Hal's Friday Evening Blog Review #6 - What A Waste Of Bandwidth!

...Not my one-line review of tonight's featured blog - that's just what it's called. This is the kind of thing you want to come home to if you love the computers you work with, you code hard at the office all week, you've had a few Friday evening beers in a bar that wasn't too crowded... you might have pumped a tenner or so into the quiz machine, you almost fell asleep on the train home and missed your stop, and you just want to read about Linux, people controlling robots wirelessly with Sony PSPs, a Star Wars version of The Last Supper, a graphical representation of pi, and other examples the kind of nerdy stuff featured by Slashdot et al.

This floats my boat to an extent although I'm only an ersatz nerd really - I like building PCs (but that's not very hard really) and the odd bit of Perl coding once in a while, and I have Linux as a dual-boot on my PC but I don't use it very much at the moment. My wife describes me as the "uber-nerd" but that's just because she sees the ever-expanding piles of SCART leads behind the TV, for the VCR, DVD, DVD recorder, Freeview box, etc. etc. and wonders where it's going to end. Plus we had speakers wired for 5.1 in our previous house and proper full-size speakers as well, not the satellite ones that look like baby intercoms used to in the 7os. That kind of set-up certainly rakes it in for the people who make speaker wire, but I found the overall effect rather artificial, and I'm not convinced for music listening that it's any huge advance on the 70s quadrophonic systems. (For films it makes a bit more sense but once you've heard the subwoofer rumble and heard the helicopter tracking round the room at the start of Apocalypse Now, you think: wow. And that's as good as it gets.)

But we are getting into hi-fi/home theatre buff territory rather than straight nerd-talk here, which is great, but deserves a full post of its own (doesn't almost everything?) Also, I realise I haven't talked much about the blog itself. But that's always a risk after a couple of beers. Anyway, it's good if you like that sort of thing - and I'm sure more of you like it than you admit to!