Scatmania.org Coming Back

Yay!

However, working from backups, I have no record of posts ocurring between Sat 29th Nov 2003 at 4:08 pm, and Tue 2nd Jan 2004 at 01:33 pm, when my blog started posting duplicates LiveJournal, too. Even there, I don’t have a backup of anything but what LiveJournal has.

If, for whatever reason, somebody’s taken screengrabs or saved pages from Scatmania, could they e-mail them to me ASAP, or leave a comment here. It’d be great not to have to try to recover things from memory.

Thanks in advance.

Scatmania.org Gets Deleted

Arg!

The server on which Scatmania is hosted malfunctioned, resulting in the deletion of the entirety of my weblog. I’ll be trying to recover bits of it in the near future, but I’ll probably lose (at least) the last few weeks.

Not happy.

On the upside, I may use this as an excuse to re-write the engine behind my blog, as I’ve been meaning to for some time. Yay.

Watch this space.

Hot Puppies, Troma Night, And A Fantastic Transcript Of A Speech On DRM

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

Went to the castle to see The Hot Puppies yesterday evening. Everything I’d heard was true – they really are very good. They play well, they sing well, they look good… and they exude confidence. A wonderful show.

Troma Night was somewhat shorter than usual, owing to the aforementioned puppi…

Suz. And Naivety.

Just been having on online chat with Suz:

(15:53:41) Dan: It [an online weather forecast on a web site I run] says we should expect a wet weekend, clearing up for an overcast week.
(15:53:54) Suz: and who puts it on the web site?
(15:53:59) Dan: The BBC.
(15:53:59) Suz: i always thought it was paul
(15:54:02) Suz: oh
(15:54:06) Dan: No – it’s taken from the BBC, who take it from the MET office.
(15:54:11) Dan: It’s entirely automatic.
(15:54:28) Suz: oh i see. i wondered why paul had the time or botherdness to do it

Sweet that she thought that Paul was spending about an hour a week keeping an online calendar up-to-date manually.

Photos From Malawi

[this post was lost during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004]

[an image in this post was recovered on Thursday 30th December 2004]

Here’s some photos of my trip to Malawi, as the group have now started uploading photos to me at last!


Dan looks down on Lake Malawi.


Dan on the descent.


Two baboons, at Vwasa National Park.


Livingstonia Hospital: This woman and her baby have both been diagnosed with AIDS
Thanks to ARVs, the woman’s condition is improving. Her baby cannot be treated and will die.


Beautiful waterfall, on a river running from Livingstonia to Lake Malawi.

Will post more when I can be bothered. Meanwhile, photos are continuously being uploaded to Scatmania’s Malawi Album [update: link killed 2006]

Live Music, Anyone?

[the image in this post was lost during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004]

[the image in this post was recovered on Thursday 30th December 2004]

Castell Rock gig poster

Sounds like an excuse to lounge on soggy grass and drink real ale if ever I heard one. Yay….

×

How To Make Invisibility Paint

(shamelessly stolen from http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/sbos18.htm)

How To Make Invisibility Paint
If you put invisibility paint on anything, it turns it invisible. Here’s how to make invisibility paint:

Start by taking a large tin, which must be able to hold enough paint to fill it. Take one ordinary apple (or, if you don’t have an ordinary apple, a doughnut-shaped one). Chop it up and put it in the tin.

Add a soft nutshell, a silver-looking cobweb, three white onions, a piece of paper with “Deely Bo” written on it, a pinch of September sunlight (or two pinches of August sunlight), and a sugar pencil. Blue sugar pencils are best.

At this point, you should say, “Star of stars, so far and faint, help me with this see-through paint.” You have to say it out loud, no matter how stupid it makes you look, because the paint will know if you haven’t.

Next, you crush a moth and put that in the tin, then add a slug’s eye-stalks, a snake’s skin, a tree, and the sting from a poisonous cat.

And I’m sorry about this, but you also have to add a drop of your own blood. A friend’s blood just won’t do, no matter how much of it you can get.

Three months earlier, you should have ordered from your local blacksmith a small hammer with the metal bit shaped like a pear. Hit the side of the tin seventy-seven times with this hammer. Ignore any grown-ups who complain about the noise.

Lastly, fill the tin to the brim with some nice, fresh milk.

Mix everything together with a large spoon, and bake it for two hours in hot snow.

And that’s all there is to it! Invisibility paint!

Remember, invisibility pain makes things disappear completely. Whatever it gets on will turn invisible straight away. Be careful!

Now you know how to make invisibility paint. I’ll let you figure out how to find the tin once the mixture is ready.

Lariam Dream The Fifth

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

[more of this post was recovered on Friday 24 November 2017]

Wierder than all the rest, this dream’s insane. Perhaps it’s time to be thankful that I only remember fragments of it. The bits I remember, in an order that seems to make sense in hindsight.

I’m travelling by car – down the A1, South, towards Leeds. Somebody is driving, but I’m not sure who. There are two other passengers: one is Claire, and the other is Not Claire. I don’t understand why I’m transporting both of them, but apparently I need them for something important in Preston.

We arrive at Preston, and go to my mum’s house. (recurring theme, anybody? – what’s going on in my head) I leave Claire and Not Claire there, and excuse myself.

I find myself at some kind of crypt, made with red bricks and with a black slate roof. (this particular building featured in a dream once before, when I was in primary school) I go inside, and find a dead horse inside a coffin. (spacial awareness was somewhat screwed by this point) The ghost of the horse was here, I knew, and, concentrating on it, I was able to see ‘through it’s eyes’ that it was looking over my shoulder at the body. And then, something else: I could see …

 

A Selection Of News Items From Around The World

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

[more of this post was recovered on Friday 24 November 2017]

Here’s some stuff I found interesting this weekend:

Swedish health workers, in an effort to stem the growing cases of chlamydia among young people, have launched a ‘condom ambulance [BBC News]. If you find yourself ‘caught short’ in Sweden, just give them a bell and they’ll rush around to your house with a pack-of-three, for the equivelent cost of about £4.

Chinese researchers have used a carbon nanotube [Wikipedia] as a filament in a new, experimental light bulb [The Register]. This bulb emits more light and works at a lower threshold than tungsten at the same voltage, and was still functioning fine after being switched on and off 5000 times. The future of lighting?

And finally, researchers from Hebrew University in Israel may have found a solution to the problems associated with passwords. As it stands, ‘secure’ passwords are hard to remember, and often find themselves written down, whereas insecure ones can be cracker. Plus, for real security, passwords should be …

 

Fucking Car Alarm

Somebody’s parked a car opposite our house and left it there, last night. It keeps on setting off it’s own alarm (a noisy horn-and-siren affair) – about once ever two hours, for about a quarter of an hour during the night. This morning, it’s been consistently going off for the last half hour: it keeps being deactivated, but then coming back on again. Does anybody know how to break in to and deactivate one of these things?

In other news, I bumped into Matt a last week, who some of you may remember as going out with Ceris (the scary) and having lived in Ty Isa with folks like Kit and, briefly, Paul. Anyway, we were catching up, and he revealed that shortly after Kit left (Matt didn’t know that I knew Paul), somebody tipped off Enviromental Services about the state of the house, and they’ve since all evicted by the council. It’s fun to know things.

Letters After My Name

Results day today, and so I finally get to find out whether or not I get a degree in exchange for my last five years at University. And I do. I’m now entitled to put letters after my name, which is nice.

I’ve got a lower second, which is (I know) less than I’m capable of, but considering my resits and other lark last year, it’s exactly what I expected, so that’s great. Was damn pleased to see that my dissertation got a first.

Now I suppose I’d better get on with the rest of my life.

Back From Malawi

Yay! I’m back in Aberystwyth!

For my next task, I’m going to have to sift through over 7 hours of video footage of my trip, to produce DVDs for the consumption of the cycling team. Which is nice.

It feels good to be back in Aber (it feels good not to be eating nsima!). To give me a proper ‘welcome back’, and really make me feel like I’d returned, Paul greeted me by telling me that the Troma Night web site was broken and that I had lots of work to do. Thanks, Paul. Just what I needed to help cure this jetlag.

18 hours of travelling time is a great way to fuck up your system.

Anyway – you’ll all be hearing much, much more about my Malawian exploits over the next week or so, but for now, I need to start decompressing this video…

He’s coming home, he’s coming… Dan is coming home

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

This repost was published in hindsight, on 11 March 2019.

Claire wrote:

Owing to Kenya Airlines being arsey, Dan will now be home Monday, instead of Wednesday! Yaaaaay! Pity they couldn’t do their tour of Zambia as well as Malawi, but it means he’ll be home early. I’m going to pick him up from Preston. If anyone wants a ride, feel free, since he has not got much stuff with him.

Had my first day at work today, 8am-1pm shift. The boss is really nice and made me cups of tea and lunch. The people are nice too though the children are sometimes annoying. I think I’ll learn a lot about how to deal with kids before I’m finished! Working again on Saturday, and then 6 days a week from then on.

Going out for curry tonight, should be good. I have sunburn from sleeping on the beach yesterday. My hand is a bit swollen, but I put on after-sun and I don’t know what else to do. It doesn’t hurt anymore though.

Can’t wait to see Dan. I didn’t realise quite how much I was missing him until I got a message from him and I was so happy that he’s coming home. It lifted a huge weight from my mind, like I thought he’d been mauled by tigers or something because I hadn’t heard from him in days. I was counting down the days, and before long it would have been in hours, but now it’s only 42 and three-quarter hours until I see him!

Hurray!!