sad song

memory

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?
- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

ipod touch day

the ipod is six years old today. and today was the day I gave in and bought an ipod touch which I didn't need. Couldn't resist finding out what the touch screen and new interface looks like. Looks every bit as good as I imagined it, I just get the feeling that I should be holding it to my my ear and making a call. the volume seems a bit low on song playback though, hope that silly euro nanny thing about limiting volume hasn't been set up.

only the shallow.......

Only the shallow know themselves.
- Oscar Wilde

From Here To Eternity

Deborah Kerr died today aged 86. I thought she was older and had died many years ago.

Road to Nowhere

let the trees grow apples

Saw a link to this photo on the FAKE STEVE site. Apart entirely from the fact that this must be a worrying picture for Microsoft, it's even more amazing to me that I can spot only one guy using pen and paper.

mind

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
- AA Milne

big words

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
- Stephen King

Apple

I liked this picture in the New York Times this morning. Steve Jobs holding one of the new ipods introduced yesterday. In profile he looks old, like an old man discovering something. Looking at it intently as if looking for directions. There is also a sci-fi futuristic feel to the photo. Jobs on the deck of some spacecraft Kirk or Picard like trying to communicate with some alien life form. Great new ipods by the way, especially the much derided new “fatty nano” which I think will sell millions.

goodbye Mr Calculator

In town today I was sad to see a for sale sign on the “Mr Calculator” electronic shop. Once upon a time it was one of the few places to go in Dublin to look at new tech toys. Never cheap, it must have found it impossible to compete with the internet – ironic since it was one of the first places in town you could buy wireless and web devices. The Indian guy who owned it was passionate about his stuff. Wonder what he decided to do? Retire probably. I would have bought more stuff there if it wasn’t so expensive. It had a small shop window that was the tech equivalent of a Dickensian toy shop window. As it happens, I remember buying a Bluetooth adaptor for a Compaq iPac there one Christmas Eve years ago.

data center

PC world site was down today, had this picture on site down notice. So old and futuristic all at the same time.

maoning ireland

A phone in show on RTE at the moment with the Joe Duffy stand in talking to people who have decided to leave Ireland. The presenter doing his level best to get the new wild geese talk about how the “quality of life” in Ireland is making them leave but the callers keep talking about wanting to leave because of the bad Summer weather. The show was clearly intended to be another RTE moan about how the Celtic Tiger has made us lose our soul etc but ends up being about people who want to leave to get year round sun. Very funny.

Seriousness

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
- Oscar Wilde

beige bath towels

Nothing says, 'I have no idea what to get you,' quite like giant beige bath towels.
- Missbhavens

Hanif Kureishi on Italy

A fine piece of travel writing in today's Guardian Travel section by Hanif Kureishi. He's writing about being on holiday in the The Grand Hotel Gardone on Lake Garda in Italy. It's a piece that sometimes strains for melancholia :

"What to do? How to cope? I have no answers, but can only gape at the lake from an old hotel, which resembles a dissolving sugar lump, continuously reminded that western civilisation is in crisis. Indeed, as I tell the journalist, I consider it to be doomed, as cracks open up across its formerly firm surface, like the ping-pong ball the little boy and I use for table tennis."

But youth and optimism, like the face of his son mirroring his own youthful self, is what stays in my mind after finishing the piece.

I read it at a sunny suburban Dublin table while eating dinner. The piece, and the welcome sunburst during a wet Irish Summer makes me want to visit Italy again.

i think so?

Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised.
- Marilyn Manson

maybe

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.
- R. Buckminster Fuller

wonder if this is true?

Gore Vidal talking about Howard Austen, his companion, but not lover, for 53 years. 'It is very easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part and impossible when it does.' This satisfies no one of course but there, as Henry James would say, it is.'

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut