I’ve just finished listening to George Carlin’s Napalm and Silly Putty again. It’s very funny. He certainly doesn’t hold back about some of the things he talks about. It was the first audio book that I ever bought. It was also the last audio book that I ever bought. Nothing to do with the book. I just haven’t bought an audio book since.

Here are a couple of quotes:

“The reason I talk to myself is that I’m the only one whose answers I accept.”

“I had an interesting morning. I got into an argument with my Rice Krispies. I distinctly heard, “Snap, crackle and fuck you”. I don’t know which one of them said it, I was reaching for the artificial sweetener at the time and not looking directly into the bowl, but I heard it.”

Is there a coffee shortage I don’t know about? Whenever I go to Starbucks I usually order a tall latte. During the last 3 occassions, and at different locations too, I ordered a latte and ended up with half a cup of foam. I eventually found the coffee hiding at the bottom of the cup. Normally when I order a coffee I expect to get a whole cup of the stuff, not just half. I distinctly remember not ordering a tall “dry” latte so why all the foam?

In the future when I go to Starbucks I will order an espresso macchiato. Now when I get my coffee and find that there isn’t much coffee in my cup, I am not going to be disappointed as I am not expecting to find a lot coffee there; there isn’t supposed to be a lot of coffee in a macchiato. However, give me a latte with half a cup of foam and I am going to get angry. After all, I want to drink my latte, not use it for shaving.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how in the future it would be possible to access the Internet at home by means other than having to use a telephone line. Looks like the future has already arrived.

The Register: “PCCW takes wireless broadband to London”

Now you can create podcasts with QuickTime Pro 7.

I saw the movie Sideways over the weekend. It’s a fantastic film. It’s really funny but doesn’t try to be, unlike most other Hollywood comedies that try really hard but fail; the kind where you can see the jokes coming from a mile away. If you get the chance to see it, you should do so. The other reason I liked it is that I saw a bit of myself in one of the main characters. I won’t say which one 🙂

The best £4.99 I ever spent. It even has a list of the chords for all the songs so you can play along while you listen. Now where did I put my guitar …

Google Talk : “Unveiled on 24 August, the Google Talk system unites net telephony with an instant messaging network and builds on the Gmail e-mail service.”

Last night I went to the The Porterhouse in Convent Garden. If you like beer, you’ll like The Porterhouse. Its beer menu is huge and it has all kinds of beer from all over the world with interesting names, and tastes. There’s Crocodile beer brewed in Sweden (how many crocodiles have you seen in Sweden?), kosher beer from Israel and even Palestinian beer. I am not so sure what’s so Palestinian about it though as it is brewed in Belgium, conforms to some German purity standard and is sold in the UK.

I tried a beer from Russia but I can’t remember the name. I do, however, remember not being able to pronounce the name of it. I don’t recommend it though. The Russians should stick to what they know best: vodka and communism. I also had strawberry beer from Belgium. It was actually quite nice. There were other fruit flavours too, including passionfruit, but that’s just a little too weird!

I have been using Skype for around 6 months or so now. Skype have a service called SkypeOut that allows me to make phone calls to landlines or mobile phones, either locally or abroad, from my laptop or PDA. It’s cheap too, much cheaper than calling from a landline. I always thought it would be cool if you could do reverse: make phone calls from a landline or a mobile that get routed to wherever I happened to be logged in. Well, now you can with SkypeIn.

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Occasionally I have more to say than a few sentences but if I write a long post I don’t want all of the text showing up on the front page. What I want is a link that says something along the lines of “Read the rest of this post”. I never could figure out how to do that with WordPress, until today, thanks to a handy tip from Miles.

Add <!- -more- -> at the point where you want to break the text. At this point WordPress will add a URL that links to the full text of the entry. Easy eh? Well not exactly.

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Over the last few days I have been playing around with Google Maps. To be more precise, I have been building an online pedometer tool for Wendy Bumgardner over at walking.about.com. Users can draw their walk on the map and the tool tells them how long the route is as well as giving the user the ability to bookmark a walk etc.

There’s a link to the tool from here. If you have any suggestions please add a comment or send me an email.

The script that does all the work is here (after you download it remember to remove the .txt extension). I will be adding to it and improving it during the coming weeks. Feel free to use it for your own purposes.

I have just modified my DNS settings so this site can now be accessed using the URL http://www.simonbuckle.com/. Hopefully it will be a bit more memorable than the previous one. The old URL will continue to work.