20050730

The return

It seems like weeks and weeks since I've last been on-line. In reality - it has, but finally the essential engineering works on the PC and done and dusted, and before much longer a normal service should resume.

During the downtime a lot has been happening, not to myself especially, but certainly in the wider world, and even just the wider city of London. The pace of the London bomb investigation in particular has been quite amazing in its rapidity, and a true credit to the Metropolitan Police. It's eight days since four poor excuses for human beings tried, but fortunately failed, in their attempts to set off what would have been a second round of explosions on the London Transport system. 8 days later, they are all under arrest by the Metropolitan Police, with one arrested in Rome of all places.

One of the men, while being arrested was asking the police officers involved if they were going to shoot him. This from a man who was seemingly quite content to blow up himself and those around him but a week ago. There are some truly twisted people out there.

There was good news that the IRA are moving towards a permanent end to violence, but otherwise the TV news has been dominated by pictures of famine in Niger, flooding in Mumbai, even tornados in Birmingham.

As for myself I've recently discovered the wide world of podcasting, which may promise a whole new niche of online audio content. Whereas streaming audio generally requires considerable infrastructure and cost to operate, creating pre-recorded downloadable shows is well within the reach of a much broader range of would-be content providers. I've sampled just a few programmes so far, but have been impressed with the generally high quality, both technically and in terms of content. As broadband continues to spread like wildfire, the provision of multi-media content beyond that of the text pages we have seen to date is looking much more viable, and within the reach of a considerable audience. As nearly all MP3 player owners will use their PC to transfer music and audio to their player, it's a logical, yet nevertheless masterful stroke to make available a wider range of content for MP3 players using the same platforms users are current familiar with. It's early days for Podcasting, but an interesting future may well lay ahead.

As for website news, time and internet access (or more accurately the lack thereof) has meant that only a handful of photos from the Royal International Air Tatoo have been added to the photo galleries, in addition to a few snaps from the mobile camera. There is, however, plenty more to be added, and a fair number of photos have been backing up, awaiting optimisation and upload. Hopefully it won't be too much longer before they'll be available online.

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