• The November Plan – Post now updated with my recent trip to Austria.
• Apple’s Mistake – “How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that’s just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak.”
• The Daily Shoot – A great idea to help people (myself included!) to take more pictures. I think a lot of us have the will, just not the time or inspiration. Time is hard but inspiration just got a little easier.

While there was a very long short-list of places to go, Vienna eventually won the coveted prize of being the destination of my November trip, 2009. Before I stepped onto the plane I confess that I have little idea what there is to see in Austria’s capital city. It certainly has a famous name but you can’t base an entire trip on an Ultravox song and the teenage home of one of the least loved people from the twentieth century.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “From My Past.” I guess this image shows something from all of our pasts, except perhaps the glasses. I saw this in the Natural History Museum in Vienna and it amused me.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Vehicle.” I’m entry number 167.

My entry for this weeks PhotoFriday, “Vehicle,” was partly inspired by a conversation last weekend about the highlights of Norway. This is the train — vehicle — that takes you on the Flåm railway, twisting and turning down the side of Sognefjord from the top to the water front.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Three.” I’m entry number 227.

Finding three of something for this weeks PhotoFriday, “Three,” was harder than I was expecting. In the end, the answer was staring me in the face.

It may look like a hacked Rubiks cube but actually it’s designed this way. B brought it back from her recent trip to Tokyo. This three-by-one puzzle is, I think, much simpler than the real thing. Though this could also just be an older me. The last time I solved a real cube I just took the stickers off…

• News Corp to Offer Plaid Stamps! – “Giving Murdoch the benefit of the doubt, then, I’m guessing he simply doesn’t mean what he said. Perhaps he just wanted to sow a little confusion, get some publicity and maybe a concession or two from Google.”
• The night the Berlin Wall fell – “For me it was that rare occasion when a story was unqualified good news. After years watching the way communism was practised, I felt no need to mourn its collapse. Whatever came next had to be better.” Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin wall.
• OMG Ponies!!! (Aka Humanity: Epic Fail) – “The real world has failed us. It has concentrated on local simplicity, leading to global complexity. It’s easy to organise a meeting if everyone is in the same time zone – but once you get different continents involved, invariably people get confused. It’s easy to get writing to work uniformly left to right or uniformly right to left – but if you’ve got a mixture, it becomes really hard to keep track of. The diversity which makes humanity such an interesting species is the curse of computing.”

• Darwin teaching ‘divides opinion’ – Very depressing. This isn’t hard. Creationism and Intelligent Design is not science and therefore has no place in the Science classroom.
• Share the Memories: Happy 8th Birthday iPod – I didn’t get mine until January 2002 but it was worth the wait. After a series of tape and CD players that never quite lived up to the promise, the first gen iPod really did change the way I listened to music. Plus it still works, which is more than can be said for my fifth gen iPod…

I confess that I was very tempted to roll out one of my old favourite autumnal pictures but in the end I actually went out with my camera and took the above image. This was literally taken just outside my flat. The golden light and the yellowing leaves say “Autumn 2009” to me. Obviously for the true British Autumn we’d also need some rain.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “…Is In The Details.” I’m entry number 175.

The obvious part of this weeks PhotoFriday theme, “…Is In The Details,” is details. It calls for something close-up, imperfections and all. But there’s a missing part, typically “the devil,” so I thought it was appropriate that the above picture is a close-up of some tiles on a church in Spain. Hopefully that means that no dæmons are present.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Dawn.” I’m entry number 74.

• Palm Pre smartphone – “So you’re after a smartphone, you’ve got money to burn and an obvious decision to make: this or the iPhone. No other touchscreen smartphone is even in the running. The Pre has some obvious advantages. It’s a bit smaller than the iPhone and ‘Synergy’ works well, which could prove useful if you’re more familiar with Facebook than the concept of Gmail or an Exchange server. But weigh it against the iPhone and it’s hard to recommend.”
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide Turns 30 – Still one of my favourite books.
• Cat registered as hypnotherapist – To be fair, cats do seem to convince people to pet them and feed them without any apparent pay-back. Maybe they do hypnotise them?