Sunday June 30
Ouch. CNN airs In Memoriam
, retelling the acts of war last September 11. Tough viewing. Enya's album is more appropriate than Leno afterwards.
After five months on air, this site finally made it into the Google cache this week. I know that some people don't want to be listed in search engines, and the use of a robots.txt file in the top directory (or in each page header) would prevent that. Some of the searches that have brought people here...
More foolish search strings in a couple of weeks.
Saturday June 29
If it's Saturday, it's time for the Friday Five.
When was the last time you...
1. ...sent a handwritten letter? If postcards don't count, then probably just after Easter. No, I won't say to whom.
2. ...baked something from scratch or made something by hand? A very long time ago indeed. Thankfully.
3. ...camped in a tent? Late August 1994. Never again. Thankfully.
4. ...volunteered your time to church, school, or community? To the greater community, about seven minutes before writing this.
5. ...helped a stranger? Depending on how you define "stranger", either seven and a half minutes ago, or on Thursday afternoon.
A real BUFFYbus from season 3. TOW Oz is suspected of being a wolf (great); TOW Amy becomes a rat (less good than I remembered); TOW Buffy loses it (funky ending, but not a good 'un); TOOW Vamp Willow (the best episode *ever*); and TOW the box of spiders (pretty darned decent.) KYTV begins again from 1.01 on Monday.
Oh, a few random completely made up celeb goss things. Mariah Carey is double-dating Eminem and Tyrese, who are (apparently) singers. Celine Dion booked a store after hours, expected to flounce out with USD 2000 worth of merchandise without paying, and threw a Hissyfit (TM) when she couldn't. Jennipher Lopes has sent back 25,000 bottles of perfume that were to bear her name "because they stink almost as badly as my movies." Westshite will spend a million quid to relaunch themselves in the US; my standing bet that "Flying Without Wings" is good till Dec 31, 2004. Remember, folks, all these claims are completely without any substance whatsoever, except my bet on Westlife.
Friday June 28
SO YOU THINK YOU'RE A GOOD DRIVER has a race for 3.5 miles across London between a cycle-rickshaw, a car, a bus, and a walker. Now, 3.5 miles on the flat, without any competition, is a distance I'd expect to cover in between 45 and 50 minutes. It takes the model they've picked the thick end of two hours. Lazy. I might have beaten the 51 minutes of the bus, especially if I could have picked my own route. Would have done well to better the 35 minutes of the car, but no chance of the 21 minutes for the cycle-rickshaw.
A readme for the site.
Thursday June 27
A very slight change to the CSS, and a more significant change to the document HTML. The sidebar (on the left) is now absolutely positioned, rather than floating. This allows me to move the text of the sidebar to the end of the page, meaning this content comes first for speech readers. And search engines...
The United Stations have finally figured that "separation of Church and State" and "one nation under god" are mutually incompatible. The California Appeals Court, the one that replaced the corrupt body that selected a petty drunkard as president, decides that the 1954 addition to the "pledge of allegiance" is not constitutionally valid. In passing, I note that it is perfectly fine and encouragable for millions of schoolchildren to swear their allegiance to the US, yet millions of Chinese schoolchildren doing the same would be denounced as brainwashing or manipulation.
This is very good: ultranewsblog coupled with an (almost) exhaustive collection of links. Any site with a section devoted to the latest mathematics news is doing very well. Lightly against the mainstream consumerist culture, but without the in-yer-face agenda of Indymedia.
Playing catch up. The spoof Grauniad commentary from the US-Mexico game led regular reader C to note another spoof. These are spoofs. They are not real. Also remember World Cup Blog.
Those experimenting with WinMX over a modem will love the Auto Complete option.
The next record on this site is Now Known. It'll appear when Jade's Heinstein-a-go-go is no longer a FPP.
Worldcom's fraud is believed to be USD 3.8 billion in fifteen months. (GBP 2.5 billion today, 2.65 billion just three weeks ago). By style, companies that style their name with an internal capital will lose that upper case letter.
And the Austrian GP farce that so annoyed me some weeks ago has been settled. Ferrari will take a six-figure fine. No annulment of the race results, no loss of championship points, and certainly no ban from future races. Which means that I'll be taking absolutely no interest in the rest of the "competition", because it's clearly not a competition in any meaningful sense of the word. The Italians have brought F1 into disrepute, and the governing body has ignored it. I won't.
Wednesday June 26
Another day, another big business scandal. Large telephone company Worldcom has over-reported its profits for the past year and a half. The method? Turn regular expenses into capital investments. It's like claiming that you've used it to extend your house (adding value) when you've actually spent it on a big boozy party. The finance director has bitten the bullet, and about 2000 mostly innocent employees will also lose their jobs. The profit over-report, at USD 3.8bn, makes Enron look like a party in the park. The common link between the two scandals? The auditors who allowed both scams were Arthur Andersen (RIP.)
The Palestinian authorities will hold free elections in January, and local elections in May. Whoever gets the most votes will win.
Tuesday June 25
I run a strange and complex calendar. This week's Monday Mission.
1. Do you wear glasses/contact lenses? If so would you consider going through Lasik surgery? (Or if you already have, please tell us about it)
No, but if I did, I wear them with pride. The rest of my family wears specs, it's almost certain that I'll need them some time, but not right now.
2. Did you ever have to wear braces? How are your teeth? (any cavities, any pulled teeth, root canals, etc.)
Yep, braces for about two years, when I was 10-12. Not something that particularly impacted my life per se, but it may have helped lead on to the rest of the shit. As for now: two teeth had to come out to straighten up the front (just by the fangs), the two top wisdom teeth came out when I was 19, the bottom ones are impacted and barely poking above the gumline, and two top molars have small fillings. Everything else is in fine order. I bring floss.
3. What (if any) recent movies have moved you emotionally? Which one and how so?
Don't do movies, but the BUFFY finale was a good 'un.
4. Would you rather live the remainder of your golden years in a rest home, or pass away before it came to that?
By the time I'm that old, they'll have invented something better.
5. What natural creation or phenomenon just flat-out leaves you with a sense of wonder?
All of it? OK, let's go with the desert of Arizona - New Mexico, and the coast of Newfoundland, and the rolling countryside of middle England.
6. Have you ever been in a fist fight or a situation where you had to get physically violent with someone else?
Not that I can recall, to be honest.
7. Are there any recent happenings that you wish you would have handled differently? What happened and what do you wish you'd done?
That would between myself and my fifth most frequent visitor (hi...)
BONUS: How far away can you go, and still be dancing with me?
To the end of the earth, and then about 1.25 miles more.
Monday Mission 2.25
Monday June 24
An interesting policy shift from the republicanparty's shadow US government. Antipresident Shrub says that if the Palestine population elects leaders who are not Arafat, then he will use his muscle to push Israel to recognise a provisional Palestinian government and settle on the 1967 borders - in effect, a return to the accord rejected at Camp David in July 2000. The Palestinians say stuff that, Arafat was directly elected in a free and fair election, this Shrub chap wasn't, and he really ought to get a reality check. The republicanparty represents the avowedly pro-Israel wing of US political opinion, and for all the talk of "two states living side by side in peace," it will tend to back Israel, whether right or wrong.