What I'm Reading
Finished An Introduction to English Poetry by James Fenton, which I'd been meaning to read for a while after reading his Guardian series on the subject a while back. First thought: I've been robbed! It's a very short book, only about 120pages without the index and glossary, so quite a lot of it is present in the Guardian series. It does develop things more fully in the printed version though.

As you'd expect: very lucid, straightforward and informative. Also has a small amount of the author's opinions, particularly on the 20th century move away from metrical poems to free verse. Definitely worth reading if you're interested in poetry but don't know much about the formal stuff. If you've already studied it and know your trochees from your spondees this would already be pretty familiar.

What I'm Watching
The latest Studio Ghibli to arrive from the Amazon rental list was Spirited Away. Another very good one, with an impressively non-insipid girl taken away to a bath-house for gods and spirits. Might be a little bit scary for the very small kids though.

(Red=Entertainment,green=originality;blue=intelligence).

Operation Become Less FatOperation Don't Get Fatter
Not fatter.

Consumerism
Have had the Nokia N80 for a couple of weeks now. Moderately satisfied with it. Being just slightly a net junkie I wanted something I could surf the web with, and it has a 352 x 416 resolution screen which makes that practical. Most web pages render OK: HuSi's fine; streetmap.co.uk works on the Opera browser. Google Maps doesn't render on either Opera or the built-in browser though. It's pretty fast in 3G areas, bearable on GPRS, though they charge quite a lot for data.

Didn't want something as big as a proper PDA phone though: the N80 a fair bit smaller than a Treo or Sidekick, though a bit chunkier than a normal phone.

Have been using the camera a bit. 3 megapixels, but a fairly crappy lens makes things a bit blurry. Has a flash, "digital zoom", and a close-up mode which presumably changes the focus. Quite configurable.

MP3 player works. No standard headphone jack, though they do supply an adaptor as well as a headset. Haven't used it much though: not much space on the supplied 256KB mini-SD card.

Will probably upgrade the memory card sometime. It claims to support up to 1 GB cards, though some people on the forums claim to have got it working with 2GB (others have had problems). Tempted to buy a mobile keyboard as well: would have most of the functionality I'd want from a laptop then.

Apps: Java apps work. Freecell works though it's a bit tiny on the screen. Symbian apps are a bit scarce due to a lack of backwards-compatibility in this release.

Connectivity: to manage contacts you need the Nokia PC Suite which is as shitty as ever, but for MP3s and photos you can just plug it in as an external hard-drive. You need to tell the MP3 player to search for new tracks though.

FM Radio: crap. Only gets one station clearly at home. It also uses the headphones as an aerial (as most of these gadgets do), so since there's no standard headphone jack you have to carry either the headset or the adaptor around with you to use it.

Overall: handy for me, but probably a bit too big for most people wanting a phone-call phone, and a bit small for people wanting a PDA phone.

Web
How to draw a pixel head.

Early Bengali science fiction.