OK well I now have a new toy to play with, a nice little EeePC which I got off ebay.

Basically that means a couple of things:

Firstly it ends my 12 years association with Psion, really as I started with off with a little Psion 3, and progressed through a 3a (which I got from a now defunct pawn brokers on the City Road) and a Revo, culminating in getting a much desired Psion 7 (again off of ebay).

After much work hunting around, I eventually managed to load it up with a Netbook personality module, a working wifi card, a full java 1.1 environment, and lots of abandonwear.

But time and tech wait for no man, and the psion (with associated kit) has finally left me to go to a collector in Russia, and the money has been recycled to get this little eeepc 701 running xandros.

I must admit I’ll miss the physicality of the keyboard and screen that came with the Psion 7/Netbook, but it’s nice to have a os you do some serious dev with.

Secondly, it may also mean that I might be able to blog post more often, as I can now write things up on the train to work, and post when I get in.

Well, hopefully……

It’s going cheap, check it out on ebay…. (with thanks to Lionel Bart)

• Psion Series7/Netbook
• Psion Revo – spares/repair
• Cisco Aironet 340 Wifi card – Psion compatable
• Buffalo WLI-PCM-L11GP Wifi card
• Psion 256K Flash Memory
• Psion 128K Flash Memory
• Psion IrDA Travel Modem + disk
• Sharp Zaurus PDA and accessories

Here are a new of my favourites:

Least Auklet – be at your side

Haling from Liverpool in the early 80’s, Least Auklet fitted snugly into the emerging 80’s pop-miserablist scene. They supported Echo and the Bunnymen on their “We’re a mite pissed-off” tour and seemed to be headed on for greater things.

However, things soon fell apart during their ill fated “Bring down Thatcher by staring at your shoes” tour, as the bands extreme taciturness mean’t that they never told each other where the venues actually were, and so everything disintegrated in an orgy of indifference.

The lead singer is now running a Chip Shop in Doncaster, while the drummer is the COO of an international investment bank

Artlenburg – Sure that everyone will

These wacky Latvian trip-hop ambient funsters exploded onto the club scene in the early 90’s. Charming the ectasy-ravaged ravers with their chill out anthems based on on traditional Latvian folk ditties.

However, they soon became disillusioned with the “commercialism” and “fakery” of the music business, and the fact that they couldn’t get laid.

They were last seen in an igloo somewhere above the Arctic Circle, playing their music as a “ambient tribute to the desolation”…. mainly to seals

Lady Chapel – I Myself Deny It

Following the tried and trusted English musical formula piloted by The Primitives, Transvision Vamp and the Ting Tings of an attractive blonde fronting some anonymous indie-musos wearing black, Lady Chapel’s indie-jangle-pop enchanted many.

Their meteoric rise, and and subsequent precipitous fall from grace was sadly mirrored by lead singer Jayne Janie’s tragic death in a freak space hopper accident

With the Fake Band Game at least.

The rules they publish are slightly different from the ones I was using (thanks Swami)? a couple fo years ago which are:

1. Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random – The first article title on the page is the name of your band.
2. Click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 – The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
3. Visit http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ – The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4. Use your graphics program of choice to throw them together, and post the result.

Extra points for indicating the musical genre of the album, but if you get as far as putting together the track listing, naming the lead singer’s girlfriend or printing the Tour t-shirts off on Cafe Press, then you may have gone too far.

I’ll post a couple of my favourites in bit.

I must admit I tinkered with the idea of creating some actual music to go along with them on MySpace. Of my bands probably? Artlenburg would have been best, as I have no discernible musical talent.

Plus if I chose Lady Chapel, asking someone to act as lead singer to your fake internet band comes across as a little creepy

Anyway, I turned round an realised that I already had a life, so droppped the idea.

Looks like geekdom might be eating it’s own young again, only to eulogize them while still picking the bits from it’s teeth.

It’s already? happened once with FireFly, and looks like the same thing is likely to happen Dollhouse, and Heroes has been getting huge amounts of flack since the rather-botched finale of Series One.

Much can be said about the inflated expectations of anything with Wheadon’s name attached to it, or the all pervading evil-ness of Fox executives or why the US Network don’t give sleeper hits a chance like those nice HBO people.

Suffice to say, your geek-dom can be either fantastically loyal or can turn on a six-pence and rip your meta-phorical throat out.

To be quite honest, I can’t really see why unmitigated dross like Smallville (and to a lesser extent Lost, which disappeared up it’s own backside long ago) continues to have legs, while Heroes gets a bad rep.

I mean, if you go back and look at a look at some old Buffy’s, aside from one or two very innovative episodes, it does have its fair share of annoying characters and repetitive episodes.

I suppose it comes down to billing, all the best regarded sci-fi seems to have started as sleeper hits (Buffy, X Files etc) but once the driving force behind the show moves on they are expected to have a 100% hit rate by both exec and fanboi’s alike.