Status-Q

Arty photo du jour...

It's just fabulous here.

I'm sitting at a departure gate at Stansted airport, where my flight is delayed "due to the late arrival of the incoming aircraft". I love the way they say that, as if it excuses everything. I couldn't help laughing as RyanAir announced just now that another flight will have "an on-time departure". Definitely worthy of announcement!

The best bit, though, was as I walked past another gate where the last remaining passenger was asked in no uncertain terms to "make himself known at gate 45 immediately". A couple of people called out "I'm Spartacus!", "No, I'm Spartacus"...

I've long been a fan of Garrison Keillor's, and so was delighted to discover that the News from Lake Wobegon, a regular part of his Prairie Home Companion radio show, is now available as a podcast.

Wonderful stuff.

In May I was in Sydney, and had dinner at the revolving restaurant at the top of the Centrepoint tower. The food was not bad. The view was spectacular. I took a few photos, some of which were a bit blurry and most of which had some reflections from inside the restaurant, but with the help of Photoshop I managed to blend three roughish images together to get this. It's reasonably high resolution, if you want to click it and see the other sizes on Flickr.

Michael and I got a couple of new toys for the Ndiyo office. We took them out of the box and plugged them in, ran some of our experimental software, and they just worked.

So we decided to point a camcorder at them and make a little movie...

We're biased, of course, but we think this is quite cool.

A little over a month ago I visited the Starbucks in the Forbidden City in Beijing. I was mildly embarrassed about doing so, but it was, a local friend had told me beforehand, 'a godsend'. So I thought I could go proudly, celebrating the success of the free market over the surrounding communism... And so I paid standard global Starbucks prices for my cup of coffee. The following day, my friend and I had a delicious meal for two, with large Tsing Tao beers, at an (admittedly very primitive) back-street cafe, for substantially less than one of my cups of coffee. OK, I admit it - I had two. And they were, indeed, a godsend. And now it's gone. It was, actually, very discreet; I had a hard time finding it and I knew it was there. But even that was too much, apparently; everything in Beijing is being 'tidied up' in preparation for the Olympics and I guess this may have been a casualty.

But frankly, for any country, hosting the Olympics seems like a much bigger folly to me than hosting Starbucks...

"Four students will be grouped together to perform the waltz and they will change partners regularly as soon as one song finishes. This way, the risk of young love will be lowered."

BBC story here.

In case anyone else is Googling for this...

Nokia have released the Nokia Media Transfer app which allows Mac users to copy media to their phones conveniently. Only certain phones are supported at present, but a few more than they let on... If you have an E-series Nokia it may be worth trying.

Basically, you install the application, let it search for your phone, and if it sees it but says it isn't supported, then quit the app and see if you can find a 'profile' file for your device here. Put it in /Library/Application Support/Nokia Media Transfer/Profiles and then remove anything in your ~/Library/Application Support/Nokia Media Transfer/ folder. Restart the application and you should find your phone is supported.

More info in this thread. Many thanks to all concerned- it works on my E61.

Today I spoke to a friend in Seattle who, I discover, has an iPhone. I heard it ringing in the background. That's about as close as we get to the action from here.

The somewhat embarrassingly geeky bit of this story is that I was able to recognise it as an iPhone ringtone even though I've never even actually seen one...