Status-Q

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Richard Wachman's article has some interesting facts about US/UK business relationships. I was surprised to discover that, in some ways, the relationship is rather well-balanced:

• The US/UK investment relationship is worth $376bn, split almost equally between the countries
• One million Britons are employed by US companies in the UK and about a million Americans are employed by UK companies in the US

Of course, if you think of these in proportion to the countries' sizes, they aren't quite so balanced...

My friend C.D., who told me about Britney, has been in touch again. Perhaps knowing about my failed attempts at dieting, she points out that 'Quentin Stafford-Fraser' is an anagram of

Feasters ain't fun for Dr. Q.

[Original Link] Things to do when the boss is away

Here's an example: I had spent my life completely unaware, until a friend pointed it out last week, of the fact that "Britney Spears" is an anagram of "Presbyterian".

[Original Link] An intriguing concept. Can't decide whether I also find it disturbing..

Sir Walter Elliott, in Jane Austen's Persuasion, likes nothing better than to look himself up in the Baronetage and trace his family line. Those of us who have unusual surnames but somehow missed out on being part of the landed gentry, now have a modern equivalent of Sir Walter's pastime.

Amazon is putting the entire text of a substantial portion of its books into its search engine, which means that you can find books based not just on what's on the cover, but on what's inside. And so it was that this morning I did a search for 'Stafford-Fraser' and discovered that, amongst other places, there is a brief reference to me in Frederick S. Lane's book Obscene Profits: Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age

Somehow, I don't think Sir Walter would be impressed.

[Original Link] Mark Pilgrim has a pretty thorough list of the main user-interface changes in Panther.

All the major political parties here are concerned about the fact that fewer and fewer young people are involved or interested in politics. I think this is inevitable. As most political extremes collapse towards the centre, we may end up with more stable ways to govern the country, but it's hardly the thing to excite young minds. Teenagers want protests to take part in, causes to fight for, rogues to be outraged at. They don't want anything middle-of-the-road.

Who was it who said, "If you're not a communist before you're thirty, you haven't got a heart. If you're still a communist after you're thirty, you haven't got a brain." ?

[Original Link] John Naughton on Microsoft Office 2003.

Today Apple released the new version of their operating system, Mac OS X 10.3, more commonly known as Panther.

Actually, they released it yesterday at 8pm, and when I woke up this morning a friend of mine was still online in Seattle (1am their time) after the big gathering of 'hundreds' for the launch at the local Apple store.

Here, in contrast, our local Apple dealer closed at 5.30pm yesterday, so we had to wait until this morning to get a copy. And they only had 25. It would have been much too nerdy to be seen actually waiting at the door when they opened, so I sauntered in at a much more laid-back five minutes past the hour, and one of those 25 copies is now mine.

I also treated my elderly PowerBook to a new hard disk (so I could do drastic things without destroying my chance of returning to safety) and so I have a completely fresh install of Panther. I copied my applications, documents, some preferences etc into it from a backup on an external firewire drive, and so far it's all going very nicely.

Like 10.2, this is not a very major overhaul from the appearances point of view, but there are small improvements to almost everything which make the cost (100 UKP) definitely worthwhile for me. The big changes are well documented elsewhere; the main benefit I've seen so far is the much better integration with a Windows network, and with remote servers. I can browse the 'network neighbourhood', can print to the Deskjet connected to Rose's Windows machine, and can interact much more seamlessly with remote WebDAV and FTP servers.

And the 'Exposé' feature is lovely too.