Nothing to Declare

…is the best brush-off I know for unsolicited callers. As it happens, it’s true - BT has messed up and put my business number in the home phone book. When the callers come however, all I have to do is say the above and they immediately hang up. Superb!

Took this from the Motley Fool:

“The current model of analyst-intermediated, opinion-based technology buying and selling produces poor financial returns. Across the world, corporate managers spend more than $1 trillion a year on technology. To help managers invest, and technology marketers persuade, $2 billion a year is spent on technology analysts. Yet 70% of projects fail to deliver a financial return, according to the Standish Group and other commentators.”

That’s an interesting, but not particularly insightful point. IT may produce poor financial returns but that doesn’t mean Gartner, Forrester etc are failing their shareholders. Also, what is Standish Group other than an analyst house? And finally, what of the 30% ? Should we all go back to pen and paper, and blow the Internet? I don’t think so.

Well, I finally got round to listening to Massive Attack. Proof (should we need it) that another man’s meat is this man’s poison. I’m sure it’s very good, if you’re in to that sort of thing.

Update: Hold that thought… now playing: Teardrop

Installing Ubuntu Linux in a Microsoft VirtualPC virtual machine. And some other things besides.

For my own future reference as much as anything, I had to:

* install in safe graphics mode so that the display was viewable during install

* reduce the colour depth to 16 bit (booting in recovery mode and running “dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg”)

* add the parameter “i8042.noloop” to the kernel command in the file /boot/grub/menu.lst so the mouse can work

* log in as root and run “dhclient” to pick up an IP address from my wireless router

* (update) added “snd-sb16″ to the file /etc/modules, to enable sound

There - so easy my granny could do it :-) I then downloaded all the patches (180Mb of them) to be up to date.

First impression - not too shabby! I’m running 2Gb of RAM, so I’ve allocated 500 Meg to Ubuntu and its running fine. Nice, clean interface as well - and plenty of games!

Due to a sequence of circumstances I have ended up reading four books in parallel. At first glance they are unconnected:

Derren Brown - Tricks of the Mind

Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion

M. Scott Peck - The Road Less Travelled and Beyond

Christopher Booker - The Seven Basic Plots

At first glance these were totally unconnected, apart from being non-fiction and vaguely esoteric that is. Delve a little deeper and two are people wanting to debunk myths, one is explaining their roots and the other is exploring that part of the human psyche that needs them. Derren was a staunch Christian who is now keen to reveal all things “magical” as mere (though still clever) trickery, Richard is keen to state that magic is how we see things we don’t understand, and Scott thinks we could all do with a bit more of it. Christopher won’t be the last to point out how we love certain types of stories, but whether they fulfil a purely human or a spiritual need is a moot point. I’ll let you know in, ooh, about 3,000 pages!

How did I end up reading them all at once? Who knows, perhaps it was meant