Bifurcated Rivets

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15 December 1999

Don't you just hate it when you have a program running on two machines which have identical configuration files and yet they behave in different ways?

GMTPlus9 addicts will have seen this, but it is too good not to duplicate - We come in peace.

And if the mean streets get boring you can always go back into the lab and identify firearms, or perhaps learn how to perform autopsy properly.

Wanna walk down those mean streets? Check out the Private Investigators Portal. (at this point I get to say sic as there is indeed no apostrophe in the site title). The odd thing is that when I view it I get a page with just a title. Does this mean I have to demonstrate my skills as a PI in order to find out how I get to view the site?

14 December 1999

Hmm, I just cleaned out my mouse. Much better. Now I have mouse droppings all over my desk.

Hmmm, today is turning into lots of links with no commentary. Mind you none of them are particularly intellectually challenging so what's to say about them anyway? Who knows the secret of the black magic box?

Want a fake ID card? Belvine can help.

A review of the Lancaster University Computer Science Department's band....

Here's another Parsons article.

A snippet about Jack Parsons the rocket scientist and magician.

The Laissez Faire City Times - I am not quite sure what to make of this yet.

Raiders of the Low Forehead???

Marginal Books - distributors of the books your mother warned you about.

The European Voynich Manuscript Transcript Project. Includes a voynich manuscript font! And if you want more try this page.

Hate mail about some pages describing Nitrous Oxide intoxication.

I have not seen Journey to the West mentioned before, and I want to know why I wasn't told about it before.

"All Jack Crazyquilt wanted was a nice place in the desert to meditate. But life is never that simple, even for a Zen coyote."

Aliens amongst us? Find out more from Northern Communion. It's a classic - horrid backgrounds, animations and stuff about probes...

Daily Grail is a newslog about alternative archaeology. Some good stuff here.

I had some mail about the insulated mug I got from Amazon, which made me think about it a bit more and I realised that it is clearly a US driven marketing thing that someone has decided to use in the UK without any thought. We don't use insulated mugs. We don't drink cold drinks with lots of ice in them. In the UK you send people a straightforward china/pottery mug if you want them to use it.

13 December 1999

RIP Joseph Heller

I have a whole heap of spiffy sounding links, but I left them at home. *sigh*

Well I hope its clear! Thanks for the tip Dan.

I wonder why Brig thinks that "one" is an old fashioned usage? One uses it all the time! It is often much clearer than using "you", which can sound as though one is excluding oneself from the conversation.

As I came into work this morning I saw a van with the name L. Bloom on the side, sadly there was nothing else Joycean about it at all.

I caught five minutes of a Ricky Martin performance on the television yesterday. He appears to be short, plump, bandy legged and unable to dance. On the other hand his backing musicians were simply astonishing - I could have listened to them all night. (BTW I am tall, thin, long-legged and can't dance as well as Ricky Martin, but I am not a Latino heart-throb either)

10 December 1999

Another puzzling page. (You need Japanese character set enabled)

Oh no. More snow in the background. (Thanks Lindsay)

I have been intrigued by all the talk of Iron Chef on various weblogs and since my new video plays NTSC tapes, I asked my friend Ole to send me a tape of the show since we will never see it over here. And now I want more! It's great.

Today I have mostly been fighting RTF. You'd think there would exist a filter that took in RTF and output PostScript. You'd also think that Microsoft products would produce correct RTF.

Annoying background image? This page takes some beating! (Thanks Paco)

9 December 1999

RIP Kenny Baker - a great musician

BTW if you see rendering horrors on this page do let me know and I'll try and fix them.

The Perseus Project - a big digital collection of Greek stuff. (I was looking for the Greek word for shoe)

I also found that Brenda Love's Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices has a webpage. I believe the book is out of print, but I have seen it remaindered very cheaply recently.

I did find lots of interesting dictionary resources of which the most interesting was Logos which looks like a good resource to bookmark.

Mr Barrett tried as part of his shoe lover search to find a reverse lookup dictionary, and didn't find one. There appear to be several in fact : Casey's Snow Day (which doesn't seem to work very well), the Word Tree which has one of the strangest conventional webpages I have ever seen and it seems to be a book anyway, a First Name reverse dictionary, and I used to have a program on the Macintosh that implemented just this functionality really well and I cannot for the life of me remember its name - I do remember that I typed in "protein defiency disease" as a test and it came straight back with kwashiorkor, so I was impressed! I cannot now find the discs for this program - it had a name like "inspiration" or something. Still haven't found the shoe lover word though.

The Shattered Wig Press. All this because I was trying to find the word that means "shoe lover" for Mr. Barrett

I have no idea what this page is about at all.

I had not run into Cultronix before. Some interesting looking articles.

This week's Tom Tomorrow is spot on.

8 December 1999

Now this is a macho device! I wonder if they sell them?

Well, Looka took me to Mandomonger Farm, which introduced me to the concept of a Doula. I can honestly say that I have never heard this word used before anywhere. Mandomonger also pointed out a Rounder album of Banjo music I probably ought to have. *sigh*

My new "easier to use" interface to my weblogging tool is starting to be right. It's a little hard at the moment because I am used to the "hard to use" version and so my habits are driven by that. The really nice thing that is does is to stack up links it finds in the current selection whenever I move the mouse into its window. It would be nice if my browser let me interrogate its internals directly, but that's too much to hope for I suppose.

I enjoyed the bell anointing service last night very much. The bells themselves looked splendid and there was something wonderfully pagan about the process of naming and anointing them. The church itself is a beautiful, ancient building and there was a great sense of community. Pity about all the religious stuff though - I think that community gatherings are a great idea, but we shouldn't have to need the excuse of "religion" to make them happen.

7 December 1999

Whilst checking out a Userland error message I found psychography.net which looks as though it may be interesting, but is sadly completely unreadable - small, black text on a dark blue background. *sigh*

My life is accelerating away from me faster than I can keep up. And I am on a time management course tomorrow.

There seems to be some confusion as to when Sadie Hawkins day should be held - 1st November or 6th November? For a totally bogus festival it's nearly as bad as Easter! Here's a nice picture of the stage show.

The Millenium Commision went halves on some new church bells for our village. They are on display tonight in the church before they are dedicated and hung, so I shall pop along and have a look I think.

The new Robert Rankin is out! Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls It introduces the mystic art of Penistry, which is somewhat like Palmistry...

6 December 1999

I'm playing with a new extension to my weblog tool and this is a test. I need a name for this tool - currently I am thinking of "Fenby" as it is a sort of amanuensis.

"appritiation" - spotted in a slashdot posting. I assume they meant appreciation but I can't be sure. (OK, so I made a spello in this message myself but I'll think of an excuse)

If you want to play further with the BBC censoring e-mail system try this message:

"Matsushita held a cocktail party at their swanky new skyscraper in Scunthorpe on Saturday. I bumped into Dick Feltcher, whose haircut was a little shaggy. He'd accumulated quite a pile of buttered scones. The subject of blow-jobs never came up, however. What a chump."

Give it the subject "This Parser Sucks". Thanks for that, Mike.

Watch out for "Sheep across America".

3 December 1999

Hmm, Mont Blanc not selling pens on the Internet. Doesn't stop me wanting one though.

Really hard to read opthalmological page. Moving to the dogy background for the vision impaired how about this one or this one. The last one makes me feel ill, it's really horrible. (OK, I know, I know, pot calling kettles etc.)

Go the BBC home page. Scroll to the bottom and click on "E-mail a friend". Send yourself a message with the title "Saturday in Scunthorpe" or "Scraping scrapped skyscrapers"...

Useful pages about Sumo - done by the person who commentates on the British Eurosport transmissions. Lots of good stuff on technique and terminology.

New London Review of Books. There is one review that covers 4 or 5 pages and only once mentions one of the three books supposedly under review. Quite bizarre. However there are several books advertised (not reviewed) that sound interesting:
The Blood of Strangers: Stories from Emergency Medicine by Frank Huyler  UK  USA ,
Tupperware : The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America by Alison J. Clarke  UK  USA ,
Air Apparent : How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize Weather by Mark S. Monmonier UK  USA ,
Holding on to Reality : The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium by Albert Borgmann UK  USA ,
Speaking into the Air : A History of the Idea of Communication by John Durham Peters  UK  USA ,
Death in England : An Illustrated History Edited by Clare Gittings and Peter C. Jupp  UK  USA

2 December 1999

It's good to see people demonstrating about big political issues again. Particularly in the USA.

I like this automata museum in Kyoto (Via Misterpants)

I was watching Sumo last night - Rikishi no karada ripa desu ne! But they edit out all the ceremony. It owuld really nice if they showed some of it - after all if you see a boxing or wrestling match they show all the guff :Me lords, laydeees and genlmen, presenting in the #0000FF corner, from Halifax, the WWW super-lightweight Tag team champions of the world, the Blink Brothers, fetauring the Killer App himself, "Java" Jack Applet and his partner "Cascading" Mike Stylesheet... Perhaps not as reverent as a Shinto prayer but just as important a part of the ceremony.

1 December 1999

Very weird pages of photographs of a couch and its owner.

I really need an RTF to PostScript converter.

Take this colour vision test.

The excellent Strange Brew asks if we ever stuff humans. Check out the Bentham Project....

30 November 1999

I'm doing this by hand from home - what a pain without the assistance of my logging tool! That's probably all for today anyway as I have marking to do, furniture to shift and a sick son.

Writing in Cyberspace: a study of the uses, style and content of email. Haven't read this yet, but the extracts look as though it will be worth tracking down when I get the chance

RIP Phoebe Snetsinger - the world's most successful twitcher.

29 November 1999

Amazon UK sent me an insulated drink thing - they call it a mug, but it isnt a mug by my definition, for a start it doesn't have a handle. Quite why they sent it I am not sure - only one other person round here got one. It's quite a nice drinks thing as drinks things go, but it is a little too American for my taste - I don't drink that much drink at one sitting.

Keo seems like a strange idea. Do they really believe it will return in 50,000 years? But hey, 6,000 uncensored words to the future - not bad!

At last! Now I can have a proper homepage - I have a decent picture of my cat. And what a handsome beast he is. Thanks, Dad. (Yes, my kitchen is yellow and blue)

Strange Brew objects to <rant> tags, and I confess to being guilty - put it down to my over dry sense of humour. Anyway also mentioned is magic sand - I don't remember it, but I wonder if it is the same as Sqand? I saw this substance in a toyshop this weekend, and none of the search engines I have tried have any links at all. How odd. Ahah, I used ifind and Sqand is magic sand. Thanks to the excellent Scribble for pointing to me to ifind, and for mentioneing Mercator (which just went 1.0.17 and has a Mac version again).

The Bad Movie Report discusses Rat Phink a Boo Boo.

Wow - The Jain's Death.

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