Apparently you’ll live to 102 if you take enough acid.
Is it just me or have the last few weeks been really bad for important people dying – Lorentz (the chaos theory guy) died while I was in New York and various other people have vanished recently. What’s going on?

I’m not generally into cute cat stuff but this is priceless – Some couple have been getting huge water bills for months and when he stays home sick one day he finds the cat has been flushing the toilet continuously the whole day – far fetched but there’s a video. Even if it’s faked the cat is amazingly well trained.

I’ve been watching the Microsoft bid for Yahoo with some interest – one aspect of which is how Yahoo seem to be able to ignore the whole thing. Well Marc Andreesen seems to have been wondering some of what I was but he’s able to ask very smart lawyers to explain it all to him. His summary is really lucid and useful in understanding not only this transaction but is a nice overview of the space (also Marc’s blog is great – it’s something you should be reading)

I’ve had my air for about 10 days now and have been using it as my primary machine all along. Like some famous people I’d been using a 5 year old powerbook up to now. It was showing it’s ago a little with the CD drive slot slightly bent making inserting CDs a mild hassle – it was also slowing down as time went by and one of the memory slots had died many years earlier. Nonetheless this was my only machine for all this time and it was fairly fabulous. Only in the past 6 months had I run into some programs that I wanted which were available only in Intel versions. Also some newer video seemed to strain the poor PowerPC processor to it’s limits. I’d been convincing myself I needed a new notebook anyway when Steve announced the air at Macworld recently. I rushed to the apple store to check it out and it was wonderful. Light, quick, light, solid, light. Did I mention light?
Now many people have complained that it’s too slow – however for me this was a significant speed upgrade – in addition, I mostly need something that keeps about 60 tabs open in Safari and runs Word well. I’m happy to report the air does both with aplomb. The lack of ports is obviously the other thing people are unhappy about but I’m happy to report you shouldn’t care – I use exactly one port on my powerbook – the USB port which connects everything I own. The air’s USB port is a little fiddly and stiff but otherwise perfect. My camera, iPhone, iPod and foam missile launcher all work perfectly.
Then there’s battery life – I’m getting around 3.5 hours but I’m on wireless 100% of the time.
Finally I get to the lightness – This thing is basically irrelevant in a bag – I have a paper notebook which takes up more space and weighs more than this – I’m actually considering buying a new bag since the one I have is now to light to actually carry about – it doesn’t hang on my shoulder properly and feels like it might slip off. Really you won’t notice you have a computer with you at all.
So far so good – now what went wrong?
Apple’s greatest product is the migration assistant – you’ll only run this 3 times in your life but everytime will be like magic. When you buy a new Mac it asks you if you happen to have an old one lying about and if you’d like to transfer over all the information and applications? You poke about with some cables and press a few buttons and then wait for 2 hours. Then your new Mac is your old Mac – that’s it. Down to the auto-form-filling entries and cached web pages everything is there and works.
Migration assistant failed me miserably here. You have to install some magic software on your old Mac because you need to migrate over the network and not via cables (no ports on the air remember) but while the two machines claim to find each other the magic never happens. Scratching about I found a few other souls who’d tried the combination of the powerbook and the Air and had this fail. Seemingly there is no cure aside from drastic upgrades and possibly tromboning via time capsule. I wasn’t prepared to try this so I went medieval – I copied most of the files over by hand and moved selected applications and their settings directories – amazingly it almost all worked – I had to:

• Pop my password back into iTunes to get my music working
• Enter some licience details from Omnigraffle and Omnioutliner as well as taskpaper
• Re-install ncftp
• Choose a new VNC client – chicken of the VNC works for me but the old one didn’t like leopard
• Couldn’t get my ssh keys working as I discovered I’d forgotten my passphrase – still wondering if I simply re-generate them or somehow get the ssh-agent working again

That was about it – aside from the copying I figure that I spent about 2 hours getting this stuff working. I still occasionally find the odd thing that doesn’t work (I still need to re-install Erlang, Haskell and Prolog for example) but mostly all is good.
Using the thing is wonderful as well – it’s solid feeling and doesn’t flex and sits well on my lap or a desk. I’m now using it every day and am perfectly happy.

One of the great things about living in the centre of London is that events come to you instead of the other way around. Last week it was the turn of the Olympic torch to pass along Hyde Park and beneath my balcony. This is the torch being handed off a few moments after someone rushed into the street and tried to grab it.
About an hour before anything started happening the Tibet protesters and the police started to gather. There were an extraordinary number of police – I saw at least a hundred just in my small stretch of road. Though the Tibet people were noisy and somewhat rowdy, there seemed to be a basic sort of detente going on – a few protesters even chatting to the cops during lulls in the noise.
Of course then the torch turned up. I saw 2 ‘incidents’ one of which made it on to the front page of the Times. From the photos it looked quite dramatic but in reality a guy charged through the relatively sparse police lines (they weren’t standing close enough to link arms), immediately tripped and fell into the path the Chinese ‘bodyguards’ running with the torch and was then bundled off by 4 or 5 cops. Someone also tried to put the torch out with a supersoaker water pistol and the police seemed to react to this but given it was from about 10 feet away and it had been snowing pretty consistently the entire morning I’m not sure how serious an attempt this was.
As usual, this was blown out of all proportion – though I’m not a fan of the police in general, they pretty much didn’t annoy anyone and took care of the disturbances pretty efficiently. The protesters were mostly well behaved and only a few took liberties.
I’m not really annoyed with either side here but I am annoyed with London, the government and the Chinese. Why was this stupid ritual being enacted and why did we deploy 2000 policemen on Sunday overtime to protect it? London’s budget for the Olympics has moved from £3bn to £12bn and no-one here wants the damn thing – when are we going to admit that this is a completely corrupt process and – more the point – no one cares about the stupid sports?

Weirdly it’s snowing in London – making a mockery of my ‘Spring is here’ prediction.

The first line of Northen Rock’s 2007 annual report
"2007 was a difficult and challenging year for Northern Rock"

The director of the Idaho Anti-Wolf Coalition, Ron Gillett, was charged with assaulting wolf advocate Lynne Stone.