Via Jack comes a meme with a point. From The Stacks Winter Reading Challenge. Reduce the pile of books sitting beside the bed. Pick five books that you’ve bought but haven’t read yet, and read them, between now and January 30th. Simple.

1. A Deepness in the Sky - Vernor Vinge (been on the stack for five and half years)
2. The Clerkenwell Tales - Peter Ackroyd (two years)
3. Collapse - Jared Diamond (six months)
4. The Algebraist - Iain M Banks (one year)
5. Who On Earth Is Tom Baker - Tom Baker (four years)

Got a short e-mail today about my StarDate Converter:

Have you considered making the current stardate available via RSS?

Hmm, interesting. First of all I’d have to translate the calculator to PHP or whatever to do the calculations on the server, but after that making the output available via RSS would be easy enough.

But would it be practical: the second decimal place represents a period of little over five minutes, so if someone wanted this to create a stardate ‘clock’ they’d be hitting my server at least that often. Not a disaster on its own but something that would need keeping an eye on if it proved popular.

Maybe I should test it out with the French Revolutionary Calendar first (I really need to convert that to PHP anyway so that the dates on this blog aren’t reliant on JavaScript). Hmmm, let’s see where this leads.

Very True Mood:  curious

My iPod’s dead. And guess what? It’s about fourteen months old and so just out of warranty. Fucking typical.

[Update] - For the curious, here’s what’s wrong.

• The screen faintly displays the diagnostic tests menu but the backlight is off
• It doesn’t respond to any of the controls
• When connecting it to the computer, it isn’t detected by either iTunes or even Windows. So I can’t try a reinstall.
• When plugging it into the wall charger the display doesn’t change to indicate that any charging is taking place

I didn’t have time before work this morning to do any further tests, but it doesn’t look good.

Very True Mood:  angry