I quite like the new styling of Spencer Street Station, I think the renovations were long overdue and the whole station is much easier to navigate. What baffles me is the name change. “Southern Cross Station”? I’m pretty sure having the street name is far less confusing for everyone and allows us all a little more alliteration in our lives. Still, what’s more puzzling that original change is the fact that they can’t seem to ditch the original name! See, it turns out that all the signs read “Southern Cross formerly Spencer Street”. So what was the point of the name change?

I predict that within 10 years time it will be renamed “The Station”, only to realise that’s idiotic and change back to “Spencer Street”.

I just bought a new keyboard/mouse combo today to act as inputs for my laptop when I’m at work. I went with the Microsoft Wired Desktop 500 set and it’s pretty nice. There is one, glaring, problem though: the keyboard has a PS/2 connector. Pretty useless on a laptop that doesn’t have a PS/2 port!

Why Microsoft would even make non-USB keyboards anymore? I guess I should have gone for the more expensive wireless set. At least the mouse is usable.

The next season of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya has had some details posted, including a hint as to which plots will be covered from the light novels. In typical “hardcore fan” style there are a few hoops to jump through to get to the information (which adds to the fun) but if you don’t understand Japanese it’s slightly difficult. Thankfully the ANN post reveals the details for us English-speaking fans. I’m now officially excited about the next season!

This is kind of cool. It seems a company in America has come up with a way to transfer power of fibre optic cables. So, the converse of Broadband over Power. If you can’t be bothered reading the article, the method used involves pretty much what you would expect - using high-powered lasers to transfer photonic energy which is then converted back to electricity by photovoltaic cells.

A sneak peek at Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from the American release of Order of the Pheonix on DVD, which oddly got released a month after the UK and Australian versions.

SAGE, as seen on Slashdot and Digg, is a mathematical modelling and computation tool. I’ve never used Mathematica or MATLAB so I don’t exactly have a need for this but I’m sure someone may get some use out of it. It uses Python as its scripting language so it should be easier to extend than using a custom language.