a favour sort of thing. It turned out to be an old Pentium 1, 133Mhz with 32Mb of RAM and it was running Windows 98 SE. Now this caused me to have to think way back to when I last supported these sort of machines in anything more than a 'OMG you have a machine that old' manner. The thing was, after mentioning how old it was to the staff member, the response was 'it does the job just fine'.

It got me thinking, with the ever present push for faster, sleeker, more 'feature-rich' computers, are we forgetting the actual purpose of a computer? Being blinded by gimmicks and shiny features we will never use? Many will go to a shop and spend £1000 on a PC that they will only ever browse the web on and email their brother. Would we do the same for a car? Would we spend £10,000 on a car that we are only going to drive to the corner shop with? I doubt it.

It makes me think that there is a major gap in the PC market. This gap being a well structured second-hand/refurbished PC company. We have many little shops that sell the occasional pc, but no-one 'big' like PC World or Dell.

If this market were combined with an OS which is up to date, namely Linux, it would be an excellent way of getting computers into the homes of those who can't afford to go out and buy the latest and greatest.

Furthermore, it would be another way of reducing the environmental damage caused by old PC's. True, this company wouldn't provide CRT monitors as they use far too much electricity, but there are plenty of refurbished TFT's around from liquidating companies etc...

So, this is to one of you 'venture capitalist' types or someone with money to invest somehow. How about looking into this?

EduGeek Local Groups?

So, EduGeek.net has over 2300 registered users now, resulting in 2.2million hits in the last 3 months. This number has to be something close to the number of users on the national Linux User Groups lists I believe.

So, it is my idea to start up some local edugeek meetups/groups where those of us in an area can get together and engage in those extra-vocational tasks that we all enjoy, namely drinking, geeking and ranting.

For example, I know in the area I'm in there are at least 3 members of the site - and that is in one town! Expand that to the West Somerset and Taunton areas and we could be talking at least 10 or so. Plenty for a meetup!