Paul’s Ramblings

Non-geeks stop reading NOW. It turns out that our hotel on the border of France and Switzerland is also next door to what is, arguably, the biggest, meanest, most expensive piece of scientific equipment on the planet: the CERN Large Hadron Collider. That big thing behind me is NOT the LHC, it’s just a sculpture, the real thing is burried 100m underground, runs underneath a number of towns and straddles both Switzerland and France and has a circumference of 26km. My main reason for visiting is really just symbolic, it’s also home to some of the most significant computing power on the planet and is a Mecca for an amazing thing, simply called The Grid.

I’ve been having some trouble with telephone calls of late. Specifically, Internet telephony (or VOIP). Making telephone calls from our computer gives us an economical way of staying in touch with home, but lately it has done little more than inspire me to gnaw my own toes off.

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Firefox 3 is soon to be released and it comes with a nice tweak for the visually fussy, such as myself. It is now possible to load the colour profile for your specific display (LCD screen) directly into Firefox. Why would one wish to do this? In a word, perfection. The colour profile lets Firefox present images in true to life colours on your display.

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I’m not turning hyper-pedagogical, nor am I trying to out do my mother; I have started my own library. Library 2.0 to be precise. I know this careless expression is just compounding the obscurity that veils, what is arguably, the maturation of the World Wide Web, but, in a shameless bout of whimsy, I’ll employ its misuse regardless. The bottom line is this, I’m starting my own library to retain, and catalogue, articles which, for whatever reason, interest me. This means that I don’t need to rely on bookmarks that could be outdated with time.

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Of recent times I’ve been given to the dark art of reading, that is to say, actually reading, from a computer screen. A little vocalised, but otherwise immutable fact, is that reading from a computer screen is unpleasant, on account of the luminescent, backlit nature of all computer screens. Cutting this already ambling account short, I was playing around with the Adobe Reader preferences and discovered that on my Macbook the default text smoothing setting was for that of a CRT monitor, not indeed an LCD screen. Two clicks later and my electronic edition of Dicken’s ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ was looking decidedly clearer.