Posts

  • 1st
    • Moving house, moving access points → At some point in the next 48 hours, I’ll be leaving this house, and more importantly, leaving the cable modem that’s served me nicely for the last 4 years. It’s 256Kbps, which is not great these days, but it works, costs less than 15 UKP per month, and was available months before anywhere in the [...]
    • Disturbing deductions about the US military → Someone in the navy found me!
  • 8th
    • Further Reading → MLP
    • Review: Girdle, Etcher, Bark: An Infernal Moudly Bread → Being stuck in ASCII poverty, I’m too embarrassed to write Godel, Escher, Bach in the title. Here are my thoughts on it. This book will take you a long time to read. I’m not a particularly slow reader, but it took me about 3 weeks to get through this, whereas a similarly sized novel would take [...]
  • 9th
    • War: opportunity cost → I will say one thing about the war in Iraq: opportunity cost. Costofwar.com calculates the opportunity cost of this specific war, and What the World Wants does the same for war in general, in sickening detail. It looks like Gulf War II will cost well in excess of $100bn. That’s about the cost of NASA’s [...]
    • Review: Velox → I’ve just switched broadband providers from Virtua to Velox. Here is some data: Velox is faster, even at the same speed rating. Velox is slightly cheaper. The Velox DSL modem is smaller and prettier than the Virtua cable modem Velox uses a telephone line, but doesn’t interfere with voice calls, providing you put a filter on every socket you [...]
  • 10th
    • Dragging a sofa up the side of an apartment → We have a sofa which is bigger than the service elevator in our apartment building, so the situation described in the title above was arrived at. There was also a large mirror to be hauled up. Here are the death defying photos: Lift off It’s heavier than it looks Man on the other side of the street Mirror from [...]
  • 11th
  • 13th
    • Review: Dune → The back cover proclaims it as “one of the monuments of science fiction” and compares it to the Lord of the Rings. I have to say it’s overrated. In case you don’t know, and are incapable of googling for a proper review, Dune is set on an ultraharsh desert planet; most of the events of the [...]
    • Corcovado → The Christ Statue in Rio de Janeiro
  • 15th
    • Pirates! → Went to see Pirates of the Caribbean expecting nothing much, and found that it’s actually really good! Want to know what made it good? It had dialogue that wasn’t written by Hollywood’s usual lobotomized neanderthals. And good skeleton effects. It’s long, probably longer than it should be, but Johnny Depp’s Fear and Loathing ether-walk is [...]
    • In-vitro language surgery → I think a lot about language design and change, but since I’m not a linguist, and since there’s so much out there I’ve yet to read, I’m loathed to write down any thoughts whatsoever, in case they turn out to be embarrassingly wrong. However, I’m allowed to change my mind and make retractions if necessary, [...]
    • Confess online! → The world's only confession box that delivers direct to God
  • 16th
    • Spelling reform vs. syllabaries → Alphabets are poorly designed. I want to make a better one.
    • Why are there 24 hours in a day? → There are many thing I’m interested in, but one in particular is the number of hours in a day. Well. I’m not obsessed with it or anything, but it’s always made me wonder how on earth we got everyone on earth to agree to split the day into 24 segments. Splitting the year up [...]
  • 18th
  • 20th
    • Backtranslated Bond Titles → In Brazil, foreign films get butchered in the translation. The most obvious examples are the titles which are horrid. Here are the titles of all the Bond films, backtranslated (not by machine - this is what they really mean). My favourite mangling is Moonraker: 007 versus the satanic Dr. No Moscow versus 007 007 versus Goldfinger 007 versus atomic [...]
  • 25th
    • Further Reading → MLP
    • Still no net access in halls → I gave my form in on Sunday. Heard nothing back. They probably just hate me. The library has been refurbished with hundreds of new machines, all with nice LCD monitors and Windows XP. I’m no fan of shovelling cash down Microsoft’s bottomless and insatiable gullet, but it’s nice to have machines that don’t take 5 [...]
  • 26th
    • Badgers are cool → Found this cool poem in an old english book of mine. Doesn’t say what year, but I think it’s year 5 or 6: Badgers are cool Badgers are great Badgers live under ground, mate.
  • 27th