Over the last few weeks I have noticed a great number of people moaning and growning that life is difficult and they can’t take the strain. IT seems as the weeks and years progress in my life, more and more people are complaining of injustices done to them from others and how the whole world, yes - not just part of it, but the whole damn world; is completely against them and only them.
Well sorry to burst the bubble that is keeping so many of you above water, but that’s just completely and utterly pathetic. Life is difficult, anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something. We all have problems of differing types and scales. None of these problems are more or less important than anyone elses problems, yet so many of us seem to think that we’re in a unique situation that means that “I alone am SO hard done by!”
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27.May.07 
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Today marks the 25th anniversary since the opening of FAC 51 - The Haçienda, a music venue that defined both Manchester and the UK music scene in the closing years of the twentieth century. Unfortunately it was almost exactly ten years ago that the lights went out on FAC 51 for the last time and today there is no sign of the original club. In it’s place is a large block of luxery apartments, which is a real shame that such a piece of modern history has been lost forever - at least the name plate survived.
All that know me personally will know I was too young to have gone to The Haçienda. Born just a year before it opened, I was approaching my 16th birthday when it shut. But I knew of it’s existance through the appearances on Channel 4 (The Tube) or the regular features on national news for another drug related murder. The club has been responsible for a lot of things in it’s time, most of all creating a new Manchester from the old industrial past.
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21.May.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
It seems as the UK national ban on smoking in public places approaches, the smokers are getting up in arms about it. One smoker in particular who doesn’t like this piece of European Law is my girlfriend, who has been smoking for longer than she can remember. The problem for her is simply that she will now be forced to go outside when she wants a cigarette rather than sitting in the comfy confines of a bar. She interprets the new smoking laws as a breach of her rights to enjoy be free to do what one wants to do, after-all this is a free country is this not?
Well, probably unsurprisingly to you, I do not agree. I think the smoking ban is a very good thing and long overdue. To put some perspective of where I am coming from I have smoked up until 3 weeks ago, not nearly the at the rate Siân does, but certainly more than is healthy at any rate; i.e more than none. I gave up because I know what was coming and I thought it would be far better to do it on my own terms than by force. But being a former smoker, I am certainly not in the anti-smoking lobby. Simply we all (yes we do) know that smoking is bad for us, but we do it anyway.
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15.May.07 Uncategorized Comments (2)
Apple rarely give wonderful free things away for developers. Consumers enjoy a whole host of wonderful free applications from the Cupertino company; well okay to be fair only iTunes and QuickTime these days. But it is even worse for developers who generally can only enjoy iTunes and QuickTime themselves. Actually I should point out that the Apple Xcode integrated development environment is almost free, if you purchase a copy of Mac OS X that is.
But behind every great product is an even greater Open Source project and Apple’s WebKit is one of them. To explain, WebKit is the Mac OS X variant of KHTML rendering engine common in the Linux KDE environment. Apple chose KHTML because of it’s rendering speed (far faster than Gecko in most cases), as well as it’s broad support of web pages due to additional Internet Explorer rendering quirks being supported. KHTML being an Open Source project itself requires Apple to release all of it’s code for Safari (Apple’s own branded browser) under the same LGPL licence as KHTML, thus WebKit was born.
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04.May.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
After many months of having our electricity supplied by Ecotricity, it’s time for a change. Ecotricity are a good company with their hearts firmly in the right place, but unfortunately their fuel mix is firmly in the wrong place. After many comments on this very blog plus some research of my own, I have unearthed a rather sad truth. Ecotricity’s green credentials are wilting rather.
Using data from the UK government, it has sadly become clear that Ecotricity’s fuel mix (a report on where they source their power from) isn’t as green as their web site. In fact in 2005 Ecotricity had sourced only 17.4% of their power from renewable sources, 22.3% from coal, 30.3% from natural gas, 24.7% from nuclear and 5.3% from other sources.
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01.May.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
Today the BBC Trust annouced that they are officially backing a new free-to-view satellite service in a joint venture with ITV. The decision to approve this proposal was reached after several months of public consultation, of which I voiced my support directly to the BBC in April. Freesat will rival BSkyB’s own “Freesat” service and I can foresee that Sky will withdraw their service in the coming months.
The decision was approved due to overwelming public support and market analysis that indicated that there would not be a detrimental effect to existing cable and satellite operators in the UK. The provisions of the agreement require the BBC Trust to maintain suffient control over the joint venture; other networks using the service are not subsidised by the TV Licence; and the operations of BBC/ITV Freesat are kept seperate from the existing Freeview digital terrestrial service.
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27.Apr.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
Today marks the first anniversary of Polaris Digital Limited, which was registered with Companies House on April 18th 2006. It is still here and as you can see we have had a bit of a go at our logo and brand in general as we focus on our core values. All sounds very serious, but believe me it isn’t. All of this goes hand in hand with our new web presence that has been promised for months and will finally be arriving next month.
What is digital horticulture? We like to think of it as taking an idea and placing it in a digital environment where it can grow and evolve into something beautiful. One example of this might be our PDnH Server (PDOS/01) that has been in development for over a year now (and show’s no sign of stopping any time soon). Initially it was built to run our web site, but now it has expanded to run several more. With each new challenge it encounters, the feature set gets a little richer. Today PDnH Server is a completely alien animal from the first version and we are boldly heading for our first version 1.0 release by the end of September 2008.
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18.Apr.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
Well you may have noticed that Soup of the Day is currently experiencing a small lull in regular postings. This seems to be a general lull across all web based projects I am involved in or quietly watch from afar. However silence on this blog means that lots and lots is going on behind the scenes and most of which I can’t talk about quite yet.
Polaris Digital as a limited company has completed its first year and is still alive, which I am extremely proud of. There have been good and bad times, but this is a massive learning process for me and each little mistake ensures that I know much more about how business works and how to manage work and life effectively. The biggest thing going on with Polaris Digital at the moment that is unclassified is our new web site, which is getting ever so close to launch. In the mean time a new holding page is going to replace the main site from next week.
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13.Apr.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
For the past month there has been the strangest noise coming from the Champagne province of France. For the past five years the sound of heavy machinery has been the status quo for residents along a 500 kilometre corridor from Paris to Strasbourg, but the noise of rushing air and metal on metal has just started to thunder from the new Ligne à Grande Vittesse (High Speed Line) called LGV Est (High Speed Line East). The locals in the area have been warned to expect this from their cousins along the LGV Atlantique corridor from Paris to Tours, where in May 1990 a modified TGV Atlantique unit 325 set a new world record for a manned train (wheel on rail) of 515.3 km/h (320.3 mph).
Fast forward to today and a consortium of SNCF, RFF and Alstom have pushed their own world record even further with a new unit that reached a rocketing 574.8 km/h (357.2 mph). To put this in some perspective, in 2003 a Japanese magnetic-levitation (Mag-Lev) train set a record of 581 km/h (361 mph) which means the specially adapted TGV unit was within a whisker of going faster than even a Mag-Lev train. Many sources have stated that Alstom were confident they could have beaten the Japanese record and we are only left to speculate why they didn’t go for the ultimate prize. But they have broken their own record for manned wheel-on-rail speed and that certainly shouldn’t be ignored.
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03.Apr.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
Some of you may know that Siân and I are currently growing a lot of vegetables and fruit. Well when I say ‘a lot’, it should say, ‘as much as we can fit in our flat’. Siân has always had a hobbit like facination with gardening that I must admit I did not share until recently. However since I have been growing a Cactus my interest in horticulture has begun to perk up.
The 2007 crop includes the Chilli’s that are my responsibility, Potato’s, Tomato’s and Onions. This pretty much is our horde for this year, but if successful we will hopefully be able to grow more next year with the addition of an allotment that we’re hoping to gain this summer. Once we have a fully cultivated allotment space, we hope to grow more vegetables and fruit for 2008 onwards, reducing our need to buy vegetables from the supermarket.
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02.Apr.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
