What do you do when you’ve successfully gotten a demo to Mobile World Congress and you want to reward yourself?

Go order a little light reading of course!

Amazon are really getting to like it when I log in at this stage I think

Although, the more recent book purchase was with The Book Depository and between lower prices and free shipping, they actually worked out cheaper than Amazon did (and thanks to Neal Asher for that tip). They weren’t cheaper for every book though – ironically the science fiction books I was looking at were more expensive – but for the programming books I was looking for, they came in about seven or eight euros under amazon.com and their shipping is about six weeks faster than amazon’s, for free. So we’ll see in a day or three when the books arrive if they’re as good as they look…

Finally got round to sending off an Amazon order that’s been building up since last year…

• “Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs Novels)”, “Broken Angels”,“Woken Furies: A Takeshi Kovacs Novel”
  Richard K. Morgan
• “Wireless”
  Charles Stross
• “Regenesis”
  C. J. Cherryh
• “In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language”
  Arika Okrent
• “Great Mambo Chicken And The Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over The Edge”
  Ed Regis
• “The Starflight Handbook: A Pioneer’s Guide to Interstellar Travel (Wiley Science Editions)”
  Eugene F. Mallove
• “Spacefaring: The Human Dimension”
  Albert A. Harrison
• “Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut”
  Mike Mullane
• “Envisioning Information”,  “Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative”,  “Visual & Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Decision Making”, “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition”, “Beautiful Evidence”
  Edward R. Tufte
• “Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style”
  Virginia Tufte
• “Tesla : The Lost Inventions”
  George Trinkaus
• “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy”, “My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla”
  Nikola Tesla
• “I’m Just Here for the Food: Version 2.0″
  Alton Brown

Have to admit, I’m rather looking forward to the delivery van. Stross’s body of work so far has been very enjoyable (and anyone who’s written perl for a living can’t be all bad); Regenesis is the sequel to Cyteen that’s been ten years in the writing; I’ve been promising myself I’d get Tufte’s books for two years now – I’d borrowed a copy, skimmed one in the bookshop and even read a bootleg copy of one, and they’re just wonderful books even if read as coffee-table books rather than working textbooks; Alton Brown never fails to deliver and I’m Just Here for the Food is already a classic; … Read the rest

Ferdinand von Prondzynski, the president of DCU, has written a few blog posts about ways to cope with the way the government has been slashing the funding for universities (usually on the quiet), but with the recent announcement of the proposed new college loans plan, he’s written more, and most recently this post discussing the levels of the fees for different courses, which he disagrees with, mainly because the universities haven’t been asked to the policy table from what I can see:

In the end, this is another aspect of any new framework for student contributions that confirms the importance of full consultation with the higher education institutions before any final model is put in place.

The engagement with the idea to the stage where its details are being debated is sufficiently depressing that I wrote a reply to his post, and I wanted to reproduce it here:

I still find it enormously depressing to see the reintroduction of fees embraced in this manner, especially by university heads, despite their being a suboptimal solution to a blatantly manufactured problem.

My father was the first in his clan to go to college, which he did as a mature student on a scholarship and money earned by my mother working sewing curtains for a furnishings shop. Once he graduated, my mother then became the first in her clan to go to college, supported by my father’s now higher income. And the year she graduated, I became the first child from either of our clans to go to college after finishing the leaving certificate course. We did not receive a single penny in grant funding for this; every resource available was pooled to fund that education, along with the initial scholarship which was the end result of five years of work by

… Read the rest

Meet herself indoors!