Next time you venture out into ‘Second Life’, please feel free to visit a little place called ‘The 1920s Berlin Project’.
Here I’ve tried to recreate the backstreets of the great city during this very exciting time.
To me that is the only reason Second Life is interesting, it enables me to share my passion for history, educate people and experience a tiny bit of time travel, something that seems to be rather tricky in Real Life.

It just intrigued me that Senyor Fry got quite so much quiver into his condemnation, when surely the QI in him should have been intrigued by the Science of Discworld series. Their ‘thought experiment’ narratives are stuffed to the gills with scientific insights & mysteries. Redeemed TP’s hackeries a helluva a lot in my eyes

Great post. I have added you to my digg bookmark…

I hope i get true you’re spamfilter so i can tell you what a great blog you have and that i bookmarked it….

Now coming to important things, I’d like to thank you very much for the time you’re spending in writting this fantastic blog. I really have a great deal of joy reading it, and I must say I quite understant your Macintosh love realtionship. I’m 20, and I still remember the day my father got home with that black-and-whiteish Mac Plus (I think it was in 1990). It was so easy to use, so ellegant, so lacking of a Hard Disk and still so perfect. I was 3, and still I was able to use it (mostly to play, because -Oh yes!- it had games. Some of the better computer games I’ve ever played, by the way, and I’m talking from the perspective of almost 20 years of delighted game-playing). Anyway, I was able to use it with my three-year-old brain and NEVER, NEVER, NEVER had a problem such as a system failure.

But then came the PC horror. I realized none of my nine-year-old friends had ever heard about Macintosh. They talked about Windows, and Word, and MS-Dos. What’s more, in the informatic lessons in the school they kept teaching how to use that crappy system, absolutely uncohomprensible for me -almost a Macintosh breather since my birth- making the kids assume that was all the informatic world that was there for them. For me it was like walking backwards, I could’nt see the point on that informatic lessons. They made no sense, Ms-Dos made no sense. Even windows was far away from Mac. And still, PC imposed it’s criteria.

Now I’m still a Mac lover (we still have that Mac Plus somewhere, well kept) but I have a PC in my room too. It seems it was clever to use messenger, and Microsoft Office, and Windows and all that loathesome systems just in order to be able to talk with people about computers. But on the other hand, for intelligent, easy, stylish and no system-failure tasks, I will always chose Mac.

I sympathise with the pigeonholes of ‘if you like opera, you can’t possibly like video games’ and the like. Apparently I can’t enjoy both Megadeth and Maxim Vengerov. And the fact that I’m female and I actually LIKE gaming, gadgets and cars – well something is clearly wrong with me! But that’s nothing compared to the fact that I am in MENSA, and blonde! (it still amazes me that people carry these stereotypes so literally)

I’m afraid I have to throw you a blinder here though Stephen – I like Norman Douglas AND Terry Pratchett!!

Thanks for the nice read, keep up the interesting posts…..

For daily use, and for just getting stuff done– whether that’s writing, making music, sending email, looking at web pages, organizing documents created while writing or so on, or general non-inherently-technical-stuff that just happens to work better with a computer involved, then windows, icons, and the rest are absolutely the way to go.

My problems, as a unix systems administrator, arise when people who only know that sort of interface try to impose it on fantastically complex tasks, like Domain Name Service, web server configuration, and so on. It’s true that Microsoft has created a few mostly-functional toy versions of these pieces of software, but in order to get to any really complex configuration options, well, it gets unweildy pretty quickly. (Tabbed dialogs were created by evil evil men and I hope they get punched for it, whoever they are.) If nothing else, it’s hard to search for specific parameters in large configuration dialogs. Apple has a start on making that workable with Spotlight in the System Preferences, but it’s still not nearly as simple as opening httpd.config in a text editor, searching for the line, and changing it.

Even as somebody who can explain things like how to fake virtual hosts using mod_rewrite rather than an actual VirtualHost paragraph on an apache server, when I sit down to write music or email or whatever on a computer, it’s vital that it simply work with a minimum of messing around. I often run into college students who are surprised to find that I use a Mac for day-to-day tasks and projects. “You’re a unix admin!” they say. “Why don’t you use unix!” (This has come up less often since OS X made the Mac cool again.) The simple response is that I get paid to mess around and do complicated stuff, and when I’m at home, I want to be able to relax and just not worry about it. No linux box at home, nope. I keep the fiddly stuff at work and work on the meat of my projects at home, rather than the infrastructure required to support those projects. And at work, I build that infrastructure so that other people can do the same. I do like building infrastructure, or I wouldn’t do it as a job, but my job is not my life, and I don’t want my technology toys to be like my job.