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| Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 | | 11:34 pm |
11/11
Nothing involved and thoughtful, this year, but I didn't want to not note it. The atmosphere this year is slightly different to previous years; you can feel the gradual drift towards emphasising "and those presently". I suppose this is a cyclic thing... Last year, I wrote that there are maybe a hundred and fifty thousand people - no doubt less now - in the country who can remember 1918, fuzzily, as little children. Tens of thousands will be old enough to have been permanently touched by it; to remember the awful hushed silences and the drawn curtains along deserted streets, or a strange man, dusty and unshaven, who came to the door one day after the shouting was over, and announced himself as Father. And, of course, twenty years later they saw it all again; they had grown old enough to be the ones sitting in empty houses, or the ones sitting somewhere grimmer; and, for some, it all came around a third time a generation later, sitting and waiting to have a knock on the door and someone offer condolences for their son. So, have a little sad music. Mothers, Daughters, Wives; I turned up a copy of this years ago, and have been haunted by it ever since. (This version, despite being sung in a somewhat different voice to the narrative, seems to work a lot better; the original just doesn't quite seem to have the same emotion in it. This is worse than either, mind you.) | | Sunday, November 8th, 2009 | | 7:21 pm |
Triumph!
http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/Well, that's one task I've been procrastinating over for a while. Now to find all that half-written - well, more half-digested - material and start making it coherent enough to put online. (The plan is to use this journal for personal material, transfer anything vaguely contentful there, and then use the fact that it exists as encouragement to actually do the vaguely-contentful writing. We shall see...) | | Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 | | 12:52 pm |
I don't even want to think about this.
There is a list of phrases I hope never again to hear in my life. This article has just added a particularly choice one: "self-administered concentrated hydrofluoric acid enema". (The sentence continues "...while intoxicated from intranasal cocaine administration." I suppose that helps explain certain questions.) | | Monday, October 19th, 2009 | | 8:41 pm |
Online banking: another one not to use
I have just registered a savings account with Alliance & Leicester. This involved waiting for them to send me three letters over the course of a week - one with the account details, one with the customer ID number, and one with a five-digit PIN. I then logged in. They made me create, as passwords: - a "phrase" linked to a randomly generated image;
- a new five-digit PIN;
- a new password (which couldn't contain non alphanumeric characters);
- three "memorable things";
- and quite possibly one other thing I've already forgotten about
Hum. I appreciate the principle of the thing, but I really can't see this one working out well. | | Sunday, October 18th, 2009 | | 11:24 pm |
The vastly delayed booklog
Checking my records, I have apparently not posted one of these since August 2nd. So, what have I read in the intervening two and a half months? In rough order... ( ...a list... )Note (with a couple of exceptions) the absence of anything with particular, y'know, merit. It's been an easy couple of months; lots of fiction. That makes... what, 130 this year, plus the three I'm currently reading? Hmm. Puts me on course for about 160-170 in the year, then. We shall see. | | Monday, September 28th, 2009 | | 8:48 pm |
Dear internet: blogs
I have, sometime in the last six months, lost the RSS aggregator service I used to use; this is on balance probably a good thing, as it means the vast backlog of "keep this post to look at later" will no longer be there looming at me. On the other hand, it means I am now reading very little, and I occasionally am forced to do productive things rather than procrastinate. So, to avoid this horror: what should I be looking at? Advise me! (Assume I currently don't read anything, it's simpler that way) | | Sunday, September 27th, 2009 | | 12:52 pm |
Canoe!
It is an implausibly clear and sunny late-September day. Iona and I are taking the canoe out on Hinksey Lake this afternoon. Anyone interested in joining us? 2.30pm here for, hopefully, 3pm at Hinksey Lake - if we're not at either we'll be somewhere in the middle carrying the thing. (Let me know if you need directions to either) | | Saturday, September 26th, 2009 | | 11:57 am |
A subtle semantic difference
This is a lovely piece of analysis of LibraryThing data - books tagged as "geek" versus books tagged as "nerd", filtered to avoid overlap. ("nerd" gets you Tolkein; "geek" gets you perl and cyberpunk.) | | Monday, September 7th, 2009 | | 8:59 pm |
Today's carefully selected statistic
From the "outreach newsletter" of a university which shall remain nameless: Job opportunities on graduation from ---- are excellent. For example, in 2007, 100 percent of our teacher training graduates, and 95 percent of our radiography and nursing graduates, gained employment within six months. Spot the two reasons that might not generalise very well to most graduates in 2009. | | Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 | | 11:49 pm |
Advice wanted: mp3 players?
Among everything else, my mp3 player died today. Well, it's not dead dead, but it's dying; randomly hanging due to being unable to access the drive, which is not desperately conducive to doing its job. I rebooted it seven times in twenty-five minutes today, and got about ten minutes running time out of it at most. I could try rebuilding it (for, what, the third time?) but that approach is probably into diminishing returns by now; it's six years old, and the chassis is now so battered that the power and headphone sockets need gentle treatment in order to work. So, I should probably think about getting a new one. ( ...notes... )Advice, please! What's out there? What should I avoid? Should I just buy an old Archos off ebay, a fresh hard drive, and take a screwdriver to it again? | | Saturday, August 29th, 2009 | | 11:14 pm |
| | Thursday, August 20th, 2009 | | 1:10 pm |
Bike query
As some of you may recall (I can't remember if I posted about it or not), last April my bike had a rather catastrophic collapse of the back wheel - the axle bolt sheared completely in half whilst I was in traffic. The wheel itself jammed into the frame, there were horrifying noises, and it was all quite a mess. So, I walked it home, and that weekend bought a new axle and so forth and fitted it. It wasn't perfect, but it worked. I've had to reattach that a couple of times - the nut occasionally begins to work loose and the wheel "drops" in its housing - but it's not broken again. On the other hand, the back wheel's got more and more precarious over time; the brakes got jammed against it at one point, needing some complicated reworking to fix, I've had to wire the back mudgard to stop it chafing against the tyre; and now the whole wheel's inexplicably wobbling from side to side, about half an inch of yaw each way, no matter how firmly I bolt the axle. So, today or tomorrow, I'm going to strip it all down again and see if I can get it working anything like smoothly. Unfortunately, I suspect this is a pretty deep-rooted problem, and the wheel itself - or the mounting point on the frame - might be screwed. So, the actual request here: this is probably beyond my capacity to fix. Can anyone recommend a bike repair shop in Oxford (preferably not too far from South Oxford, since I'll need to walk back), who'll be able to look at this and fix it for a reasonable price for me, or alternatively tell me upfront if it's beyond help? I should try and get this fixed before I have to commute again... | | Friday, August 14th, 2009 | | 9:01 pm |
Hurrah
Finally, finally, British politics has gone past the point of diminishing returns. Health Secretary Andy Burnham has accused a Tory MEP who attacked the NHS on American TV of being "unpatriotic". [BBC] "Unpatriotic", hurrah. There really isn't much left for them to accuse each other of, is there? | | Thursday, August 6th, 2009 | | 7:55 pm |
On the road again
I am currently belting happily along the East Coast Main Line, on that nice stretch where it runs parallel to the A1 through the Borders, and you get to stream past a couple of struggling lorries every few minutes. Which is to say: I'm using the eee, for the first time in a while. I gave it a good going-over at the weekend, formatting and reinstalling it with Ubuntu, and it's now in that pleasant state where it Just Works. I sat down at London, took it out of the pouch, fired it up, and I've been happily working ever since without having to find power cables, or deal with anything falling over, or the like. It's been up for three and a half hours, and there's still a third of the battery left - in fact, comfortably enough battery to handle the whole London-Edinburgh run with the wireless running. Oh, wireless. Because there's a free internet connection; a flaky one, which is getting about 2000ms ping times to the world outside and a packet loss rate of 10%, but it works for once. Which means I can do all sorts of useful things on the journey, a pleasant surprise. Including, just for the hell of it, photography.  (Yes, I know it's terrible. Proof of concept testing, that's my excuse) ...and now the sun is shining bronze on the Forth, sinking down out of a bank of cloud, and I'm almost home. Long-distance travelling really is pretty comfortable, sometimes. | | Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 | | 8:00 pm |
Free to good home: heavy gloves
Clearing out the wardrobe, I've found a pair of heavy-duty waterproof gloves I was given as a gift. They seem pretty good, but the reason they're languishing in the cupboard is that they're too big for me, Anyone want them? They're large (size is given as "Men's Large"), black, padded, and made of some insulating-but-waterproof synthetic material. Look like they'd be excellent for cycling... if your hands are big enough. | | 2:57 pm |
Things I learned this morning
...you can use a syringe effectively despite putting a ~70° angle in the needle. I'd have expected it to clog, or snap, or something. (In other news, ow. Dentistry. Still, it was interesting.) | | Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 | | 1:15 am |
Booklog
This seems to be becoming a once-in-three-weeks pattern. Er. A song for Nero - Thomas Holt, 2003: published Abacus, 2004. ( ...notes... )Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson, 1992: published Voyager, 1996. ( ...notes... )PDF copy, from the publishers, at the bottom of the page here. Get it while you can... On an unrelated note, I see it's been planned for a television adaptation. This is the second or third time someone's announced that, so we shall see; but it certainly has the potential to work well. Why the Germans lose at war : the myth of German military superiority. Kenneth Macksey: published Greenhill, 1996. ( ...notes... )Also a dozen others: - Fiasco: the American military adventure in Iraq - Thomas Ricks
- Night Watch - Terry Pratchett
- How I live now - Meg Rosoff
- The dreaming void - Peter F. Hamilton
- Yellow blue tibia - Adam Roberts
- Rumpole and the Reign of Terror - John Mortimer
- Islam: a short history - Karen Armstrong
- Architects of eternity - Richard Corfield
- Service of all the dead - Colin Dexter
- Iron Sunrise - Charles Stross
- Clarke County, space - Allen M. Steele
- A dirty job - Christopher Moore
| | Saturday, August 1st, 2009 | | 12:48 pm |
Planetary problems
21/7: "The planet Jupiter shows evidence of having being hit by a large object, either a comet or asteroid. A dark mark has appeared in its atmosphere towards the southern pole." [ BBC] 1/8: "Astronomers are puzzled by a strange bright spot which has appeared in the clouds of Venus." [ BBC] Life really does sometimes feel like Chapter 1 of a bad sf novel. Which one next? | | Sunday, July 26th, 2009 | | 8:41 am |
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