Bifurcated Rivets

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27 December 1999

RIP Curtis Mayfield

22 December 1999

Updates will, of course, be sporadic to non-existent after today until the start of January. So appropriate greetings to everyone whatever festivals you are choosing to celebrate.

Andrew of GMTPlus9 mentions that his granny will be 103 today. I was thinking about people who have lived in three centuries the other day.

I was considering making a random weblog statistic generator, but I don't know if I can be bothered. It might just be paying to much attention to something silly that is flavour of the day.

21 December 1999

Kernel problems all day, but now fixed. I hope.

A complete discography of the band Naked Raygun. I must confess to never having heard of them, but I am an old fogey I suppose.

Strange Brew links to this fabulous toy raygun gallery. This is the kind of site that makes all the crap on the web worthwhile - it looks nice (apart from using frames of course) and it provides good quality information on a very specialist topic. There's probably a book on toy rayguns and also a whole sub-culture of collectors, but they will both be too much effort to find if you just want a small amount of information.

I really must do some work on my reading pages at some point. It's not that I've stopped reading or anything it's just that, like my life, it has been increasingly fragmented over the last couple of months. The article I mentioned yesterday about reader's block really rang a bell with me - I just can't seem to get going with anything at the moment.

RIP Hank Snow

20 December 1999

I bought the most fabulous facsimile edition of Scott Skinner's Logie Collection on Saturday. it is gorgeous and it is full of tunes that I had not come across before too. Another Skinner link with some nice pictures of him. There are some Skinner tunes on this site, which seems to have lots of good music stuff on it.

The greengrocers at the top of my street has become an Internet food supplier! Now if they were to start offering organic stuff I would even consider using them.

There was a great article about reader's block in the Guardian on Saturday, but it doesn't seem to be on the web site. The point it was making was that you tend to read harder things when you are younger so don't put things off if you reall do intend to read them!

Brian's thoughts on time travel, time travel for beginners, Jarry on building a time machine, and a guide to the nine-dimensional universe. Just in case you want to skip Xmas and all the start of the last year of the twentieth century nonsense.

Things you must know about phonographs, and things you must avoid. Good pages.

The person who specified the multipart mime encoding and forgot to include the need for individual lengths for each part wants to a good talking to (at the very least).

I just signed 450 letters. Ouch.

Oh, and when you finally manage to get to the links page some of the the links don't point where they are supposed to and others are simply mistyped. Pathetic really. Anyway, i found at least one of the links I was looking for - an article about subliminal advertising and why the original "research" work was bogus.

I happened to be watching Sky Rocket on saturday night (for Futurama) and they mentioned some great sites, so I went to their page and it is so badly designed that the button I need to click to get to their link page renders off the bottom of my window. if you resize you just get a bigger logo window. Wonderful how so-called "web designers" test out their sites isn't it?

socks, lies and videotape

Someone sent me a link to the smelling robots guy. (Thanks John A.)

A comprehensive, country by country, directory of search engines. Definitely the weblogger's friend methinks.

- .... .. ... .. ... .- ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. .--. .- --. . --- ..-. .. -. ..-. --- .-. -- .- - .. --- -. .- -... --- ..- - -- --- .-. ... . -.-. --- -.. . .- -. -.. .--. .... --- -. . - .. -.-. .- .-.. .--. .... .- -... . - ... .-.-.-

pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. (There is now a page listing the longest words that occur in weblogs. That ought to hold 'em)

The word embarbascar in Spanish means either "to throw heliotropes onto the water to encourage fish to bite" or " to catch your ploughshare on a root".

The discussion on Saturday morning was great fun and very wide-ranging. I'll have to try to get to more of them. We didn't get out to the Ceilidh on Saturday, because P was ill. This was the first time in years that we had paid upfront for the tickets as well. *sigh*

So far I have found bloat mildly entertaining but this time I am angry! I am a Scotsman with a weblog, not an Englishman. Sheesh!!!

17 December 1999

Hmmm, and now it's the weekend, or at least nearly the weekend. I'm going to a discussion on the Future of the Book at the Lit&Phil tomorrow morning which should be good. Tomorrow night is the Addison Rapper Ceilidh where the very excellent Robin Dunn band are playing (as they almost always do), so some dancing on the cards for then.

New reading for the year 2000 (pronounced twenty hundred) - "Odour Detection by Mobile Robots" by R. Andrew Russell of Monash University. Can't sniff out a link for it, sorry.

Hmm, Brig has timestamps. I don't think I like them - they aren't stampy enough.

This history of the Las Vegas Strip is fun and very comprehensive. However, I don't really understand how we're supposed to not download the pictures unless we turn image loading off and where's the point in that?

One day I'm going to work somewhere where you don't have to drive east in the morning and west in the evening. At this time of year and in these latitudes the sun is so low that driving is really hard.

16 December 1999

This XML Music Markup Language looks interesting.

I really must scan in some of the pics I took of my vegetables this year - there were some good crops. Instead here are some pictures of the crops grown by Mr Gorjuss

Hmm, this is what you get when Adobe thank you for trying their Linux products....

Supermemo appears to be some kind of learning aid. Runs on Windows only though.

Last night Penny and I were at The Cluny (no webpage yet) which is a café/bar in the basement of an old bonded warehouse in Newcastle. It is a great place - the Student Jazz band competition finals happened to be on while we were there - the food and drink are good and well priced. They sell Mordues and other good beers. I was driving so was on coffeee (good) and a drink called "Bouvrage". It isessentially raspberry juice and I can recommend it highly. One of the few non-alcoholic bar drinks that is not sweet. (It has some sugar in it, but only enough to take the edge off the rasps). Here's a photo of the producer holding some bottles of it.

New cryptogram - some interesting stuff as usual.

I do like all the birthday e-mail you get via the Birthday service at boutell.com They have some other fun stuff like a java pinball machine and some vegetarian recipes.

Happy birthday to ME!!!

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