Mostly Harmless

Very quiet day at work as far as customers went. Had one quick task to do in the morning, and then nada. Which gave me time to set up World Cup broadcast feeds to the engineering department's way-too-widescreen TV, and also figured out how to send the sci-fi channel to my video server so i can record Dr Who and watch it on Monday. While I was at it, I also set up to capture the weekend soccer games, since folks at work are going to want to see those.

To me soccer is boring. There is a very limited number of skills involved, and I think in the end, endurance wins out over skill and talent. Come to think of it, basketball and tennis are like that too. Baseball requires the ability to stay awake, more than anything else. Golf is more of a skill game, but it's so boring to watch a whole match - the actual action is only about 5% of the time spent on the course.

go-home time. No plans for tonight, may watch a DVD, may take the laptop to Starbucks. Or maybe I'll take a book to Starbucks. Am now reading William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties. As usual, it's set in a dark future with overwhelmingly Japanese overtones, even in America. But I like Gibson's writing, and sometimes his characters have some meat on 'em.

Tomorrow will take my sapphires and camera setup to the local park, which I scoped out this morning. Plenty of picnic tables I can set up on, out in the sunshine.

Skype Pilot

Just got off the "phone" with a friend in Thailand. I'd signed up for a Skype account way back when it first came out, to use at work, but then they wouldn't buy me a headset...

But I have one for my laptop, and here I am bucking stars and using the T-mobile wireless hookup when I get email from David asking me if I could get on Skype if he called. I was very impressed, there was no lag, audio was loud and clear in both directions, and the only annoyance was when my Big Ben chime went off at 10 o'clock, it was way loud (but it's local so didn't go out over the Skype connection). Oh yeah, there also was the fact that I had not used the headset before, and it took me a while to remember (a) it's a behind-the-head style and (b) the mike has an on-off switch, which was off.

This is a new concept - being able to call around the world for free, at land line quality audio. I like it.