Diane

The initial promotional pack from the producers arrived today. Boy, don’t I wish I could just rip the four-minute trailer to a file and post it: but the music on it is copyright, so that isn’t going to happen.

Nonetheless, it looks gorgeous. And here’s the first promo poster.

Yes, there we are, wayyyy down at the bottom among the co-production partners’ logos. (chuckle) Some day we will be in bigger lettering. For the moment, though, everything looks just fine…

Meanwhile, people who’ve seen the earliest pre-release info are already arguing about it on the forums on IMDb.

I love this…

“The Spirit rover on Mars took the first picture of Earth ever made from the surface of another planet.”

Just. Too. Neat. For. Words.

Lovers of good bookshelves, cast your eyes over here:

www.shelfstore.net and www.shelvingsystem.co.uk

Especially if you have a lot of paperbacks (we have some thousands), you’ve probably noticed that finding nice-looking bookshelves that make the most of the available wall space is a nuisance. These people offer a good solution to the problem.

The shelving components come in a number of standard widths, heights and depths, so that with a little effort it’s possible to put together a shelf that will suit even an awkward space. (They say there are 294 possible basic combinations: I haven’t checked their math, but that seems about right.) The wood is solid pine, not too knotty, in a pleasant, neutral satin finish. The full-depth brackets that hold the shelves up run into fairly deep grooves cut into the shelf bottoms, so that the more books you put on a shelf, the more secure it gets. And the holes into which the brackets run come at 5 mm intervals, so that you can adjust the shelves pretty closely to the height of what you’re putting on them. These are perfect for CDs and DVDs, too. You can join separate units to one another, you can build units over or around awkward pieces of furniture (radiators, etc), and there are extras available for them — cupboard doors, drawers, glass shelves. There’s also a Java-based design tool on one of their web pages so that you can see how the basic layout looks and works, and store the design for later reference or to order.

When I first stumbled across the Shelfstore website, we decided to test them by designing one shelf that would go on a “waste-space” wall in one of the upstairs bathrooms. The space is about 7 ft high by 20″ wide, and we ordered nine shelves for it, 5″ deep. Delivery took about two weeks (part of this was just shipping time from England to Ireland, which is routinely 4-5 days for largish things coming via TNT or one of the other “bulk” couriers). The bookcase took about twenty minutes to assemble, including the two brackets that secure the top of it to the wall and make everything rock-steady. The components are very solid and well-made: the finished shelf holds 250 paperbacks, +/- a few.

Two more of these were delivered over the last week, one for the living room, again as a test, and a second one for the bathroom (which is rapidly turning into an excellent library). The living-room one devoured all the books which had been in its predecessor shelf, and had room for half as many more again.

We’re sold. Have a look at the websites and see if they suit you. (US readers: yes, they ship to the States: yes, the shipping charges will probably stun you. The owner tells me that thet’re contemplating setting up a US-based distribution center because they’ve been getting so many orders from there.)

From the diaries of Debbie of Galilee:

“I wanted to get him the perfect thing for his birthday, so I asked Matthew and he said, well, myrrh is good, but then Luke said, oh please, everyone always gives him myrrh, I bet he wishes those wise men had brought scented candles, some imported marmalade, and a nice box of notecards. …”

This is like the Berlin Wall falling, biologically speaking…

“…Researchers yesterday reported evidence that appears to topple a decades-old tenet of reproductive biology: that girls are born with all the eggs they’ll ever have, a pool that dwindles and degenerates with age….”

Now let’s see if the research holds up under scrutiny, and whether other researchers can reproduce the results…

Oh, wow, this is so desperately wonderful. More! More!

“Our robotic inspectors on the surface, the rovers, have yet to find vast stockpiles of water, but keep in mind that Mars is a planet far larger than France and California combined. The rovers are also likely the victims of deception — the Martians could easily be moving the water to keep it hidden from the slow-moving and gullible rovers. (As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said, inspections on the ground are ‘a sham.’)”

(chuckle)

…Thanks to Fred Clark at Slacktivist.

…about the small print in the version of the WizPod “ad” on the YW site: here it is.

I regret to say that the date has nothing to do with the 2000th / 6000th -anniversary of the pub date for Wizards at War. … 🙂

So we’re back, and there was no time to blog, as it turned out: there was just too much stuff going on during the trip, both work and play. Now I have a lot of piled-up mail and business to deal with before there’ll really be time to post the many pictures we took. Anyway, we had fun: the weather held fair the whole time, which is a lot to ask, this time of year.

I stumbled across something neat, though. There’s a website called iPodLounge.com which caters to those happy folk who possess one of these sweet little things. (And one of those, as of a couple of weeks ago, is me.) One section of the site is dedicated to iPod “travel photos” — pictures people have taken of their iPods in interesting places, and sometimes using the image reflected in the iPod’s mirrored back surface to show where they are (the Taj Palace Hotel in Mumbai, for example).

There’s also an area where people can post pictures of iPods as art (check out the SnowPod at the bottom); and in another gallery, a contest has been going on for site users interested in designing new “concept” iPods.

Well, I must have had another of those Corel Photo-Paint blackouts after seeing that, because I can’t think how else this would have happened. (The image also appears somewhere or other on this page: I don’t seem able to do a fixed link to it — the URL changes dynamically as new images are posted.) Such a device does seem like a logical extension of possibilities we’ve already seen played out in earlier volumes of the Young Wizards series: wizards in general seem to be almost the archetypal “early adopters”…so it wouldn’t surprise me if one of these turns up in Wizards at War. We shall see.

Meanwhile, I’m waiting for the first question about why the “bite” is missing….

…and smiled (a little ruefully). I’ve had a few of these in my time…

Meanwhile…we go away tomorrow, and once again I marvel (helplessly) at how, no matter how hard I try to get Pre-Travel Stuff done four or five days before the trip, I still wind up doing so much of it the day before. Is all the current business e-mail migrated to the laptops, have we packed all the necessary cables and chargers, blah, blah, blah…

The trouble is, Life (meaning the normal progress of it, which at the moment largely seems to involve cats, laundry and firewood) keeps interfering with my trip-management plans. (mutter) Well, never mind. At least at the moment we have the minor pleasure of a small but strictly scenic snowfall — it’s just barely sticking: “wintry showers”, as the local weatherfolk call it, and nothing more. (I hope I haven’t now spoken too soon: last time it snowed here just before Fasnacht, we had a blizzard, the first genuine one I’d seen here in fifteen years — one which almost saddled us with the massive irony of not being able to go to Switzerland because of snow in Ireland: several feet of it, so that the taxi almost couldn’t make it up our road two days after the major fall…)

It’s almost Fasnacht: so we’ll be heading out for Basel on Friday morning. I’ll blog from there as I can. Phoneblogging is still a little iffy — I don’t believe I can get GPRS roaming in Switzerland at the moment — but our hotel has broadband, so I should be able to upload some pics of the Morgestraich and the parades that follow it on Monday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon.

Don’t expect many pictures of the Tuesday part of the celebrations, though. Tuesday is children’s day, and those kids are merciless about stuffing the clothes of non-Baslers with confetti…even if you’re wearing a blaggede pin like the one to the right, which identifies you as a supporter of the holiday and a “friend” of Fasnacht. Anyway, we’ll probably head off for Germany or France that day. (From one side or the other of Basel, you can be across either border and into another country in about ten minutes.)

Meanwhile, for those interested in seeing the Morgestraich — the opening of Fasnacht, the “reveille” candlelit parade through the Old Town of Basel with thousands of fifers and drummers — the action kicks off at 0300 GMT/UTC on Monday morning, March 1st. There’ll once again be streaming video and audio courtesy of the wonderful Radio Basilisk: the link to the audio and video streams is here — in the middle column of the page, scroll down to see the link in the right-side column that says “Morgestraich”. The link becomes active on Monday morning early, Basel time: that’s about 6 PM EST, 3 pm PST. But the marching starts on the stroke of four by the Münster clock, when almost all the lights in the city go out for the benefit of those marching with candles and lamps and the huge satirical lanterns, the laderne. …The page also has links to video from last year’s Fasnacht, if you’re interested of getting an advance taste of what’s to come.

There are webcams, too: check this page. And the Fasnachts-Comité, the “umbrella” organization that takes care of everything including cleaning up tons of confetti every night, has a link here.

I know that when you try to log in, you’re getting a message saying that the Forums have been suspended. This is due to a billing problem (a charge got declined due to a full credit card, and Infopop’s notice about the decline got missed). Lee and I are working to get this situation sorted out today, if possible.

The conference scheduled for tonight should be able to go ahead as planned, since the chat client itself is not affected by the discussion forum problem. Use this link to get at the chat client for the time being.

As always, you need to be a Forum member and to have been issued a chat username and password by Lee in order to attend.

(sigh) Sorry for the inconvenience, all.