Sun, Sapporo and silicon, or something
Feb. 10th, 2008 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenThese long weekends are rather agreeable. On Friday, I went to the Battersea Beer Festival, which was jolly pleasant, even though I spent a good third of my evening queueing to get in. Bumped into ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sblackery and friends and had a most enjoyable evening all round.
Which meant that getting up on Saturday morning to prepare forjamesb and Simoné's wedding was a little bit of a trial, but the early mornings are becoming a habit. As are early nights; it's just after 10pm, but I'm shattered and shortly off to bed. The wedding was good fun. Stef's Hard Stare to the crowd at the "does anyone know just reason why not" line brought the house down.
Then a slow trip to Docklands courtesy ofpmcmurray with Julie and Dave Lally, followed by a very pleasant lunch and evening of drinking and talking and dancing into the night in Bar 38 at West India Quay, a truly appalling dive of a place and the sort of designery winebar I normally go out of my way to avoid. Horribly overpriced, a poor selection of indifferent beer, and lousy loud and intrusive chart-type music until some rather chavvy gatecrashers persuaded the DJ (and I use that term loosely) to play some better, more indie/rocky stuff. Generally, a very fine day, though, and I wish the happy couple all possible luck and prosperity.
Today, I went uptown to meet withlostcarpark where we spent an enjoyable afternoon doing geeky touristy things like a trip on the London Eye - must have been about my fifth or sixth go! - icecreams in the sun, a stroll down Tottenham Court Road to lovingly fondle Asus EEE mini-notebooks - alas out of stock everywhere - and to the Apple Store to caress a MacBook Air.
Finally, a spot of dinner at Ramen Seto in Kingly Street, which I recommend - basic freshly-prepared Japanese food, not too expensive and totally un-corporate and un-marketed, compared to Wagamama. (Although I do still rather like Wagamama's food, I must confess, the trendiness and now near-ubiquity puts me off. My first day in my first job, I had lunch in the newly-opened first Waga in Bloomsbury, setting a completely unrealistic standard for London working lunches. We went there in part because Chinese founder and owner Alan Yau was an existing Micro Anvika client.)
A jolly fine weekend, all in all.
But back, as you might expect and with a sort of dreadful inevitability, to the geeking...
Oddly, I find the dead-basic £200 Eee a very appealing little device - half the weight and slimmer than my trusty and invaluable Psion Netbook, much more powerful and versatile, but much cheaper. The only thing it loses out on is the battery life: my nine-year-old Netbook gives me 10h use between charges, equating to about a week of use. The Eee gives about 2h: probably less than a day, so you must carry a charger. James and I both lust after one. I'd rather have a bigger screen - everyone would - and a bigger keyboard with a Centrally Located Input Tool (AKA a nipple-mouse or Trackpoint™, the red rubbery things IBM use) but it would do just fine as it is, thank-you very much.
The MacBook Air, on the other hand, I don't fancy at all. It's very clever and very pretty, skinny and light but somehow not as skinny or as light as I expected from the online media adulation. The keyboard is merely all right. There aren't enough ports and there's no expansion, and frankly, I don't want to sacrifice quite that much flexibility just for it to be thin and light. The big multitouch trackpad is nice but multitouch on desktop Mac OS X is somehow just a gimmick, whereas on the iPhone it's a transformative user interface.
It's also the price of six of the Asus machines. I'd much rather have an Eee and a thousand quid left over, ta.
If I did have a spare half a dozen grand, sure, I'd have a 15" MacBook Pro, a totally wasted MacPro as my desktop machine and a whacking great iMac as my front-room PC, TV and media box. But I don't, and somehow, I find more value in the fact that the assortment of kit I have got that actually fulfils these rôles cost me next to nothing: it's all second-hand, recycled or repurposed or rebuilt, and thus rather green and ecofriendly.
On the other hand, if I had large amounts of cash burning holes in my pocket, there are far more fun ways to spend it than on computers!
And now: bed. I have to be up for work in about 7 hours' time. Oh, dear...
sblackery and friends and had a most enjoyable evening all round.Which meant that getting up on Saturday morning to prepare for
jamesb and Simoné's wedding was a little bit of a trial, but the early mornings are becoming a habit. As are early nights; it's just after 10pm, but I'm shattered and shortly off to bed. The wedding was good fun. Stef's Hard Stare to the crowd at the "does anyone know just reason why not" line brought the house down.Then a slow trip to Docklands courtesy of
pmcmurray with Julie and Dave Lally, followed by a very pleasant lunch and evening of drinking and talking and dancing into the night in Bar 38 at West India Quay, a truly appalling dive of a place and the sort of designery winebar I normally go out of my way to avoid. Horribly overpriced, a poor selection of indifferent beer, and lousy loud and intrusive chart-type music until some rather chavvy gatecrashers persuaded the DJ (and I use that term loosely) to play some better, more indie/rocky stuff. Generally, a very fine day, though, and I wish the happy couple all possible luck and prosperity.Today, I went uptown to meet with
lostcarpark where we spent an enjoyable afternoon doing geeky touristy things like a trip on the London Eye - must have been about my fifth or sixth go! - icecreams in the sun, a stroll down Tottenham Court Road to lovingly fondle Asus EEE mini-notebooks - alas out of stock everywhere - and to the Apple Store to caress a MacBook Air. Finally, a spot of dinner at Ramen Seto in Kingly Street, which I recommend - basic freshly-prepared Japanese food, not too expensive and totally un-corporate and un-marketed, compared to Wagamama. (Although I do still rather like Wagamama's food, I must confess, the trendiness and now near-ubiquity puts me off. My first day in my first job, I had lunch in the newly-opened first Waga in Bloomsbury, setting a completely unrealistic standard for London working lunches. We went there in part because Chinese founder and owner Alan Yau was an existing Micro Anvika client.)
A jolly fine weekend, all in all.
But back, as you might expect and with a sort of dreadful inevitability, to the geeking...
Oddly, I find the dead-basic £200 Eee a very appealing little device - half the weight and slimmer than my trusty and invaluable Psion Netbook, much more powerful and versatile, but much cheaper. The only thing it loses out on is the battery life: my nine-year-old Netbook gives me 10h use between charges, equating to about a week of use. The Eee gives about 2h: probably less than a day, so you must carry a charger. James and I both lust after one. I'd rather have a bigger screen - everyone would - and a bigger keyboard with a Centrally Located Input Tool (AKA a nipple-mouse or Trackpoint™, the red rubbery things IBM use) but it would do just fine as it is, thank-you very much.
The MacBook Air, on the other hand, I don't fancy at all. It's very clever and very pretty, skinny and light but somehow not as skinny or as light as I expected from the online media adulation. The keyboard is merely all right. There aren't enough ports and there's no expansion, and frankly, I don't want to sacrifice quite that much flexibility just for it to be thin and light. The big multitouch trackpad is nice but multitouch on desktop Mac OS X is somehow just a gimmick, whereas on the iPhone it's a transformative user interface.
It's also the price of six of the Asus machines. I'd much rather have an Eee and a thousand quid left over, ta.
If I did have a spare half a dozen grand, sure, I'd have a 15" MacBook Pro, a totally wasted MacPro as my desktop machine and a whacking great iMac as my front-room PC, TV and media box. But I don't, and somehow, I find more value in the fact that the assortment of kit I have got that actually fulfils these rôles cost me next to nothing: it's all second-hand, recycled or repurposed or rebuilt, and thus rather green and ecofriendly.
On the other hand, if I had large amounts of cash burning holes in my pocket, there are far more fun ways to spend it than on computers!
And now: bed. I have to be up for work in about 7 hours' time. Oh, dear...
