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Saturday, February 28, 2004

Here's a collection of interesting links I've been meaning to blog this last week. In no particular order:

A house in West Yorkshire that was the site of a gruesome murder. The police believe there may still be body parts concealed in the property. I can see the legal reasoning here—I mean, it's not as though a lost digit or two behind the skirting board is going to cause structural damage. Unless there's an associated poltergeist. It used to be traditional to bury a body (later a cat) in the foundations of a house being built.

A bloke working for NASA, whose job it is to sniff items before they go aboard their spacecraft...

A 10 billion trillion trillion carat star has recently been discovered.

A bronze coin, bearing the face of Emperor Domitianus has been discovered in Oxfordshire. I think there must be something wrong with this report, though. They say he ruled in 271 AD, and that he was the 'penultimate emperor', but, given that the Roman Empire in the West lasted well into the 5th century (and in Britain till the beginning of the 5th century), that sort of suggests that the last Roman Emperor ruled for well over a century. Hmm...

The shortlist of 12 designs for an 'East of England' landmark has been decided. I quite like the lost 'city' (surely 'town' or 'village' really?) idea. The feature film sounds pants, frankly. And, forgive me if I'm being thick, but I just don't get the North Sea Train one.

Alex's Live Journal. Sounds like blogging, but without the pathetic attempts to keep people interested with hilarious links. Umm... I'll add this one to my permanent links.

ESA's Rosetta Project to land a probe on a comet. This is so cool. I really hope it works, but it has so many stages where something could go wrong...

What the World Thinks of God, a BBC survey. It showed the Brits to be relatively sane, I'm relieved to report. As a polytheist, though, I have reservations about the assumptions behind some of the questions. I find it ironic that Bush and his ilk talk about the danger of religious fundamentalism/fanaticism (meaning, of course, muslim fundamentalism...).

Oh, and, coincidentally I assure you, look what we have here: the US government decides it can do whatever it bloody well likes with any person from any part of the world, even if, by some miracle, the unfortunate detainee is found not guilty by their farcical show trial. This affects all of us. Effectively what it says is that the US authorities can take anyone they don't like prisoner and hold him or her indefinitely. I'm sure they would reply that I needn't be concerned for my own sake, as long as I refrain from threatening their nation, but what really counts here is whether or not they claim that I'm a threat to them. So they act as police, prosecution, and judge in a secret trial (where they restrict the evidence available to the defence). The only thing stopping them from imprisoning me (or you, dear reader) forever is the fact that they don't want to. Should Donald Rumsfeld take a personal dislike to me, I'm a gonner.

I wonder whether the real reason for detaining people indefinitely in Camp X-Ray is to provide a ready supply of slave labour for US call centres... 'Salaam! You're through to Ibrahim. How can I help you?'

Monday, February 23, 2004

Cambridge is a wonderful, homely city, but I feel it could learn a trick or two from Barcelona.

Ways in which Barcelona is better than Cambridge:
I don't think that's too much to ask...

Friday, February 13, 2004

Going to see the Red Hot Chilli Peppers in June! Tra, la, la   :)

(Must sort out the smiley thing...)

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Well, hello there! Good to speak to you again. (I'm refusing to allow myself to be wracked by guilt for not posting regularly...)

I'm still struggling in the quagmire of possibilities for my latest computer hardware fad. It's three fads really, which exacerbates the problem.

1) First off I want to stop my machine machine making such a racket. Silent PC Review is a site with loads of useful info. I could probably reduce the noise fairly simply and fairly cheaply by buying a new PSU and decent fans for the CPU and case, but I've now got it into my head that I ought to get a water-cooling system. The options for water-cooling are:
The Aquarius III is cheaper, but I'm not confident that I can modify it to cool a graphics card as well (which is possible with the Exos).

2) Next up on my list of projects is adding a couple of old hard disks. I currently run XP, and I want to bung a formatted disk into my system and install Linux on it. Thus far, easy enough, but I also want to add in another disk with Win98 already installed. Will Win98 throw a complete wobbly on discovering that its entire environment has changed?! We'll see... [Cue manic laughter]

3) And third up (the simplest by far) is adding more memory (256 MB > 512 or 768, depending on how rich I'm feeling) and getting a new graphics card so that I can play The Sims 2 when it comes out. :)

And, you see that smiley there, I'm working on a plan to use pretty little picture smileys instead...

At some point I'm going to try out Mozilla's new web browser Firefox.

Other random stuff:
I reckon I bear an uncanny resemblance to Kennewick Man?!

Tuesday, February 03, 2004

Yo! Hadn't been going to blog today, due to general laziness, but am now surfing the tiny ripple of invigoration caused by the latest weebl and bob splashing like a small capybara into the swamp of my consciousness.

Sooooooooo, what else is new? There's an area in the US where they have to prevent electromagnetic pollution so that their radio-telescope will work. That's an extreme case, but this kind of pollution could become a problem in everyday life.

Oh, and Hitler had a Welsh girlfriend.

Monday, February 02, 2004

Aloha! Too busy to write anything creative this evening (really busy—I mean in a mo I've got to go and eat treacle tart and ice cream in front of a Channel 4 prog on scary insects), so you, gentle reader, will have to make do with these scrappily annotated links.

The formidable Matthew Collinson has kindly jacked me into his web-matrix. This is in no way connected with Dr Collinson (I hope), but it made me giggle. And I sincerely hope that anyone who takes this seriously (apparently including the developers) drowns in a sea of foetid whale blubber.

Catch you later, darlings.

Sunday, February 01, 2004

Just changed the font for posts to Arial Narrow on Leila's suggestion (she reckons serif fonts look old-fashioned). I started out with a serif one because I thought it would handle italics better, but Arial Narrow doesn't look so bad.

Been looking at boots. Can't decide whether to get smart ones for wearing about town, or tough ones for going on adventures. Probably I'll have to get a pair of each. I really like Merrells.

Also I've been looking at fancy cooling systems for my computer. It's possible that I'm going to end up with three hard disks in my machine (WinXP, Win98SE, and Linux) which could get pretty hot! I want to replace my ribbon cables with round cables to improve air flow, and I really want a liquid cooling system, but I know this is just a boys 'n' toys thing... :) There's a company called Extreme Cooling which is pretty, umm... cool.

Right, off to play Britannia now!