I’m sitting around still sniffling with a cold, reading PD James’ “The Children of Men” and listening to Thomas Dolby’s new album, “The Sole Inhabitant” (which led to me listening to “The Golden Age of Wireless” and “The Flat Earth”.

I’ll get to “The Children of Men” another time. It’s rather different from the film, but I’m only 60 pages in so I can’t tell you precisely how different. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the film and I’m enjoying the book. Thomas Dolby is a good accompaniment to it… moody, a bit futuristic.

It’s a bit of a tease to call “The Sole Inhabitant” a new album. It’s a live recording from his 2006 tour. The track list runs like this:

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You decide.

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One thing you get used to when using a Mac is the weird little warts in its otherwise beautiful design. Like when Quicktime uses one key sequence to go into full-screen mode and the DVD player uses another one. Or when the space key allows you to click on the default button in some dialogs but not all.

One peculiarity of the Macintosh platform is that there’s no way built-into the system to route the audio input to the audio output. Windows has been able to do this ever since the first sound cards for PCs. It’s a pretty obvious thing to want to do; hook up an audio source to your computer, mix the audio with whatever your computer is generating and send the whole thing to your stereo which can then blast your head off with it. Mac users are denied this simple pleasure.

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My copy of The Burning Crusade showed up today, thanks to Amazon. The expansion went live last night at midnight, with some people in more… urban… areas being able to find their local game stores open at midnight dispensing Burning Crusade goodness. When I quit World of Warcraft just shy of 1AM, a grand total of 12 people on the Gilneas server had made it through to Hellfire Peninsula, the new continent.

The normal package includes four CDROM’s, a manual, two guest keys and the user’s key printed on the first CDROM sleeve.

Beyond the Dark Portal	Fel Soldiers marching to the Dark Portal
View of the Dark Portal from the other side

Some facts about it:
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Over the holiday break I’ve moved Shiny Things to both a new server and a new domain. What used to be http://www.romkey.com/shinythings/ is now http://shinythings.romkey.com/. The new domain should make it a little easier to maintain (and to move in the future, if need be). The new server is a machine in Texas where Blue Forest Research, LLC (our business) is hosting our domains. Now if our DSL goes out again at least the services we host won’t go off the air (until Texas is underwater, at which point we’ll find a new server).

All the old links should be automatically redirected here, so if you encounter any problems with Shiny Things please let me know - you can email me at gmail.com, user name ‘romkey’.
[tags]shiny things[/tags][tags]server[/tags][tags]blue forest research[/tags]