Last year I went on a walking holiday in France with two friends. We started in Nice, got the train to Sospel and then walked to the coast at Menton. Between them we saw some beautiful scenery, drank some lovely wine and ate fantastic food. I can’t share the alcohol or steak, but you can see the pictures…

We started the week in Nice. I’d heard great things about the place but, on the whole, I wasn’t terribly impressed. I’ll be positive and say this is probably because they were digging the whole town up to install a new tram system, or because we didn’t spend very much time there. Anyway, this means that there are no decent pictures.

Rather than just provide a link to the news that Nick Park’s “Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit” won an Oscar, I thought I’d also point you to an interview:

NETRIBUTION – OSCAR WINNER NICK PARK — Wallace, Gromit and Me

The care and attention that goes into these films is, no doubt, exactly why they’re as good as they are.

On the other hand I have no idea why “Crash” did so well. It wasn’t a bad movie by any means but I thought it lacked the cleverness and brilliance that characterised most reviews I saw of it.

I was sad to see the passing of Linda Smith. I never saw any of her stand up work but I heard her frequently on Just a Minute and The News Quiz, where she was always sharp and funny.

Jeremy Hardy called her “the wittiest and brightest person working on TV or radio panel games” which really isn’t very far from the mark.

Guardian Unlimited | Obituaries | Linda Smith (Jeremy Hardy)

As you may have seen, I was generally quite impressed with the photo books that the previous version of iPhoto was able to generate. I was therefore quite keen to try the new cards that you can buy using iPhoto 6, the version included with the recently released iLife ’06. (Am I the only person that thinks that “iLife” is a really naff name? First that, then “MacBook Pro” rather than “Powerbook.” What next?!)

I came across this article in the dead-tree edition of Computer Weekly: it discusses how to avoid open source licensing pitfalls. It’s an interesting but flawed piece.

What did he get right? I think it’s fair to say that people should assess the risks of installing free software. Free software is still new to a lot of people making the details of these risk somewhat unknown. He’s right to say that many people do not understand what obligations using some of the various free software licences put them under. I work for a very technically-focused company yet even we have had some internal problems with this.

As many of you will already know, I recently came back from a trip to Vietnam. Some will even have seen the pictures. Others, however, do not like looking at pictures on a computer screen and always insist that I get prints. This time I decided to go one better and get a book.

Those still wallowing in the PC world may not be aware of a Macintosh application called iPhoto. It’s a bit like Adobe Photoshop Album if you’re familiar with that. It allows you to catalogue photos, categorise and label them and perform some minor edits such as red-eye removal, cropping and simple colour adjustment, although I normally use Photoshop for this kind of thing. I mention it here as one extra feature that I’ve never used before was its ability to make custom books. I normally use Photobox for my prints but this seemed like a much easier option.

Even when I disagree with him, I tend to like Paul Graham’s writing. I like this essay, “How to Do What You Love.” Spending forty or more hours a week at work it’s important to like what you do.

This paragraph rang especially true: “If your work is not your favourite thing to do, you’ll have terrible problems with procrastination. You’ll have to force yourself to work, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.” I’m procrastinating a lot these days…

I’m starting to sound like a grumpy old man. (Those that know me should stop nodding their heads and agreeing now, please.) This is another “things were better in my day” post.

As I previously mentioned, both graduates and companies are complaining that university courses are not vocational enough. I personally dispute that. However I am generally in agreement with Joel Spolsky when he says that “Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers.”

Apparently web users judge sites in the blink of an eye — potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds. I hope you took just a little longer checking out my websites!

We normally see employers complaining that recent graduates don’t have “relevant” skills. This article is an interesting twist on that, with the job-seekers themselves complaining about their courses.

The Register: IT grads damn university courses

I think both employers and job seekers are missing the point. There’s a difference between “education” and “training.” University degrees should not simply be vocational training, they should teach principles that can be applied throughout a career and not just specific technologies that might well have a shelf-life of only a few years.