Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

Archive forMarch 2nd, 2003 | back to home

2 March 2003
Filed under:London,Personal,Useful web resources at12:09 pm

After months of winter misery the sun is starting to have noticeable force and the temperature is climbing to around 10 degrees during the day – a little nippy, but bearable. Toronto (where I used to live), meanwhile, still has temperatures that can plunge to -12 degrees during the day.

Sadly, in terms of hours of daylight London appears to be well behind. Thanks to the US Naval Observatory I can see that this year we don’t start to get more sun than Toronto until April 23rd and we start falling behind again on August 20th. Four months of gloriously long days is little compensation for eight months of increasing darkness…

NB – daylight savings time may affect this, but I am not sure in what direction as both countries have it, and (I think) at slightly different times. Also note I am talking about hours of daylight in the evening here – the situation looks better when you count the time of sunrise as well as sunset, but I like to be asleep around sunrise!

The BBC interviews a bunch of people who think gaming may be a 3G driver. But you can have a mobile phone with a big colour screen without it being 3G and 2.5G – anything that gives you “always on” – is enough to allow multiplayer gaming. You don’t need a lot of bandwidth…

Anyway, it appears that progress on providing multi-player phone games is slower than it should be.