While I was travelling home from our trip to Malaysia last month, I was struck again by what a disorganised pain in the botty it is to go through all those stages of ticketing / passport control / security checks / customs... especially when I found myself in a transit airport struggling to find my passport while at the same time removing my belt and putting all my bits and pieces on the security conveyor belt - then ten seconds later I had to struggle to find my boarding pass while at the same time holding up my trousers and trying to recover stuff from the *other* side of the same security belt.

I'd already gone through a similar rigmarole when I arrived in that airport a short while earlier. And before that it had happened when I'd left Malaysia.

So here's my manifesto for a set of improvements so global air travel stops driving all their passengers mad:

Read more...

It's been months with nothing to post (hmmm... actually my sister got married and we had some more France Telecom trouble - so that's a lie) but I was suddenly inspired to post a totally random thought:

I believe Craig Armstrong may have knowingly worked the theme tune for the Great Egg Race (nerdy science-based British TV game show from the late seventies / early eighties) into the (supposedly) romantic balcony scene of the nineties film version of Romeo and Juliet!

I was just listening to my Craig Armstrong CD here at work - and once again struck by the similarity between the swooping strings at the climax of the balcony scene music and the resonant piano chords at the end of the old TV theme.

So I found the theme music online and had a listen.

...

Now I could be wrong, but it seems to me that Mr. Armstrong may have been playing some kind of joke! A quick search shows I'm the only one that thinks this, though.

Perhaps I'll try putting clips on here some time (but I seem to be too lazy/busy to do any blogging these days, so don't count on it).

I just read that Yahoo! is going to close GeoCities...

Gaaahh!

I deliberately migrated my old university-based home page to GeoCities years ago... precisely because I thought it would be a site that stayed online for a long time! The idea was that wherever I was in the world, I could still get access to my bookmarks and a few pictures to show people.

Okay, it's true that since the coming of the blog and then MyOpera's automatic bookmark updating (handy on my phone, that one! ) I haven't been using the home page much any more - in fact for the last five or six years the GeoCities one has just been a redirect to a "local" copy of the home page on whichever server I have it - but even so it marks the passing of an era.

Looks like MyOpera will end up being my only place for keeping stuff now... let's hope Opera doesn't go tits-up in the near future!


On the other hand, for mail I have had almost exactly the opposite problem. I got locked into OperaMail when it used to be a very open service (no data limits, free SMTP and POP access, etc.) and decided to adopt it as my permanent address. I hate it when friends keep changing mail addresses - I have a couple with about ten different addresses next to their contact details! - so I vowed never to do the same.

Unfortunately for me, OperaMail then moved to a different provider (Outblaze) and the service was severely restricted (3MB mailbox, no POP or SMTP - webmail only). I found web-to-POP solutions, so I stuck with it. But unlike GeoCities - OperaMail seems totally frozen in time... destined to stay forever with draconian mail limits from the mid-nineties. Years after all the other services have gone up to multi-gigabyte-sized mailboxes, I still have a TOTAL(*) LIMIT of 3 MEGABYTES!!! (And I still have to run web-to-POP software to get the mail at home.)

(*) Which can be annoying when people complain that their single mail containing a 5MB movie clip didn't get through... not that I really want to receive huuuuge mails either, thinking about it.

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Cheer up! Spring is on the way... LET'S PARTY!"

Happy Feast of Steven, Mickelmas, Jul or whatever other North-European pre-Christian midwinter festival you choose to celebrate this year.