Volume 53
29 Mar 2004
I keep spelling Kazakhstan incorrectly!
I'm off to Almaty in Khazakstan tomorrow, so updates will be at most sparse until next week.
RIP Peter Ustinov
28 Mar 2004
27 Mar 2004
George Bush Credibility Twister - actually this is astonishingly lame, surely they can come up with something better than this.
26 Mar 2004
Ah, it does read on the iBook.
Interestingly, the EC album won't read on the iBook.
25 Mar 2004
The EC Robert Johnson record just arrived. It claims to be copy protected (I wouldn't have ordered it if I'd known that), anyway I stuck it in the PC, iTunes starts up and plays it without problem. What sort of protection is that? Anyway it's excellent even if it is supposedly protected.
I got Korean Nigerian spam this morning (if you see what I mean)
Fun (Except of course the reality is that when you've done it a couple of times it becomes tedious and then you have to recharge the batteries for 7 hours or something....)
24 Mar 2004
Just watched what I think was the last episode of Caterick. Was I the only person in the world who watched it? Did anyone have the slightest idea what happened? (Apart from the surreality, the digital signal was breaking up and so it was almost impossible to watch)
Dead Corporate Mascots - I only knew two of them, but it is not surprising as the others all US mascots (apart from Jesus of course)
RIP Richard Hobson - a fine Tyneside artist, and a neighbour and friend
23 Mar 2004
22 Mar 2004
I heard some of the new Eric Clapton album on saturday - sounds fantastic. I am not a huge EC fan but this is just covers of Robert Johnson songs and everyone sounds as though they are having a great time. Went looking for it in the shops but of course it wasn't released till today. *sigh*
21 Mar 2004
20 Mar 2004
Ah : "The nickname of the Addicks is believed to have been taken from a local fish and chip shop"
I'm trying to find out why Charlton are called the "Addicks" so I go to the club home page. Can I find it? Can I hell. The FAQ tells me about SPAM and internet fraud!
19 Mar 2004
Of course now I need something I can call wise so that I can have "Moorcam and Wise". Tea, Ern?
(The Town Moor is in the background BTW)
Hmm, I thought I'd try and set up a rivets cam but there seems to be a great dearth of information on how to do it (apart from things that say "it's easy!!") and there also seems to be a lot of software that doesn't work. I thought this was just off the shelf technology!
Transom - "a showcase and workshop for new public radio" with lots of interesting stuff about doing radio.
I saw the C4 advert that the celebrity swearing one is the darkside of. It makes more sense now.
Ah, it turns out that the Cherokee Shuffle page has more on it than some of the others do! Odd
Kinky Friedman lyrics - especially useful is the page Cherokee Shuffle (Instrumental) Lyrics
18 Mar 2004
My daughter complains that since I turned up on MSN she can't use really rude screen names any more.
There's a lot of spam today
Hmm, the iBook just fell to the floor. Seems to be OK
Gosh, I do like Wes Montogomery
I noticed that the preacher at the Methodist Church in town was called the Rev. J. Grindrod-Helmn : a wonderful Victorian sounding name - the net tells me that the J is for Joan and that she lives in Alnwick with her husband Monty
17 Mar 2004
My daughter, upstairs, just said good night to me via IM. Ah, the 21st century.
My wife was sitting next to Chris Boardman at a meeting today.
Isn't it annoying when you lose links - I remember a flash animation series about a TV chef and I logged it, and I thought I would go and see if there were any more episodes but I can't find the damn thing.
Someone handed in some coursework I set about ways of sorting books suggesting "by John Rah" as a possible method.
16 Mar 2004
Mmmmm, the Flying Burrito brothers playing "Rocky Top" with Sneaky Pete on the Steel. (Mind, it's a live recording and the vocals are awful but the tunage is extremely fine : 5-string banjo and pedal steel, perfect for coffee time on a Tuesday afternoon when you don't have chocolate under your B key anymore) And its followed by "6 days on the Road", and then "Truck Drivin' Man" So 10-4 to that, rubber duck. Or something
Ah ha. got it back on.
Hmm, well I've got the key cover off and cleaned off the chocolate ut I am having troule getting the key ack on. The relevant apple tech note descries another keyoard all together.Apart from having hands that are too large for this kind of fiddly work, I can't actually see well enough what is meant to e happening. Welog renamed as ifurcated rivets methinks
15 Mar 2004
Waving at myself - so long as it's only waving. Another weblog from the NE of England (well, Sunderland... :-) )
My Product Advisor - a very nice interface for helping you chose cameras and cars. I played with the camera side of it and it asked all the right questions but I felt the recommendations at the end didn't fit the bill, for example, I'd said max price $400 but it gave me 3 cameras over $1000. I had said that price was not as important as other issues but I think that is a bit OTT. SO if you use it you need to be quite precise with your answers to the questions I think.
14 Mar 2004
How do you get chocolate out from under the B key on an iBook?
Did you know that Gil Scott Heron's dad played for Celtic?
Knights of Columbus museum "Dramatic statues invite museum visitors to enter the Galleries. The center statue is of Father Michael J. McGivney, founder of the Knights of Columbus. The other two are of St. Peter." Do I detect a tiny amount of hubris here?
I remember experiments like this - I once got the value of g to be 1.83. "Local anomaly" said the demonstrator for the lab (who jacked in Physics and ran the Edinburgh Folk Festival and now (based on google searches...) has something to do with this company)
13 Mar 2004
I am drinking hot honey and lemon with Tequila in it. What is the Mexican for "toddy"?
I bought When Harry Met Sally and Something Happened on DVD today for a tenner. Watched WHMS tonight - it really is one of my favourite films: funny and true.
Single shoe spooters - I see dozens of those. If you go down by the river at one of the swirly tidal places you see them everywhere.
I hate printers! They always run out of ink without warning when you don't have a spare and need the printout. (Not mentioning the ridiculos price of refills of course - a trip to Cartridge World is about to happen)
Hmmm, Moondance by Van Morrison - love the piano. Being try to make a dobro version of the song. The 60s style swinging flute is good too. The tune got stuck in my head the other day when I heard a version by someone else when I was in HMV. It was a sort of pseudo-Sinatra version don't know who though. (Should that be Phrank Psinatra? Good name for a rapper.)
Electronic Tea - nice looking log, I got this one via the home page of The Movement who sound pretty good
Yesterday's bad links shoud be OK now ("Weird" and "World Changing")
12 Mar 2004
Freecycle looks like a good idea. We need a group in Newcastle definitely. Some nice person (therefore excludes me) should start one. (via the Daily Jive)
You must listen to the sound clips of the sarrusaphone - particularly the version of Goodbye Pork Pie Hat arranged for sarrusaphone and 4 bass flutes....
Oooh, lots of pictures of Contrabass instruments including Sarrusaphones. In fact it was the contrabass sarrusaphone I particularly wanted to see. Weird looking things - they remind me of some kind of space weapon from a '50s science fiction movie. Probably hard to play too. But what wonderful long lunar notes one could make!
I've been trying to find a picture of a sarrusaphone (an instrument I have never knowingly seen or heard). Sarrusaphone turns out to return a single image on google image search but the actual image referred to is missing so it is hard to make out what it looks like, except for a lot of metal tubes in a box of course.
Apropos of the fact the Shania Twain is on the wireless at the moment, I noticed that tickets for her concert in Newcastle cost 49.50UKP - am I just getting old or is this just a ridiculous price. For that money I'd expect to get to keep her.
Damn it, even Nike make yoga bags (entirely meaningless to those of who you who did not have the viewing pleasure of Black Books last night)
11 Mar 2004
Well, Black Books was very funny. Best thing I've seen for ages.
10 Mar 2004
Still feeling lousy today. horrid.
Odd flash - the URL suggests that this is coursework. The animation is fine, but I'm not sure abotut he unusable navigation that appears when you click site map
9 Mar 2004
Journey into Kimland - fascinating account of a trip to North Korea, well worth reading all of it.
Ugh, got a horrible cold today and feel utterly dreadful.
The STC 1000 sounds fun (though it also sounds like something that would get stolen from a top secret laboratory in an episode of the Man from UNCLE)
8 Mar 2004
7 Mar 2004
Always Safe - always not updated (And have a happy holiday too! With your stun gun and pepper spray)
Very strange version of the Louis Armstrong song "Butter and Egg Man" on Steel radio at the moment - it's by Tom Morrel too. Doesn't quite work.
I wonder why I have never yet found a Tubular Rivets tin (as opposed to Bifurcated Rivets of course)? I have a catalogue that has a page of engravings of the damn things (French ones too!) yet they don't seem to turn up anywhere. Perhaps they were just advertised rather than actually produced.
I wanted to mess with MSN Messenger and was entirely astonished to be able to get bifurcated at hotmail.com! So you can always try and contact me there - I might be on : I need to play with IM a bit more since I ought to be more au fait with it. (I know I had some other name once but I can't remember the password, or the name to tell the truth)