I've never stayed in the conference hotel at Manchester before. I was a little surprised to be kept away by a bunch of chortling idiots in the corridor at midnight last night. As a result I woke up pretty dazed, then almost brained myself on the handwash basin which has been clever placed in that part of space your head naturally inhabits while sitting on...well, I'm sure you can work it out.

It looked like the prize for prat of the day was going to go to room service. Leaving the floor mat over the edge of shower tray is not a great idea — most people turn the shower on before getting into it; how could this been beaten for being stupid?

Five minutes later, I took my spare pair of shoes out of my luggage in preparation for the new day. Both of them for my left foot. Hmmm.

Am in Manchester for an Ontogenesis meeting, which is focused on tools and APIs this time; perhaps less exciting than previous meetings, but also potentially most useful; spanners are not interesting, per se, but where would we be without them.

Sean Bechhofer started off talking about the OWL API — it's taken a long time, but this seems to have been a bit of a slow burn; it was started in 2002. It's starting to get a lot wider use now, and a bit of a community around it.

I have finally finished reading the Night Listener. I've always had a fragmented relationship with Armistead Maupin; I keep on getting half-way through a book, then stopping. I borrowed More Tales of the City from a friend, for example, and was half-way through reading it, when I found the copy I had bought 3 years before and then stopped. In that case, I had moved house in between and it got backed at the bottom. The Night Listener got caught by my move from Manchester. I've tried to start reading it again several times, but mostly while travelling; I think it's been around the world at least twice. For some reason, I picked it up a few days ago, and read the second half in two days. My conclusions: it's great, nicely paced, gentle and engrossing; the writer-writing-about-a-writer plot only annoys occasionally.

To celebrate my success in finishing it, I picked up Atonement, as I have stalled on this several times. Hmmm. Well, less good here. I still couldn't care less about Bryony's adolescent playwrite prentensions, nor understand why it needs so many chapters. Worse, I've read these chapters four times now. I should hire the film, but it's got Keira Knightly in; an actor that you can see through both metaphorically and physically.

I've been looking forward to the second season of Northern Exposure for a while; unfortunately, the music has been replaced with elevator musack. Moreover, as well as the music being badly chosen, it's been mixed poorly, at bad levels. It totally breaks the suspension of disbelief, making it's very hard to get involved. Very poor performance, indeed.

Installed Hardy Heron today on some laptops I have at home — I had decided to try and rip my entire CD collection again with consistent naming and organisation, and the best tool for the job — ripit — is linux based. The wonderous wubi makes a quick installation for a single purpose possible. There is not risk to your machine, and no painful partitioning to be done.

Hardy worked pretty well. X worked fine, as did the new resolution switchers. They have moved the location of the "no, no, no, don't autoplay the CD, not under any circumstances, just don't do it" dialog from removable devices and media to the file browser. They need to rename something—a CD is "removable media" in my book.

I couldn't get the wireless to work which was pretty disappointing, but this turned out to be because I had clicked the wrong button — if you single-click the network on the panel and pick the relevant network it all just works. If you right-click and fiddle with the settings yourself, it doesn't. Hardy actually got all three of my cards (spread between two computers) with no problems.

Neither computer is upto much, and each CD is taking ~20 mins, which is much longer than I expected. Still can't really blame hardy for this.

Went to see a for sale flat at the weekend. At one point, the estate agent said "I dreamt last night that I owned this flat; when I woke up and found that I didn't, I was devastated".

Really, it's true. I am not making this up.

Yet another post has appeared about Ade Wolfson, this time from a parent of one of this kids, this time in the public media; it's could that a counter-opinion has appeared in the mainstream media: not everyone is internet-centric.

Just tried the BBC's iplayer for the first time. Pretty good, actually. It basically works, the image quality is good, download speed is fine. The download manager is pretty clunk and limited — you can't control how many things it downloads at once for instance. The DRM is a pain because you have to use windows media player to watch stuff back; normally I am a VLC man, and I miss having the keyboard shortcuts.

Shortly after downloading a few things, my download speed plummted. I think Virgin have chocked me for blowing my download limit, which is the first time this has happened. I managed to get a "0" reading on a download speed diagnostic; strangely, it also showed I have a 2MB upload which makes no sense at all. Is cable not asymmetric?

Update

Take it all back. IPlayer installs kservice.exe as an automatic systems service. This spams the outgoing connection even after terminating iplayer. Moreover, it's a CPU hog, that turned my machine to treacle. This rather disingenuous blog post mentions the problem, says "it's outside the scope of this article" and suggests you firewall it out. I have a better idea; the BBC should switch the damn thing off. Very, very poor.

A second account of the death of Ade Wolfson has appeared online now; I've never met the author, but it's a good write-up. More information in it than mine.