This week I went to the Edinburgh Military Tattoo . Despite having lived in Edinburgh for the last 4 years I had never been before and it also fitted in nicely with my idea of doing festival things, in a not doing festival things kind of way. I still felt uneasy about actually buying the tickets though, so I stole them off the old bat that grassed me up for taking a photo in Mary Kings Close. That’ll teach her to mess with the Edinburgh Festival Grinch.

The Tattoo was great and I would recommend anyone who is Edinburgh during August to try and go. We were even treated to a surprise appearance from Sean Connery. Top!

My favourite planet in the whole wide Universe is …… apparently….. no longer good enough to be a planet. So says the International Astronomical Union who have just demoted Pluto so that it will now be called a ‘dwarf planet’. Im just waiting until we find another 6 so Disney can make a movie of the whole thing.

Basically, for decades there have been people saying that Pluto does not deserve to be a Planet because it is so much smaller than the eight ‘classical planets’ and because its orbit is highly elliptical etc etc etc. They say that NASAs New Horizons Mission which launched in January 2006 and is due to fly past Pluto in 2015 , will, when it continues on and reaches the Kuiper Belt , will find hundreds of other objects similar in size to Pluto.

The new definition for a planet is that the object in question has to match 3 criteria.

1 - Have strong enough gravity so that it makes itself ‘nearly’ round.
2 - Be the main body in a region orbiting a parent star.
3 - To have cleared its neighbourhood of other objects.

Pluto misses out as it crosses inside Neptune’s orbit for about 26 years out of its 248 year orbit with our sun (the last time it entered the orbit of Neptune was 21st January 1979 which was the day I was born), which makes this new definition absolute BO**OX!!!! There is not a planet in the solar system that would meet all those criteria. Neptune …. if it were a true planet would surely have cleared Pluto – as their orbits cross. Earth has something like 10,000 asteroids alone trailing in its orbit, Jupiter has thousands. This is insane.

There is just so much we don’t yet know about Pluto. I mean, just look below for the two best images we currently have of the tiny thing.

Its only in recent months that we have found that Pluto has 3 moons, Charon (known about since 1978), Nix and Hydra.

Astronomers say that if we continued to consider Pluto as a planet then we would have to start looking at other objects that might want to be called moons such as Ceres and Vesta , but I say this:

Just keep Pluto as a Planet and say, right thats it these are our Planets. Why do we have to classify everything and put it in a box and say this is this and that is that. Its madness. Just think how unhappy the school kids are gonna be.

They`ll change their mind again, you mark my words, Pluto will be back. The Festival Grinch says so.

The title to this entry might give you a good idea of why its been nearly a week since my last entry. I had a friend up to stay with me here in Edinburgh since last Thursday and since then I`ve basically done nothing but eat and drink way way way too much.

Of course being the Edinburgh Festival Grinch I had to entertain my guest by doing festival events in a , not doing festival events kind of way. This generally meant free festival events which were crap and I spent most of the shows snarling at people and telling them how bad the whole festival idea was ….. and also going to non festival tourist attractions such as Mary Kings Close and one of the many Edinburgh Ghost Walks.

You will of course notice that both these things are done underground so that I can imagine that the Edinburgh Festival is not actually happening at all. Ggggrrrrrr.

Sadly, no photography was allowed in Mary Kings close. I did attempt a sneaky picture just to break the rules, but I was grassed up on by some old granny. “That man has just taken a photo!!!!” Curse her!!!! Thwarted by an old bat!

Pictures were allowed on the ghost tour however and one of snaps I took showed something interesting.

Click here for the full size image.

At the top of the picture you can see an orb which, I am told, usually represents the presence of a ghost like entity. Either that or the tour organisers paint the walls with some kind of reflective paint. Who am I to say?

Anyhow, it turns out that you can pay about £40 per head to take a group of people down to the vaults that I visited and took the above picture in and spend the night there. I think I`ll do it and do some more ghost hunting. Anyone else up for it?

I am the Edinburgh Fringe Festival Grinch.

I bloody hate the festival I do. I hate the fact that I cannot walk along any street in town without having to direct a tourist to the bloody Castle …. its right there! You can see the bloody thing! I hate the fact that getting my lunch time sandwich takes twice as long as all the Yanks have eaten all the food and they’ve had to send out for more supplies. I hate that I have to avoid being run into by tourists not looking where they are going. I hate people thrusting fliars into my face …. I never ever ever ever ever take them, I just growl at the person handing them out instead.

Even if there is anything I want to actually go and see, you cannot get through on the phone for hours, and dont ….. just dont get me started on that darn website! Can you actually believe that when I was asked to give over my credit card details today that thee page I was using was not even using https protocol ….. just plain old regular, non ecrypted http? How absolutely amazingly incompetent, stupid, lazy, ridiculous is that? People are just giving out their credit card numbers for anyone to get hold of. I mean …… oh my God!! Someone should complain ….. I cant be bothered. I`m the Festival Grinch.

I`ve decided that I`m going to run around snarling at tourists and pulling down advertising posters. I`m off…….

Now what I`m a wine expert , I need a wine cellar to keep all my wines. After all, I cant just buy any old Spanish anti-freeze these days. I`ve acquired a taste for the finer things and must only have the best (so long as it doesnt cost too much).

The problem is that I live in a small 2 bedroom flat in Edinburgh. Not much scope for a cellar is there I hear you say? Ha! yes there is thanks to the great people at Spiral Cellars .

Basically what these guys do is dig a big hole in your floor, luckily I live in a ground floor flat, and install you a wine cellar.

Top! All I need to do now is fork out thousands of pounds for top quality grade A wines, and another £1,800 to actually buy the wine cellar. No problem with my huge work bonus coming up soon no doubt

My desk at work is relatively tidy. The one next to me is not. Sometimes we all get told to clean up our desks because and important client is coming around the office and they could not possibly want to spend their cash on clients who have books and other work related documents on their desks. Absolutely not. So every now and then the desks get cleared, and very soon after the paper and books start piling back up again etc etc.

Its a good area of the office where I sit. There are a good bunch of guys aro0nd me and we all tend to have a good laugh. Occasionally there is something said which will cause somebody to throw something ….. usually a plastic duck …… at one of their desk neighbours. That is until …. the plastic duck went missing ….. probably during the last desk clearing. What to do? We need more things to throw at each other. Books and monitors just wont do. After a bit of searching, I found the solution:

The USB rocket launcher.

Its controlled through software you run on your PC where you can alter the direction and trajectory of the rockets and fire them at your colleagues. Top! Who needs a plastic duck when you have real fire power.

Of course one thing then led to another. and soon people were looking for tanks on eBay (it was a slow day ). We could not find a tank, but we did find a

Missile tracking telescope
Essential to track those missiles being fired from your USB rocket launcher. A snip at $175,000.00. But that would only be good for watching as your colleague bombards you with rockets. What you really need is


Missile man robot

What could be better? You would never have to clean your desk again, missile robot man would be standing guard 24/7. Top!

A little while ago I posted an entry about Kaywa QU-codes . Getting excited about a whole world of computing that I seem to have ignored in quite a while, I started digging a bit more about the use of mobile internet devices. I found an article that shows in Japan, which is often ahead of the rest of the world in mobile technology, more people connect to the Internet via their mobile, than via their PC (69mln compared to 66mln).

Looks like Japan is leading the way in finding new uses of the mobile internet too. I found a New your times article which talks about using your mobile device as a compass to find out what’s going on or what facilities are available in the area.

The idea is that your mobile device is fitted with a GPS chip so that you can use the mobile GUI to select something to search for, such as restaurants, cinemas etc, point your device in a direction and it will show you what is in that area. Pretty coo eh? A small quote from the article:

“Mr. Matsunuma showed how it works on a Shinjuku street. He selected “lodgings” on the screen. Then he pointed his phone toward a cluster of tall buildings. A list of hotels in that area popped up, with distances. He chose the closest one, about a quarter-mile away. An arrow appeared to show him the way, and in the upper left corner the number of meters ticked down as he got closer. Another click, and he could see a map showing both his and the hotel’s locations.”

This kind of thing would be great in Edinburgh at this time of year. Walking along the main high street in Edinburgh, not sure what fringe festival shows are nearby. Just get out the mobile, fancy watching some comedy, point the mobile in any direction and bang …. A full list of performances, times of performances, distances and reviews etc. Awesome!

No doubt this kind of thing will be available in the UK in ….. oh say ……. 20 years.

Last night was top!

Its still early August and already i`ve been at 10 barbeques this summer already. Last night was my turn to be the host

In short it was a great night. I did learn one thing though. If you are hosting a barbeque yourself, always ask the guests to bring extra food, drink etc. This morning I woke up to find the fridge full of bounty that will keep me in ale and supplies for lunches for months! Top!

Look at any computer today and what do you see? Monitor, yep, keyboard, yep, mouse …. of course. For how much longer? Not for too long I should think thanks to New York University research into Multi-Touch Interaction .

Its basically a touch screen system that, as the name might suggest, accepts input from more than one source at a time. Traditionally touch screen devices, such as your local pubs quiz machine, can only recognise input from one part of the screen at a time. So what? how much difference can taking input from more than once source at a time make? Well …..

quite a lot by the looks of this video demonstration

Pretty cool stuff. you can draw images, manipulate images, open files, resize graphics, move objects around the screen, navigate through 3d maps .. anything ……well pretty much anything …….

I was thinking about this, and although the guy is pretty much saying that this is intended for a complete replacement for the keyboard and mouse, I remain unconvinced. For my job, I spend much of the day at a keyboard writing code (at least thats what is says on my timesheets ) I tend to type quite quickly and rely heavily on the physical contact of the keys to let me know when something has happened. The same would be true if they tried to develop piano tutoring software the device.

Personally I think a combination of a keyboard and this touch screen device would be top, but if you disagree, then please leave a comment … .please! …. no seriously though do leave a comment

Work currently have a big drive on to ’stamp down our carbon footprint’. Basically we are a huge IT company and aim to reduce our energy emissions by a big figure (that I can never remember) in a short time. The way we intend to achieve this target became apparent to me today at 5 o’clock …… when all the power was cut off from our office. Bang on 5 all computers, air con, photocopiers etc etc etc just went dead. Top idea. Seems as though our company is really serious about all this as they also managed to take out the power to half of the Edinburgh city centre too …… and my gym. Not being able to do any more work for the day I left the office and headed straight to Bannatynes on Queen street. Outside were about 15 people just staring at the front door. Nobody was being allowed in because my works carbon footprint reduction policy conflicts with the gyms health and safety policy thingy.

Anyway, I joined the confused mob. We all waited staring at the front door for about 15 minutes. Silently, as though paying respect. Then the manger turns up and asks us all to clear off as the power will not be coming back on any time soon. The weak pealed off, but the hard core stayed. I eventually gave up after waiting after 45 minutes.

Does that mean I addicted?

So, I have a plan that would combine work, the gym AND reduce the carbon footprint quite easily. My plan is thus:

Every office in the UK has an exercise bike, cross trainer, rowing machine etc at the end of each row of desks. When the power cuts out the less important members of staff ….. project managers, senior management, sales types ….. all run from whatever they are doing and start going hell for leather on the exercise machines. This would generate enough electricity for the room, improve the fitness of the nation and reduce our carbon footprint.

See, all government policies rolled up and sorted in one go.

Just make me Prime Minster now why don’t you and save the bother of voting and stuff.