Category: misc

Something my supervisor allegedly said, which i thought was very wise: “If you’ve got money to throw at a problem, do it, because the one thing you’re never going to have spare is time”.

note to self:

no matter how low your per-attempt probability of success, the only way to ensure a hit rate of zero is not to make any attempts

Townes Van Zandt said

We all got holes to fill,
And them holes are all that’s real,
Some fall on you like a storm, sometimes you dig your own.

She said: I wonder what it feels like to have holes falling on you?

He said: I think having holes fall on you feels just like nothing. It’s probably so much like nothing you want to scream but you can’t. Before it happens you think you’re afraid of nothing, but when Nothing happens to you, you realise you’re afraid of Nothing, and Nothing will eat out your heart and leave you alone in the dark with it.

Dear Neil

I read this and thought of you.

Hope all is well
Tom

It’s always surprised me that the top search term that leads people to this site is “fallen angel”. I’ve only mentioned the phrase once. But a google image search shows that most of the matches for ‘fallen angel’ are rubbish, and i’ve got a photo of Banksy‘s stencil on my site, so maybe it’s not too surprising…

Here’s something worth doing – a google image search for ‘leunig’. And bingo, a spread of wonders to enjoy!

At last – I have learnt how to correctly fold my hakama. This site was most useful, although this site was prettier. The meaning (supposedly) symbolised by each fold in the hakama is discussed here. Now all I have to do is learn the correct way to put the thing on and I’m sorted...

Andy found a spiritual-epistemological necker cube! We both agree with the majority of the statements below, but reach exactly the opposite of conclusion from that intended by the original author.

Usually I use streetmap.co.uk to get a quick O/S map of an area by postcode or street name, but today I’ve found multimap.com more useful (the interface is more graphical, the zoom in and out is better – it’s easier to use if you’re not sure where what you are looking for is in relation to everything else).

I found a map of all the counties of Great Britain and a postcode map of the same

This guide tells you what the different parts of the postcode mean. And a map and list of all the london postcodes (strictly areas and districts, but not sectors or street information) is here

Five years ago there was a Kronenberg 1664 advert with a fantastic french hip-hop track on it. I promised my girlfriend I’d find out what it was and get a copy.

Well, thanks to this site and my housemate‘s CD collection i’ve found it.

Apologies for the small delay, but, Naomi, if you still want the track I now have a copy and it’s Mc Solaar’s A La Claire Fontaine from his album Prose Combat.

Question: if i was going to put one of these photos on my CV, which one should i put?

And for bonus marks: which one is the real me?

Photo take from www.burningman.com. ‘An Elevated Chat’ (2003, David Huang. The photo shows SkyChairs by Cedar Goebel)

Getting a bike in London is like getting the freedom of the city. I now inhabit the city, rather than just being here. I move through space, making it my own, joining the dots of my knowledge. I’m no longer confined to small geographical areas and tube-teleported betweem them.

The exploration-exploitation dilemma is crucially reweighted; exploration is cheap, exploitation is fun. I get lost easily. I get found easily. I move under my own power in the streams of the city traffic; I’m part of the flow.

And it’s probably even healthy for me in some ways (as long as i don’t get killed).

My friend jenny sent me this picture from a few weeks ago at a party in Brighton. I’ve no idea who these people are but i didn’t want to delete the picture, so i put it here.

If you stand on Victoria station at rush hour there are more people in your field of view than most people, for most of human history, would have met in their entire lives. In ten minutes more people walk passed you than the sum population of the human species at its narrowist bottleneck.

All in all, I think we’re coping remarkably well.

Why Oz is better than the UK, item #1 – Michael Leunig. The Age newspaper (Melbourne) have him as a daily cartoonist and he’s glorious. This from yesterday:

And in case you missed it (via Neil) it’s the Dante’s Inferno Test

Based on your answers, your purity will be judged and you will be banished to the appropriate level of hell

The Brain Eaters: (1958) Amorphous brain parasites lock onto people’s necks and zombify them.

I finally managed to get the PHP for my photo gallery working. Seems that PHP 4.2.0 and higher have a different default value ‘register_globals’ (it’s now set to ‘off’) meaning that you need to explicitly pass variables between functions. All i did was add $_REQUEST[‘var’]; in two places and it started working again.

It also means that I can host my friend Hugh’s photos and feel very jealous of his Nepal-Thailand trip.

If you live in Sheffield people will occasionally tell each other that it is the 4th largest city in the UK. Then you have to spent time trying to work out what the others are. Of course it depends where you draw the boundaries. But CityMayors.com provides this list:

Which i think goes to show that size isn’t everything. Incidentally, if you live in Sheffield and need reminding, there’s a list of good things about the city here

– 7.2% of Sheffield’s working population are employed in the creative industries, well above the national average of 4%
Sheffield is officially the safest city in the UK (according to Government statistics)
– One third of Sheffield is within the Peak District National Park (no other UK city has a national park within its boundary)
– Sheffield is England’s greenest city, containing 150 woodlands and 50 public parks
– Half of the City’s population live within 15 minutes of open countryside
– Sheffield offers the highest level of funding assistance anywhere in Europe for inward investors

And now Sheffield is lonesome for her heroes!

Since we’re talking about idiolects, here’s something silly that amused me greatly. I’ve had my phone four months and if i use a word in a text-message which isn’t in its dictionary then it remembers it. Today I found a way to look at this list of added words. In a way they show my (text-message) idiolect. And sometimes also my bad spelling. Here they are:

WASHINGTON, DC-
In a move designed to make the United States seem more “bad-assed and scary in a quasi-heavy-metal manner,” Congress passed a bill Monday changing the nation’s name to the ?nited St?tes of ?merica. “Much like M?tley Cr?e and Mot?rhead, the ?nited St?tes is not to be messed with,” said Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). An upcoming redesign of the ?merican flag will feature the new name in burnished silver wrought in a jagged, gothic font and bolted to a black background. A new national anthem is also in the works, to be written by composer Glenn Danzig and tentatively titled “Howl Of The She-Demon.”

A friend sent me this, which rocked. It sounds like it is from The Onion but at the time of writing the site was down so i couldn’t check.

Site redesign, so thought i’d put banksy’s fallen angel here.