Category: Uncategorized

Ignore the weirdness that may require you to turn off the advert blocker in your web browser (?!), and sponsor my friend Katie and her NESTA chums in next month’s Race for Life in Battersea Park. It’s in aid of Cancer Research UK; if you need any further convincing, head over to the blog Alan kept for Jules. ’nuff said.

Those of you with eagle eyes may have noticed this article in the Telegraph over the weekend, about the possibility of the Christmas Lectures moving to Bangalore. I… couldn’t possibly comment.

[update: the story hit the news wires too.]

London, Ri (that’s ‘RI’ to the rest of us), NESTA, Tower of ibid, Crown Jewels (Ooh! Sparkly!), not the Eye, Greenwich, rain, Ducks, Bowling (bowling?), DIY window seat, circular saws, home again x2, jiggity x2, Bangalore next week, gaaaaah.

More later.

In the meantime, amuse yourselves with this.

There are, at rough count, about fifteen hard drives in my flat. One of them just died. Which one? Er… my main backup drive, that gets an incremental from my PowerBook every Saturday morning.

That’s… that’s not good, is it? Eeek!

So, now I’m frantically backing up before I catch the morning’s red-eye to Stanstead. Ugh ugh ugh.

In November of 2001, this website asked its readers in a poll “What Star Wars mystery do you most want solved?” Most voted for the plot-centric “Why didn’t Vader sense Leia,” but five percent chose “Where does the ladder on Luke’s X-wing go?” as their favorite puzzle.

Link.

This Mail plugin is genius – it reads your outgoing mail, and if it looks like you’ve referred to attaching a file to the message, but have not actually done so, it… er… presents you with a smug dialog box suggesting that you might be losing your marbles.

From Rosie, reading TV industry rag C21:

The conclusion was that CBeebies needs to attract older children, particularly boys aged four-six. “In general, CBeebies is weak on the heroes and the dinosaurs and the diggers,” says [channel controller] Deverell. “It needs to feel a little less gentile and a little more noisey and boisterous and surprising.”

She notes:

I think he meant ‘genteel’. At least I hope so, or there’s going to be a whole lot of very Jewish kids television.

To which I reply:

Can I blog that? Can I? Can I?

And Rosie responds:

Oh all right. I insist that there must be many gags playing on kids tv show titles, though.

Suggestions in the comments, please. Just skip the one about changing my font for blockquotes, I know that already.

I’ve just seen an NHS advert featuring schoolkids playing a card game based around fruit and veg. A few immediate thoughts:

• It’s presumably aimed at kids. And it’s on at half midnight. Does the NHS know something I don’t?
• They don’t understand the rules to Top Trumps.
• Partly as a consequence, it’s patronising as hell.
• The linked website is surprisingly sparse.
• ‘Swap chocolate for apples’ isn’t going to win them any friends.

However:

• I really really like the logo.

[shrug]

So far as I can tell, this mp3 file is the soundtrack to the never-heard, long-lost, fabled, blah blah Channel 4 pilot based around NTK, from all the way back in the mists of time around The Second Coming of Jobs, and before the world-changing publication of… er… Starship Titanic. Hear Dave, Danny, and the crew generally rip the piss.

On the other hand, while the gags are mostly rather good, they tend towards the kernal-compilation end of obscure. It’s not hard to picture a commissioning editor watch the tape only to respond with a resounding ‘huh?’ One for the contemporary history/alternate timeline buffs, but the geekier amongst us will giggle rather a lot.

A combination of being faffed around by people I may (or may not) be working for, bank errors, and the various airlines’ ludicrous ticketing systems have conspired to keep me in Glasgow for the moment. If it’s my money, I’m not coughing up £220. It was only £60 when I clicked ‘buy,’ but by the time my bank agreed that was reasonable, tickets were mysteriously rather more expensive. Ugh.

However, some of the people I should be meeting are still faffing, so not going gives them a little more time to get their act together. Hopefully, I’ll be down Thusday-Sunday next week. And yes, at the moment, traveling on Easter Sunday is weirdly plausible.

Now all I have to do is work out whether I’m traveling on the train from Leeds (going there via Cumbria)… or from Glasgow. Ugh. Too hard.

Thanks for all the replies pointing me to the various airlines servicing Glasgow/Prestwick and London (Various). I’m tempted to be snarky, but on reflection I suppose it is possible that I was being stupid enough not to know about them. But for the record, I’m trying to avoid domestic flights when I can – without going into the sums I suspect they’re the least-sustainable thing I do, so I’m trying to cut down. I wouldn’t mind so much if the trains didn’t usually end up costing more. Joined-up this transport and environment policy is emphatically not.