Articles – Page 101

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]

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.

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…

Off To Malawi!

I’m off to Malawi!

I’ve found my bus ticket (stupid train strikes), my passport (stupid immigration laws), my juggling balls (stupid… no, wait… juggling is good)… I guess I’m ready to go.

Contrary to my assumption that my bus would be leaving from the bus station, it’s apparently leaving from Plascrug… which is… somewhere… hmm…

Anyway, y’all, take care, have fun without me, blah blah blah, be thinking of you. Will try to update this blog (or at least phone-in an update that can be appended as a comment) while I’m on the road. And sorry I couldn’t get Product ‘X’ working better than it does before I left.

Hugz & kittenz;

It’s Not Just A Games Console…

…it fits in your living room, detects intruders, and has a 3-year warranty!

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, go have a play with my latest software toy, Product ‘X’. Eventually, we’ll be able to replace both innovators and (more importantly) marketers with a system like this: it generates instant hype!

I might have to write an add-in for it that lets it automatically fill in patent application forms. =o)

Go play with Product ‘X’, and tell me what you think.

Pre-Malawi Update

Here’s the state of play before I leave Aber for awhile, in answer to all the questions that people keep on asking me and that therefore I ought to answer in a centralised manner, here, to save them from doing so (and me from repeatedly having to say the same replies):

Yes, I leave for Malawi on Wednesday the 16th on June, early in the morning. Yes, I realise that this is Claire’s 21st birthday, and for this reason we’ve re-scheduled her birthday for the more convenient Tuesday 15th (meaning that she’ll get one day longer of being 21 than most people get… except for those for whom their 21st falls before February in a leap year, or after February the year before, I suppose).

No, I’m not taking my bike: I’m acquiring one out there. Yes, I’ll be back on the 30th June, string-and-balsa aeroplanes permitting. Yes, I’m aware that (despite now no longer being illegal) long hair on men is still frowned upon in some parts of Malawi, and I’ll be concealing mine tucked-under a hat.

Yes, the side-effects of the lariam have mostly stopped, now. I still have interesting sleep patterns and really, really weird dreams (I haven’t been blogging them because they’ve all either [a] been more disturbing for those who’d read them even than the one about Matt was, or [b] because I’ve only remembered fragments of them).

Right; and on that note – I have things I need to get on with. I’ll post one more update, at least, before I leave for Malawi: other than that, I’ll be quiet on the blog front for the next fortnight.

The Importance Of A Sensible Patent System In Europe

If Haydn had patented “a symphony, characterised by that sound is produced [ in extended sonata form ]”, Mozart would have been in trouble.

No ePatents
Click Here — Sign The Petition

Just thought I’d share that link with you. This is something which could eventually affect the way we all use computers. To those of you who don’t recognise these images or have no idea what I’m on about, I urge you to read about the issue of software patenting in Europe.

The difference between a patent and a copyright

Thanks for listening.

The Doctor That DOESN’T Just Tell You What You Want To Hear

I went to the doctor this morning to discuss the side-effects of the lariam tablets. I’d made the appointment just a week ago, when I was still having weird mood swings and not being able to sleep, like, at all. Since my last tablet, though, last Tuesday, I’ve been pretty much fine: nothing worse than the weird dreams, which I can cope with. I kept the appointment anyway.

“What I really want to know is,” I told the doctor, “Are the bad side effects – the ones I had in the first week – likely to come back? Is lariam one of those things that, if you get your body attuned to it, it’ll be fine from then on… or is it somewhat more random and unpredictable?”

“All I can say,” replied the doctor, and here’s the best line in the entire dialogue, “Is that if it were me, I wouldn’t be taking lariam.”

Lovely. Thanks, doc.

In any case, he’s agreed to write a prescription for a more expensive but less-controversial drug, which I can collect later in the week if my third pill (tomorrow) makes me go weird again. He seemed quite keen to switch me to it immediately, but I’ve opted to give lariam a go for a little longer yet.

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

Watched Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind last night with Claire and Paul. It’s an absolutely stunning film (currently ranking at #49 in the IMDB’s top 250 films list), a must-see! Go watch it! But try to know as little as you can about it before you do; it’ll only improve the expeirence.

In other news, the U.S. patent system is a joke. Seen this patent for “Method of exercising a cat”?

Random Drunken Piano Appreciation Society Of Aberystwyth

So Paul, Claire and I are in The Flat. Paul’s reading, I’m coding, and Claire is playing the piano. It’s half past eleven. The doorbell rings.

Who could that be? None of us are expecting anybody, and most of the folks we know have already left town to be with their families, etc. I go downstairs and open the door. A confused-looking young man smelling of beer looks in at me, confused.

“What’s the piano?” he asks.

“It’s a long instrument with lots of keys, but that’s not important right now,” I reply. Somehow this humour is lost on him. “It’s my girlfriend,” I continue, “She’s playing the piano upstairs.”

“Oh,” he says, “Tell her she’s very good.”

So I did.

Random.

Lariam Dream The Fourth

Perhaps the most disturbing dream yet since I started on this weird medication. And I promise you that if you know the people starring in it, you’ll be scared, too…

Warning: Sexually Explicit Content – You Have Been Warned

I only remember fragments of the dream, but two particular images stand out:

Lots of men in their 40s, all with beards, sharing a bungalow. With Adam Westwood.
Matt Reynolds fucking me up the arse, and repeatedly telling me how much he was loving it.

Just thought I’d share those images with you so you know what my head’s going through. Fucking weird.