Last weekend I was in Bristol for Bristolcon. Bristolcon is a great one-day convention, and I'd say the best one day con currently running. It's greatest strength is it's programme, Bristolcon runs two full programme streams, and you are quite often having to chose between to excellent items. For this reason, and despite it theoretically being in commuting distance I travelled there on the Friday before so I could hit the first item at 10am, which was "Seriously Inventive Ways Of Killing People", ably moderated by anne Lyle, despite sounding like she was losing her voice, and running though to "GSV Farewell, My Friend", a tribute to Iain M. Banks at the end of the main programme. The highlight item for me was the GoH interview with Mark Buckingham. I was familiar with his work from Marvelman, Hellblazer and Fables, but I'd never seen him at a con before so I had no expectations, but he is a seriously superb guest. Entertaining, enthusiastic, and a great interviewee. If I see him on a con programme again I'll be tagging his items as definites.
Apart from making an early start on the con prorgramme, the other reason for heading to Bristol the day before was so that I had some time to do a bit of sight-seeing and shopping. Bristol has such an excellent selection of indy shops & markets and, for when sustenance is required, great cafes. I was fairly restrained this trip, only bought 3 CDs (well, 1 CD, 1 double CD, 1 CD boxset), a BluRay, and a couple of 2nd hand books. I wanted to give the con dealers room a fair chance the next day.

The main new bit of sight-seeing for me was accidental. I was heading back in the direction of the con hotel and discovered the street art on Nelson Street. This is part of the See No Evil Street Art Project.

I took a few photos ( Street ArtCollapse )
I think I have taken more photos in Bristol than anywhere else this year. Back in August I was there for a house-warming, and spent some time Gromit hunting. I've a set of those I took on Flickr.

Since LJ seems to have had/is having another of its all too frequent periods of access problems. At some point I must look into adding some bling to this user, it looks quite desperately plain.

Household Management, a marvellous little story by Ellen Klages on Strange Horizons.
Only 2 days left on the Strange Horizons fund drive (see http://strangehorizons.com/fund_drives/2012/main.shtml), a site well worth supporting. They publish quality SF and Fantasy, available on-line for free, but paying their authors pro rates. They are not far off their initial funding target for the year, and I've just donated a few quid myself.

I really like my Kindle, it is robust, simple, a good basic dedicated e-reader, but I'm getting fed up of feeling like I'm dealing with a sleazy black-marketeer rather than a responsible retailer every time I buy an ebook from Amazon. What with the proprietary formats, tax avoidance, charging 20%/paying 3% VAT scam, squeezing the publishers, remote wiping books from Kindles, closing peoples accounts without explanation or appeal, the zombie Amazon storefronts , and so on, I'm thinking I should look for a less evil alternative.

With that in mind, the new Kobo Glo is looking like a nice alternative. This review on Engadget compares the hardware favourably to the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight and in a number of respects as good as or better than the similar Kindle Paperwhite. It has the advantage of being a tenner cheaper than the Kindle Paperwhite, and I already have a Kobo account from way back. My current Kindle (the recent non-touch basic model) is selling for about £50-60 on eBay so it could only cost £40-50 for the replacement, and while I can continue to read my Kindle books on my PC, phone & tablet with the relevant Kindle software, they could just as easily fall through my copy of Calibre and a few Python scripts and emerge as DRM-stripped EPUBs from the other end to be installed on a new e-reader.

Despite feeling perfectly fine on Sunday I now feel achey, headachey, have a forehead I could fry eggs on, and generally feel crap. Spent today working from home, though I have so few functioning brain cells my main contribution to productivity has been not going into the office and so not passing the lurgy on to my colleagues.
Bristolcon was excellent, a very good programme with very engaged and full audiences in almost every item, and very interesting programme participants. I traveled to Bristol on the Friday before and spent the afternoon shopping and sight-seeing. Found St.Nicholas Market almost by accident, and proceeded to buy a couple of second hand books, a couple of prints, chocolate, and had a late lunch of Pieminster chicken pie and mash. Thus fortified I headed to Rise records, one of my favorite record shows, with a brief stop in Fopp on the way, then across the road to Forbidden Planet. There was a definite Alphonse Mucha theme underlying the day. The chocolate was by Chocolate Amatller (70% Ghanaian) with a detail from an Art Nouveau picture on the pack with turned out to be from an Alphonse Mucha design done for the company in 1900 though I didn't know that until I googled the chocolate yesterday. Then I found some inexpensive A4 prints and bought one of a Mucha Bières de la Meuse poster, and the book bought in Fopp was a collection of Mucha art, which for only £6 was very reasonable. Rise was as good as ever despite having part of the shop closed for refurbishment, and as on my previous visit I ended up buying CDs I didn't even know existed but was very pleased to find. I was a lot more restrained in Forbidden Planet, but I knew I'd have a con dealers room to check out on the Saturday, so ended up getting just the latest issue of Fairest (the Fables spin-off with a new arc written by Lauren Beukes) and Hawkeye #3. Then back to Bristolcon where I dropped off my slot punch which was needed for the con badges, and helped carry a few boxes in from the car park, after which the bar called, and I ended up staying far too late, I think it was nearly 2am when I turned in, not so much driven by the lateness of the hour, but by having drunk too much Stella to be able to maintain a cogent argument about the influence of cyberpunk on Hollywood cinema.
The con itself ran very well. Even with just 2 streams I was nearly always having to choose between two interesting looking programme items. The dealers room was not large but I picked up some nice 2nd hand graphic novels, a couple of new indie comics and a book. One of the items I specifically want to mention was Anne Sudworth's GoH talk. That was really fascinating, she is not only interesting and charming, it was a real insight in to how she does her art. As she is also a guest at next year's Eastercon that will be an opportunity for people to see something they missed by not going to Bristolcon.
I didn't stay Saturday night, but left right after the closing ceremony, and came home a lot more heavily laden than I had set off.

Looks like Wokingham was a lot more Sci-Fi in 1962 than when I moved here a few years ago. This Pathe newsreel clip from 1962 visits a Space Age Hairdressers in Wokingham, Berkshire. The surprising thing is that the place shown is still a hairdressers, though with a different name and owner, see it here on Google Street View http://goo.gl/maps/bMWyC
There is a silent out-takes reel with a lot more views around the town on the British Pathe web site, http://www.britishpathe.com/video/out-takes-cuts-from-cp-405-reel-1-of-2-window, the Wokingham scenes are from 49 secs to 6 min 37 secs.
HT for link via Gavin Rothery's blog http://www.gavinrothery.com/my-blog/

To peteyoung and purplecthulhu. Have a great day!

Sad news.

Happy Birthday to del_c and jamesb. Have a great day guys!

My netbook is well over 3 years old now, and while it is still working, it is getting a bit flaky. Plus, I'm beginning to get bored with installing new operating systems on it. I've had over 10 on it, many flavours of Linux, Jolicloud, etc., but I have a spare laptop I can use for that purpose now. The netbook's 512MB memory is the main limitation, though I'm used to managing that, the graphics performance is very poor, it struggles with standard definition video, and the 5 hour battery life is only achieved by having a huge lump of a battery sticking out of it.
So I'm thinking of buying an iPad.
I had thought originally that I would buy an Android tablet as I've been very happy with my two Android phones (currently a Samsung Galaxy S II), but frankly they just haven't got there yet. Even with ICS the UI just does not appeal, and so few Android apps seem to have a decent tablet version. I want a tablet rather than another netbook, even though there are many netbooks available at low prices, as one of the key uses I'd like to make of it is reading comics, and that just doesn't work on a netbook. For watching videos the 9.7inch iPad screen gives about the same size images as my 8.9inch netbook due to the different screen ratio, and I've been happy enough with that on the netbook (though if there was an 11.6" 16:9 Android tablet on the market I would be tempted by that). The nicest Android tablet currently on sale that I like the look of the best is the Asus Transformer Prime TF201, and while nice, it appears to be riddled with too many flaws to justify the high price. So iPad it is, unless I want to wait another year. So which one? I don't really want or need a top end tablet. It is very much a secondary machine for me, and I can't justify spending what a high end one would cost, so a low to middling spec one is better for me. I'm thinking iPad 2, rather than "New iPad", and probably a 32GB or 64GB one as I'm likely to want to carry around a lot of video (though going small and getting a Seagate GoFlex Satellite wireless external disk is tempting).
Any advice or suggestions from iPad users out there?

Happy birthday to del_c!

I first read about the burger place #MEATEASY in the excellent London restaurant blog Cheese and Biscuits. #MEATEASY is a temporary venue in New Cross for the people who ran The Meatwagon, the Guerrilla Burger Van of Old London Town, "mobile purveyor of beefy heaven" as Cheese and Biscuits called them. I'd wanted to visit it on one of my all too infrequent trips into London these days, but when I had to start my diet, I thought that was just not going to happen. However, a few days ago, my latent superpower of self-serving rationalisation kicked in. I had the afternoon of the April Tun booked off as leave, mostly so I wouldn't ending up working late and missing it as has happened all to depressingly often. A quarter pound cheeseburger, I told myself, was about 600 calories, and at my weight, walking at 3 miles per hour, I'd burn about 100 calories per mile. All I had to do was walk to #MEATEASY from six miles away, and I'd have pre-burnt the calories to eat there. ( travelogue with picturesCollapse )

I need to do this on a box which currently has neither. Which would be easier, XP then Ubuntu, or Ubuntu then XP? If it makes a difference, Ubuntu will be the long term primary OS. It's ages since I've built a dual boot box, and I don't have time to experiment.

1952 Onward (all marks)
( Big cover picCollapse )
I don't strictly speaking one of these but...