Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

... James Coburn died yesterday aged 74...

Last night's journey from London to Copenhagen was made more interesting by a baggage handlers strike in Denmark, and by the fact that my tickets had been lost in the post. So there was a long, long queue at the ticket desk while I got my tickets renewed, full of people from cancelled flights. Then there was a long, long queue for the check-in desk. Finally when I got there, there were no seats left that weren't pre-allocated. They'd taken my bag, so gave me a blank boarding pass and told me they'd issue me a seat at the gate.

At the gate they took my boarding pass, and told me to site and wait. The aircraft began boarding, and the people around me vanished. Finally I got given a boarding pass - for a seat at the front of the plane. I'd been upgraded... As were two of the representatives of the company that was flying me here to this conference, who'd been waiting to offer me one of their seats if I was bumped from the plane. The wine and brandy helped the airline dinner slide down...

The baggage hall at Copenhagen was full of piles of luggage, covering trolley and making ad hoc mazes... There must have been thousands of cases, and thousands of homes waiting for their belongings... At least we'd arrived, and were ready for the thrilling taxi ride to the hotel

...as a jobbing IT journalist I'm used to signing non-disclosure agreements. What I'm not used to are disclosure agreements...

Apparently some beta code I've picked up here at IT Forum has a click-wrap end-user licence agreement that prevents you from reviewing the product. So, when they gave me a copy, hoping I'd write about it, I had to put my name and address on a piece of paper that had been signed by a representative of the company. This piece of paper informed me that that clause didn't apply to me, and giving me full permission to write about the product and to tell the world about all its nifty features (if said world is interested in enterprise systems management tools for large Windows networks...).

Strange days indeed.

For the Apple lovers and switchers amongst us, Boing Boing points out that someone is now intending to construct replica Apple I's. Now, time for Apple to release the ROMs!