Peter Sullivan's Journal

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Keeping a Straight Face
Sometimes the feed line is so obvious, you don't even need to take it. Commons committee chairman asks Lord Mandleson if he is "this PM's Willie."

Current Mood: croggled

The Ultimate Michael Jackson Tribute Video
As THE WORLD gathers to remember THE KING OF POP, a chance to link to the ultimate Michael Jackson tribute video. Hat-tip to

stevegreen.

Current Mood: amused

Citrix on Mac OS X Annoyance Resolved
Working from home today.

The (otherwise excellent) Citrix ICA client for Mac OS X appears to have one minor flaw -- when used on my Mac Book Pro, at any rate. As I only ever use the touchpad, I am pretty much on automatic pilot to control-click for anything that needs a right-click mouse event. Citrix either doesn't detect this, or doesn't pass it through to the remote application. The solution is to use the other, less well-known, method of generating a right-click mouse event. Go to System Preferences - Keyboard & Mouse - Trackpad and switch on "Place two fingers on trackpad and click button for secondary click."

Now I've discovered this, I'm not entirely sure I ever need to go in to work again. Oh, except for those meeting thingies...

Current Mood: satisfied

Iran - moving from the symbolic to the practical
Going green for Iran may be, as some have called it, an empty gesture. But if you have a computer that's permanently connected to the internet, you can set it up as a proxy for Iranian citizens to use. Instructions for GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac are available, along with some more general guidance.

Current Mood: politicised

Window Shopping for Books
Had a brief saunter around a couple of local bookshops yesterday, but didn't actually buy any books. However, I did notice that:

Bryan's Talbot's Alice in Sunderland was (correctly) filed under "Local Interest" rather than "Graphic Novel" (or, if you adopt mrs. ceemage's classification, "Comics.")
Peter Purves' autobiography is, almost inevitably, entitled Here's One I Wrote Earlier.

Twenty Years of Remembrance
For the June Fourth Incident.

Current Mood: sombre

Democracy - my part in its victory
As our house is probably the closest (by walking route, if not as the crow flies) to the local special school that serves as our local polling station, I've already been down and out to vote. No council elections here (we elect three years out of four, and this year is the "off year"), but the European Parliament elections cover the whole country.

As a middle manager, I have a highly-developed skill of reading things upside down (always useful when sitting the other side of a senior manager's desk), and thus was able to determine that I was the fourth person to vote at this polling station. So, my vote was enough to put us in in the position of having had more voters than polling staff on duty. Which is not bad for 07:25 a.m.

Of course, in an ideal world, it would have been a Single Transferable Vote voting system (as in Northern Ireland) rather than d'Hondt with closed party lists, but I suppose any degree of Proportional Representation is better than none.

I'm assuming that we'll have exit polls at 10:01 p.m. tonight, but most council elections won't be counted until Friday morning, whilst the European ballots don't get counted until Sunday, once the polls have closed across the rest of Europe.

Life imitating art, pt. 94
Obama is to appoint a "cyber tsar" and a cyber security office in the White House. Or, as some people might put it, a Secretary for the Internet.

Webcasting from Baycon
Information about the latest incarnation of The Virtual Fan Lounge has just been posted here. Tell your friends, tell your enemies.

Current Mood: fannish

Game Openings
I have just opened a Railway Rivals waiting list -- for the first time this millennium -- at http://www.burdonvale.co.uk/octopus/

Map FR - "She's a bitch of a map, but I love her." Which is either a

wwhyte quote or a

mylescorcoran one.

You do the math
OK, something not quite right here ("Berlusconi's wife to divorce him" [BBC])

Ms Lario is Mr Berlusconi's second wife and a former actress. The couple have three children from their 19-year marriage, all in their 20s.

Current Mood: croggled

On the way home tonight, my playlist in the car (all with the CD player turned "all the way up to 11") were:

Tragedy
YMCA
Teletubbies say Eh-Oh!
Barbie Girl
and Whigfield's Saturday Night (this last one three times)

From this, we can deduce that:
(a) I have no shame whatsoever, and
(b) I have had quite a week at work.

Zombie Jane Asher wants your brainsssssss...
Not actually that interesting a story, but once I'd thought of the headline, my inner

johnnyeponymous insisted that I use it.

Through the medium of interpretative dance
Because it's Monday, and far too many of us have to go to work whether we want to or not. Almost certainly the most unusual version of Madonna's Like a Prayer that you'll see today. Hat-tip to

simonbillenness

Current Mood: silly

Most important piece of news from the Sir Clement Freud obituaries
According to Neil Gaiman, there are another four unpublished Grimble stories out there.

Hat-tip to

simonbillenness

Current Mood: sad

AKICILJ, test - geek advice sought
Is there anyone out there who understands the inner workings of TCP/IP enough to answer this for me? What happens if I have two open internet connections on the same machine at the same time (e.g. wifi and 3g mobile broadband)?Should the TCP/IP driver software be "intelligent" enough to use this in the optimum way? In other words, load-share if both connections are about as reliable as each other, or use the stronger one in preference to the weaker if one is clearly not working as well? In other words, if I have two internet connections, will I get the 'best of both worlds,' or the 'worst of both worlds'?

Current Mood: geeky

Unconventional convention thoughts.
Charlie Stross has just walked past with a *very* black coffee and a croissant. Someone obviously didn't make breakfast.

We may be able to add to the schedule for today - see if we can get Geri Sullivan and the Reno in 2011 people here at the convention together, for some joint promotion. I've been down to the Reno 2011 desk, and left them a note to explain what we're looking to do, together with my cell phone number and e-mail address.

I've also shelled out the £15 for a day's wifi access today, which should hopefully improve the stability of the connection today. Not that it was *that* bad yesterday, all things considered. If not, well my broadband modem is still in my pocket. (Insert your own Mae West joke here.)

Current Mood: fannish

Saturday morning at the convention

And of course despite being awake until 2 am, my internal alarm clock still goes off at 6:30 am. Still, it's amazing how effective the restorative powers of a shower and a full hotel breakfast can be.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Into LXtra Time
OK, I'm meant to be winding myself down to sleep, trying to avoid the usual convention curse of staying up too late on the Friday and wrecking yourself for the rest of the weekend. Let's do a brain-dump and see if that works.

I drove down to Eastercon on Friday afternoon, and it took less time than expected. On check-in, I noticed a sign suggesting that people who wanted to use the hotel wifi should register with Ops so that we could see if we could get a group rate. I went and duly registered, but it looks as if there won't be enough interest to make it viable.

In the meantime, I tested my 3G mobile broadband set-up on site, and found that it was just as good/bad as at home. That is, the connection was fairly solid, but I had to ratchet the video quality down a notch in order to preserve the audio quality. (This is a fairly easy trade-off to decide on when you're going to be mainly covering panels and the like, where the video is useful, but the audio is essential.)

I then chilled out for a bit, before hooking up with Steve Green and heading to the Mimosa room, where our first LXtra event was being held - the Fan Guest of Honour speech from Bill and Mary Burns (actually an interview by Greg Pickersgill). Thankfully, the room wasn't being used for anything the hour before, which gave me plenty of time to get set up, including doing some realistic testing of the all-important sound levels.

We had a good turn out in the LXtra chat room - apologies to anyone I've missed, but I remember seeing S&ra Bond, Rob Jackson, Robert Litchmann, Ian Maule, Bill Mills, Cheryl Morgan, Curt Phillips, Steve Rogerson, Geri Sullivan, Kat Templeton, plus a few other un-named ustreamers.

I tried to leave the laptop up front alone as much as possible, and followed the chat room on my iPhone (yes, I am an Apple poseur fanboi) in case there were any problems. The feed did require resetting a couple of times, and I think we lost the final few minutes of the session. But everyone felt it was a really high-quality panel, both for Greg's effective questioning as well as for Bill and Mary's responses. Geri Sullivan declared it the best Fan GoH session she'd ever seen!

The room was then cleared for a "Burns Night" celebration, so I went out into the lobby to see if I could entice anyone to come and talk to us. Jim Mowatt came over and we indulged in one of those somewhat bizarre conversations that conventions seem ripe for, about the difference between fast zombie movies and slow zombie movies. James Bacon then stepped over to see what we were doing, and very kindly (since I'm sure a con co-chair has many other calls on his time) sat down and chatted to us for a while, before rounding up a bevy of young ladies to prove how many beautiful women there were at the con. And that's when the battery power decided to run out on the laptop...

Despite the various teething problems, I think the first evening of webcasting from a British convention (that I'm aware of, anyway) was pretty successful overall, and I appear to be harvesting a surfeit of egoboo at the moment.

Current Mood: fannish

Get a little LXtra...
Despite spreading publicity about this across half the known internet, I don't appear to have mentioned this in my own LJ yet. Steve Green ("for TAFF") and I will be attempting to do the first(?) live video streaming from a British convention, following on from the successful video streams from Corflu this year and last. Because this is still an experiment, in both a technical and 'nettiquette' sense, we won't be doing 24/7 video streaming, but will be covering a selection of panels and other events going on over the weekend. The video stream itself will be at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/LXtra and details of our (hopefully evolving) schedule will be at

tuckerverse.