BatFlattery

Damian has a long rumination on the vexed business of getting people to pay you money to do something. (I’m also glad to link to a voice in favour of respecting books!)
I realised whilst studying for my BA that I was probably not setting myself up for maximum financial return in my career, but I unfortunately then became a bit too focused on it, first becoming a lawyer, and then a chartered accountant when my accountant friends seemed to have it easier finding high-paying jobs.

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The FT has ended months of speculation with confirmation that at least O2 will be selling iPhone in the UK this autumn. Official announcements are expected at the end of the month. More on my UK iPhone blog.

In another victory for the blogosphere, NASA have been forced to admit to errors in their temperature record. Although the Times article does not mention the blogger, it was Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.org.

Of course, “the flawed data had a negligible effect on global warming statistics, and none at all on the overall warming trend.” Uh, right. But how many other errors are there?

It’s amazing that every time a climate scientist get caught out (remember the Great Hockey Stick debacle?) the rest rush in to reassure the public that the great project is unaffected. Global warming is still happening, we all still need to feel very guilty and make drastic changes in our lifestyles (based on their say-so), nothing to see here, move along.

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I am old enough to remember the great VHS versus Betamax battle. In those days (yea! long ago) I was a Sony fan, and so of course I made sure our family supported Sony. Betamax was the technical superior in any event. But if it was made by Sony, it was good. I think we had two or three Beta VCRs at one stage, including the famous Beta Hi-Fi.

I still remember the day Sony brought out its first VHS VCR. Like a knife in the gut, it was.

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One of the great things about being an A-list blogger is that you can use your enormous power of influence to tackle issues of great importance. As I’m a Z-list blogger (if that) I am able to influence very few (probably just the two of you who read this blog, I suppose). Nevertheless, one does what one can, and I do have an issue of great importance to raise.

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In this discussion at Gary’s gaff, certain people have been asking pointed questions about the cornering and stopping abilities of American muscle cars. Is it true that your average Porsche outhandles your average Mustang? Certainly. Of that there is no doubt. The Porsche is designed from scratch by sports-car engineers to handle well. It’s got decades of such design experience behind it. There are few compromises entertained by its engineers when it comes to performance and handling.

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I saw Transformers last week: not brilliant but certainly enjoyable. The bits that made me grin the most starred the yellow Autobot Bumblebee, at least when he was in his guise of a yellow Camaro. At first he’s a model that has seen better days, but then he, um, transforms into a very sleek-looking Camaro indeed.

Now I didn’t realise this at the time, but it seems that the car is supposed to be the 2009 Chevy Camaro. Since that model doesn’t actually exist yet, GM had a specialty car company graft fibreglass mouldings of their new Camaro concept car onto the running gear of a Pontiac GTO from Australia. All the gory details are here, together with some more pictures.

Welcome to Wordpress! As threatened in the previous post, this blog is now hosted on a new domain under Wordpress version 2.2.2. And after uploading and installing Wordpress (I didn’t even make a new database, just used one of my existing Wordpress ones with a different table prefix), importing all the Blogger posts was literally a matter of clicking a few buttons. Amazing. I’m well impressed.

Having heard a lot about Wordpress in the past, I decided to take the plunge when I wanted to create my iPhone blog. I downloaded it and installed it on the virtual server hosting package I use for my other sites, and after setting up the MySQL database things were up and running very, very smoothly.

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