at last, my work here is done, i have had a story accepted on slashdot, oh yes. the nerd in me can now retire.
Interesting guy, I must get hold of some of his writing.
This chap has created a chess set based on The Sentinel
ABC is reporting that the US troops in Iraq are being asking to pray for George Bush. Sunday's prayer is "Pray that the President and his advisers will seek God and his wisdom daily and not rely on their own understanding". I have to say I agree with the last part.
Nina Simone died over the weekend. BBC report..
"Web site under construction" - how 90s! I can't believe people still do this and expect users to make an effort to come back to the site in the future to see if the site owners have finally gotten their act together.
Attended a very interesting talk by Tim O'Reilly last night. I found it a little rambling, and sometimes hard to follow his train of thought. However he has a lot of interesting ideas, and a sound, balanced view of open source and the Internet, something that seems rare even in the open source community.
Some links that came out of it :
- The Importance of Perl an essay Tim wrote in 1998 explaining how Perl fits into the Internet
- foundation for information policy research, particularly the link to information about the recent proposed European Union Copyright Directive and software patents that threatens bad things.
- The Sole of a New Machine - The story of a group of engineers designing and building a mini computer in the 1970's
A rare event - I agree with something Microsoft is doing : Toward a Spam-Free Future. One line particularly stands out -
"Like almost everyone, I receive a lot of spam every day, much of it offering to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It's ridiculous."
The biggest understatement from the world's richest man?
Incredimail - how to utterly and totally miss the point of email. What rubbish. Beware anyone sending me one of these, a) my mail client doesn't display all that crap, and b) you will not get a reply. End of story.
Tanya Streeter has broken both the men and women's free diving world records. The Guardian has an article on the event. Well done Tanya!
hacky-but-works bit of shell to grab the last 10 search terms people have entered at MetaCrawler:
lynx -dump http://www.metaspy.com/spymagic/Spy | grep " \[[0-9]" \works nicely with things like the phosphor hack of XScreensaver.
| grep -v "Powered by InfoSpace" \
| grep -v "\[3\]MetaCrawler" | sed 's/ \[[0-9]*\]/ /g'
Dr Robert M. Bowman directed all the "Star Wars" programmes under presidents Ford and Carter, and flew 101 combat missons during the US's war with Vietnam. You would maybe expect his view on world terrorist problems to be in line with the current US government's. I was surprised at what he has to say. The piece was originally written after the attacks on Sep 11.
The Guardian has an interesting article on a sport called Parkour, which seems to involve jumping around on roofs, walls, roads, pavements, basically anything you can find. You may have seen an example of this if you saw the recent BBC promotional film. Luc Besson has made a film about it. There is also a US based site with some videos.
A way of adding an element of risk back into life, which these days can seem too safe?
Mailinator is a neat way of being able to give out disposable email addresses when you don't want to give out your real one in fear of spam. Messages sent to any address at the mailinator.com domain are available for reading instantly and kept for a couple of hours. One interesting waste of half an hour is to guess addresses others may have used and read the mails you find.
Delia Smith cooks like a surgeon, Rick Stein cooks like an artist. Delia may know her stuff, but her approach to cooking for me takes all the fun out of it. She seems far too interested in perfect measurements and using all the right equipment. Rick on the other hand is far more passionate about what he does, and obviously loves it. He has persuaded me to start eating and enjoying fish, something I didn't think anyone could do. Two completely different approaches to the same thing.
I was walking past one of those soap box speakers in Leicester square a while back just as he had asked a question of the crowd. I didn't hear what the question was, but I did hear that he was asking people to put their hand up if they agreed. I saw nobody with their hand up so I thrust mine into the air, and waved it a little for good measure. He looked rather disgruntled as he noticed me, then waved his hand in my direction and said something like, ok so we have one person who agrees, BUT STILL! I walked off at that point. I've wondered since what I'd actually agreed to, but I like to think that I helped create a slightly more balanced view of whatever it was.
"Art Spiegelman is one of the world's most revered graphic artists. Yet when he turned his hand to the burning issues of our day, the US media didn't want to know." - from the Independent. Thanks to my bro for the link.
Just found this solution to the problem of Avantgo not providing an OS X conduit. Idiots.
So I'm looking through the bumf that came with my D-Link ADSL router, and I find a little piece of paper stating that the device conforms to all the right radio standards blah blah. The statement is signed by the president of D-Link, a guy with the most fantastic name of - Mr Wonder Wang. Excellent :) He is mentioned here.
Whilst watching the credits for Chariots of Fire recently I noticed Dodi Fayed's name in the credits as an executive producer. I didn't know he did any production, but it seems he was quite active in the film world, though more financially than creatively. Odd seeing his name like that out of it's usual much sadder context.
It's Groundhog Day! The Independent has an interesting article about the film and how it is being used by religious organisations to illustrate principals of rebirth, and the cycle of life.
Mike Post wrote, among other things, the theme to the Rockford Files, a damn fine tune that takes me back a bit. Apparently he also wrote the theme to NYPD Blue which includes the sound of 1000 Japanese men jumping up and down on a wooden floor. Makes me wonder if 800 Lebanese women would have achieved the same result?
Interesting article in the Guardian about "Sir Alfred", or Merhan Karimi Nasseri, his real name. He has been living on a bench in terminal 1 of Charles de Gaulle Airport since 1988. Steven Spielberg's The Terminal is loosley based on him.
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