In fact why not go one further and have a global time which is the same worldwide. Does everyone have to start work at 9am? What difference does it make if you call it 9pm if the sun is up and you’ve just had your breakfast. Seems a lot easier to me if my 2pm meeting is at 2pm and I don’t have to work out which timezone people are calling in from and adjust accordingly.

Keyboard is very usable, similar to the HD2, I’m surprised how accurate it is given the smaller real estate but I guess that’s more to do with clever software than anything else (damn you autocorrect!)

I bought the phone sim free so I am not “stuck with it” for any contract length. I’m expecting to upgrade next year for the new iPhone 5. That being said this one is pretty good.

Very clear morning. Good opportunity for photography although had no time as usual. Dark nights coming, which means I might try and get back into astrophotography.

Have a 4 day weekend (yay) so that gives me a little time to play. Although I wanted to rebuild my NAS. HDD are expensive if you are buying 4.

–end stream of conciousness–

I have to admit I am very pleased with my little 80mm refractor. Even after 5 years of use (and poor treatment to be honest) it is still giving me fantastic performance on clusters and the brighter DSO’s.

However that being said, I’m hankering after aperture. I miss my dobsonian but the price of the lightbridge’s has gone up massively and the 12″ I purchased a few years ago is now 50% more. Perhaps I should have kept that, it would have been an investment!

Whilst I was installing and configuring the server it reminded me that there is minimal client side configuration required. In fact if the workstations were not being used to run Office and other thick apps I would consider using thin clients or some Linux variant to connect to the server. It’s a taste of the “good old days” when people liked to have their servers locked away in air conditioned rooms and accessed via green screen terminals.

To be fair this DOS application isn’t much more advanced than the old green screens. It seems a shame to waste modern hardware on such a beast but I’m advised that replacement costs are a minimum of 6 figures. As such a single box holding the server AND workstations (with suitable backup) is a cheap and dirty solution to running 16bit programs on 64bit hardware.

There was a sign on the lawns that didn’t say “no ball games” it said “please be careful, if your ball goes onto the road it may cause an accident” – how polite.

There was a specially designated bin for BBQ’s and a sign that said “be careful, may be hot”

The whole feeling was one of a pleasant atmosphere and generally all round warm fuzzyness.

I leave to return to staffordshire this evening, its something of a contrast.

I also watched episode one of Brian Cox’s Wonders Of The Universe which was about time. Not the usual time of the human scale, hours, days, years, and not even the deep time of geology where eons pass by and rock flows like water. He was talking about cosmological time, our sun orbits in our galaxy every 250 million years, the universe is 14 billion years old (with only another 15 billion years to go).

It was the strange combination of the two programs that got me to thinking. We only have 15 billion years left to experience the universe (discounting multiverse theories). We are already about halfway through.

I want Kurzweil to be right so I can spend the next billion years learning all I can about the universe and 10 billion years after that working out what to do about the last 5 billion years left!

I think it’s a worthwhile pursuit and it gives me something to aim for. I would give it a 50/50 chance of me reaching the singularity (assuming we recognise it) and a 1 in 100 chance of surviving past it. Something like a 1 in 1000 chance of seeing the end of the stelliferous era, which is pretty good odds really.

My kids I would give a 99% chance of reaching the singularity, and a 50/50 chance of living past it. If the can get past the next 100 years I would say they can choose to see the end or not as they please.

It makes me realise how insignificant my current day to day problems are, and perhaps it should give me better perspective on my life and how important my family is.

My predictions for the new iPad won’t surprise anyone, a smaller svelt case, same battery life, maybe a little lighter. Added camera (just one I think, not the predicted 2), I very much doubt any new connecters will make an appearance. Any one who is expecting an SD card slot will be disappointed.

The new MacBook pros will only be a small update, a push to i5 for the 13″ version. Not so sure about thunderbolt / light peak.

We’ll see how close I am next week, invitations have been given out for the March 2nd “show”.