Category: Uncategorized

‘It’s never dull in Hull‘, apparently.

But hey, I’ve done the fish trail – and the brown dust is, I believe, ‘seasoning salt,’ a mix of salt, pepper, and paprika. Must be a new thing – I don’t recall it being common around East Park in the 70s/80s.

‘What the hell is wrong with Apple?‘ asks Mark Morford of the SF Gate Chronicle. Hear, hear.

My friend Violet was so excited by her new PowerBook’s box, she had to hide it from herself and wait for company to arrive before she even opened it. As for iPods – the experience of unpacking one should be on the national curriculum.

They don’t call us ‘Apple Evangelists’ for nothing.

Right. Own up. Which one of you failed to tell me about this?

Hot-smoked dill salmon, miniature mixed game pie, Old Peculier and Blue Swaledale cheeses, sundried tomato-stuffed green olives, baked-today chunky bread, Earl Grey/Green Tea mustard, entertainingly rough South African Shiraz.

Fan-ruddy-tastic, I tell you. Bought at… wait for it… Tebay Service Station on the M6.

It’s the only privately-owned motorway services in the UK. It’s like all the other services, only with ducks, friendly staff who care, and one of the best delis around. Yes, the latter is a bit unexpected, but it turns out to be well worth the trip. It’s one of the few things I’ll miss about zipping up and down between Leeds and Glasgow.

…but possibly as late as Q5 or Q6.

I like the thinking here: redefine the environment so the problem disappears. It’s the ‘Green’s Function’ solution to scheduling.

Chris Heilman has (a.) added me to his blogroll, which surprises and flatters me and should by rights catapult this site if not into the A-list, at least into the D-list (though my Technorati rating still seems to be ‘Level 1 Novice -3’, harrumph), and – much more importantly – (b.) posted some delightful pictures of rocks. Click through, you’ll see.

This just in, from the department of terrific headlines.

I was actually looking for an article about Kennedy flagging up $2bn/month missing from the millitary budget in Iraq, linked by Vinay, but this is both more fun and possibly more accurate reporting.

It’s surprisingly hard to find a photogenic orange. Seriously, next time you’re at the market, cast a critical eye over the citrus fruit; which would you pick to represent That Which Is Orangeness? Oranges are round and… uh… orange, right? Hardly, they’re mostly a bit squiffy around the edges, and more-or-less yellowish. Big ones tend to be a little mottled, have surface blemishes, and the crown (or whatever the end is call) has often split, which isn’t very attractive.

In my own admittedly limited sample, I found large satsumas to look much more like oranges than the oranges did. Smaller satsumas aren’t really up to scratch, though, and they’re usually somewhat oblate to boot.

As for why I seek orangelike oranges – it’s Proposals time. Which means we’re pitching for business. And… well, if you were writing a pitch for a quarter-million quids’-worth of business, you’d want a decent orange too, right?

Or maybe my life is a little weird. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

…by an English television producer, the theory that one can jumble letters up and still make sense of the words is (a.) featuring all over the web, suddenly, and (b.) cobblers.

See, the thing is, about a year ago there was a similar run of articles about how we don’t read the letters of words, bur rather the overall shape of the word itself. That is: replace a bunch of words with just the outline transcribed by the ascenders and descenders, and you can still read the word – or at least, the sentence, if you have a run of such block outlines.

And both theories can’t be right, can they? Couple with the fact that nobody seems able to pin down the ‘rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy,’ and I claim urban myth. Sorry. Nice idea, not taken in by it.