andrewlighten.com

I’ve been waiting for this. It was so inevitable.

Time to clear this up once and for all.

When we speak of shallots in Australia, do we mean:

• Spring onions?
• The tiny garlic size onions that are almost like a baby brown onion? *WINNER, as we thought*

Please comment.

US Patent 5823572:

A self defense weapon for use by a victim subject to being attacked by a perpetrator includes a memo pad having a plurality of pages. The memo pad has a plurality of edges and an indentation in at last one of the edges adapted to accept at least part of at least one finger or the victim’s hand such that the indentation facilitates the victim’s capability to firmly grasp and hold the memo pad in the victim’s hand, whereby the memo pad can thereby be used by the victim as a self defense weapon to ward off perpetrators.

The results of the 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are available online. I’ve heard of this before, in passing. It’s basically a rotten-tomatoes kind of award for the worst opening lines in fictional writing.

I liked the entry in the ‘Romance’ category:

Bill swore the affair had ended, but Louise knew he was lying, after discovering Tupperware containers under the seat of his car, which were not the off-brand containers that she bought to save money, but authentic, burpable, lidded Tupperware; and she knew he would see that woman again, because unlike the flimsy, fake containers that should always be recycled responsibly, real Tupperware must be returned to its rightful owner.

The ‘Fantasy Fiction’ category has a good entry too:

“Toads of glory, slugs of joy,” sang Groin the dwarf as he trotted jovially down the path before a great dragon ate him because the author knew that this story was a train wreck after he typed the first few words.

Best of all, however, was this year’s winner in the ‘Adventure’ category:

Leopold looked up at the arrow piercing the skin of the dirigible with a sort of wondrous dismay — the wheezy shriek was just the sort of sound he always imagined a baby moose being beaten with a pair of accordions might make.

This morning I got on the bike for the first time in probably 4 months. Out to Cragie, across to Carisbrook, around the trotting track, up Tullaroop Road and then back through town.

A total of 30.5 km at a very pedestrian 28 km/hr.

Now I’m going to lie down and pass out.

(Actually, that’s a complete lie. I feel fantastic considering it’s been so long since I’ve ridden. I know I’ll be paying for it later today and tomorrow, but right now I feel great.)

Lisa found this on YouTube earlier. It sounds so much like Nick Cave. We figure it must have been recorded during his Nursery Rhymes for the Damned phase.

• The annual Maryborough Christmas carols are on the 21st of December — the Sunday just before the Christmas week. I think I’d previously told a few people the 20th, but it’s definitely the Sunday, which makes it the 21st. Was confirmed at SES last Wednesday night.
• The Brumby government have allocated $$$ to bring passenger rail back to Maryborough by 2010. Our very happy and joyful mayor was on the TV before quaffing wine and talking about how good it will be.

How cool is this? The shiny new Kogan Agora mobile phone goes on sale in Australia first.  They’re taking pre-orders right now – $299 for dispatch late January.

Being as telepathic as I am, right now I know what you’re thinking: So what?

Well, here’s what. This is the second phone — and the first for sale in Australia — that’s powered by Google’s Android open source software.

The whole idea of android is that it’s an open platform for building mobile communication applications. You can get the Android SDK from Google (it’s been available for a while, actually) and write applications for the phone far more easily than ever before. It’s built on a Linux core bundled with a collection of device drivers for mobile things such as bluetooth, 3G, WiFi, audio, video, etc. The feature bullet points on the ‘What is Android?’ page sums it up:

• Application framework enabling reuse and replacement of components
• Dalvik virtual machine optimized for mobile devices
• Integrated browser based on the open source WebKit engine
• Optimized graphics powered by a custom 2D graphics library; 3D graphics based on the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification (hardware acceleration optional)
• SQLite for structured data storage
• Media support for common audio, video, and still image formats (MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, PNG, GIF)
• GSM Telephony (hardware dependent)
• Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, and WiFi (hardware dependent)
• Camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer (hardware dependent)
• Rich development environment including a device emulator, tools for debugging, memory and performance profiling, and a plugin for the Eclipse IDE

Some things about this list that may not be obvious: The Dalvik VM is a Java runtime for mobile devices. WebKit is the same web rendering engine behind Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome web browsers. Eclipse is a very popular Java-centric software development environment.

It’s quite clear that this is aimed fair-and-square at Apple’s iPhone but with a far more open development environment. Let the uber-smart phone battles begin!

Oh, and as you can see from the screenshot, it’s got all the Google stuff built in from day one, including mobile access to Google search, GMail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Maps browsing, YouTube, etc.

Think of it as a mobile copy of Google, plus a phone, plus a camera, plus a development environment where you can write any software you want with hooks into all the above. This is going to be huge.