Today was the 90th anniversary of Britain's declaration of war on Germany in 1914, and to mark the occasion a ceremony was held at the Centotaph. The only four World War I veterans well enough to attend laid wreaths, before receiving veteran's badges at the Ministry of Defence. According to the BBC, attending the ceremony were Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, veterans minister Ivor Caplin and Commonwealth high commisioners to London. Note who didn't attend: not one member of the Royal family, the Prime Minister or even the defence secretary, who was over in Gibralter ogling the locals. I am not anti-royal, and this is not an anti-government comment, but as this could be the last ceremony of this kind that they are able to attend, would it really have been too much to expect?

In case they got lost on the way, I've marked on a map the relevant locations, along with the approximate time it would take to travel to the Cenotaph:



1 - The Cenotaph
2 - 10 Downing Street (30 second walk)
3 - Ministry of Defence (1 minute walk)
4 - Houses of Parliament (2 minute walk)
5 - Clarence House, official residence of Prince Charles (5 minute drive)
6 - Buckingham Palace (5 minute drive)

Oh well, I'm sure they all had good excuses...

I've just added a new gallery to the site - Fort William, Oban & the Scottish Highlands, taken last week. I've also redesigned the existing Canada galleries so that they're integrated in to the site. In case you're wondering, I used Jalbum to generate the galleries. Links posted here open in a new window, so to view the galleries click the links on the left.

After the iRiver problems I wrote about earlier, I have been on the look out for a portable mp3/audio player that supports OGG, has an FM radio and has decent battery life. After my brief flirtation with a flash-based player I've decided to go for a hard drive one. I've completely ruled out iRiver - I emailed them to get clarification on whether the white noise problem has been fixed, and they couldn't even be bothered to reply; I'm not willing to buy from a company with that level of customer service.

Well, I think I've found what I'm looking for, one of these chaps, an iAudio M3:



It has everything that I'm looking for, has great reviews, is smaller than an iPod and judging from comments on the iAudio forum, they listen and respond to their customers.

So where's the dilemma? There are now three versions, the standard 20GB & 40GB models with 12 hours battery life, and now also a long play 20GB model, the M3L, with 35 hours. And the 20GB M3L is exactly the same price as the standard 40GB!! Why do they have to make these decisions so difficult!? So do I go with the smaller hard drive, but longer battery life, or vice versa? If anyone has a hard drive MP3 player I'd appreciate it if you could let me know which you'd go for and why, bearing in mind that neither will hold my entire music collection (around 60GB, and almost all of it legal!).

It's not often I write about really serious subjects on here, but sometimes you read something that so knocks you sideways that you start to question your own opinions.

This story in the New York Times, via Washington Monthly, tells the story of a mother who, after finding out she was pregnant with triplets, had an abortion. Except she only aborted two of them and kept the other one.

'I'll never leave my house because I'll have to care for these children. I'll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise. Even in my moments of thinking about having three, I don't think that deep down I was ever considering it.'

The immediate reaction to this is one of revulsion - aborting two and keeping one just because it would change your life too much seems just wrong. But how is this different to aborting a single fetus just because it was unplanned? I have always considered myself to be pro-choice, but I can't see any moral argument why this is worse.

Should we only allow the termination of all fetus in cases like these? But then you're forcing the mother to deny one of them life, and that doesn't seem right. If it's for medical reasons or after rape then decision is a completely different on, so perhaps the motive should be examined? But again, how is this different to aborting a single fetus because it will get in the way of your career? I think I'm going to need some time on this one.

Following their purchase earlier this week, Google are now offering Picasa, a digital photo album for free from their UK site. It was previously for sale at £30.The main features are:

- Slideshow. Automatic or manual full screen slideshow of an album.
- Editing. Red-eye removal, cropping, black & white, rotation and auto-enhance.
- Timeline. Full-screen graphical view.
- Email photos with automatic resize.
- Keyword searching. Add keywords to each image for easier searching.

I've already downloaded and installed it; my inital thoughts? Good stuff:

- Very nice clean, minimalist interface.
- Quick import: it imported my 1393 photos, 1.69GB, in about a minute.
- The slideshow is well implemented.

Whilst it's free, and I shouldn't really complain: the not-so-good stuff:

- There doesn't seem to be a way of displaying a single image full-screen without starting a slideshow.
- The keyword searching is very basic. For example, you can't use 'and' or 'or'.
- The timeline feature doesn't seem to work on my PC - it displays in a very low resolution, making the pictures fuzzy.
- I can't find any reference to whether the rotation is lossless; until I can be sure it is, I'm going to avoid it.

Is it worth downloading? If you already use another album package, such as Adobe Album or PS Photo Album there is nothing ground-breaking in Picasa that warrants changing. This may be different in the future - I wouldn't be at all surprised it the next version contains built-in Blogger functions. If, though, your photos are spread all over your hard drives at the moment with nothing to help organise them, then follow the link and download it now - for free, it is a very good product.

Sorry, shameless plug here. If by some stroke of luck you're in the market for a late 70s Kramer 350G aluminium (or aluminum for those across the pond) neck guitar, then have I got just the thing for you - I've just put mine up up for auction on Ebay. I was expecting about £200 for it, but with 7 days left it's already up to £220, with a fair bit of interest. The auction ends Saturday 17th July at 2334.

When it's sold I'd like to get one of these, an Ibanez AR3000, but I haven't found anyone in the UK who sells them yet. If you happen to know of somewhere that's got them, let me know.

**UPDATE 14/07/2004**
Come on, get those bids in. Up to £255 with just 3 days left. Pictures of it here.