California’s 11th state execution happened at 12:01am today. Donald Beardslee murdered 2 girls while on parole in 1981. The San Francisco Chronicle has an account of the case.

It was reported on last night’s news as if it was a normal news item. Yes, it was at the top of the bulletin, but it was only a couple of minutes long report (including the description of his meal, which he didn’t eat) and it was followed by a couple of other stories. The news presenters still had an ‘and finally’ story at the end (in this case, the new Airbus) and they still had a little joke over the weather report.

11 executions puts California 18th on the list of states by number of executions since 1976. 38 of the 50 states allow executions, and 6 of those have not actually executed anyone since 1976. Although California is a fair way down the list on executions, it has the largest number of people on Death Row of all the states, at 639. So, juries are happy to condemn people, but at least the state is fairly cautious about executing them. In contrast, Texas, with a population around two-thirds of California’s, has executed 337 people since 1976 and has 447 people currently on death row.

Amnesty International

We all know that American TV is bad. It is just one of those universally-acknowledged truths. But it is soooooo bad.

Firstly, there are the ad breaks. We have an ad break after the credits, 3 or so ad breaks during the program and then another ad break before the final credits. And that is for a half-hour program. I watched the Golden Globes the other night and there were only 2 awards, plus some shots of people schmoozing, between each ad break.

And then there are the ads – which are excrutiatingly bad. In advertising sophistication, as in electrical standards and weights and measures, the Americans are lagging behind the rest of the world. Every now and then you spot one which you hope is going to be ironic. And then you realise it isn’t, and you sink back into depression.

The way I have avoided being sent insane (until now) by this is using our Tivo, which is nothing more or less than a hard disk video recorder. So I wind through the ads and never need to look at them. It has actually become worth delaying watching a program by ten minutes, because then the program on the Tivo is behind the broadcast, and you can wind forward through the ads while you are watching. The sad side effect is that when you end up watching something live for a change, you realise that you’re brain is melting. Like now.

Lets make that more like 7.

We have just returned from an… interesting weekend in Tahoe. Having been frustrated with our plans to go up last weekend by the bad weather, we were pretty determined to try and get some skiing in this weekend. This was somewhat challenging, as this weekend is 3-day holiday weekend (Martin Luther King day is Monday), so most of the hotels were booked up. Nevertheless, we found a nice little cabin for rent on Friday and booked it right away. Nathan managed to get away from work at lunchtime on Friday and so we set off with plenty of time. The weather was lovely on Friday – warm and clear – and we got a fair way up the bay with only some stop-start traffic. Then it all slowed down for a while, and we crawled more or less from Berkeley to Sacramento, taking around 3 hours. After that it sped up again, and having left San Jose at about 2pm, we were at our cabin, in the snow, by 9pm.
And then we started feeling bad.
I had a headache, N started shivering so badly that he nearly shook all three covers and blankets off the bed. This was not good.
Saturday morning was blue skies, sunny and crisp. We, however, were not crisp. We were very soggy. We couldn’t even get ourselves up until lunchtime. Once we’d dragged ourselves out of bed, we took a little drive up to Heavenly, just about 3 miles from the cabin. The snow looked perfect, but neither of us were in any condition to ski. N was at least optimistic though. After lunch, we went and hired him boots and skis so that he could get on the slopes on Sunday, when he felt better. And then we went to the supermarket to buy drugs (don’t worry, nothing stronger than paracetamol) and went home again. There was some comepensation for this wasted day in the form of a private hot tub at the cabin. I definitely recommend a hot tub in the open air, in the snow as a cold remedy.
So Sunday morning, we were going to feel much better, and get some skiing in. But no. We still felt bad, if not worse. Weeping into our tissues, we returned the skis, unused, checked out and drove home.
So that is the tragic story of our weekend – 12 hours of driving, quite a lot of money on a cabin with a hot tub, thirty-odd dollars in ski hire (at least we didn’t buy ski passes in advance). And no skiing. Not a sausage.

It’ soooooo sad!

Tags: Tahoe | Skiing | Illness

I embarked today on the traditional new year activity of going to join a gym. Of course, what I actually did was get a tour of a gym, nod and smile at the instructor showing me around, hum and hah at the prices, and say I’d have to think about it 🙂

Still, it did spur me on to do some free activity, i.e. going for a jog, for the first time in ages. Obviously, it was rather more painful than it should have been, but that’s to be expected after the, ahem, break I’ve had. The important thing is that I started, and that I got to wear my nice new Nike gear that I purchased this week to spur me on. I wonder how many runs I would justify the purchase of an iPod shuffle? In preparation, I have prepared a playlist to be transferred as soon as I get one, which I am using on my regular old iPod in the meantime. It’s much more motivational to have music than to listen to the sound of your own wheezing while you’re running.

So, without further ado, the workout plan continues with skiing (at last) this weekend. Watch this space…

Today I went to visit that temple of geekdom that is Macworld in San Francisco. It certainly attracts an interesting cross-section of people; kids with their friends or parents, suited business people, die-hard Mac fanatics – the last easily spotted as they will probably be wearing an XL mac t-shirt, faded through repeated washing.

There was also a pretty interesting cross-section of products there, reflecting the huge diversity of activities undertaken by a group of people united only by a hardware manufacturer. Something that helped it stand out from most trade shows and other exhibitions was the large number of live demonstrations of software and hardware going on. There was also a common feature to these presentations – “Isn’t that cool?” or “This is so cool”. This phrase was used by presenters all over the place, but also people in the audience at the presentations, and people around the exhibition hall. Of course this might have more to do with being in California than anything else!

In between presentations on the Apple stage, they were running a variety of their very cool iPod TV ads. I found the contrast between the excellent dancing in these ads and the likely dancing skills of most of the audience quite amusing.

Highlights of MacWorld:

Tiny 5MP cameras from Canon. The remarkable thing about these is not their size as much as the combination of tiny size and 5 megapixel sensor. Of course it compromises by having a small lens and no optical zoom, but still looks very neat.

Mac mini – it’s so much smaller than just about any other desktop I’ve seen. Best advice for people thinking of switching to this from their PC is to wait 4 or 5 months until the next version of the operating system is released (Mac OS X 10.4 or tiger) so that it will come bundled with the box.

iPod shuffle – so small and light, with an incredibly unMac-like price – barely more than the cost of a similar-sized USB storage device, which it will do as well.

Pages – Part of the new iWork suite, this looks like it is going to be a useful word processor, combined with desktop-publishing features, which is something that MS Word is really not designed to do.

Today I thought I would give you a preview of MacExpo which is on this week in San Francisco. This annual gathering of geekdom gets a lot of attention, partly because it is the event where many new Apple products are announced, and partly because Steve Jobs gives the keynote speech, allowing those who are so inclined to indulge in some hero-worship. For these reasons, there will be plenty of coverage on websites and in the papers of the goings on at the Moscone Center in the coming week. So to prepare you for the excitement, I thought I would give a little tour of the best places to look for Apple-related information (for all you techies – you know who you are). I am also going to visit myself later in the week, so look out for a report from the trenches too.

A good summary site that doesn’t indulge in too much hype is the Guardian’s onlineblog. They have a reporter attending the conference, and give a nice summary of rumours and other information.

To get the full Apple experience, go to Apple’s site to watch Steve Job’s keynote speech. Unlike previous years, this one is not being broadcast live, but will be available as a Quicktime file from 6pm PST on Tuesday (or 2am GMT Wednesday). Apple will also have the latest new product information on their site soon after the speech – or at least they have in the past.

For those with a more serious Mac obsession, macrumours carries all sorts of gossip and guesses about what will happen next, and The Cult of Mac is a good blog on the Wired Magazine site.

So what are we likely to see? Well, attempting to synthesise the most popular rumours, rather than create any new ones, we are looking at a small flash-based iPod, around 1GB in capacity, an Apple-Motorola phone collaboration, a possible Apple media server and a possible business software suite to rival Microsoft Office. Of course, this is all just fevered speculation at this point, so watch this space…

Hi again. Long time no blog. We were away over Christmas, but I know that’s no excuse, as the laptops and the network went with us. So here is a catch-up summary of the last month in an attempt to get back on track. I promise to try harder in 2005.

The week before Christmas included all the predictable Christmas shopping things. As we were too disorganised to send Christmas cards by post in time, e-cards went out, along with a donation to Oxfam in the form of 2 broods of chickens.

My Christmas present this year was a new laptop to replace my dead iBook. N then took it upon himself to dismantle and fix the iBook (not a pretty sight) which is now back in action. N received (amongst other things) an X-box, which is playing Halo on as I type.

Christmas and the New Year were spent on Vancouver Island with my cousin Nicky, my Mum and Dad, my sister and my aunt and other cousins. It was a pretty full house most of the time, so pretty hectic. We had planned to go skiing in the week between Christmas and New Year, but our luck being what it is, there was no snow. As compensation, we booked a hotel in downtown Vancouver and took the ferry across there for a couple of nights instead. Vancouver is a great city, and despite the rain and cold weather, we had a good time. Of course, we still didn’t get any skiing in.

Having returned home on the 1st Jan, and N having discovered that there was at least 2 feet of powder available at Lake Tahoe, plans were put in place to drive to Tahoe for skiing this weekend. However, once again, the weather was against us. A big ‘storm’ (bit of low pressure) has been hanging around all weekend, and brought pretty much non-stop snow in the mountains, bringing down around 5 feet of fresh snow. This is great for skiing this week, but there was basically no visibility all weekend, so it wouldn’t have been worth the drive.

This coming weekend is a holiday weekend, so we will try and go skiing, but it is likely to be very busy. It is Martin Luther King day on Monday, which seems as good an excuse as any for a day off. Not that I have a job…

Today I had my California drivers test. We have been driving around so far (quite legally) on our UK licences, but a driving licence is a really handy form of ID apart from anything else.

The California drivers test seems to be somewhat simpler than a UK test, not including any manoeuvres other than a reverse in a straight line. It does include a few specialities of California, such as the requirement to turn your tires towards the curb when parking on a hill.

The test itself took about 20 minutes. Once the instructor had checked that I could locate things like the lights and windscreen wipers, and that I could do the hand signals (when was the last time you saw someone use those?), we started the actual driving. We drove around a few streets, did the aforementioned reverse, and then pretty much drove back.

Well, to put you out of your suspense, I PASSED, with (ahem) not quite flying colours. I got 12 minor errors out of a possible maximum of 15! But a pass is a pass 🙂

Sometimes California is a great place to be. San Francisco has a bit of a reputation for being foggy and cold, but that’s certainly not been my experience. Like on Wednesday, when I went into the city to do some Christmas shopping (oh, the life of leisure!). How many places are there where you can shop the week before Christmas, and have lunch outside, in the sunshine, and have it warm enough to take your coat off (at least in the Northern Hemisphere)?

Of course, San Francisco is perhaps not as tropical as the palm trees in Union Square suggest. And apparently we are at the start of the ‘wet season’ – which seems to mean that it rains once every two weeks. Anyway, I’m thankful for the nice weather, and hoping that it holds for my driving test on Monday.

Although there are only about 3 weeks until Christmas, the Palo Alto climate means that it feels much more like late September. There are still beautiful red and gold leaves on a lot of the trees, the weather is still pretty mild, at least during the day (about 17C today, and probably warmer in the sun) and there are still squirrels everywhere.

The preponderance of squirrels is partly because Palo Alto is such a wooded town. Just about every street around us has trees every few yards (metres?) down both sides, as well as some really mature trees in people’s yards. There is even a local charity dedicated to planting more trees in the town, which you can support with donations at the local grocery store (see, I even talk native now :). The surprising thing is that there are two varieties of squirrel here – not grey and red, but grey and black. As I have discovered using the magic of the interweb, black squirrels occur in lots of places. They seem to be a genetic sub-division of the grey (gray?) squirrel, like black cats or white mice. (By the way, there are some very odd people out there – just type squirrels into Google and find out!).