Bifurcated Rivets

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3 April 2000

16:28:58
Monorail society - do they have a one track mind? I think that their statement that monorails are a "proven transport alternative" is highly debatable. Not that I have anything against monorails, I think they are great. Check out also the Elevated Transportation Company, though probably only if you live in Seattle.

15:44:56
Find a party in the UK.... Amazingly useless site. Probably wonderful if you live in London.

14:33:59
Half Life - nothing to do with the game: "This is the first draft of a full-length play intended specifically for presentation on the Internet. It takes up to three hours to read".

13:13:29
Art form or form art? (via gmtPlus9)

11:52:51
Bought Half Life cheap this weekend and spent a lot of time playing it yesterday. My son and I make a great team - he's great with the controls and I can hack the tactics. (Mind you, he's pretty hot on the tactics too)

11:51:19
Ah, misterpants - that's what my life has been missing for a while.

10:15:58
Ebiquity looks good if you are interested in news from the whole ubiquitous computing front. (Which I am.)

09:35:51
Sheesh! What a lot of spam in my mailbox today. Someone must have sold a few lists to bozos again.

31 March 2000

07:57:29
Went to see Phill Jupitus last night. He was very funny indeed. The support act (Richard Morton) was also very funny. Doesn't have a web page.

07:26:11
I'm sure everyone else will have logged this one too, but it is very funny. Interview with a Search Engine. (I must admit to being wary of pages that include the word "satire" or "joke" in their URL - it usually means that it isn't)

30 March 2000

14:31:01
Want to buy J-pop and stuff? Try DeoDeo. No use if you live outside the USA though.

14:27:39
Some Japanese artists and some of their work.

14:27:00
National Museum of Art, Osaka - poke around and you will find some interesting pictures.

13:01:55
An interesting privacy hole in the web protocols.

12:35:49
Myreadinglist - looks like a good idea. I'm going to sign up and see anyway.

12:27:19
The Stray Sheep products. I assume the Stray Sheep is a TV program.

12:24:55
I also watched an edition of Nomura & Company which I can't find a link for. It's one of those quiz games where you have to guess which is the correct answer to a question from four that you are offered. I can't work out if the people doing the guessing are "celebrities" or not, but the prize appears to be a cartoon drawing of all the people on the show, so it isn't worth a lot to win!

12:17:15
Last night I was watching a tape of this rather odd Japanese music program called Hey Hey Hey Music Champ. Very strange with machine gun speed Japanese and text flashing across the screen at high speed. Perhaps the oddest segment was them trying to interview Britney Spears who stood there looking lost whilst the manic presenter leapt about, presumably making fun of her. (baka na gaijin!) They kept cutting to shots of this rather large guy in the audience who I presume was her minder who looked a little distressed and kept edging nearer and nearer the stage. There was an interpreter but she didn't seem to do anything much.

11:59:29
Since you ask, I have very short little fingers.

11:04:56
RIP Anthony Powell - I read Dance to the Music of Time when I was a student and loved it. (Though when I tried to read it again more recently I couldn't get on with it at all for some reason)

29 March 2000

08:59:18
I'm just cutting a Redhat 6.2 CD - the file took many, many hours to arrive and I have no idea if it all came. Soon find out though.

08:57:51
There's a lot of non-updating going on in the weblog world at the moment. Me included of course. maybe I should start doing long pieces like Brig. Of course if I formatted the page into long, thin columns it would look like there was more of what I do write....

28 March 2000

12:28:26
RIP Alex Comfort and Ian Dury. I'll read the Joy of Sex whilst listening to the Blockheads

11:36:45
I have been ftping (from a mirror I hasten to add) the ISO CD image of Redhat 6.2 for nearly 3 hours and I have less than a third of it.

11:29:20
More elephant stuff.

11:27:54
Elephants in Thailand. Elephants in Finland...

11:24:16
Ghost walks in the UK. Never seen the attraction of these myself.

09:04:15
DaveBoy.com - a good case for mandatory use of national domains if ever I saw one. None of the links work for me anyway....

07:46:27
This morning I had a conversation with one of those people who thinks my name is Lesley. They fall into a class of people who know me but not very well. They remember that my name is something that begins with an L and can be used by both men and women. Into their brain pops Lesley. Of course, I'm used to it now, just as I am used to half the world thinking I'm a woman, but it used be a little disconcerting.

27 March 2000

12:14:16
Ancient Scripts of the World now has a new home.

09:07:12
Barflies.net - music magazine (Thanks George)

09:00:04
The Journal of Mundane Behaviour - looks as though it has potential to be very good so long as it avoids too much sociology speak. The paper about Japanese elevator behaviour is excellent - very readable and interesting.

24 March 2000

10:14:25
Learn Shiatsu. What a good idea.

10:14:02
The Dull Men's Club - lots of snippets of fascinating information. And a test!

22 March 2000

13:07:23
Dalriada Music - they have some good music, but what a vile site! It's slow and very clunky.

12:41:13
My head feels like it's stuffed with steel wool at the moment. Ugh.

10:12:13
A nice history of Hillbilly Music.

10:11:59
I was thinking about Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers this morning  UK . Is it my modern sensibility retrofitting things or is this name clearly intended as innuendo? (Think of the song "Keep your skillet good and greasy"). They were a wild bunch by all stories so it seems very likely - perhaps it is a deep cover, musos' joke, like the Wallochmor Ceilidh Band - Wallochmor means "Big Willy" in Gaelic. (Strange that Amazon USA has no Original Skillet Licker recordings available!)

09:51:33
Hey, I just wrote some HTML that used the <blink> tag!!! Am I now banned from decent society?

09:34:28
More Armenian stuff - Virtual Ani. A nicely done site. (Thanks Peter)

21 March 2000

15:23:30
They are returning the Lindisfarne Gospels back to the North-East. About time too.

14:59:32
Good grief, google has 157,996 hits on Joined Up Thinking.

14:55:29
Stuff (though not a lot) about One Way Pendulum - one of my favourite movies of all time. You've pr.obably never heard of it. We have a family catchphrase from it though "Fifteen stone, ten pounds" . None of you have any idea what I am talking about have you?

14:20:35
Can you tell the difference between porn stars and my little pony? Take the test.... (By guessing I managed 8 out of 12 - I am not familiar with either my little pony or porn stars, I really did guess)

13:06:49
Lovely American Pie parody. (Real Audio) From Brendan's American Pie Archive.

09:46:30
Austin Osman Spare archive. A strange man indeed. He looks like Hitler in the painting on the front page.

09:41:49
I came in this morning meaning to look for Ernest Dowson pages, and then serendipitously found a link somewhere else. Sadly it proved to be dead. But here's another one. (It has a link to the other deceased page too)

09:39:15
Here's an Alexander Technique webpage. I can recommend it highly to you, very life enhancing. Not the webpage, which is reasonable, it's the technique I'm recommending.

09:36:58
Information about the Armenian Church. (There seems to be an Armenian theme developing here).

09:35:51
Some pages about Bohuslav Martinu. (Note that HTML does not define a reprsentation for the accented U at the end of his name)

09:34:03
Yesterday, whilst walking round the campus, I happened to notice that all the women around were wearing trousers. When I was young this would certainly have been unusual. So I looked some more and all day I only saw six women wearing a skirt on the campus, one of those was wearing traditional dress and one other was in a nurses uniform. I also so 4 women playing football (two in skirts) together, and when I thought about it I realised I had never seen a kick-about football game in which the only particpants were women. How the world has changed since I were a lad.

09:29:14
A site about the conductor Sergiu Celibidache.

09:28:41
Ahah, a Perec webpage. In French though and no detailed analysis of the intricacies of L:AUM that I can find.

09:23:06
Looking for a Perec web page lead me to this site of Strange and Unusual Dictionaries. Wonderful. That lead me to the Foolish Dictionary.

09:19:58
I've been reading George Perec's Life: A User Manual  UK  USA and enjoying it. Surprising as I am not a great reader of fiction and certainly not challenging post-modern fiction. Also surprisingly I cant find a web site dedicated to the book as it is just the sort of thing that I would have expected someone to do!

09:14:02
Listening to JD Crowe  UK  USA this morning. Stunning stuff. What could be better than 5-string banjo, mandolin and pedal steel guitar? (Don't answer that) Anyway it's great playing and fantastic driving music.

09:10:51
Oh dear - BillyJack.net

20 March 2000

09:28:52
Half the net seems to be dead today.

09:28:42
The Lowry Gallery on the web. I wonder if they will have on show any of the "sadistic" pictures that he painted and which were written up in the papers at the weekend?

17 March 2000

16:22:30
Edgar Rice Burroughs pages.

16:14:21
Keanumundu - the Online Virtual Temple of the Society for Keanu Consciousness.

16:10:12
Gay? Live in the Country? ruralgay is for you then. They don't realise that not everybody runs Windows though.

15:55:56
INTELNET - "an experimental site for the communication of creative minds, and an intellectualn response to the challenge of the expanding electronic universe"

15:48:18
This page sounds like a poem, but is in fact part of a concordance.

15:46:49
Talking of Protestants, you can discount reformation books at Still Waters Revival Books. Just what we need, people being encouraged to read Calvin and the like!

15:44:32
I tried reading another Christopher Brookmyre book - same problem. Good plot idea, just overwritten. He did raise the interesting point as to why, in Scotland at least, Catholics are always described as "devout" whilst Protestants are always "staunch". I had never noticed this phenomenon, but it is quite true.

15:40:30
How to determine the time of salat.

13:54:12
Cló Iar-Chonnachta - Irish music/books etc.

13:14:03
Appliance shooting page. The mind boggles.

10:05:26
Topix have a horrible website but sell the most amazing stuff. Check out the angel flashcard, and the portable hyper-baric oxygen chamber! How could I live without them? (sorry no direct links as the URLS are horrible!)

09:58:25
Congrats to brig on the new look - at last I can read it without strain!

09:19:37
This morning, I have mostly been listening to Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys.

16 March 2000

13:01:07
2000 World Championship Punkin' Chunkin'

12:58:05
Gaslight - "Gaslight is an Internet discussion list which reviews one story a week from the genres of mystery, adventure and The Weird written between 1800 and 1919."

12:33:15
Sulphur in Beer (Thanks Gavin)

09:25:00
Brain functioning not properly.

13 March 2000

13:41:39
The Contemporary A Cappella Society.

13:27:07
Whilst in this rhyming mood in the watches of the night I realised how desperately we need the new top level domains:

4am, and its cold, its wet
insomia.org, insomnia.net

If you want to rhyme with domains you have restricted choice (especially if you want scansion as well)

13:24:39
Still not sleeping properly. I keep having a weird dream about apples. And making strange verse in my head:

Once more unto the beach dear friends
And fill the strand up with our English beds.

13:20:10
A site devoted to Mikhail Bakhtin, who I am told I should read.

10:18:50
Underground! A website about underground military sites in the UK.

10:17:09
John Speed Maps.

10:11:58
I tried reading the most recent Christopher Brookmyre because people keep telling me how good he is, and I didn't like the first book. The idea behind it is excellent, but the way things pan out is never quite believable enough for some reason. The worls simply isnt over the top in the way that he describes. I realised what really annoys me though, and it was the same with Trainspotting  UK  USA - I can't abide things written out in dialect. For goodness sake, I already read with a Scottish accent anyway!

09:57:32
Eric conveys an emotion. Bizarre

09:15:41
Information about the January UFO sighting in Illinois. This one is very strange - it's pretty clear that the people involved something odd. You can read a transcript of the police radio transmissions. Almost certainly one of the mystery aircraft that fly around.

09:08:21
Interesting article about the medieval recorder.

09:06:19
The Labyrinth project - Resources for Medieval Studies. A great index. It lead me to this site with reproductions of the first Scottish books.

09:03:58
There is supposed to be a recording of the oldest playable musical instrument on the Nature website but the URL I have doesn't work and the search engine reveals nothing.

10 March 2000

12:48:36
Dan mentions Omniedit, but doesn't cover the horrendous security implications! This is just about the most insecure way of dealing with your personal files that anyone could come up with. It may be useful, but it's badly thought through. (Pak-o's weblog tool is going to be addressing these issues I hope - that's right isn't it Pak-o?)

12:11:15
SPEBSQSA

09:54:37
I was also sent a copy of the SPAMku book which is entertaining (and I used the Ex-word 2k to translate the single Japanese poem in it). The package also had two tapes of iron Chef episodes and other US Japanese television, so I am fixed up for a while!

09:52:35
I was just given a Casio Ex-word 2000 by a friend. It's designed specifically for Japanese speakers so it is a little hard to use at the moment, but it is the most fantastic unit. It is light, and really easy to use.

09:45:34
Want to know about dispute resolution?

09:43:44
hmmm. ingenuous.net.

9 March 2000

15:51:00
insomnia.com

15:49:28
Wide Aperture Suction Torque Expander Or Forced Turbulence Intake Manifold Enhancer.

7 March 2000

14:41:22
Blast, gorjuss has gone listified.

14:39:37
A fairly unexpected frontpage at Prozac.com. I'm sure they could have sugarcoated the pill a bit more. I mean does it work differntly in different countries? Sure the regulations are different, but there must be some general stuff they could say.

09:45:06
I don't like the new look Go Gaga at all. Very ugly and far too busy.

6 March 2000

16:24:46
Oh, I got a name check in the Guardian Online section last week. They had an article about online memorial sites, and actually remembered that I was there first! They did suggest that my site was somehow not "slick". However, I must admit that I don't actually think that slickness is an attribute that people require or look for from cemetries!!

16:21:56
Grrrr, I can't get gdbm support to work properly in PHP.

2 March 2000

08:18:00
Getting up to speed with php has made me realise how utterly awful computer based documentation systems are at helping you learn. I have all the documentation installed locally and can browse it using the KDE file manager. It works fine when I know what I am looking for, but when I all I want to do is skim over something, get the gist of it and then follow some ideas it is totally useless. I can't think of a computer based system that would let me do it either - what I need is a paper copy of the manual.

1 March 2000

14:35:02
phping.....

29 February 2000

16:56:53
Spent today installing php, learning how to use it and converting one of my systems to use it. It's all right but it is missing a couple of things I'd like to have.

09:16:10
Failed to sleep again last night.

09:11:57
*Sigh*, Brig links to a some Sony noise-cancelling headphones. I have been after some of these ever since my friend Ole bought some similar ones when I was with him in Tokyo. They are fantastic, except that I've never found anyone that sells them here and also they are way, way out of the price range I can afford. *double sigh*

09:05:00
A nice looking page about Budapest.

09:01:01
Ingres painted a famous picture of a Turkish bath. It was not like that last night I can assure you.

08:54:38
Newcastle has one of only 4 purpose built Turkish Baths that are left in Britain. I went there for the first time last night and I will now go regularly as it was a fantastic experience. Enormously hot and very relaxing.

If you happen to be in Kusadisi in Turkey and are Behind the Post office, you can have a genuinely Turkish bath. You might want to take the Sydney Gay History Homoesexual Walk and see the turkish baths there. The association of Turkish baths with homosexuality seems to be the probable cause of a rule that you have to wear shorts or trunks in the baths here - there are no mixed sessions, so I assume that is the reason anyway.

08:40:05
Leonard pointed me to "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster. Thanks! (Warnning the page does weird things to your window with javascript) Oh, and he and several others had more success with the New Statesman search engine than I did and found the link I was looking for yesterday.

28 February 2000

15:53:30
Why is this site called the narrow road? And who is Jimelle?

15:51:26
Want a dendrobatid? You can buy them on the web of course....

13:50:44
I was going to try and link to a good article about e-commerce will not be the next big thing in the New Statesman, but the website is such a mess I can't begin to find it! There was an article in the Guardian on the same subject inspired by the New Statesman article. They both use this quote from Keynes:

"The inhabitant of London could order...sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages."

This was written in 1900. There was a fatuous response to the article in the letters column on Saturday which went on about business to business e-commerce and managed to miss the point completely.

09:26:32
This handyman site has some duct tape ideas on it.... (Thanks George - by the way your e-mail address always fails when I try to reply to your messages!!!)

09:00:53
Thanks for all the mail about Duct tape. The Duck company have a website. Several people pointed out the usage of "gaffer" in the tape probably refers to the film industry use of the word to mean an electrician, rather than a boss. I assume there is a relationship between the two meanings though.

08:54:08
I watched Harry Hill last night and for some reason found it very funny - in the past he has done nothing at all for me. The Horse Whisperer joke really got me. <whisper>horse</whisper>.

Talking of television and comedies reminds me of a musing I was going to muse last week about Friends. It was the episode where Rachel moves out and Chandler moves in. What is wrong with these people, or is it just a US thing? What's with all this "roomies" bit? I don't know anyone, not one single person, who ever thought of someone else as a "roomy". Sure people shared flats, but that was pretty much a guarantee that after a year you never spoke to that person again. (I discount so-called "partners" in this BTW) Do people really behave like that in New York? I wouldn't want to share a flat with Joey or Chandler! Note that Phoebe (the only sensible person in the program) does not have a roommate, not does Ross. What does all this signify? Nothing probably.

(Oh, and Channel4 really need to get their act together about updating their website which is a week out of date on its schedules)

08:39:53
Scribble (one of my favourites) has a great selection of yodelling links - they s

08:30:54
The Yopy looks a lot like a Nino that runs Linux. I still want one though. A Quartz might be fun instead of my crappy mobile, but I really cant see me wtching streaming multimedia on it.

08:26:44
New Ghost Sites

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