Isn’t that just neat?

(and one day I’ll figure out how to embed movies in WP…)

Anyway, the important thing is that I scored a cool freebie:

Woohoo!

A quick note to point UK readers in the direction of the new-look Newton’s Apple website

my first thought was “Apple? Newton? Cool!”?

Damn damn damn damn.

This, however, makes me feel a bit better:

Credit

1.

2.

 ”Oops”

On leaving Oxford I was saddled with a ‘professional’ email address of rgrant@cmtech.co.uk, which I never liked (I rapidly went off the management in that company too, so was only stuck with it for two years). About that time I registered a yahoo.co.uk, with username rpg14. That still works, although I seldom check it. When I left ‘cmtech’ and went to work at the MRC-LMB I was fortunate enough to obtain ‘rpg’ as my username. ‘@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk’ was still rather a mouthful, but at least ‘rpg’ was pretty memorable.

I went through quite a few ISP-based email addresses at that time, Tesco, Waitrose, Flyer, NTL . . . before bothering to register rg-d.com. Naturally, ‘rpg’ at that works, although I’ve switched off the ‘catch-all’ facility because it gets spammed to buggery. I also got an invite to gmail.com (thanks CK!); and although ‘rpg’ was taken, ‘rpgrant’ was free. I belatedly realized I should have tagged ‘rpgmail’, so missed out on some coolness there.

On arrival at Sydney Uni, changing my login ID from rgra3423 or whatever it was became a priority, and I was able to reserve ‘rpg’. rpg at usyd . edu . au thus became the coolest email address I’ve ever had, if not the shortest (rpg at rg-d . com is short, but not incredibly memorable. rpg.com is taken, of course). rpgrant @ my Australian ISP is also mine.

But two weeks ago I found out that the University of Sydney have pulled a real swifty, and created a memorable alias (that is bound to piss off the Yanks, but hey; .edu, as .com and .org, should never have been country-specific).

Ladles and gentlespoons, short and sweet:

We’re back.

 Having obtained your unlock code (calling Virgin Mobile at any time is difficult, and they don’t reply to emails) you’ll need to do the following:

1. Make sure your Virgin sim is in.
2. Enter 2945#*1201#
3. Go to the ‘Settings’ menu and find ‘Security setting’
4. In there should now be an ‘unlock’ menu.   
5. Enter the code, hit ‘OK’ and away you go.

The cunning bit is the 2945#*1201#

.

In my formative years I used to read a lot of science fiction. This ranged from the classic (Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke) through the outrageous (E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith) to the execrable (Heinlein). Somewhere in the midst of all that I came across a single book by a forgotten author, number two in a four part series I think, that actually attempted to be a little more realistic.

Yes, I know; ‘realistic’ and ’science fiction’ in the same paragraph. Bear with me.

The thing that I remember most about the book was the description of space warfare. In a thinly-veiled dig at Star Wars one of the characters talked about the impossibility of aeronautical manoeuvering in the airless void and the equally unlikely practicalities of light and ‘plasma’ weapons with which entire generations are familiar. Opposing fleets would, instead, use atomic-tipped missiles fired at each other across vast distances, making space combat a somewhat — ha ha — hit and miss affair.

But this cove had equipped his spaceships with railguns that fired pound-sized lumps of metal at some prodigious rate into the path of the enemy fleet. Which, on encountering thousands of these small but very fast projectiles, was colandered (not having the advantage of something so dubious as shielding technology.)

And of course, the Aurorans in Escape Velocity have rail guns too. The Auroran’s weapon is a slow, clumsy affair, not as cool as my mind’s eye version of them: Massed banks of the things firing scatter shot across a vast volume of space.

So a little bit of me is pleased to see that the US Navy is taking delivery of a 32 megajoule experimental railgun.Apparently it draws 3 million amps per shot, which to me seems a small price to pay for delivering a payload two hundred miles. . . at Mach 8.

My plan, therefore, is to lobby the NSW government to build that bloody nuclear station, in my garden, and construct a hundred railguns. That would result in withering fire of six hundred rounds per minute, which might not be in the same class as a Gatling gun, but boy, it would make the bastards who speed down our road at 3 in the morning think twice.