Caboose

Got back from my week of trying to learn how to snowboard, unfortunately not in quite the same state as when I left.

Oh yes, it’s one-handed typing time, I broke my shoulder (in two places) on the fifth day.

Some nice scenic photos of the Tignes area will follow soon, first I’ve got to sort out my insurance claim.

The rest of this post is the full story of what happened…
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I’m off on holiday tomorrow, away skiing for a week in Tignes. The snow is looking good, or at least it was before it got dark.

There should be some photos and information here when I get back.

Just noticed I hadn’t posted for a while, so it’s good that I’ve got something to talk about.

Went to see Donnie Darko again last night with a couple of friends, the Picturehouse has it on for another week due to popular demand. It doesn’t make much more sense the second time around, see my previous entry for my thoughts then.

Don’t read on unless you’ve seen the film
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This weekend I’ve mostly been playing games. I’ve discovered that one of my favourite games of a few years ago, Dune II, works on Linux with DOSEMU.

The sound doesn’t work, which is a bit of a shame as you lose all the digitised voices warning you of impending attack and providing other useful information. It’s still utterly absorbing though…

Almost forgot. Happy New Year to anyone reading this.

After months (years?) of the North American part of Journeys consisting mostly of placeholders I’ve actually done some more work on it.

The North America page now includes a brief outline of the route we drove, with links to some of the places we visited.

I also reorganised the files a bit, the Slovenia section was almost completely content-free, so it has gone now. The addresses have changed a bit as well, probably breaking some links but my clever new 404 error page should point people in the right direction.

The next step is to get round to rescanning some of the pictures. Quite a few of them are a bit too dark.

One, less noticeable, change is that <link> tags have been added, this makes navigation easier for people using text mode browsers and other non-graphical ways of using the web.

An excellent article by Tim O’Reilly on why the big media companies have got it all wrong: Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution (via kottke.org).

Why do our governments support subsidising these industries — by changing the law to protect them — when they’re perfectly happy to watch other industries employing many more people fade away?

I was glad to hear that the RRS Ernest Shackleton has reached Halley at last.

They didn’t make it last year, due to exceptionally heavy sea ice near Halley. This meant that the usual supplies of fuel couldn’t be delivered to the base and they were on their emergency year’s supply. If the Shack hadn’t got there this year the base was going to have to be shut down.

Even though it’s now years since I left the place I still have friends working there this summer, and a certain emotional attachment to it as well.

Couldn’t resist this: The Perpetual War Portfolio (via kottke.org)

On my way back out of town yesterday I wandered into Richer Sounds and bought myself a DVD player.

As it’s hooked up to my little 14″ portable TV I wasn’t all that worried about picture or sound quality, so I just picked the cheapest one there, the Acoustic Solutions DVD 321 at GBP70. As far as I can tell the only difference between it and the more expensive DVD 421 is that it doesn’t have a front panel display, which is pretty redundant anyway.

One thing I really like about it is that it’s so small, a lot of DVD players seem to have been designed to use up spare video recorder casings. There’s no need for them to be that big.

Picture quality seems fine, it’s easy to use and it all seems to work well. I spent most of yesterday watching the box set of Twin Peaks series one I got from my parents for Christmas. The menu system on the DVD is almost as bewildering as Twin Peaks itself!

Update 30/12/02:I’ve found a bit of information on the web about these DVD players and it seems that as well as being able to change region and disable Macrovision you can enable VCD playback (The ‘5001’/’5000′ setting in the secret settings). Nice.