I have moved to a new Wordpress 2.3 blog at a new site.

Please visit: http://markbenson.org/blog/

I don’t frankly give a crap what else happened in Tech in February of 2008. i don’t care bit the MS >> Yahoo merger. I don’t care about new MacBooks, or The iPhone SDK, I don’t give a flying about any of that.

This is what matters and I’m absolutely chewing at the bit to get my hands on it:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/224

It’s Microsoft Worldwide Telescope. I think it is, from what I’ve seen at least, truly wonderful. It made Scoble cry, apparently. Frankly I don’t blame him, I can’t wait to show my niece this.

So here I was sat at my desk, playing with my new LAMP server, and suddenly the whole house shakes like nothing I’ve ever experienced.

It would appear we had an earthquake! Epicenter is reported to be about 30 miles west of here and magnitude 4.7.

It’s rare to even have a quake in the UK, especially one of this mag. It’s been felt right across the centre of the country.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Maps/10/0_55.php

Epicenter map form USGS and info.

If you hold any international domains (.com, .net, .org etc.) beware of this:

I received a letter in the post today from the ‘Domain Registry of America’ asking me to switch my domain over to them from my existing registrar. I was not interested from the get go as the prices were loopy (25 GBP a year!!??) and I like my existing registrar (also the host of this site) thank you very much. I decided I’d confirm my existing registrar still held the domain admin for me, which they do, and they were also good enough to point out to me that DRoA are basically in the business of charging rather ‘ambitious’ fees for registrations, renewals and transfers of domains. I kind of already guessed from the prices on the letter, but this only confirmed what I already thought.

So if you get a letter from these guys then open it, have a good laugh, then burn it

Yeh, sorry, I’m not having an interesting time atm. MacWorld was a bit of a let down, the Air is a nice looking, ne stunning, lightweight laptop but it has fundamental drawbacks that even an ultra-portable user will eventually find inexcusable. 1 USB port? No FireWire? Oh please…

In other news, I bought 2 500GB drives for the Mac Pro because I’m sick of running out of hard drive space. I found out the Apple Wireless (Bluetooth) Keyboard works flawlessly with my Windows Mobile 6 HTC Touch. I also worked out how to use the Bluetooth phone system with sad same HTC Touch in a Land Rover Discovery 3 the other day and I have to say it’s DAMN cool

Wait, that all sounded vaguely interesting. Oh well, whatever…

This App (thumbs up to F-Secure for the post), would appear to have less than in-tact morals. While not a security risk per se, it is a nasty piece of work and as fake as a Hollywood breast implant. Avoid at all costs.

This pisses me off. I mean yes I know CES is a healm of capitalism and crap consumer goods that no-one wants, but really guys, there are limits. Once would probably have been funny, no, wait, no it wouldn’t.

Think about it like this. You’re a poor hack from a TV company who’s probably getting paid far too little to stand there trying to put a presentation across about your newest product and some retard decides it’d be funny to turn off all the TVs. You look an ass, your company looks an ass and people walk away because of it. Just imagine how pissed off you would be, for a second. Not only are you making these people’s lives even more of a misery than they undoubtedly already are. I mean who is gonna enjoy giving the same presentation full of corporate pap 5-10 times a day anyway? Have you not morals?!

Well I hope you’re happy. You play a stupid prank, not once but multiple times. You then post it on the net and sit around laughing like a bunch of stupid high school drop outs who just pushed an old lady over. Now it’s all over the web that bloggers are pulling stupid pranks at CES. Great. So when CES refuse to invite bloggers because you can’t be trusted to conduct yourself like proper journalists then I hope you’ll be even happier, having set the clock back 5 years and returned CES to the journo hacks, who go and butter every company up and write resultantly biased drivel.

Congratulations, idiots. Just because CES is barely worth attending these days is not an excuse to try and get your asses banned.
via Gizmodo