Status-Q

I keep most of my email, except for spam and obviously temporary stuff. And I’m fairly careful about removing myself from mailing lists whenever possible.

But I notice that my IMAP server is currently storing just under 57,000 of my past messages. That’s over 9 years, so the average is only 17 per day that I’ve kept. It still seems like a big number, though!

I’ve been thinking about and experimenting with various backup options recently, seeking the One True Backup Solution. In my search for enlightenment I came across a rather nice site called The Tao of Backup.

Many of my readers, I know, have been good enough to read Rose’s novel, The Blackstone Key, and I suppose it would be terribly churlish to suggest that it might make a good Christmas present for somebody, so I shall avoid doing so.

I have had fun revamping Rose’s web site over the last few weekends, though, and those of you who enjoyed the story might be interested in the first batch of historical facts that we’ve added to the site, which give a little more background to the novel – you can find them on the left hand side of the book’s page under ‘The world of The Blackstone Key‘. More to come…

You might also be interested to know that the sequel, The Counterfeit Guest, will hit UK shelves three months from today (at about the same time as the paperback of the first book). Both are available to pre-order from Amazon.

My friend David MacKay gave a splendid lecture this evening to mark the publication of his book, Sustainable Energy – without the hot air.

Many years in the making, this is a masterpiece: beautifully produced, thoroughly researched, and intelligently presented. I suspect it will become required reading for anyone really interested in the topic of sustainable energy: how to generate it, and how to use less of it. And yet it lives up to its name, being delightfully un-stuffy.

David is more interested in spreading sense than in making money, and you can download the book for free if wanted from withouthotair.com. Almost all of the materials are under a Creative Commons licence and he’s made high-resolution versions of most of the figures available on the web site.

But I recommend buying it: the book itself is very aesthetically pleasing, and could make a good Christmas present.

Rose and I are off to Paris for a short break in a few weeks’ time, an easier trip these days since the Eurostar train now departs from St Pancras station.

And this led me to wonder who this Pancras chap actually was? Well, the story goes that he was beheaded by the Romans at the age of 14 for refusing to make a sacrifice to the Roman gods. Pictures like this one show a rather mature 14-year-old, I think, and the story has been embellished over the centuries, with later versions having him thrown to the wild beasts in the arena. But none the less, he lost his head, and various other bits of him are supposed, eventually, to have made their way to England, which is why we have various things named after him, like a railway… errm… terminal.

I was amused by the line in the Wikipedia article that said:

Pancras is normally invoked against cramp, false witness, headache, and perjury.

Why cramp, I wonder?

That he found a cure for headaches, though, that I can believe.

Our dear chancellor has decided to reduce VAT from 17.5% to 15%. This means that every business in the land has to reconfigure their billing systems, check the dates of their invoices rather carefully, and (in many cases) reprint lots of documentation to change their advertised prices.

In exchange, they’ll will benefit from the wild shopping spree that can be expected when things costing £99 drop to a bargain £97! The queues of people in sleeping bags outside the department stores, waiting for opening time on Monday morning, will make all the changes worthwhile, and no doubt we will still be rejoicing in a year’s time, when we have to change everything back again.

Actually, that’s probably when the shopping crowds will turn out: the day before the prices go back up again, 13 months from now, in the post-Christmas sales at the end of 2009. I’m not convinced that’s when it’ll be most needed! In the meantime, the lost taxes will supposedly come to something like £12.5bn. Just the thing for a country plunging into debt. I rather suspect this is all really just a ploy to find useful consulting work for all those newly-redundant bank staff.

Still, I’m certainly no expert, and perhaps it’ll all work out in ways I don’t quite grasp. It does seem like a lot of bother to me, though.

We just need to make sure we don’t come up with any other schemes for throwing money away, like, say, hosting the Olympics. Now that would be really silly.

Regular walking or running not really your thing? Or have you spent so much time at the gym that you’ve forgotten what it’s like to run or cycle and actually move around at the same time?

You need SpeedFit!

Yes, they’re serious…

Many thanks to Frazer for the link!

Using paintballs to illustrate the difference between sequential and parallel processing.

Is this the world’s biggest inkjet printing head?

I liked the Matt cartoon in the Telegraph this morning!

But since the British media, whenever it comes to America, almost invariably spout… well… the price of everything and the value of nothing, I was pleased also to see Anne Applebaum’s piece, which quoted the most brilliant use of a hundred or so bytes that I’ve seen in a long time:

Early yesterday morning, black Americans were sending a short text message to one another:
“Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Barack could run. Barack is running so our children can fly.”

It’s easy to say that the honeymoon won’t last, that things may not look so rosy in 4 years’ time, etc. But it’s been a very long time since America has had any good news. Now it’s got some, and it has every right to be proud of it.

I thought this an interesting chart. Older people are more conservative.

Exactly what you’d expect, of course, but I was surprised to see quite such a clear trend.

Beware of those email autoreplies – they can sometimes have unexpected consequences.

A wonderful story from Wales.