Yak & Natter

Saturday: Ray was in Brighton. The band he’s in, loopjoy*, were playing at the Freebutt pub. We went along, and loopjoy (not sure if the * is mandatory) really are quite lovely live. The venue is great too: small but friendly, with a sound engineer who looked constantly baffled or hassled.

Last night we went to the Komedia to see Stewart Lee. He was very good, despite having been to the funeral of Malcolm Hardee yesterday. He finished his normal act, took a break and came back to finish with a recital of some prose he wrote for the Sit-down Comedy: Stand-ups Swap the Stage for the Page book, edited by Malcom Hardee.

I spotted this guy waiting outside the Apple Store in Regent Street during our day trip to London yesterday. We left the Apple store with an early birthday present for me, which I guess means that Richard gets custody of the 20GB iPod we bought in New York last year.

I’ve just had lunch at Wagamama in Tunbridge Wells. It’s been quite a few years since my last Wagamama experience, and it was as good and tasty as I remember. I can see there being lots of visits to the Brighton one when it opens later this month.

I’ve just been reading a thread on Gone Boarding about a study about helmet wearing for boarders and skiers. I don’t have a helmet at the moment for snowboarding, but yet I do wear one when I’m on my mountain bike, both on and off road. Somehow that doesn’t seem to make much sense, I’ve banged my head more often snowboarding than I have on the bike. Maybe that’s another thing I should add to my shopping list next time I’m at a resort.

It’ll probably never happen, which is a shame: “The holiday resort, named Pleasure Island, would be based two thirds of a mile off the coast of Brighton, between the city’s two piers”.

Does anyone else mentally picture a man in a white suit greeting guests: “Welcome to Pleasure Island“

“An area of the development would also be set aside for low cost housing and flats” which I can only assume is designed to be the equivalent of a factory town for anyone working on this luxury resort.

Productivity thought: I was just writing an email, and I wasn’t sure about the spelling of a word. It was all over in a few milliseconds, but what I found my fingers doing was to start typing the first few letters of the word and then I pressed CTRL+Space. If you use an IDE which has “code completion”, you’ll will know where I’m going here… I was expecting a list of matching words to appear, from which I could pick the one I intended to use. Of course, it didn’t. I think it’d be a good feature to have, and would really mean that I never have to learn how to spell.

I haven’t done a listing of Palm Os apps for a long time… so, it’s time to get them

noted down… On my Sony Clie TH55 I have

• For email : SnapperMail – I test a load of email applications, and although this is pricey, it works well with IMAP over wireless and even handles attachments pretty well
• For a week plan of my appointments/todos : WP+ – I’ve used this application for many years and am still very happy with it
• For secure data : Secret – another application I’ve used for years
• For storing data : DB – there’s also an editor for use on the desktop
• For business : Timesheet
• For backing up : FlyZip – backs up automatically every day and saves it to my memory card
• For amusement : RocketMania – excellent game, blow up fireworks by linking up the fuse, Falling – a really simple game, thats quite addictive, iSilo – an application to display documents

I’ve added another snowboarding blog to my read list – The Funky Drummer is a GoneBoarding guy who is working and boarding in Japan at the moment. It’s a fun read, both for information on life and snowboarding in Japan.