BB is in the Guardian today, with a short paragraph of penetrating insight on Beckham and United; actually much greater than the sum total of our football knowledge.

Currently reading: Bully for Brontosaurus by Stephen Jay Gould, now my other favourite author of readable intellectual discourse alongside Alain de Botton. The late Gould covers an astonishing array of genuinely interesting facts and sniffs out the fascinating, often wryly amusing stories behind them. One of them, and not even the most intriguing, is that apparently 30% of Americans still believe man and dinosaurs co-existed at some point in history. Well, they’ve seen them fighting on TV and in movies. It must be true, raht Cleetus? (2% probably think Jeff Goldblum killed the last one a few years ago, just before he fought off an alien invasion with a Powerbook.)

School Run

Sensitive teacher arrives at tough L.A. inner city state school and quickly realises that she will have to adopt some unconventional techniques to reach out to troubled pupils. Unfortunately, she is shot dead during the first maths lesson, after asking one of the younger boys to be quiet.

Barry Manilow took a wrong turn when getting out of bed and broke his nose by hitting the wall. In other rock news, Mick Jagger has suffered a split lip and Pete Townsend sprained his wrist.

I’ve installed so many open source software packages in my time, it’s frustrating when I occasionally come across one that isn’t built and running in five minutes. ./configure; make; make install What’s so hard about that? A monkey could do it (OK, an IT journalist would need some training).

Problem: you need to get an overall view of the performance of your Solaris servers. Something with pretty graphs. That doesn’t require hours of configuration, the installation of complex, insecure client-side agents and a significant overhead in data collection and handling.

Solution: nothing. But you can get close…

I’m putting this down here because it’s taken some non-trivial web searching to find an answer:

I needed to convert some audio files (alarms) from my Psion Series 3a to my spiffy new Series 5mx. PsiWin allegedly does this for you, except it didn’t in my case - probably because PsiWin is The Worst PDA Sync Software In Existence. (I haven’t tried all the rest but I find it hard to imagine anything less useful, unless Palm HotSync randomly corrupts files.) If you want to know why Psion is no longer a player in the PDA market, look to PsiWin.

Peter Gabriel, MEN Arena, 18th May 2003

The MEN Arena is filled with a cacophony of creaks and groans, as a large 30+ aged audience attempts gamely to cope with the worst seating this side of a new Virgin train. Playing the MEN demands a lot of a performer, chiefly the ability to keep peoples’ attention despite the crippling onset of arthritis in their knees and lower back. Still, the babysitters of Cheadle and Altrincham must have been doing well on Sunday night, to judge by the attendees at Peter Gabriel’s first UK show in ten years. Was that the reason so many left early, or was it to seek emergency osteopathy?

A contre-jour sort of day in Worcester. (I know all these fancy foreign terms.)

The 13th photo I took.