Entries from July 2002 ↓

I’ve just got a new battery in my Mickey Mouse watch.

The first place I tried couldn’t do it. They looked at the watch and told me it would cost �9.99 because I needed a lithium battery. A minute later they said that the watch would not be water resistant after they finished. Another minute after that they told me that they couldn’t get the back off the watch because it was unusually large. When I asked if they knew anyone else who could open it, they suggested another shop but added “our tool isn’t big enough, and we all use the same tool, so he probably won’t be able to open it either”.

So, I visited the other shop and, sure enough, he had exactly the same tool, but he had no problem opening the watch. For �4.50 he had the new battery fitted and the cover replaced in less than a minute, proving beyond a doubt that the size of your tool doesn’t matter; it’s what you do with it that counts.

Just like VHS and Windoze, Java is popular despite being inferior; but all three are useful and used because of their popularity.

Many great people use Java to develop great stuff: Lucene is absolutely amazing, and Freenet looks brilliant. Projects like Jakarta and GNU, and people like Stephen Ostermiller, are making my Java experience much more bearable.

I prefer forcing steam through finely-ground coffee beans.
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After Peru leading the way and some mumbling in the EU, it seems the UK has finally woken up and produced an Open Source policy. This is good news for everyone, even those who want to be locked into proprietary software.

Hopefully those of us who have been working with Free Software from before it was called Open Source will benefit.

I wish I could make my blog look good. Unfortunately, I don’t really have any artistic ability or colour coordination.

I’ve just bought some food for my reptiles: a bag of small locusts (there were no big ones left) for Chow Yun Fat-boy (aka Spike) the bearded dragon, and a nice big mouse for SCSI the corn snake.

Yesterday I watched a documentary about aquatic dinosaurs. One of the paleontologists was talking about part of Icthyosaur Park where the fossils of at least 14 icthyosaurs were found together. They went on to provide several theories to explain how and why these creatures were found together. They then mentioned an old (Native American) Indian legend about the nearby lake: it used to contain many enormous fish that all disappeared after something large hit it. Of course, the paleontologists immediately disregarded the legend since people didn’t evolve until many millions of years after the dinosaurs disappeared. If this is true, why do so many different cultures throughout the world have legends, and detailed descriptions, of dragons?

Karen has wanted a blog for a few months, but I only got around to installing MovableType today. It wasn’t difficult, so I should have done it weeks ago. Now that it’s working, I’ll let Karen play with all the templates and styles.