In honour of the anniversary of the first moon landing, Google have taken their Google Maps system and loaded in some of the surface of the moon to make Google Moon.
Having said that, they also reveal a long kept secret about our nearest celestial neighbour – just zoom right in to the surface and see!
After the frustration with trying to find a replacement battery for our old digital camera, and discovering that Sony no longer made the relevant battery, I thought I’d get ahead of the game, and buy some suitable extra batteries for our new camera in advance.
Looking through Amazon I found the Fujifilm NH-10 Rechargeable Battery for FinePix A310 & E Series, which was also listed on the FujiFilm site as a replacement battery for the camera.
It turned up today, and whilst the site is absolutely right, it is compatible with the camera, it just isn’t compatible with the charger that came with the camera. The only way to charge it is to pay out another £42 for a special docking cradle that will allow the camera to charge the battery. You can’t even charge it in the camera using the normal AC power supply – only the docking cradle will do.
What is even more annoying is that the supplied charger is actually perfectly capable of charging the two cells that make up the NH-10, it’s just that some bright spark has decided to supply the two batteries in a double casing that binds the two separate AA cells together, and since the charger requires the cells in one arrangement and the camera in another it’s not possible to charge the cells in the camera’s charger.
Some crazy design idea, or cynical marketing ploy? I wonder!
I came across an interesting article, written by Will Shipley, who created both Omniweb, a leading Mac browser, and more recently Delicious Library, a very impressive bit of software for keeping track of your CD and DVD collections.
The general gist of the presentation, given to students at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference is that you are more likely to make your fourtune in the Mac market because although the market is significantly smaller, there are also a lot fewer Mac developers around, as he says in the slides:
“Doing what ‘everyone else’ is doing is the surest route to failure.�
It is worth noting at this point that he claims that purely by word of mouth, Delicious Library made $54,000 profit on the first day.
Anyway, the slides are quite amusing, providing quite a good discussion starter on their own, and that’s before we get to his ‘recreation’ of the presentation for a podcast!
We were up early this morning for two reasons – firstly Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was released, so Beth was waiting for the postman with her copy from Amazon, but secondly because we had to pick up the coach to go to Rev Joan’s licensing as Priest in Charge of St Cadoc’s in Raglan, Wales.
We were by far the youngest people on the coach, however after my busy week I didn’t much fancy the two hour drive to Wales. However it did prove to be quite fun. The first interesting bit aside from the slightly bizarre route the driver chose to get to the M4, was when on arriving in Wales we were pulled over by the Police! It turned out to be part of a regular programme to check the roadworthiness of coaches, so we got an impromptu stop at a service area whilst the inspector went round and checked the tyres, the emergency door and so on. However it didn’t delay us too much, so we arrived at Raglan in time to get drinks at the Vicarage.
The Vicarage is a relatively modern building, arranged with the living rooms on the top floor, and the bedrooms below, to take advantage of the views. Whilst the church itself sits at a main crossroads in the village, the Vicarage is hidden away round the back of some older cottages.
After the drinks, I took a look in the church building, before it filled up with people, and then us together with all the other visitors went to the local hotel, opposite the church for lunch. Lunch was a large hot buffet, and was held in the function room which was swelteringly hot. However it was a good chance to chat to the various people who had come along.
The service itself went pretty well, and the small group from St James Choir who went along to sing got loads of compliments, however I guess it must have been pretty intimidating for the local choir to have us roll up. Bishop Dominic, now Bishop of Monmouth, but who used to be our Bishop in Reading preached a cracking sermon, which pulled no punches at all – he told the congregation that Rev Joan had been employed to grow the church, not to be like a chaplain in a hospice! He also said that they should be willing to put up with new services and forms of worship that they may not like, but that would bring in people from outside.
After the service we had another party, again with more food, before we rolled out to the coach for our trip home.
All in all I think we gave Rev Joan a good send off – hopefully she’ll do well and be very happy in her new parish. We should be able to keep up to date with how things are going though, as Hugh, her husband is carrying on working at his current job around here, so will still be seen around Finchampstead.
There is a selection of the pictures I took during the day in our photo galleries.
With the recent announcment by IBM of new G5 dual core chips, easily comparable with what Intel can produce, the whole Apple/Intel deal now seems somewhat strange. However in his latest column, Robert X Cringely gives some opinions as to quite what is going on, speculating that this is part of a bigger picture, moving towards the regularly denied video iPod.
An article well worth reading.