Playing with OSX’s Screen Sharing app the other day, I found out what happens if you try to share your own screen:

Fantastic comment from ‘John Watts’ on this article over at The Register:

Macs are overpriced underspec’d poncey toys for people with too much money. Macs are great value for money – you couldn’t get the same spec for the same money elsewhere. OSX is great Windows is shit. Windows is great OSX is shit. 2GB is nowhere near enough memory these days. 2GB might not be enough for Vista but Macs run fine with it. OSX copied Vista. Vista copied OSX. Some boring shit about the finer points of Intel processor technology that’s the equivalent of showing everyone how big your willy is except nobody is interested whatever. OSX is shit and Windows is shit; I run Ubuntu blah blah blah. I hate Steve Jobs he eats babies. Bill Gates eats the babies and their mothers. I run Cock-Rot Linux and it’s the best in the world and I don’t know why everyone uses Ubuntu when you can do everything using Vi and the terminal feature of my obscure mobile phone (which nobody ever rings ’cause I’ve got no friends). Some other boring comment about processors from someone who wants to show the world that his willy is bigger than the other processor posters (okay, one person read the whole post). Apple hardware is overpriced I hate anyone with an iPhone. Actually BSD is much better than Linux or Windows or OSX, that’s why such a large percentage of people have it installed on their home machines. Doh, didn’t you know that OSX is Unix and runs BSD. Actually it’s not Unix ’cause Apple won’t pay for the certification. Yes it is. No it’s not. Fanboi something. Don’t you know the whole fan-boy thing is old and so juvenille, just like your spelling. I still use a Lisa and it does everything I need it to. I use a Commodore 64 with a hard-drive and it’s better than the Lisa. I don’t know what I’m talking about and haven’t read the article but I’m going to chip in with something irrelevant and wrong anyway. OSX sucks. OSX rocks. Bootcamp. DRM. iTunes. Steve Jobs is on first name terms with Satan. Bill Gates is Satan. I’ve got an iPhone and I love it. It really pisses me off that Apple has to put i in front of everything. Something about PPC versus Intel. Something completely without evidence comparing Apples and Oranges (pun intentional) proving PPC is and always will be better than x86. Something completely without evidence comparing Apples and Oranges proving x86 is and always will be better than PPC. GPL. Google. Linux. QNX. My Dad’s harder than your Dad. My Nan’s harder than your nan. Something anti-American. Angry riposte proving anti-American point. Thoughtful welll thought out riposte clearly disproving anti-American point that nobody will ever read because there’s so much uninformed chaff above it.

… just got a number eleven.

Spent most of the afternoon enjoying coffee and cake in Russia’s first Costa Coffee. It’s on Pushkin Square, just along from Russia’s first McDonald’s – which, in turn, celebrated its eighteenth birthday earlier this year.

Costa have ambitious plans: 20 outlets in the first year, 200 within five. Starbucks have similar plans. It’s all a micro-indicator of the levels of investor confidence, consumer income and perceived economic potential in this country.

The newly-opened Costa’s good, too – a pretty reasonable facsimile of our own local one back on the UK, although we’re still searching for a viable alternative to the sadly-departed Volkonski*. Don’t get me wrong, we’re more than happy to be intrepid and head out to a random bit of forest for some shashlik. But on the odd driech Sunday afternoon, when Moscow is at its very greyest, a little slice of home goes a long way. Particularly for the kids.

Ah yes, the kids – and the point of this post. Tom (6 1/2) spent most of today’s Costa experience learning how to use his mum’s iPod. He’s played around with them before, but today he was really keen to actually learn the menu structure and how the various functions worked.

Which prompted me to regale the kids with the story of how, when I was around the same age as Tom, I had my first brush with a Sony Walkman. My parents’ friend Ron, visiting from San Francisco (where else?), brought it with him. I have a snapshot-memory of listening to Synchronicity II while playing Snapper on our BBC Micro. Must have been 1982.

Dad, what’s a Walkman?

Very good question. Well, kids, (ignoring the reinvented brand of MP3 players and cellphones), it was what we had when I was younger instead of iPods. You put tapes in them and listened to the music.

Tapes? What do you mean?

Lordy. I know technology moves fast. But when my own kids, the iPod generation, have to ask what a Walkman is or what tapes are, it makes me feel old.

—

* – Volkonski on Old Arbat closed suddenly a couple of weeks ago, replaced virtually overnight by yet another sushi bar. Word on the street is some sort of landlord / rent issue. Whatever happened, Moscow’s the poorer for it.

When is a teacake not a teacake? – from Boulton & Co

Naomi Campbell banned from BA – from el Reg

Ten Lords a-Blogging – h/t Simon

I’m a ‘commentary with a regional perspective‘, apparently. Cool.

Putin Pants – patriotism, Shapovalova-stylee

… and finally …

a mobile banya, courtesy of Theo.

Much being made in the blogosphere this week of the PM’s decision to scrap plans for a Prime Ministerial ‘plane or two – coincident with his travelling to the US on a 757 owned by charter airline Titan Airways. (I wonder if they have a stewardess called Tina?)

Sky’s ‘Boulton & Co’ gives the ‘garish pimpmobile’ of a Seven-Five particular stick, although to be fair it’s all in the spirit of fun – more than one can say for some of their readers.

Egad. All it needs is a Playboy bunny on the tail to give it that extra touch of class.

Indeed.

Half a mo, though. From the pictures on Titan Airways’ website, if you look at the whole thing, it’s not such a bad-looking craft after all. The white nose section sets off the dark fuselage rather nicely. And, having just watched the Beeb’s ‘Space Odyssey’ over the past couple of evenings, I’m down with the moon-of-Saturn allusion too.

So gaun yersel’, boss. The Garish Pimpmobile’s alright with me.

Back up and running on WordPress 2.5. Still a few plugin issues to sort out, including with Feedburner, but we’re getting there. Seems to have fixed the problem with MarsEdit, too. Ura!

I’m not really sure how. But when I try to send a new post with MarsEdit I get an error message, something about XML parsing data. The post still uploads, though, but only in draft and minus its category data.

Oh, and when I log into my WordPress dashboard, if I edit a post or approve a comment and then hit ‘submit’, I get a blank screen.

Time to upgrade to 2.5, then. Hope it works. If not, well, it’s been nice knowing you.

So according to the BBC’s Justin Webb:

Truly the British foreign service is staffed with all-rounders with time on their hands…

I hate to conform to Justin’s stereotype, but I, too, knew that Thunderbirds was British. I suspect a quick straw-poll of ‘us’ would turn up a fair few more – dare I say a significant majority?

But I’m cheating. Firstly, I have a six year old son. So the words Thunderbirds are Go have been in the household vocabulary for a good while. The nine-year-old daughter who’s into Busted (who, by the way, are also British) probably has something to do with it too. And secondly, they filmed part of the remake at my old school (but perhaps I shouldn’t admit to that for fear of reinforcing another, altogether different stereotype).

But hang on. What’s this about time on their hands? Great, that’s OK then – I don’t fit the stereotype after all ;-)

Simon observes that, from Number Ten to Barack Obama, they’re all at it. Perhaps it’s just my rather small social networking and blog reading circles, but it seems like the political world’s going mad for Twitter.

I do wonder, though, what use much of it is. If you’re an Obama supporter, you may well sign up to his feed. But if you’re not, or of you’re undecided, why would you bother? More to the point, what proportion of America’s non-voters or floating voters (do the US have those?) are politically active enough to sign up to a potential President’s twitterings?

I signed up for Twitter ages ago, and then promptly forgot about it. I did have a BBC Breaking News feed being sent to my cellphone, but it seems to have broken. I’m just not sure it’s relevant for me right now. I don’t have GPRS so am not ‘always on’, and Facebook status updates take care of the keeping-up-with-friends side of what Twitter offers. Plus, and here’s the thing, none of my friends use it.

I’m not completely anti, though. I do think Twitter has its uses – maybe the concept just isn’t mature enough for we, the masses, to see them yet. And it must, therefore, be a Good Thing that the likes of our PM are Twittering.

In the future I can see Twitter as a replacement for clunky and costly SMS updates – flight arrivals, weather, travel advice and so on. And how about a Terminal 5 Twitter feed?