Lindsay Marshall's Weblog

Bifurcated Rivets

28 June 2000

11:51:49
OK, so it was surreal to link the SCG to the hoppings page, but it is now fixed (see yesterday, or n fact don't see yesterday since it is now fixed!)

27 June 2000

13:55:18
The start of Wimbledon, Glastonbury festival and the Newcastle hoppings, and still it didn't rain! the climate is definitely weird.

13:23:25
Great web economy bullshit generator. I'm getting out there to harness one-to-one supply-chains and synthesize leading-edge relationships. I should definitely streamline out-of-the-box infrastructures.

13:20:53
Useful collection of Latin maxims. Doctrina vim promovit insitam, is not here though.

13:15:42
Huge reading list for some guy at utexas. Featuring statistics on number of pages read and average times.... Are you surprised that SF features a lot in this list?

10:02:15
If you are into weird ranting try reading this, which appears at thepeacock which claims to be the most beautiful site on the net. ha ha.

23 June 2000

14:53:41
I've been sent loads of great links, for which many thanks. I have as yet not had time to get them up here though, but I will when things get renormalised....

14:44:48
Andy Goldsworthy's Snowballs in Summer. Excellent. (tnks for the lnk George)

22 June 2000

21 June 2000

15:24:16
Great poem about absinthe by Ernest Dowson. I am reading a biography of him at the moment.

10:05:24
Dr Bronner's Magic Soaps. I'm told they were an icon of hippiedom (thanks George!) but I must admit to having never heard of them. You can get Dr Bronner's complete writings for $2 though.

19 June 2000

17:17:01
Looking for cranks? Try crank.net (that's cranks as in kooks, not as in bicycles)

17:09:11
Ideas available at the halfbakery. SOme good thoughts. I like the idea of anti-salt.

16:56:56
Check out the bloatbusters. There is no excuse for bloat. Bring back 64K segements!!!

13:43:50
My son just came back from an exchange in France and noticed that he had been near(ish) to Carnac. I don't suppose he went though - he seems to have spent his time riding around on the back of little motorbikes...

13:40:20
e-gold sounds an interesting idea. I could add a tip box to the bottom of this page so that y'all could expresss your appreciation of the wonderful content that you get here :-)

12:59:29
I have knacked my arm repointing a wall at the weekend so doing this typing is propably really stupid. *sigh*

12:58:38
Back from Hamburg/Harburg and the tcl/tk workshop. The workshop was excellent and I met lots of interesting people and got some new ideas for stuff. Hamburg looked like a nice place, but I didn't get a chance to look round - there was a Paul Klee exhibition at the Kunsthalle that I would have liked to go to , but didn't find out about it till too late.

13 June 2000

14:12:58
Silence is golden. Tomorrow Iam in examiner's meetings all day and then off to Hamburg for the 1st European Tcl/Tk User meeting where I am talking about Frink and tclCheck.

12 June 2000

13:41:54
Our backyard is nearly finished! All we need to do is fill up one of the flower beds, strip a wall of 100 year-old whitewash and design and build the fence.....

13:41:08
Went to look at the Sitooteries this weekend. Didn't get the chance to look at all of them so we'll have to go back (which is no hardship - I like Belsay). I liked a couple of them, but some of them seemed to miss the point and to strive to hard to be "art" (or do I mena "Art"?). A sitooterie is what I want at the bottom of my garden of course. I must get on with designing the shed thing.

9 June 2000

15:38:09
Repairclinic- useful site (if you live in the USA!) for everything to do with repairing appliances. I am told that their service is excellent.

8 June 2000

10:37:59
Breathe has a fantastic TV advert at the moment : two people on a beach and as they breathe the sea goes in and out and so does the canvas of the deckchairs. it's great. The website is not however. I tried looking at it from home on a 42K connection and it just took forever to load, particularly the stupid flash screen. Not good. Oh, and when I try to sign up to it all just breaks.

10:36:14
I am getting really, really hacked off with adverts that don't say numbers properly: it's not six nine nine five, it's six thousand nine hundred and ninety five! I assume that some marketting psychologist somewhere has determined that if you don't say the dangerous words thousand and hundred then people won't notice the size of the price. Grrrrrrrrr.

10:27:38
For some reason I am reading a book about Lourdes

- it's interesting in places but is a bit heavy going at times. I also started Cryptonomicon

last night, but it unfortunately I find it almost unreadable - I liked Zodiac

and Snowcrash

, but hated The Diamond Age

. This just seems overwritten, overblown, pretentious and dull. I have never heard of The Big U at all. Oh, I quite liked the one he wrote under another name

7 June 2000

12:37:01
The TV thing went well last night, though it was very short. BBC TV crews are always so professional to work with. The Futureworld exhibition must have every scrap of fibre optic in Newcastle pointing at it as the Internet connectivity there was faster that anything I have ever seen. Quite astonishing.

12:35:22
The shower project. (nudity alert) Very odd - this is meant to be art? (thanks gordo)

6 June 2000

15:01:39
I'm on local television tonight from the BT/BBC Futureworld exhibition that is in Newcastle at the moment. Talking about the VMG of course.

14:06:32
Don't you just love the we? You click on a link and get: "Database error: Invalid SQL: INSERT INTO active_sessions VALUES('d8fe224c80d84f5ea297ccdea5775531?station=1056','Session_Galaxy','U2Vzc2lvbl9HYWxheHk6JHRoaXMtPmluID0gIiI7ICR0aGlzLT5wdCA9IGFycmF5KCk7IA==','20000606130258')MySQL Error: 1062(Duplicate entry'Session_Galaxy-d8fe224c80d84f5ea297ccdea5775531'for key 1)Session halted."

10:22:22
Useful glue advice. This is the sort of thing the web is really useful for, but for which you need fast, cheap, easy to access, permanent connectivity.

5 June 2000

15:46:04
I didn't mention that I finished Half Life the other day (I only got it recently when it became cheap...) I was very disappointed with the ending which really wasn't worth all the struggle to get there!

15:44:50
Someone read out a recipe for a cocktail called Bull in a Chinashop this morning: gin, cointreau, malibu, red bull and coconut milk. Sounds disgusting!

15:41:57
Bill Nelson's reading list. The Derek Bailey book on Improvisation

sounds interesting - he is a very challenging musician to say the least.

14:45:00
Alice (who has to come out of retirement NOW) has a great page of handwriting samples.

11:07:26
I am utterly skint at the moment so I cannot go out and get the two new Murakami translations *sigh* Norwegian Wood

and Underground

10:58:43
I really must update my reading list as it is woefully behind what I've been reading.

10:56:49
Congratulations to mat/tops who spotted that I was reading This is the Beat generation

10:50:00
Maskon - Your one-stop resource for female latex masks on the internet. (A pedant asks: What is female latex?)

1 June 2000

30 May 2000

16:03:07
Sheesh, stuff about lessons learned from the collapse of boo.com - I'm just a stupid academic and I could have told him most of this stuff before they started!

14:22:19
Won't be updating much (if any) as I will be spending most of this week marking exam papers, projects and practical work....

14:21:36
Well, this weekend I was at the Dome and the London Eye. The technology and design of the dome iompressed me, but the contents were less than thrilling. The kids enjoyed it though and it isn't nearly as bad as the media have been making out. (However, I would still have preferred for the money that went in to building it to have been used for much more socially useful purposes.) If yhappen to be near the dome you should go, but don't make a special trip. The London Eye was fantastic and if you cna you should go on it. The 30 minute ride is really too short - I could have done with going round again. (Calissta Flockhart was 5 cars in front of us we were told - "celebrities" can just phone up and jump the queue and get on free. Again the technology is very impressive and the view is stunning. We went to and from the dome by river which I would recommend if you are going - the river trip is great. Later on we saw JK from Jamiroquai do a live set in Covent Garden. One of the tightest bands I have ever seen - great playing, the guitarist was particularly good, as were the horn section.

25 May 2000

18:13:48
I must confess to still having absolutely no idea who Jill Dando was, apart, of course, from her being some kind of TV "personality". I cannot recall ever conciously seeing her on any program. From her photo, she appears to be a clone of the canonical female TV presenter.

18:11:31
The WML version of this story, claims that the patients will have "ariels" strapped to their bodies. Clearly, the system must be Tempest hardened!!

12:45:49
The PPIG workshop photos are on line. I'm in a couple: this one, this one, and this one. Why this should be of interest to anyone other than me is a mystery to me. However the ego massage is surely necessary.

24 May 2000

17:56:48
Still working on WML - anyone out there got a wap phone? Mail me and tell me about its interface!

23 May 2000

22 May 2000

16:55:20
Carlos, my PhD Student had his viva today and all went well! Hurray, and congratulations to him - it's a lovely piece of work.

13:09:21
Watched a program on Sky last night called "Secrets of the Street Magicians Finally Revealed". A couple of neat things and several tricks I knew already. The big secret it didn't point out was the sheer skill and chuzpah that you need in order to carry out these tricks well! One card trick involved a top change which is so hard to do smoothly and invisibly.

13:06:01
I got hold of that book I mentioned on Friday. Quite bizarre: full of references to mathematicians who I have never heard of and great chunks of meta-discussion about areas of maths I have never heard of. There are sentences where the only words I understand are the and of! That being said I am quite enjoying it; some of the anecdotes are good as is some of the discussion of the philosophical basis of maths.

19 May 2000

13:35:45
I have been recommended Henning Nelms "Thinking with a Pencil" as a must-read classic, but it seems to be out of print.

12:54:34
Went to a reception in The Lowry. The building is interesting, but I was not impressed by the L.S. Lowry collection. The vast majority of the pictures are just bad. (The web site is not a good advert the place either)

12:51:42
Been away at the GEMISIS conference. And had some hardware troubles with monitors.

15 May 2000

08:53:26
Well, we have our kitchen nearly back to normal after a week of disruption. We decided not to remodel it completely: no money.

12 May 2000

09:34:09
More pseudo-celtic greenery about leprechauns. I really hate this kind of twee Celtic stuff. I get particularly annoyed at the way that irishness has eaten all other kinds of celticity (sorry). So your great-grandmother was Irish? That don't impress me much.

09:30:43
Xitram! America's favourite drunken Leprechauns. Seems to be a band, but they have a website "so cool we make up our own awards".

08:51:23
If the Old Rope String Band tour passes near you go and see them. I caommand you! I have not laughed so much for ages. Hugely funny and fantastic musicianship. If I tellyou that the finale to their set involved the accordion player hanging upside down with his head in a tank of water while playing Jean's Reel then you get a vague inkling of the surreal nature of their performance. Peter Rowan was rather different, but equally fantastic - it must be 20 years since I last saw him. His guitar (a Martin) was astonishingly resonant and had tremendous sustain. He sang all the oldies like Panama Red, Midnight, Moonlight and Free Mexican Airforce, and he did a reggae-billy version of No Woman No Cry which was wonderful. The Ropers and PR did a couple of numbers at the end which returned the evening back to the surreal. The audience was filled with Newcastle folk and bluegrass people, and was very much made up of 40+-ish people and their children. There was a definite void in the 20-30 age group.

11 May 2000

13:50:52
I've got tickets for Peter Rowan tonight so it seems that I am going....

09:12:38
Damn, Peter Rowan is playing in town tonight and I don't think I can go. He's playing with some friends of mine too - the Old Rope String Band.

10 May 2000

12:02:30
There is a link in the UK backbone that is down which explains the horrible slowness of the network.

12:01:14
The joists supporting my kitchen floor are rotten and need to be partially replaced. *sigh*

10:09:46
Grrr, the web is slow today. It was yesterday too. I suppose it's all those MS systems sending ILUVYOU to each other.

9 May 2000

13:45:39
The Vaults of Erowid "Documenting the complex relationship between humans and psychoactives"

13:44:46
Big list of links - lots of alternative stuff and politics. Some good stuff in here.

13:30:14
History of the Bottle Hill Boys, who made two excellent bluegrass albums.

09:56:54
Queen of the nile collar. Note that "The workmanship is impeccible; with full, maticulous soddering on the entire piece" (sic) (I've always wanted to say that)

8 May 2000

13:22:55
Anyone know if San gennaro's "blood" liquified this weekend? (Here's a nice paper on how to do it non-miraculously...)

11:27:46
Building a "Thunderchild" Class Observatory. An observatory would be nice, but there is too much light pollution where I live.

11:26:44
The magna trust. "Magna is designed to be a discovery centre for industry and creativity."

10:29:28
And here's a book on building sheds

that sounds good too. I want to build a shed of some kind in my garden. What I want is what I describe as a "winter house": In the winter we don't go into the garden much as it is cold and wet. A winter house would be a place you could go and sit in the garden and be warm and work or just sit quietly. Of course it could double as a summer house if you wanted, but the winter house function would be its most important use.

10:24:07
This book about garden tools

sounds as though it might be rather good - I love tools and books about them.

10:00:32
George in Idaho points me to this nice Crosley radio site. It's not a brand that I know as they presumably never made it to the UK in any kind of quantites. He also points me to this Crosley car site. Is it the same company? Amazing looking cars - absolutely basic and functional, again not something you would have seen in the UK though.

09:50:16
The cherry blossom has been fantastic this year. And there haven't been big winds or rains to wreck it. Nearly over now though - the white is all but finished and the pink is starting to fade.

09:48:30
Everyone is redesigning again I notice. (How weird is the sequence of letters "igning"?)

5 May 2000

13:05:12
The Tapestry of Delights : a guide to UK psych, beat and progressive music between 1963 and 1976.

12:55:04
The electrified conch newsletter. The person who designed this page should be made to hold it and the switch thrown.

12:54:29
But there again you might want some electrified sheep netting. Assuming you have some electrified sheep.

12:34:55
Autumn Leaves : "The Pioneers of Danish Death Metal" A death metal band called Autumn Leaves? How ridiculous.

09:36:29
Went to see Galaxy Quest last night. What a good movie. My kids didn't get most of the jokes though.

09:25:49
I wish all these news reports about ILOVEYOU would point out that there are some computers not affected by it at all....

4 May 2000

16:24:47
I've been listening to Skip, Hop & Wobble

by Jerry Douglas, Russ Barenberg and Edgar Meyer. Fantastic stuff.

3 May 2000

13:52:06
On a general topic that is floating in some weblogs I read: Marshmallow is vile in any form.

11:41:28
Some pictures of bollards in the Birmingham area. Some nice ones. Bollards that is.

10:53:43
A list of insane inventions. Even though they are meant as funny, some of them actually exist.

10:52:35
My elbow is sore. I don't know what I have done to it. Can't be typing as I haven't done much of that over the last few weeks. Probably barrowing rubble. The best barrows are made by Chillington, who have a web page with some nice label images on it, however I can't find their barrows on it anywhere, just there rather superb range of hoes, though they don't seem to have a small onion hoe in their range which is a tool I am rather fond of using. I wonder if the barrows are made by a different Chillington. Here's a page of machetes made by their parent company.

10:10:30
The world never ceases to astound and depress me. Front page of the Guardian today is a story about an asthma inoculation for babies. Now, I am not against curative measures that will help people, but why are these injections needed? Because asthma is increasing because the developed world is too clean and the babies don't get exposed to enough bacteria. So rather than suggest that we might just be a little dirtier (which the multi-national household product conglomerates wouldn't like), they suggest inoculations! There is a whole trend at the moment in advertising "anti-bacterial" versions of products which is just so stupid as it feeds the pointless cleanliness obsession. I just finished reading Biting the Dust

, a history of housework which I can recommend highly. It demonstrates clearly how ignorant most people are about germs and bacteria and how manufacturers stir up panics about them.

2 May 2000

14:13:13
It is simply impossible to catch up on 3 weeks of stuff. The world is way too complicated. I shall become an ornamental hermit or something.

13:37:09
Cosmic Internet Academy - live on air. (That's live as in house, not as in The WHo Live in Leeds (though for all I know they might have))

12:40:58
Curse Free TV : "The money you save will pay for your Curse Free TV unit many times over and also protect the values and Godly principles you've worked hard to instill in your family." If you've worked that hard why are they still watching TV at all?

09:48:53
'Twas extremely wet in the Lakes last week. Our backyard is all dug up (I spent Sunday barrowing the concrete into a skip). We are going to put down a Bradstone paving that is very similar (at least in layout) to what would have been originally in the yard when the house was built. The original finish was salt glazed tile, but that is impossible (or impossibly expensive) to get.