On life and work between Dublin & Berlin

Stephen Fry, a linguistic genius, really loves technology and he has deep understanding of it. Check out his new website:

www.stephenfry.com

I’m meeting an old acquaintance tonight along with some other techie friends for an informal workshop. Both of us are quite entrenched in our own camps. He works a lot with .NET and I only develop with Ruby on Rails. I haven’t seen a line of ASP since back in the British Telecom days in Dublin so It’s going to be really interesting to see how .NET has progressed over the years and to see if I’ve got the Rails chops to impress upon them how great it is.

w00t! I’ve just tested out the position of matthewling.com in the Google Index for the search term “matthew ling” and it seems to have finally filtered it’s way to the top. Nice!

Ohman, if you want to laugh, first watch this video on the BigDog which is creepy but cool …

Then watch this video on the BigDog which is halarious …

Aston Martin’s new One-77

What: Drink a “Brandy Alexander”

Why: I just found out what a Brandy Alexander is. Originally I heard the song from Ron Sexsmith, featuring Feist. Then subsequently found out that Feist had written the song with Ron. In its original form a Brandy Alexander is a cocktail. So, when Ron plays on the 23rd of November, I know what drink I will toast the gig with.

I think that the dominance of the iPod as the killer solution for music on the move has spoiled us over the years. I can still remember in 2001 when Jason, a good friend of mine, showed me his new iPod 1st Gen with the scrollwheel and all that. I was nonchalantly fuming with jealousy. Since then I’ve collected (somewhat unintentionally) 3 iPods not including my iPhone. So it’s safe to say that I’m as good a fan as anyone out there.

So it’s hard to find something I find really compelling in todays music device market. Maybe moving to Japan would solve that. The original CGI renderings of the Spinn were nicey nice. But from this video one can see that this is a really gorgeously designed product. I’d be proud to run around with one of those. If you can just for one moment imagine that pretty much all of Apple’s products don’t exist this would really make you swoon.

link

A fantastic interview with “a PC” on his new book. I love how in this interview he goes from being the fake expert on fake trivia to really just being himself and expressing some nice opinions and ideas about the upcoming election. Go PC! ahem .. John!

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As he’s so quoteable

I’ll bet our ads will be less edgy. But my 85-year-old uncle probably will never own an iPod, and I hope we’ll get him to own a Zune

He was right about the ads. Not sure about the usability of a Zune over an iPod though, no matter what age.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cen37qxA7E