There was a queue outside the Apple Store this morning. As the doors opened up, everyone surged inside and raced to the tills. I had assumed they were after Mac minis, but they went untouched as the iPod shuffles flew off the shelves.

Quite literally.

Everyone who bought something added one to their pile, and when the 512MB models ran out, they coughed up the extra for the 1GB editions. They were adding them to their orders just like you’d add in some batteries when you bought a torch.

Regardless of the price, they’re obviously going to be big, big sellers.

I think I was the only one there who didn’t buy one.

Beyond that, I think it was a bit of a lucky day. First, a call from the financial advisor running through my mortgage advising me to dump him. Very honest of him. He said it would be far cheaper to apply on line, in spite of the fact he’d not get his commission.

And then a call from the agent. After two showings she’s already found a couple to rent it. They’ll move in at the beginning of March. That all happened a lot quicker than I’d imagined it might. Now I need to do that mortgage form again. For the third time.

Online, this time. Probably how I should have done it first time around.

Was it really Tuesday the last time I posted an entry on here? The week has absolutely flown. I’ve spent a lot of time working on stuff for renting out the flat. The whole of yesterday morning was gobbled up form-filling so I could get them in the post and back at the renting people by tomorrow morning.

I’ve only ever seen the whole rent cycle from the opposite end, when friends have been looking for places to live and been complaining about how much time they have to spend phoning and hunting and viewing and… form filling. I hope they realise it’s the same from this end, too.

Anyhow, I got the agent’s description through on Friday. It’s fairly accurate, although the pea-green bathroom has been optimistically described as ‘ivory white’, which sounds far nicer than reality. She didn’t take any pictures, though, so it’s all a bit conceptual – especially when you compare it to the full-colour alternatives on the web. Let’s hope the low price she recommended we went for – undercutting the rest of the market by about 10% – will be enough to overcome that consideration.

So now all I need to do is get the mortgage moved and I’m all set.

The rest of the weekend was spent kicking around near home. Went into town today, but yesterday went for a walk in the village. I’ve lived here four months now, and still barely know the place, so went to the library. It turned out to be about the size of a double-garage, and had probably no more than 500 books. A small school could have done better.

I was in and out in less than five minutes, much to the disgust of the bespectacled women behind the counter.

The whole place smelt of old age.

I’ve finished The Hippopotamus – for about the sixth or seventh time, I reckon, so I’m ready for next week’s Radio 4 recording and am back onto A Short History of Nearly Everything. It’s a fascinating read, and I’m burning through it as quite a rate, which when you consider I’m in the sections about geology at the moment is surely the sign of a very well written piece of work.

Bryson’s 3-page description of what would happen if an asteroid should hit the earth is a riveting read (we probably wouldn’t see it until the last second when it had already entered our atmosphere, and even if we spotted it a year before we don’t have any nuclear weapons that can escape Earth’s gravitational pull, so we could never blast it into bits like they do in the films). It’s easily as engaging as anything I have ever come across in a work of fiction, and his explanation of earthquakes makes the Asian tsunami easier to put into perspective:

The [Richter] scale is, of course, more an idea than a thing, an arbitrary measure of the Earth’s tremblings based on surface measurements. It rises exponentially, so that a 7.3 quake is fifty times more powerful than a 6.3 earthquake and 2,500 times more powerful than a 5.3 earthquake…

The scale is a simple measure of force, but says nothing about damage. A magnitude 7 quake happening deep in the mantle – say, 650 kilometres down – might cause no surface damage at all, while a significantly smaller one happening just 6 or 7 kilometres under the surface could wreak widespread devestation.

It is, at times, an uncomfortable read. The detail into which he explains what the effects could be of Yellowstone National Park erupting (pretty much the whole thing is a massive volcano) is particularly unsettling. The last time it went, it took about 10,000 years for the environment to clear. Almost all life on earth was wiped out, and only a couple of thousand humans were thought to be alive at any one point for the next few thousand years. We’re lucky to be here at all.

Its next eruption is already overdue by 40,000 years, and scientists are starting to see some strange happenings in the park. Bits of it are bulging upwards, while other parts are sinking. If that’s a sign, don’t go starting any big projects.

Tokyo has already suffered one of the most devastating earthquakes in modern times. On 1 September 1923, just before midday, the city was struck by what is known as the Great Kanto quake – an event over ten times as powerful as Kobe’s earthquake [richter 7.2, 6,394 dead, $99bn damage]. Two hundred thousand people were killed. Since that time, Tokyo has been eerily quiet, so the strain beneath the surface has been building for eighty years. Eventually it is bound to snap. In 1923, Tokyo had a population of about three million. Today it is approaching thirty million. Nobody cares to guess how many people might die, but the potential economic cost has been put as high as $7 trillion.

They eat dogs in Korea. Not because they have to, but because they want to. Cats, too. It all started during the Korean War when the locals were running so low on food they started to eat their own pets and, discovering they rather liked the taste of Daschund Kiev, they carried on when the fighting had stopped and the food returned to the shops. *

Being fairly dense when it comes to Scottish history, I can only imagine haggis came about in similar circumstances (perhaps the systematic and particularly cruel clearing of the Highlands), and somehow survived once people realised it was actually rather nice.

It’s basically a sausage, but the label is far, far too honest. It could have got away with saying ‘Ingredients: pork’. Instead, though, it read ‘Ingredients: pork lungs, oatmeal, pork liver, pork fat, pork heart’. That put off even some of the meat eaters at David’s annual haggis party last night, which struck me as somewhat ironic when they were clearly happy eating such things if they could turn a blind eye to them.

It took us an age to get there, and aeon to return, but the effort was well worth it. David can pull together a varied and interesting group of people, and his cooking is fantastic. I didn’t know it was possible to do potatoes in so many different ways.

Two of the crowd of fifty or so apparently made their living as porn stars. ‘Have you ever noticed everyone in a porn film is apparently a star?’ I asked. ‘How come nobody is just a porn extra, or a porn-in-the-film-naked?’

There was a brief moment of quiet contemplation while the various bodies assembled in the kitchen tried to think of an answer. It was broken by a cackle from the hob. ‘There’s rosemary in this gravy,’ said the cackling guy with the spoon. ‘You know what that makes it?’

More silence.

‘Rosemary’s gravy!‘

The porn question remains unanswered.

* On coming back from Korea a couple of years ago when, thanfully, the worst we had to eat was Kimchi (dogs might actually have been better) I managed to convince several people that we’d gone to a restaurant where they had a big pen full of laboradors, like lobesters in a tank at a sea food restaurant, so you could pick your own and have it prepared on the spot.

That was a strange evening. I met Will and Dave Green – he of NTK et al – in the pub that borders Liverpool Street. Wetherspoon’s. Ugh. Still, we stopped for only one drink and some strange MSG-infused snacks in a bag, and nattered to Spen as he sat there putting off the inevitable trip home to a nappy filler.

By the time we left, it was sptting with rain. I don’t know how long it had been doing that, in spite of the fact we’d been sitting outside in the cold, so we pulled our coats around us as Dave marched us down Brick Lane, beyond the curries and even the bagels until it seemed we were almost far enough east to be walking through Romford or Grays. Then by a fenced off basketball court, we turned left, through a gap in a corrigated iron fence and through a broken yard to a door that swung lazily on its hinges.

The words State 51 had been stencilled on the gate.

We were here for the dorkbot, a meeting of ‘people doing strange things with electricity’. And when they say ‘strange’, they really do mean strange.

We found ourselves in an empty shell of a room. Front and back there were tressle tables. The one at the back was home to an improvised bar, the one at the front temporary home to an Italian man, talking at close quarters into a microphone pressed hard to his lips.

The rest of the room was littered with people, variously scattered on old wooden reels that once were the core of a coil of industrial cable, or on long wooden benches, or propped against the walls.

We’d arrived late, so the Italian man was already half way through his lecturette, explaining how he had taken photos of city skylines, reduced them to just two colours, so that all of the ground and buildings were black, and all of the sky was white, and then used the resulting jagged line where the two met as the basis of a waveform, which he used to make music.

Music in the loosest sense, of course. Imagine static on a poorly tuned TV.

He called the results ‘horizons made of sound’.

Next up, a woman who transmitted a looping bleepy sound at the far end of the FM band. The limp bodies scattered around the room tuned in the various radios that had been sprinkled between them into the frequency she was using so that they could all pick up the beeps, and feed them back into the mixing desk. From there they went out again, and then back into the desk. And out and in and out and in, all the time getting louder and louder and LOUDER until the room was filled with an almost deafening cacophony of hiss and crackle and feedback.

One man, sitting in the middle of the group, held his radio up above his head and shook it, as though he were dancing to the beat of a tune I somehow couldn’t hear.

The two highlights, though, had to be Hack the Bid, a long-overdue campaign to show that not everyone in London wants the Olympics here, and Will, totally unplanned, playing some of his remix of the next Chemical Brothers album from his MP3 player.

He looked very cool. There was very little lighting there, other than a bare strip light behind the tressle table at the front of the room, silhouetting whoever was speaking. All you could see of him was an anonymous outline, dotted in the middle by the amber ember on the end of his cigarette. He looked like a ‘protected identity’ witness on the news.

A fab night, all in all. Very, very weird, but then that was half the appeal.

Elsewhere, irony on CNN:

Well, I’ve not got very far with my January task of going to watch the local ice hockey team and we’re already half way through the month. I have, however, used my time wisely. Last Saturday, it was Mark’s birthday. We all went for dinner in Maldon. Yesterday, another bit of Christmas. Tonight I made sushi. Actually fairly well.

Last night. So, Paul and I went around to Graham and Roger’s late afternoon to drink tea and eat highly brandy-fied Christmas cake. So brandy-fied, in fact, that it had started to dissolve the marzipan, which in turn had started to eat through the icing. It all conspired to make it all the more yummy.

We sat around until four and then caught a train to London with Trevor and Jon. It had come all the way from Peterborough, which was a bit of a turn-around. It almost implies someone has actually thought about how to run long-distance trains in this country.

Anyhow, Graham and Roger were treating us, although as always they didn’t tell us where we were going, except that we’d start at Pizza Express.

Which we did.

And then we went to the theatre at the Savoy. It’s a lovely art deco theatre dug into the ground to one side of the hotel. Inside, it still looks like it probably did in the 30s, with Mackintosh style decor, and silver walls throughout. The play was suitably old-fashioned.

It’s putting on Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward, right now. Penelope Keith was the headline attraction, although far from the most active part. Rather disappointingly she didn’t say ‘Jerry, do something’ even once, but it was fab nonetheless, particularly when the live people were talking to the dead people they couldn’t see but we could. If that makes sense.

So, in short I still need to sort out the ice hockey.

In the meantime, they have a once-a-month show on Radio 4 called Book Club, and the next one they are recording is with Stephen Fry, talking about The Hippopotamus, which I’ve read at least half a dozen times so far. So, I sent them an email to ask if I could be in the audience to ask a question.

It didn’t look hopeful. They have room for 20, they said, and they’ve been massively over-subscribed. To trim us down, they asked us all to submit questions, so after consultation with Chris of the Phin I asked is The Hippopotamus as much a story that supports the idea of finding happiness by maintaining your own personal faith as it is about debunking the tenets of organised religion?

And on Friday they emailed me back and asked me along.

Please make your way to BBC Bush House and report to reception, where your name will be held on a list. We will then escort to the studio, where you will be able to help yourself to refreshments and meet the other guests before the recording begins at 6pm. You will also have a chance to meet Stephen Fry and Jim Naughtie at this stage.

The recording is anticipated to take approximately one hour. We keep it very informal, with just twenty people in the audience, so please relax and remember to ask lots of questions – we need it to be as like a real-life book club as possible! It may help you to bring the questions that you have already submitted to us, which you are welcome to use as prompts.

So now I’ve started re-reading it. I thought perhaps some revision was in order.

Microsoft’s anti-spyware software is still in Beta, but having got a bit paranoid about such things lately, I installed it last night. I’m not so impressed by the results.

I knew I should have got a fairly clean bill of health because I’d run SpyBot last week, but I was still surprised by the result Microsoft kicked out, even after I’d updated to the latest definition files:

Nothing. Not a single piece of spyware on any of my drives, in my browser cache, or in the Windows registry. Well, I guess Microsoft probably knows best, but just to be sure I tried again – this time with AdAware…

Hmmm… three bits of spyware that Microsoft’s spyware detector, built specifically to work with Windows, let slip under the radar. Instead of deleting them, I ran another test – this time with SpyBot…

Six pieces of spyware!

I deleted them.

I know the Microsoft software is still in beta, but either it’s missing out on some important entries in the registry, or AdAware and, particularly, SpyBot, are being hyper paranoid.

Either way, I’d rather err on the side of caution. The Microsoft spyware killer will be gone by teatime.

Reaction to news of the Mac mini has been amazing – and very encouraging. The BBC News site seems to have gone Apple mad these last two days, and there has been a Mac or Jobs-related story on the front page pretty much permanently since Tuesday. It’s not always been the same story, either – they have been cycling them and changing the graphics.

Even the PC writers are asking if we’ve got one in yet, and whether they can have a play when we do. And now I’m getting loads of instant messages from writers desperate to see if they can borrow one to write about on our behalf, in spite of the fact it doesn’t come out over here for another two weeks.

I have to admit, I am getting a bit tempted myself. When it was announced, I was impressed, but didn’t have any particular burning desire to own one, but now… well… hmmm. It is an absolute bargain. It is a good spec. It is very very cute.

But I don’t need one.

But does that matter?

It’s very easy to get addicted to exercise. You can become so fit that you push yourself to ever-greater extremes, one of which is death. People who are always out exercising generally carry a subliminal message on their sweatshirt: ‘rubbish relationship’.
Source: Never Hit a Jellyfish with a Spade

And so it was with some trepidation that I returned to the gym for the first time since Christmas, ready to revive any unhappy singletons who succumbed to heart attacks. Unfortunately nobody did, or else the pool would have been far less unpleasant. There was a kids’ class going on in the kids’ pool – where it should be – but that didn’t stop a dozen fat mothers wading to the half-way point of the regular pool and standing in a line across its whole width, holding sub-two year olds and blocking all the swimmers.

So, I stopped after a kilometre and came to work, arriving bang on noon. Today is Jobs’ keynote at Macworld San Francisco, so we’re all still here at work, watching it scroll up our screens as Chris of the Phin sits in the in the audience transcribing it all by GPRS. Bizarrely it all seems to be working quite well.

He’s been going an hour and three quarters now. Chris’s fingers must be close to dropping off.

Still, the Mac mini is good news. Assuming the get the UK prices right… Only time will tell, but I worry that they’re going to hike it up this side of the Atlantic.

Later: It’s quarter to eleven, and we’re on the verge of leaving.

Not a very productive day. I’m on a deadline, so sat down to do some writing and decided to switch keyboards so that the better one is on my Linux machine, which I use for the majority of my writing. That meant the old PS/2 one had to go in the Windows machine.

It didn’t like that. At all. In fact, it threw a massive strop. I switched it on, there was some buzzing, then a bang, and a small cloud of smoke. That’s the second time I’ve blown a power supply in that machine. The Linux machine, meanwhile, pootles along with its out-of-date hardware. The processor is slow, the amount of memory laughable, and the graphics card barely passable, but it’s stable, and quiet, and it works very well. Far better than the newer P4 running Windows.

Which meant a trip to PC World. Can’t say I ever relish that. At least our local one seems to be fairly organised, though, and they have the Apple computers plugged in, switched on a running something useful.

All I wanted was a new power supply, but I decided to replace the keyboard for a USB one in the end (PS/2 is so out of date now), and threw in a new heatsink and fan to try and quieten things down a bit.

A bit of rebuilding later, all seems to be running well, and is certainly a lot quieter than before. As a bizarre aside, I now also have a blue neon glow peeping out from under the desk as though I’m sitting at a low-slung modded XR3i. I think this must be an overclocker’s power supply, which probably explains the lovely chrome casing. I can quite understand why people get so excited about see-through cases now.

I’m wondering whether it’s time to upgrade the Linux box now, though. It’s a painfully slow processor, and although it runs the OS just fine OpenOffice is having terrible trouble with its dictionary. There are some good monitor-less sub-