Mary Rose Cook

Source: xkcd comic 303

In my dynamic, Ruby-infused world, the Compiling Defence is disappointingly impotent.

However, since I began using Capistrano on Joyent shared servers, I have found an even better defence: “Deploying!”

Taken with the iPhone at the weekend.

I saw my old friend, Max, this weekend and he recommended For Whom The Bell Tolls. I bought a copy and started it on the train home from Leeds. I have just got to a very tense scene where Robert is in the guerrillas’ cave and is asserting his authority over the disillusioned Pablo.

Hemingway writes so plainly and everything is so well grounded, literally, in the senses. He gives us a few specific details to convey a meal, or an environment. His rope-soled canvas shoes and his oily wines are impressions that rest upon our tongues and beneath our feet - at our points of contact with the world.

A few years ago, I was killing time at the airport and I read the first few pages of a Tom Clancy novel. Clancy is a writer who, presumably to maximise his output, begins sentences with very little idea of where they are going. So, he spends most of his time writing himself out of linguistic holes. He will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid repetition, referring to the spinning blades of the helicopter to avoid repeating the word rotor. In contrast, if Hemingway has said wine already, he will say it again if it helps make the sentence clearer.

The videos from C41, the second iteration of the Mac software development conference, are now online at curator Rentzsch’s website.

Wil Shipley’s talk on hype is particularly good.

I just cannot stop listening to B. Fleischmann’s Melancholie, an electronica re-interpretation of Schubert piano miniatures. So beautiful and so sad. Danke, Theresa. Get it.

Heading off to Berlin. A guy with a skateboard has, so far, been with me the whole way. I wonder of he is going too.

Look at this cover. People on the tube are going to think I’m reading a fucking romance novel.

Loathe as I am, I am compelled:

The external monitor is not on because, when I said to the guy in the Apple Store, “All the cables I need are included, right?”, instead of answering, “No, they’re not. You’ll need to buy a special adapter”, he, either lying or mis-informed, said, “Yes”.

This is the first time I’ve had a proper keyboard and mouse for my laptop. The big joke is, I keep on reaching over them to get to the inbuilt trackpad and keyboard.

Pictured: 20” Apple Cinema Display, MacBook, microKORG, iPhone, Tascam US-122, SM58, children’s eight-note glockenspiel (in C).