adoption curve dot net

Ben Hammersley’s phrase rather than mine, but oh, isn’t this a really really good idea. And it’s also a Mac-only thing. Which makes me gnash my teeth in frustration ‘cos I haven’t got (and don’t have much prospect of getting unless Santa is going to be really generous this year) a Mac, as well as making me wonder if there isn’t something brewing at the moment.

All the really innovative stuff at the moment seems to be either Mac-based, or open-source (or both). Time was that I used to think of Macs as “nice to look at, but what would I do for software?” – now it’s starting to look like it’s actually the other way around. There seems to be less and less reason for running Micro$oft platforms at the back-end, and less and less reason for running Windows as a front-end, if you’re prepared to accept the switch-hassle. While the tradeoff between Wintel and Mac was always loaded the Windows way, it’s starting to change – there’s only really Outlook that’s keeping me as an Office user, and everything else that I’m running on my laptop is available either open-source or as a Mac version. The time to switch could be upon me – and if it’s upon me, how many others are thinking the same way?

This being an old-numbered year, we’re off to the inlaws this Christmas. The highlight of the fortnight (for the kids at least) will be the latest evacuation of hobbity tosh that is Lord of the Rings on Christmas Eve – so this expose of “What Tolkein Really Said About Elf Sex” is topical. This is exactly the kind of reason why Tolkein is unsuitable for anyone over the age of 12, or in possession of more than one item of computing equipment.

Yesterday was the MBA graduation, so I spent the afternoon dressed in robes that made me look like an extra from the Hogwarts set prior to climbing onto the stage to get my certificate from the Vice-Chancellor. All of which means I’m now a graduate rather than a graduand, and it’s the end of the line as far as the MBA is concerned – that’s it, game over, finished, over and done with. It’s a bit bizarre to think of it like that – this has been such a major part of life for the last 15 months or so, and now it’s all over. And the only tangible sign is an A4 certificate and a photo of me dressed up.

Received this morning:

Hello,
This program worked for me. If you hate Spam like I do,
you owe it to your self to try this program, and forward
this email to all of your friends which also hate Spam or
as many people possible. Together lets help clear the
Internet of Spam!

STOP SPAM IN ITS TRACKS!

Needless to say, it was spam…

Hmm, Moveable Type seems to be complaining about pound signs. “Application failed during request deserialization”, so it says…

Let’s try again, this time without the pound…

The thought of the two upcoming weeks in V90-land was getting me twitchy (hey, I’ve got work to do!) so purely out of a sense of “not a hope in hell” I googled for wifi and Whitehaven. To my utter amazement, there’s not one but two hotspots. Both in pubs, both operated by The Cloud – slightly dodgy name, so it remains to be seen if they actually exist, but maybe the 21st century isn’t passing the town by at all. At GBP6 an hour (plus beer) it’ll be an extravagance, but then you get the impression that the prices are aimed at the desperate.

An interesting piece on Mobitopia about the now-ubiquitousness of wifi. As the piece said, it’s one of those things that I’m starting to take for granted – it just works. I’m sat here at the dining table with a 54g card blazing away, which has completely liberated the place I choose to work. Two years ago I’d be hiding in the back room, because that’s where the ethernet is.

But I’ve not really been concious of wandering around in an electromagnetic soup until fairly recently – while I was setting up the wap for the incubator, there was half-a-dozen or so signals I picked up while I was wandering around the hallways with Netstumbler, but even though we were living in an apartment block in the centre of Leeds, there was never even so much as a sniff of any other signals. Now we’re in York, next door have obviously just bought an access point, because I was cursing the settings having picked up a strange IP address when I suddenly realised that it wasn’t my access point I was locking on to.

Presumably anyone sitting on the bench in the park outside would also be able to pick up both of our signals – part of me says quick, bolt it down, but then the other half says help yourself. It could come in useful next summer, assuming we’re still here – I quite fancy the idea of working out on the balcony once the weather gets warmer…