Gary Gale

This week's trawl through what appeared on the interwebs and made it into my Delicious bookmarks.

• The march towards all things bacon flavoured continues unabated; now you can get bacon (and mint) flavoured, err, mints and that get-you-going-in-the-morning first cup of coffee can now be bacon flavoured as well. Where's this going to end?
• Mac OS X 10.6, AKA Snow Leopard, got officially released today. Some people rushed out, bought it and installed it. But as ever, there's some compatibility problems, not the least of which (for me at least) is that the Cisco VPN client may (or may not) work properly. It's also for Intel based Macs only so a lot of PowerPC based Mac owners are going to be sad.
• First reviews of the new Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy book, not written by Douglas Adams on account of him being dead, find it "not really funny" and "less a case of So Long And Thanks For All The Fish and more a case of So Long And Thanks For All The Money".
• #wherecamp, the geogeeks (un)conference of choice, is coming to Europe in the form of the aptly named #WhereCampEU. Naturally, I'll be there.
• While walking into Soho, I found one of London's lost streets right under my feet. Literally.
• And finally, real men don't rock their child to sleep, they write a shell script to do it for them.

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

No Snow Leopard for you with your PowerPC chip.

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

The Bakerloo Line is part suspended today due to engineering work which is due to last over the Bank Holiday weekend, so naturally everyone either piled onto the Waterloo & City Line or onto the Northern Line at Waterloo this morning.

And on the Northern Line, somewhere between Waterloo and Embankment and underneath the Thames it all got a bit cozy as we suffered the inevitable and inexplicable "Tube stops for no apparent reason".

tag: tube, underground, commute, london

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

A semi regular, almost weekly, trawl through the latest stuff on the interwebs bookmarked on Delicious.

• This fad for all things bacon flavoured is getting out of hand; a few weeks back it was bacon flavoured vodka and now you can get bacon flavoured lip balm.
• There's lots of geeks in the United Kingdom; now you can know where they are. I might be there as well.
• Someone posted the PIN number from your credit or debit card onto the interwebs.
• Twitter's popular these days; even the birds in the trees are RT'ing.
• If Ohio was a piano, ever wondered how it'd sound? Possibly the weirdest geo and mapping visualization. Ever.
• There's a spectrum from OMG to WTF, pasing through"I get it", "that's strange" and "I don't get it" along the way.
• And finally, UNIX turned 40. It's still younger than me though.

This week's selection of what I bookmarked on Delicious.

• Illustrating just how broken the mobile operator's customer support is, Rummble's CEO Andrew Scott details his 9 month battle with O2 after they refused to honour an agreed deal and MoanLog's Gaurav Patel details the extraordinary length that 3 went to so they didn't have to give out a PAC code to a customer.
• Twitter was brought down by a distributed denial of service attack; but some people survived thanks to a PostIt note.
• Chiswick Business Park knows how to speak to humans and to dogs.
• The world didn't end at 12:34:56 on 07/08/09; probably because it had already happened in July to the US.
• The Londoner and the geo geek in me took a trip down memory lane with a collection of London Underground Tube maps.
• And finally, thanks to MobilePress, vicchi.org went mobile.

More intriguing, interesting and just plain bonkers stuff from the information hose pipe we call the internet:

• Starting off with a serious note, Ed Parsons, my opposite number at Google, wrote a great blog post on the knots that data licensing can tie you up in and why you end up paying more for a leased digital version than you do for the physical paper version.
• WordPress started bugging me about an auto-saved version of a blog post I didn't want to keep but couldn't get rid of. Turns out there's no way to do this from the WordPress dashboard but some MySQL hackery did the trick.
• "I am, and am VERY badly affected by being in close proximity to WiFi and other microwave transmission sources. Not that I’d expect you or anyone else who isn’t adversely affected to believe me". The rest of the story on the Daily Telegraph blog is priceless.
• Ofcom confirmed what anyone with the UK ADSL line already knows, that the average UK broadband speed is just over half of what's being advertised and paid for.
• A US highway exit sign got every word misspelled, apart from the word "exit".
• Forget putting men on Mars or getting the Space Shuttle working; we put cheese into space, tracked it, lost it and found it again. Makes you proud to be British.
• Someone likes Nutella. A lot.
• And finally, if your iPhone gets a text message containing a single square character. Turn it off. Turn it off now.

This week's selection of what caught my eye on the interwebs:

• After managing to acquire garygale.com I put up a personal site on the domain and cut down the subdomain proliferation that vicchi.org had acquired over the years, retiring blog.vicchi.org and where.vicchi.org amongst others.
• There's no accounting for taste it seems and some people think it's cute to have a small plastic dog humping the USB port of your laptop.
• Flavoured vodka; I can understand lemon, orange, vanilla and even chilli versions but bacon flavoured vodka?
• Possibly the best sign ever; "unattended children will be fed espresso and given a puppy".
• In order to define recursion we must first define recursion; Google demonstrates the principle of recursion by offering to look up recursion when searching for recursion.
• Twitter corrected follower counts by deleting spammer's accounts; I lost 100 followers overnight and the twitter-sphere howled in anguish.