I managed to catch a film I’ve been meaning to see for sometime on a flight to Orlando, that being Rendition (IMDB here).  The film certainly lived up to expectation, with a fine performance by Jake Gyllenhaal, and brilliantly muted Reese Witherspoon.  The heart of the story is the question of whether Rendition achieves anything?  As Douglass (Gyllenhaal) says in thevfilm : In all the years you’ve been doing this, how often can you say that we’ve produced truly legitimate intelligence? Once? Twice? Ten times? Give me a statistic; give me a number. Give me a pie chart, I love pie charts. Anything, anything that outweighs the fact that if you torture one person you create ten, a hundred, a thousand new enemies. 

Recommended viewing.

A number of Eddie Izzard sketches have been hilariously animated using Lego and posted on You Tube, Cake or Death …

You Tube also animations for several other Izzard sketches.

Whilst reading Rob Sheffield’s Love Is A Mix Tape, I came across this rather cool quote…

The self is a cloister of remembered sounds.

Wallace Stevens

Glamis Castle

Over the weekend I had a bit of a sort out in our office at home and found slides that I had neither scanned or properly filed away. So yesterday I started to scan them and found some lovely pictures I’d taken of places such as Glamis Castle in Scotland (the childhood home of Queen Elizabeth II).

I’ll be adding more pictures as I slowly work my way through scanning the slides. To see more visit our Flickr site – http://photos.mp3monster.org

I’ve not blogged for the last week or so, as I’ve been immersed in organising and seeing to SeeWhy’s office move from the centre of Windsor to a new better location a couple of miles further out from town.  The move has gone near flawlessly thanks to the help of Richard (http://www.redxr.com), and a result our IT network has gone from an inherited patch-up job to a very maintainable, structured solution with expansion capacity and taking advantage of all our resources properly.

So you can see some of the lovely surroundings – the offices are slightly to the left and down of the arrow (try zooming in the image is very well detailed). I also have some photos here.
View Larger Map

, satellite, images

The brilliantly funny and hugely intelligent Stephen Fry has started to publish a blog (http://stephenfry.com/blog/).  Like Stephen’s other work it is both very observant and literate at a level that makes me feel like a monkey bashing a keyboard.

Stephen’s latest blog (Getting Overheated) entry looks at recent event that occurred whilst filming in America, and from that to the arguments for and against global warming. It is brilliantly reduced to a single point – regardless of which side you fall, are you prepared to gamble the current global climate and the possible risks of climate change to be able to say – told you so? If the climate change predicators are wrong, well egg on face, and we may have made our fossil fuels last a bit longer. If they’re right, well we’re all still here along with hopefully a few other species as well.

Engadget are reporting (Virtual Palm OS on your Nokia N-Series tablet — hoozah! – Engadget) that a Virtual Machine of the Palm OS developed by Access is available to run on a Nokia 770 and later.  As a free solution, this is great news as it will allow the tablet to be to move closer the the PDA role many want to use their N770 for (there is personal organiser software out there but the Palm OS offers a lot more in terms of Windows integration) as well as a lot of robust product standard solution software.

The question has to be, what is the price of the Virtual Machine in terms of performance overhead.

If the usability and performance of the virtual machine is good then this can only help Nokia try and poach more Palm OS users to the N series.

We may not achieve transcendence through computation, but we will keep ourselves out of the gutter with them. What you perceive of as a vacuum is an earthy paradise – the freedom to, quite literally, line-by-line, prevent humanity from going nonlinear.

Douglas Coupland – Micro-serfs