Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

• Thu, 18:59: Thak goodness for a pen on this tablet PC. I get to sign things properly...
• Fri, 00:35: Another thought on the Facebook data centre news - they've explicitly said in the past that they have not optimised for virtualisation.
• Fri, 00:36: Sun is out, the wind is blowing. What a lovely spring day in the city by the Bay.
• Fri, 00:51: ZDNet UK blog post: Business travel essentials; a good phone headset http://bit.ly/hsH4ze #zdnetuk
• Fri, 07:05: Back up down the bottom of the Bay after a day of meetings and briefings up in the city. Much interesting at Dell...
• Fri, 07:31: Hmm. Has wizards.co.uk disapeared off the web? Not getting DNS for any of our addresses...
• Fri, 07:40: OK. Have got into one of our machines back home, and not seeing anything from that end of things either.
• Fri, 07:44: @budleysalterton Wizards DNS seems down - any ETA for it coming back?
• Fri, 08:20: I have an ancient Birman licking my foot. It tickles.
• Fri, 08:25: Bye bye Kermit: http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/

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...well, almost.

I fly to and from San Francisco several times a year (and I'm in the Bay Area right now, dosing up on those California lumens after a long cold London winter), and I'm often leaning back looking out the window watching the landscape drift below.

So I know the first few minutes of this stop motion video intimately, the steep climb out of SFO as the plane skims San Bruno Mountain, then the curve out and around the Golden Gate, before the cruise over the Sacramento Delta and on up over the Sierras and over Lake Tahoe...



SFO to Paris in two minutes. It takes a little longer in practice...

I recently inherited Mary's old pocket camera, as she'd upgraded to a newer model. It's a Casio Exilim FC-100, which looks like any pocket digicam. It works a treat, once you get used to not having a view finder, and there are a lot of controls that make it really easy to use.

But it's got a hidden super power.

It's a high speed video camera, capable of filming at 1000fps. It's at a low resolution, but still... one thousand frames a second... That high speed sensor lets the camera do all sorts of fun things (giving it a really stable night mode for one thing!).

The sun was out at the weekend, and I took it into our friends' garden here in San Jose and videoed their fountain in action.

Here are two of the high speed videos I took that afternoon...





Willow Glen, California
April 2011