drplokta

Since Plokta is not eligible for a Hugo nomination this year, I can urge everyone who is a member of the 2010 or 2011 Worldcons to nominate for the Hugo awards with a clear conscience. Remember, you don't have to have read every novel (short story, fanzine, ...) published in the past year in order to nominate in that category; you simply have to have read at least one novel (or whatever) that you thought was worthy of a Hugo award.

Here is the view from the window of my new office. Unfortunately, I'm in the middle and don't actually get this view.

I'm in California at present. I came over to run the bid desk for London in 2014 at Loscon in Los Angeles last weekend, and am now driving up the coast to San Jose for Smofcon, starting tomorrow.

Sold ten Pre-supports and eight Friends at Loscon, which isn't bad. I didn't get to see much of the convention, due to sitting on the bid desk from 10am to 6pm, and then being too jet-lagged to stay awake after dinner.

Monday, I drove up to Santa Barbara, better known to me as Santa Teresa from Sue Grafton's "Alphabet Murders" series of mystery novels. It's quite a pleasant town, and rather more attractive than most American towns. And it's mild and sunny, which makes a nice change from London in late November, especially this year.

US101 is really in a shocking state, with crumbling tarmac and bridges. US infrastructure in general seems to be in a bad way -- the airports feel like third world countries (LAX is not so bad, but SFO and Honolulu were both pretty bad on our last trip).

In Santa Barbara, I went to the beach (lots of pelicans) and the botanic gardens (lots of lizards), and also to the Apple store. My iPad developed a curious fault on the plane over. When held horizontally with the button to the right, there was an invisible line about 20% of the way across the screen from left to right that you couldn't drag anything across. Where it intersected the virtual keyboard, it also caused the "e" key to repeat itself, and the "d" key to add an "s" as well. The Genius at the Genius Bar agreed that it needed replacing under warranty, but they were out of stock. So I booked another appointment in San Luis Obispo for this morning, where they did have one, and I now have a shiny new iPad.

After San Luis Obispo, I stopped off at Hearst Castle, as featured in the works of Kage Baker, and did the guided tour. It reminds me of Portmeirion, if Clough Williams-Ellis had had about a hundred times as much money to work with. It has the same kind of Mediterranean feel, and the same use of purloined bits of architecture here and there. Photos to follow, but I don't have a card reader for the laptop.

Then up the Pacific Coast Highway through Big Sur, which is very twisty, especially for an American road. Stopped again to look at elephant seals, who have just arrived for their winter breeding season. The roadsign had a pair of binoculars on it, to indicate wildlife views, so I took my handy monocular with me, but I didn't really need it. The wild seals on the beach are no further away from the viewing area than they are in the average zoo.

Somewhere between Hearst Castle and Big Sur, I passed from southern California into Northern California, and it got cloudy and cooler. Still, it was nice to get a couple of days of sunshine.

Took me a bit longer than I expected to get to Monterey, so I will have to visit the aquarium here tomorrow morning rather than this afternoon. After that, I'm off to San Jose for Smofcon, and then home on Sunday evening, arriving Monday afternoon. And back to work on Tuesday.

Having looked up the Börner mandoline on Amazon, following Flick's little accident yesterday, I am amused to see that five of the top seven "People who bought this item also bought..." items are heavy-duty Kevlar-reinforced gloves.

Nice smooth flight, and we whizzed through immigration and baggage at Heathrow. Tired now.

If you're tired of reading about the latest iPhone, which is perfectly understandable, I'd suggest that you stop reading now.

My new toy arrived today, after six days in transit from China. And it's very shiny.

The display is, as expected, very very nice indeed, and I suspect that I'll end up doing all my reading on the phone rather than using the iPad when at home. It's the best computer display of any kind, but I fear it will take a while until they can make one big enough for an iPad (or something larger) at an affordable price.

It does have the grip of death -- if I grip the bottom of the phone, it goes from four bars to one bar -- but my old iPhone 3G does exactly the same, and I suspect most mobile phones are similar. It's just been blown up out of proportion.

Haven't really given the camera a field test yet, but the extra speed and the multi-tasking are nice to have.

For those who are curious, I got an unlocked one and will be using it on Three on pay-as-you-go. Except when out of the country, that should cost me about £5 per month (which will get me 150MB of data, 25 texts, unlimited Three-to-Three calls and £5-worth of other calls and texts). That makes the total cost of ownership over two years £310 per year, less resale value, which is substantially cheaper than buying one on a contract.

Here we are, sitting in the Plus lounge on the Stena ferry from Holyhead to Dublin, when who should walk in but dougs and julia_winolj, who are also on their way to visit relatives in Ireland. We have managed to bag the only group of seats that has power sockets and can't see the TV screens. And free wifi!

Having had an iPad (32GB, not 3G) since Friday, here are my impressions.

It looks good, with Apple's current slimmed-down shiny black and aluminium aesthetic. It's too heavy to hold up with one hand in use -- it's either two hands or rest it on your lap. This turns out not to be much of a problem.

Steve Jobs was right to say that it's a game-changer. It makes browsing the web into a whole new experience -- it's more tactile, and the screen is the perfect size for web browsing. Safari is lacking some handy features, but Atomic Web costs 59p and provides useful things like adblock and opening links in background tabs. All web browsers really need some way to scroll individual elements in a web page as well as the page as a whole, though.

There are already a lot of good apps, which make use of the larger screen. Compared with the iPhone, the screen is large enough that an app can have different parts of the screen that do different things. My current most-used apps are Goodreader (excellent PDF reader), iBooks (Apple's own eBook reader), NetNewsWire (RSS reader with Google Reader synchronization), IM+ (chat) and Plants versus Zombies (game).

Photographs look stunning on the screen, and there are a bunch of apps like Guardian Eyewitness, APOD and FlickStackr that take advantage of this.

The keyboard is about as good as a touch keyboard could be. I can easily do my usual two finger plus thumb typing in it. It could do with an apostrophe on the main keyboard, although I eventually discovered that you can get one by pressing and holding on the comma. Still, I'd rather see a couple of extra keys replacing the right-hand numeric shift key. I'm typing this review actually on the iPad, and it doesn't feel much slower than on a real keyboard.

One of my main reasons for buying it was for reading eBooks, and it has some way to go here. The screen is actually too big for eBooks, and the only two reader apps that give you two columns in landscape mode at present are iBooks (which is a pain to get your own books into) and Barnes & Noble eReader, which is only available in the US and appears to be impossible to get your one books into. I'm sure a better app will be along soon, preferably with Calibre integration.

The battery life is astonishing. We were away for a couple of days at the weekend, and I didn't need to take the charger. The claimed 10 hours seems like a bit of an under-estimate, even when playing CPU-intensive games.

Looks like any remaining in-house cleaning contracts in the Civil Service and NHS are getting contracted out, pronto. David Cameron plans to pay managers more if they can get all of their low-paid staff off their organisation's payroll and onto someone else's.

198 (Mammoth Metaphor) is expected to be installed at Somerset House on 14/5.

130 (Celebrating the International Year of Biodiversity) is expected to be installed at the Natural History Museum on 22/5.

70 (Dedicated to the wonderful Chelsea Pensioners) is not yet installed at Royal Hospital Chelsea; no date known.

87 (The Happy End of Nature) is not yet installed at Heathrow T5; no date known.

192 (bird2) is believed to now be in Victoria Tower Gardens.

117 (Untitled) is out for repair from Queen's Walk at Hungerford Bridge.

201 (The Elephant Outside the Room) is out for repair from St Paul's Church Yard.

135 (Gerald) is out for repair from Selfridges staff entrance.

112 (Tara) has been removed from Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park but not yet re-installed in Green Park.

29 (Blue Macaw) has now been installed in Green Park.

44 (Fish & Chips) has now been re-installed in Green Park.

79 (The Empire is not Striking Back) and 25 (I Miss the Forest) appear to have swapped plinths.

11 (Simply Silver) is incorrectly labelled "Whiteoaks" on its plinth (Whiteoaks is the sponsor).

65 (Burma) was in Victoria Tower Gardens and not Holland Park Avenue on 9/5; not sure where it is now.

219 (Cloudia) will reportedly be at Carnaby Street until Monday 17/5.

The locations as shown on the map (newest version from the website) for 79 (The Empire is Not Striking Back) and 124 (Elfreda) are wrong. The list of elephants has their correct locations.

111 (Mother Nature) is shown on the map and list as being outdoors and 36 (Chestnut) as being indoors; it's actually the other way round

As far as I know, all other elephants are currently where they're supposed to be, although the accuracy of the map leaves something to be desired.