Volume 45
1 Jul 2003
BTW, Happy Canada Day
Creation Science Fair "Patricia Lewis (grade 8) did an experiment to see if life can evolve from non-life. Patricia placed all the non-living ingredients of life - carbon (a charcoal briquet), purified water, and assorted minerals (a multi-vitamin) - into a sealed glass jar. The jar was left undisturbed, being exposed only to sunlight, for three weeks. (Patricia also prayed to God not to do anything miraculous during the course of the experiment, so as not to disqualify the findings.) No life evolved. This shows that life cannot come from non-life through natural processes." Or how about "Women Were Designed For Homemaking" or "Using Prayer To Microevolve Latent Antibiotic Resistance In Bacteria". Is this a parody? I hope so (William says it is)
30 Jun 2003
Altai Pentix Federation "The APF Charter, adopted by the Constitutive Congress includes the aims and purposes of the Federation. Among them are the popularization of the game of all centures and peoples Pentix; propaganda of healthy way of living; intellectualization of the rising generation."
WiFi is so good - you can update your weblog whilst sitting on the floor outside a meeting room waiting for someone to unlock the door.....
Waging Mental Battle with a Proof - I know how that feels, at least from the point of view of a programming problem (via /.)
Least functional commercial website ever? This does precisely nothing for me. (I'll have one of their pens though)
Karl tells me that Fatal Frame is a genuinely frightening game. He assures me that this isn't the ramblings of a fanboy...
27 Jun 2003
The unofficial band names page - this looks vaguely familiar so this may be the second time around...
26 Jun 2003
Design Destinations - a perfect example of how not to design a web site for a conference on design....
Odd QT movie of an auction of a car that is a realisation from some cartoon series that I have never heard of. (via Daily Jive)
Well, the mystery of Bifurcated Rivets gets more mysterious - I just acquired a new rivets tin. This one looks very like the usual tins but is yellow instead of orange and is a product of the Bifurcated Rivets Company of London and Warrington not the BR Co. of London and Aylesbury. I also have a tin from the S&D Rivet Co. of Leicester - blue this time and looks more recent judging by the typography. But all the tins have the same form factor! Was there an international standard for No9 bifurcated rivet tins? Or are all these the same compnay in different incarnations?
25 Jun 2003
Cant words used in Georgette Heyer's books. The cant words were one of the things I liked most about the historical books.
I was looking for a Dornford Yates page and astonishingly there doesn't seem to be one. I did find someone who specialises in books by slightly obscure UK authors such as Yates, Jeffrey Farnol and Georgette Heyer. Yates wrote the most astonishingly snobbish books you can imagine, though I doubt that you will find them on any library shelves now. My mother has a big collection of Georgette Heyer books and I used to enjoy them immensely, both the historical romances and the detective fiction.
24 Jun 2003
I went and did some tests for a PhD student researching pitch perception this AM. Amazing what subtle pitch shifts one can detect. I had my hearing tested as well and I am not as deaf as I thought, in fact I have a really weird "better than perfect" hearing point at 4KHz. Odd.
23 Jun 2003
Roses are red and sixes are blue : synaesthetic-colour experiences and their relations to perception and meaning. Great title, but not a thrilling browsing experience.
Plastic-Bladed Double and Single Reeds For 1-Octave Smallpipe Chanters and Uilleann Pipe Regulators and All Drones. Sound information but it needs some pictures - making reeds is hard!
Listening to Django today - all the QHCF recordings in chronological order. C'est chaud!
Richard Dawkins (a man just as intolerant as those he attacks) writes about raising consciousness about atheism by co-opting a word with cheerful associations. You would think that someone like Dawkins woudl realise that this is not how language works! Anyway you can sign up as a bright here should you so wish - if it wasn't such a stupid idea I might even consider doing it.
My daughter says the new Harry Potter is boring at the start, fairly exciting in the middle and sad at the end. So there you go.
20 Jun 2003
I've been listening to Joe Pass all day. I saw him in the late seventies. One of the best concerts I've been to.
I just looked at the map and discovered that Arkansas is right next to Mississippi which I didn't know. So (as I said in a comment) the Hot Springs that Robert Johnson sings about is almost certainly that one and it is almost certainly the own that the Devil's Son-in-law is singing about. (Notice the foot note about Hot Springs in the link - the comment about Hell is bogus IMHO)
Hot Springs Blues with Peetie Wheatstraw on piano. Lovely stuff. Don't know who the guitarist is - could be one of several.
Went to see Matrix Reloaded last night with my son and we really enjoyed it. OK, there was all the dull bogus philosophising, the even duller sequence in Zion, and, yes, the only cast member who can act even a little bit is the guy who plays Agent Smith. And all the other niggling inconsistencies need to be ignored. But the freeway chase sequence certainly made up for any of that. The cinema was nearly empty and I made my son sit through the credits to see the trailer so we were the only people in there for quite some time - there are a lot of credits!!
19 Jun 2003
Hmmm, my machine was "upgraded" to XP last night and I am trying to get everything back working correctly.
18 Jun 2003
Someone has registered the domain name base-cabinet-sink-tall-medicine-vanity-wall-shaker-cabinets.com (but hasn't got a site)
I reckon the Christians missed a trick as Truereligion.com and the truereligion.com are both Islamic sites. I note the godsword.com is not taken by anyone.
Black Keys - colombian band as far as I can make out. Sounds like they own an old Roland (or a copy of Rebirth. I wish I owned a copy of Rebirth)
Motorcycle funerals - I saw the hearse at an exhibition of coffins and it is a lovely machine. A really nice idea I think.
17 Jun 2003
Weird Japanese train spotting - click on the links and you will see pictures of "zero mile markers" in train stations all over Japan. "Zero kiro posuto"
Hmm, if I mailed you in the last couple of days, the from address on the message will be broken. Sorry about that.
Damn it, someone has charged 1000 pounds worth of goods on my credit card in Sweden.
Language Removal - I have read the FAQ and I have absolutely no idea what this is about or what kind of service these people offer! I am mystified.
16 Jun 2003
Concerned Women for America "Are Taxpayers Funding `Gay Pride' Activism at Department of Transportation?" Hmm, I can't find anything about unjust, illegal warfare though or election fraud. Funny that.
Hmm, there seems to be some kind of collision between volume 34 and volume 35
Volume 36 is now in the database.
I am enormously impressed with eMusic - it is filled with stuff I want to listen to - definitely a good bargain.
Aha, turbo10 only works with IE - so that's no good then.
On Saturday night I found a tabla site with lots of video clips of basic technique and I can't find it again. Which is very annoying.
Hmm, the Tabla Guru appears to be sitting with the drums the wrong way round. Either he is not a guru or nobody has checked the webpage.
Tabla Beat Science Look at the top right box : "You've reached sputnik7, the chronic online source for cutting-edge music, film and anime." Chronic? Do they know what the word means? Is this some new, cutting-edge use of the word/ The only slang usage I know of it means rotten.
Everyone is linking to the grasping robot videos so I will too. (Nothing like a grasping landlord video)
Coke Driver Allegedly Fired For Drinking Pepsi - almost certainly more complicated than it sounds!
Deviance "Here You'll Find Latex Wings and Props Such as Corpses and Skeletons. More Items and a Clothing Line to Come in the Future. (Note: For Those of You out There Who Are Allergic to Latex, We can Make Non-Latex Wings!)"
13 Jun 2003
What I would do with a million dollars (And if you get the stupid questionnaire popup, have a play and you will see that really old people are barred)
12 Jun 2003
http://www.111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111.com/ has been updated
Hmm, I just cleaned several years worth of lunches off ny keyboard. Feels odd. There's still a load of crud down in the gaps though.
11 Jun 2003
10 Jun 2003
I got invited to join someone's Friendster network so I followed it up (not that I need friends you understand) and it is clear that people are not taking the system as seriously as may have been intended.
I was doing my daily purge of my SPAM in box (just in case there is non-spam in there) and I saw something labelled "Christian Debt Management" - what on earth is that about? "We pray that you'll pay" or "When the boys come round you'd better turn the other cheek"
How on earth do I make a div element on a page take up all the reamining space across the page? There just doesn't seem to be a way of saying "fill tha available space" in CSS.
I've moved some more stuff into CSS and changed some p tags into div tags. If this has broken things for you let me know ASAP and I'll change it back.
Kudos to Geoff from Stumble Upon - he saw my winge and got in touch. That is excellent service! I'm impressed. (Of course it also means that he is a sad person who reads his referrer logs but you can't have everything :-) )
9 Jun 2003
Erik Satie's Crystal Ball "This site is dedicated to proving the theory voiced by Darius Milhaud shortly after Erik Satie died in 1925, that the composer had prophesied the major movements in classical music to appear over the next fifty years (that is, to the year 1975) within his own body of work."
Worst Country Song Titles - this is a truely pathetic list. Many of the titles are clever and funny, some of them aren't country, some of them are spoofs. The person doing the page clearly hasn't a clue. I suspect that the hasn't listened to any of the songs and is just going on the words, and you can't judge a song by its title (which sounds like a good title for a country song)
Hmm, can't get the "stumble on" stuff to install so I am not testing it.
7 Jun 2003
I find the 'Add a comment' text intrusive so I am playing with a graphic. it's not going to stay as it is (ugly) so it will improve, but possibly not until I am back on a fast connection on Monday.
6 Jun 2003
As always, google is your friend - stretch navigator, and it is the stupid, ugly vehicle in the video.
I am finding the new look very restful, though it is perhaps a little too rectilinear.
What is a "stretch navigator"? Is it that ridiculously large and ugly vehicle that appears in the video?
5 Jun 2003
The Cyber Hymnal featuring a really hard to use front page with text that moves continuously.
I wonder if you could really play "Gimme a pigsfoot and a bottle of beer" at a funeral? (Though I don't really want that)
Just came back from a funeral at our local church (lovely building inside - terrible photograph). I more and more think that you should sit down and write something that tells people what you want your funeral to be like. First off, if you don't do it, someone who is probably upset, will have to do it and will worry that they didn't get it right, and, second, they might well get it wrong, though of course you might not be bothered. I think the most important thing is not to have someone who knows nothing about you speaking platitudes which happened at my grandfather's funeral. Today someone read this piece which I suspect is a funeral cliche, but it is rather good, and I applaud the sentiment. It was described as "Prose" (and the URL has prose in it), but it seems to me to be a poem, so there may be som ecclesiastical meaning here I am missing.
Lots of I'm Sorry I haven't a Clue clips - if you are not a regular (or British I suspect) you will probably find it puzzling rather than funny. I however am in tears of laughter.
I listened to Mark Lamarr's Beginner's Guide to Reggae last night. I try hard to like Reggae but it really does nothing for me - I don't hate it or anything, I just find rather dull.
Black Belt Jones - I particularly like the frustrating background image where you can never see all of what it says (and if you have a narrow window, you don't even know it's there)
Your Name Here unashamedly stolen form /usr/bin/girl (a girl, a browser and a lot of spare time)
Hmm, not sure about the look yet. I quite like it, but the name image is not right yet and there are way too many type families being used.
"Blair's Protection of Elite Paedophile Rings Spells the End For His Career" The Illuminati didn't tell me anything about this!
Ryanair have only 6 people working in customer service. That's 1 for every 2.5 million customers.
4 Jun 2003
LinkedIn is another of these "let's all network" things. I joined it to see what happens (if anything) but all these kinds of systems give me creepy feelings about boosterism and excluding people. Internet Rotarians.
Miskatonic University "Welcome to the internet on-line campus of Miskatonic University, dedicated to the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Robert W. Chambers, Edgar Allan Poe, and others of the arcane tradition."
Another chord finder mined from a comment (so they might be useful after all, but I do need to extract and auto link URLs)
Bum wines - these are of course USA versions, in Glasgow they drink Lanny (sp?) and in Edinburgh it was Melroso Old Tawny Sherry. Now of course they all just drink strong cider.
3 Jun 2003
Hmm, a webring of blogging brits, but he is trying to tell people what they ought to include, so I'm not signing up for that one.
Javascript guitar chords - nice one! (Though I can't find that EbM7-5+13sus 4 that I was looking for the other day)
The Jazz Discography - could be a useful thing to own. Aaagh, I just saw how much it costs.....
Well the commenting stuff seems to work. I'm doing lots of other little changes too - mostly using CSS so if things suddenly look horrible and stay like that do let me know what browser you are using so that I can abuse you for poor software choice....
Thought I'd have a new log today.