Status-Q

"Europe is set to launch the biggest, most sophisticated spacecraft in its history."

Oh, and it happens tomorrow. Splendid stuff.

Intelligent Life magazine has a light-hearted article by Will Smith... I liked this:

Football involves a lot of running around and people trying to stamp on your feet. Rugby involves a lot of running around and people trying to stamp on your scrotum. Cricket involves a maniac hurling a piece of red concrete at every part of your anatomy. But golf: I think golf could be the sport for me. There's no body-contact, and it involves strolling round a large garden.

Developments in alternative energy sources are accomplishing some wonderful things. Yes, yes, so they could reduce greenhouse gases and our dependency on polluting fossil fuels. But that's old news.

More exciting things are in store. Take, for example, these illuminated garden birds.

Admit it, you've been wanting these for years! Well, now you can have them without the wiring hassles which have plagued installers of illuminated garden birds in the past.

The FT has an article about my pals at AlertMe. (They have a fun product - low-power wireless devices that monitor your home and can report back to you in a variety of ways. We have one of their early kits in the CamVine office.)

The article talks about the benefits for a UK startup of getting US-based funding, something we also did for DisplayLink in the early days. I suspect, though, that the relative speed with which they accomplished it is more down to the nature of the funding round, the particular fund they attracted, and the fact that there was only one investor rather than several, than it was to a real difference between the US and UK.

With CamVine, I decided to go for Angel rather than VC investors for the first round, and even stayed clear of Angel groups. I think dealing with just a few individuals made everything much easier. Perhaps we were just lucky, but we got a great group of investors... from this side of the Atlantic!

Had forgotten about this until a friend's mention of Weird Al Yankovic brought it back from the murky depths of my memory. About 20 years since I last heard this... which means, now that I think of it, that I had never heard of the web, and certainly had no idea that YouTube would come along...

Since Michael has been brave and put some of his GarageBand creations up for public appreciation, here's one of my sillier ones from a couple of years back.

I've just been comparing the web pages of a few airlines. See if you can tell, even without looking closely, which are the budget ones.

Broadsheets?

Quality magazines?

Tabloid?

The last one - RyanAir - is, I'm sure you'll agree, quite ghastly. It's the only major site that makes the early days of MySpace look good. So my question is:

• Do people who work for RyanAir have no taste? or
• Do they assume that customers for their services have no taste? or
• Is adrenalin more important than aesthetics when making a budget purchase? or
• Do you have to look cheap to persuade people that you are cheap?

It's nice to think that if Paris had just taken a few photos of Helen back to Troy, rather than the girl herself, the city might have been spared a great deal of inconvenience.

If, however, he had also chosen to jump into his chariot and pop off to the nearest Best Buy to get a digital photo frame (onto which he could load the photos from his Olympus), things might not have gone so well. Last month, customers started hectoring the store - am I pushing this too far? - when it was reported that the USB-connecting Insignia frames came pre-installed with a nasty 'trojan horse' virus.

Now it appears that some of these frames have several other nasties on them... or at least remnants which would indicate that PCs used in their manufacture needed much better quarantining.

The ease with which USB storage can be embedded into almost anything these days allows for some wonderful things to be done. But we shouldn't forget that something that we don't even think of as a storage device may look completely harmless, yet may be concealing something rather less so.

I'm just wondering what nasty surprises could be in store if they ever make a USB-configurable My Little Pony...

On the one occasion, many years ago, when I tried to fly a radio-controlled plane, I found it extremely difficult. It was OK when the plane was flying away from me, but when I wanted to bring it back towards me, the left/right controls were reversed. It was most counter-intuitive and the landing was far from elegant.

Recently, though, I've been thinking that it ought to be straightforward to mount a wireless camera on a small plane. A view of the transmitted video signal ought to let you fly the thing as if you were sitting in the cockpit of a real plane, something I know how to do.

I haven't, alas, had a chance to try it, but it turns out that lots of other people have. It's called FPV (for 'First-Person View) and there's lots more about it on this site. Here's a nice example: