For fun, and also because they look good framed, hanging on a wall, I collect old maps. And, I’ll admit it, I just love looking at the intricate detail and marveling at the cartographer’s ability to create these figures with, what is after all, some very primitive tools. Sometimes you can get some sense of the history of a region by looking at its maps. […]
READ MOREFor the past two years, I’ve carried an essential bit of kit along with me on flights. Given that I make at least one trip – two flights – per month (this year will actually work out at 38 flights all told for the year, so three flights per month), I actually spend a lot of time on planes. Not as much as some travellers, to be sure, but enough. To help pass the time, I’ve got into the habit of ripping and downloading DVDs onto a mobile device (or equivalently buying the download from Amazon) so that I can watch them on the flights. […]
READ MOREI had occasion the other day to mess around with a particular web page. The page was designed to provide an overview of a particular topic (essentially a list of high-level headers) and that had detail sections that were hidden. The user had to click on a “more” button on a particular header to show its individual detail section. Not only that, but should a detail section be shown, the “more” button was changed to a “less” button, so that the user got a hint that he could close that particular detail section (at which point, the “less” button became a “more” button once more). […]
READ MOREYes, it’s another rave from the grave: a retro calculator from Julian’s past calculator history. This one is from 1976, so I bought mine after I’d finished school and before I started university. It’s the Commodore SR 4190R, made in England (take that, oriental factories!), and a more fabulous button-oriented jabberwock of a calculator is hard to imagine. And, unlike graphics calculators of the present day with their menus and pixel displays, this is “just” a calculator. […]
READ MOREWhile we were on vacation in England at the beginning of the month, we visited Rievaulx Terrace and Temples. This is kind of an 18th century folly, a landscaped terrace on the hill just above Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire where the designer cut views in the woods on the slopes so that you caught glimpses of the ruins below as you perambulated through the gardens. To top it off, the owner wanted a couple of temples on the terrace as well: at one end the domed Doric Temple and, at the opposite end, the Ionic Temple. For rich-as-heck industrialists in the 18th century, about par for the course really. […]
READ MOREOnce upon a time (well, OK, in the mid 70s) in a land far, far away (England), I went to King’s College, London as an undergraduate to study for a degree in Mathematics. Easy peasy, I thought, pure mathematics all day, every day. I could immerse myself in the realm of the pure thought, build up logical edifices, and marvel at how far we’ve come as a race. Not so fast, said someone just before I appeared for my first year, those mathematicians will leave here with a degree, but they won’t be able to function in the real world because they won’t know how to express themselves in writing. They ought to write at least two essays, one at the end of the first year and one at the end of the second. To make it easier for them the essay topics can be mathematics-related, so something like an overview of some branch of mathematics that’s not covered in the syllabus, a biography of the personality that produced some major mathematical result, something like that. […]
READ MOREImagine a prism. White light goes in on one side, and the different wavelengths comprising the light are split because they travel at slightly different speeds in the glass. Since the other side is at an angle to the first – the prism is a triangle – these different wavelengths come out as a rainbow. That’s what it is like reading a Priest novel: the true story, whatever it may be, goes into the triangular prism, and comes out as variations of the same tale. In The Adjacent, his latest novel, somehow Priest has discovered several new colors. […]
READ MOREOne of the pleasures I had from the late 80s and early 90s, before I moved to the States, was watching Inspector Morse on the telly. The episodes were longer than the average TV cop show and had a leisurely pace which perfectly suited the Oxford setting. It also helped that the title role was sympathetically played by John Thaw – leaving you with a slight disturbing thought that Morse was perhaps an older gentler Jack Regan – with his sidekick, Sergeant Lewis, by Kevin Whatley. Undoubtedly, one factor in the success of the series was due to the chemistry between these two characters and their evolving relationship as well and the interactions with the other permanent characters in the show (one of which was undeniably Morse’s red Mark 2 Jag). The end-titles music was incredibly memorable and poignant, being derived from the Morse code for ‘Morse’. […]
READ MOREFor the longest time now (I see it’s getting on for five years), I’ve owned IMetJulian.com. It’s a handy website for those times I’m talking to someone I don’t know and I don’t have any business cards on me, yet I want to exchange contact details. I just say, remember “I met Julian” the next time you’re at a PC. Works pretty well. For fun, I even self-host it here at home, using an old Dell XPS something-or-other and Windows Web Server 2008. […]
READ MOREI had some issues today with the Windows 8 WiFi connection on my Dell XPS 12. Short story (the long one is tedious): I was using the machine at my local Acura dealer while waiting for the service on my wife’s car to be completed. I closed the lid once I could pay and get the car, yet when I opened it again at home, all Windows 8 wanted to do was to reconnect to the Acura dealers WiFi. It wouldn’t show my home WiFi at all. Even funnier (in hindsight), running the Troubleshooter resulted in a request to activate a ‘manual’ WiFi profile for an older wireless network for somewhere else. […]
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