Sunset over the Gulf of Mexico

Anna Maria Island, Florida
May 2008

WES this year was, as always, excellent. We got access to many of the people we wanted to talk to, including sessions with the co-CEOs of RIM, talking about the future of Blackberry and the role of the smartphone in a connected contextual world. It's left me with a lot to think about and the inklings of a thesis I want to explore in articles and blog entries over the next few months.

WES, also, was self-contained, and we didn't leave the air-conditioned halls of the combined hotel and conference centre from the moment we arrived (escaping the dodgy taxi driver who stiffed us $30 while accusing us of under-paying) to the point nearly four days later where I had to go ask the folk at the rental car agency just how to release the parking brake on the mini-van they'd just upgraded us to (there's a lever above the foot pedal for the parking brake that releases it)...

So we drove west, across the narrow peninsula, to one of my favourite coastlines, the white soft beaches and azure seas of the sand keys of Florida's Gulf Coast.

Currently we're on Anna Maria Island, where I spent a pleasant sunset chatting to a local photographer and twitcher about the various sea birds that made their way along the beaches. Coal-black frigate birds drifted effortlessly overhead on long thin wings, while brown pelicans bobbed their way up and down, alternately skimming the waves and soaring.

The stars of the show were the skimmers, with their strange asymmetric beaks - the lower portion much longer than the upper - and their striking black and white plumage. It was when the beaks hit the water that you could see why they were shaped the way they were. Open-mouthed the skimmers shot across the surface of the waves, leaving a wake as they aimed to catch fish swimming just below the surface.

Alone they were impressive, in formation they were amazing. Banking sharply they wove around each other, all the while skimming the waves.



If you're ever in Florida, this part of the Gulf Coast is well worth the two hour drive from the tourist hotspots of Orlando.

First there was The Register, then came The Inquirer. Now Mike Magee is back with a new experiment in online IT journalism, The IT Examiner.

The first cut of the site is up, and it's looking interesting - especially as it blends western and eastern news in one place, with journalists based in Bangalore doing much of the writing. I suspect the outsourcing section of the site will be worth following. The site only went live yesterday, so there's not much there yet, but as with all online writing the value is in the corpus, and things should grow pretty rapidly now.

Bit of a theme going on with the site names, Mike!

Parakeet flying over Richmond Park. The aliens among us squawk and screech their torrid affairs from the tree tops...

Richmond Park, London
May 2008

My 3,000^th image on Flickr comes from a walk through Richmond Park's Isabella Plantation at the height of the azalea season.



The park is one of my favourite places for photography, so it's fitting that it's the source of a milestone image.

Richmond Park, London
May 2008

Some folk from a project I'm distantly involved with are looking for ad management software for a web site.

Any recommendations from the folk out there? It'd be good to hear what's good and what horror stories people have had.

I don't have many details of what they want, but I suspect it'll be banner and side bar management with some AdWords integration as well.

Thanks!

"It's like watching a RAID array rebuild".

(29.4% Complete, Time Remaining 399.8 Minutes)

A 1927 navigation device. Scroll the map through the viewer to guide you on any of 20 or so pre-set routes.

Yes, I know, it's a link to the Daily Mail. And from a Guardianista like me, too. Sorry...

The house NAS is slowly on its way back to health.

One of the four drives in the RAID array lunched itself a while back, and I received a replacement this afternoon. Fitting it was a snap, the Buffalo Terastation Pro uses quick release drive caddies, so all I had to do was unscrew and replace the drive. The folk at RL Supplies had the right drives, and they delivered the replacement pretty quickly.

(Actually, the first thing I had to do was find the key to open the drive bay door, which in my usual efficiency I had "filed". Once that panic was over I could get to work.)

Once it was in I powered up the NAS to discover that the crash had also lunched its firmware. Luckily I could download some replacement code, and fire it off at the box. Of course the firmware updater needed me to turn of the firewall on my desktop PC so it could actually see the NAS. Still, updating the firmware was pretty straight forward, so I didn't have to much to worry about there.

Reflashed, it booted, and I could finally see the web UI. The three remaining disks were OK, and all that remained was clicking the "rebuild array" button. Oh, and waiting. And waiting. It's looking as though the process will take about ten hours. At least I was running RAID 5 and could do the restore, so waiting for the data to come back is really not too much of a hassle compared to not having anything.

And then I'll be able to get back to the house music collection - as I've ripped everything we have and stored it on the NAS. And, err, the wedding photos.

Phew.

4.6% done.

A nicely atmospheric shot of Fort Ross, a 19th century Russian trading post on the Northern California coast, between Bodega Bay and Fort Bragg. It's a really rather beautiful, but very isolated place - but the sea otter pelts were tempting.

The day we were there, the whole of the place was being used by several families worth of Russian re-enactors, all in a mix of historical and modern dress. It was slightly odd watching a group of peasant children singing modern pop songs while using toy guns as air guitars.

Fort Ross, California
April 2008

According to El Reg, the servers have been stolen from the data centre where they've been running both his and the WOMAD sites...

Maybe someone was listening to this song as they walked off with the hardware...

I know something about opening windows and doors
I know how to move quietly to creep across creaky wooden floors
I know where to find precious things in all your cupboards and drawers
Slipping the clippers
Slipping the clippers through the telephone wires
The sense of isolation inspires
Inspires me
I like to feel the suspense when I'm certain you know I am there
I like you lying awake, your baited breath charging the air
I like the touch and the smell of all the pretty dresses you wear
Intruders happy in the dark
Intruder come
Intruder come and leave his mark, leave his mark

Still, the site is slowly coming back - so score one for data recovery.

Oddly Gabriel is keynoting at Salesforce.com's European DreamForce event in London this week. I don't think this makes him quite the poster boy for SaaS!

It's starting to warm up in London. The birds are singing late into the evening, and the windows are starting to open all along the street. People are wearing shorts, and there's a definite scent of barbecue charcoal and paraffin on the gentle breeze. The cats have rediscovered the catflap

And me?

I've had my bi-annual haircut and no longer look like the slightly hairier-twin of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. In fact this time the barber seems to have been even more drastic than I expected, and I've ended up with the closest thing I've had to a short back-and-sides since, ooh, since I had my first job. Still, it's a definite weight off my shoulders...

News has just come out that Microsoft is walking away from its bid for Yahoo! after raising its offer to $33 a share.

I'm not really surprised at this result. As much as he's like to think so Yahoo! isn't worth the $37 a share that Jerry Yang was holding out for, and I really don't think Microsoft wanted to go hostile considering the damage it would have done to the Yahoo! engineering teams it wanted. More than $33 a share, and Steve Ballmer would have been risking an awful lot of additional gearing that would have ended up diluting Microsoft's control of its own destiny.

So what's next? One option is to for Microsoft to take the same approach it did with Borland in the 90s - so recruiters in the Bay Area can probably look for a bumper year as Microsoft starts to cherry pick the talent it wants from Yahoo!'s engineering teams. That'll be considerably cheaper for Microsoft, though any results will take time to filter through its product pipeline. It took nearly 10 years for .NET to get to where it is today...

The other option is, I think, going to depend on how the Microsoft and Yahoo! stock prices behave over the next quarter or two. Monday should see a steep drop in Yahoo!'s price, and an equivalent (but not so dramatic) rise in Microsoft. The spectre of a hefty gearing has depressed Microsoft's stock, and the prospect of a payday has pushed Yahoo!'s up. If Yahoo! continues to trend down, its board is going to come under considerable pressure from institutional shareholders as to why it didn't take the $33 offer. Yahoo! will end having to approach various suitors, but there won't be a white knight until Microsoft comes in with a bid at around $28 (or possibly even lower) a share, which the Yahoo! board will be forced to accept.

Either way Microsoft gets the people and skills it wants for less than it was originally planning to pay, though the second option adds a few additional properties and the trauma of a merger...

Originally posted as a comment to this entry by major_clanger

It's surprising how quickly you can knock these things up in Google Docs...