In the spring of that year, my travels brought me upon a previously undiscovered civilization. The people called themselves Ossians, and they lived in an isolated collection of
villages in a remote part of South America.
Being remote as they were, their level of technology was understandably primitive. But I was surprised by the locals’ recent obsession with new forms of communication. It all started,
they told me, when one of them discovered that by attaching a rope between two clay pots and stretching the rope taut, a voice uttered into one side could be heard on the other. (I
neglected to tell them that even as a boy I had done this very thing with tin cans.)…
6 Pk Mens Pierre Calvini Luxury Stripe Cotton Rich Sock 6-11 UK, 6-11 UK, Multicoloured
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Good value socks
Perfectly fine socks at a fair price. Because losing or wearing holes in socks is sort-of my superpower, I stocked up (or should that be “socked up”?) with these and they’ve served me
well.
Power Banks RAVPower 26800mAh Portable Charger 3-Port 5.5A iSmart - Black
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Powerful, heavyweight battery: great, but wish the ports were labelled!
Big, powerful battery, but still (barely) small enough to fit in large jeans pockets alongside a phone, for charging-on-the-go. Never seen it run dry, despite charging two phones each
night of a two-night camping trip. Only downside is the the ports aren’t labelled and some (by design) have their maximum output limited, so if you don’t know which ones those are by
heart – or carry the manual around! – then you might find that some devices charge slower than they ought to. Still a great device, and even comes with a set of USB cables (A to
B-micro, as used by most smartphones) for your convenience.
Having difficulty getting closer than 18m away (according to my devices): looks like it’s in someone’s garden! Gonna assume that the coordinates are off (or the satellites hate me
today) and just start searching in a wide area…
Nope, no luck this morning. Thought I’d be in with a chance of an FTF for sure, but I can’t find the cache.
Both my GPSr and my phone seem to think that the posted coordinates are about 18m directly onto what’s clearly private property (and Google Maps agrees too, not that it’s always as
accurate as a real life observation at GZ). Either the GPS gods aren’t smiling on me this morning, or the posted coordinates are off. :-(
McDonalds had to know what they were doing. The New Zealand branch of the franchise launched its “Create Your Taste” campaign with a special promotion: Design your own burger
and get free fries and a soft drink for your trouble. Not a bad idea in theory, but then there’s the part where they let everyone share their hideous creations. There
was no way that someone somewhere at the company didn’t speak up at one point and say “Hey uh, you know that the internet is just going to create the most offensive and terrible
burgers possible, right?”
If you’re a tourist on one of “Jump Man” of Footprints Tours’ tours, I’m sure that the obligatory “jump for a photograph” moment at the end is a fun novelty. However, the novelty
quickly wears off when you work in one of the library offices right next to their usual spot, and the call of “3… 2… 1… JUMP!” is the loudest thing you hear all day, each day,
throughout the summer season.
At a little over 590 thousand words and spanning 1,349 pages, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy is almost-certainly among
the top ten longest single-volume English-language novels. It’s pretty fucking huge.
I’ll stick with the Kindle edition: I fear that merely holding the paperback would be exhausting.
I only discovered A Suitable Boy this week (and haven’t read it – although there are some good reviews that give me an inclination to) when, on a whim, I decided to try to get
a scale of how much I’d ever written on this blog and then decided I needed something tangible to use as a comparison. Because – give or take – that’s how much I’ve written here, too:
At 593,457 words, this blog wouldn’t fit into that book unless we printed it on the covers as well.
Of course, there’s some caveats that might make you feel that the total count should be lower:
It might include a few pieces of non-content code, here and there. I tried to strip them out for the calculation, but I wasn’t entirely successful.
It included some things which might be considered metadata, like image alt-text (on the other hand, sometimes I like to hide fun messages in my image alt-text, so perhaps they
should be considered content).
On the other hand, there are a few reasons that it perhaps ought to be higher:
Post titles (which sometimes contain part of the content) and pages outside of blog posts are not included in the word count.
I’ve removed all pictures for the purpose of the word count. Tempting though it was to make each worth a thousand words, that’d amount to about another one and a half million words,
which seemed a little excessive.
Another reason for not counting images was that it was harder than you’d think to detect repeat use of images that I’ve used too many times. Like this one.
Of course, my blog doesn’t really have a plot like A Suitable Boy (might compare well to the even wordier Atlas Shrugged, though…): it’s a mixture of mostly
autobiographical wittering interspersed with musings on technology and geekery and board games and magic and VR and stuff. I’m pretty sure that if I knew where my life would be now, 18
years ago (which is approximately when I first started blogging), I’d have, y’know, tried to tie it all together with an overarching theme and some character development or something.
Or perhaps throw in the odd plot twist or surprise: something with some drama to keep the reader occupied, rather than just using the web as a stream-of-conciousness diary of whatever
it is I’m thinking about that week. I could mention, for example, that there’ll be another addition to our house later this year. You heard it here first (unless you already heard it
from somewhere else first, in which case you heard it there first.)
Brought up in a world of tiny, bright, UHD colour touchscreens, Annabel seemed slightly underwhelmed by the magic of a sonograph picture of her future baby brother.
Still: by the end of this post I’ll have hit a nice, easy-to-remember 594,000 words.
