Articles – Page 105

Two Men, Two Bikes, Six Islands

Just wrote a fantastic piece about the islands we visited on our second day’s cycling only to have this shitty device eat it. So here’s a summarry:

Barra – small. Cycled over mountain, took ferry North.
Eriskay – tiny fishing community.
South Uist – long, flat, full of highland cattle and sheep. Heavily Catholic.
Benbecula – picturesque.
North Uist – hillier, wetter. Protestant.
Berneray – tiniest of all. We stayed with a sheep farmer and his wife, and ate fantastic home-grown food from their croft.

Two Men, Two Bikes, One Mission

The keyboard on this tacky little GPRS device is crap, and I just lost this entire entry to bad user interface design (if you press the biggest button on the device, it throws it all away):

My dad and I drove to Glasgow, arriving this morning at about 2am. Then, up at 8am for the first leg of our bike ride around Scotland. Train to Crainlarich, then cycled the 42 miles or so to Obar.

Good bits: downhilling, meeting some highland cattle, eating lots of Dextrose.

Bad bits: getting really, really wet, using this shitty thing, shoelaces caught in pedals, twice, not being fit enough.

Now we’re on the ferry from Oban to Barra. Look it up yourself, I’m not posting a link. We’ve just waved to Mull. Can’t believe this is a five-hour ferry journey. Don’t think I’ve ever spent so long on a ferry and not had to wind my watch back or forward an hour.

Oh, and have met other cyclists on the ferry. But that’s not terribly interesting.

And I’m Off

[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]

[additional fragments were recovered on 13 October 2018]

Off to Scotland, that is, where I’ll be spending a long weekend cycling and island-hopping. I’ve got a brief stop in Preston for tea with my folks before I catch the train up to Scotland… but for now, I need to do some laundry, get a train ticket, and get out of Aber.

I’ll be back on Tuesday night, if anybody’s interested. My mobile’s not making outgoing calls at the moment (forgot to pay my bill, now can’t afford to – at least until my paycheque comes in), so if you call and you can’t get through (not unlikely: I’ll be hitting some low-signal areas) try my dad’s mobile number (Claire has it) or drop me a text – not an answerphone message.

Odds are very high that I won’t be anywhere near an internet connection, so don’t expect ‘blog updates or participation in the usual forums, either.

It’s a shame I won’t be here to see Kit off as he moves to Scotland (coincidence?) this weekend. But hey, at least I don’t have to help him pack and/or carry boxes around.

Oh; and I think you should all…

Chicken-Heated Atomic Weapons, And Quake [TM] For Those Who Miss Text-Based Adventures

[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]

[further fragments were recovered on 13 October 2018]

Two fantastic bits of funny news for you this April Fool’s morning:

1. A seven-ton atomic landmine, designed to prevent Soviet advance through West Germany, would have been kept warm while underground by being filled with live chickens (with enough food to keep them alive for a week). This (not an April Fool’s – really!) report brought to you by the BBC. Weird.

2. Do you remember a couple of years ago when somebody wrote ttyQuake, a front-end for iD‘s groundbreaking game, Quake, which replaced the graphics with live-generated ASCII-art [screenshot]? Well; somebody’s gone one step further: IF Quake. IF Quake is an Inform program that acts an an interface between your Z-Machine Interpreter and the Quake data files. What does this mean? It means that it’s a text-based-adventure version of Quake. So instead of wiggling your mouse and…

Operation: Anticipated Container

To those who remain in Aber:

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to acquire as many cardboard boxes as possible in anticipation of Kit’s upcoming mission in Stirling. Boxes selected are to be at the operatives’ discretion, and from targets of oppertunity. Suggested primary targets include Somerfield, Safeway, Lidl, and Kwik Save. Suggested secondary targets include Global Video and Charlie’s Stores.

Once acquired, boxes should be stored safely in The Flat, Cambrian Place. This may involve flat-packing them. Operatives are free to use whatever means at their disposal, but it is imperative that the boxes are able to be re-assembled during a subsequent mission.

The use of lethal force, while necessarily unlikely, is permitted.

This blog will self destruct.

My New Work Computer… Won’t Be Delivered Today…

It turns out that there’s been a huge fire in a BT service tunnel, knocking out 130,000 phone lines and numerous data links in the Manchester area.

This, in turn, has caused Microland UK to be unable to process our credit card details and deliver me my new work PC, a swanky-looking Athlon 64 3GHz box.

<sob>

Free Parking Jackpot

Am I the only purist here?

I am, of course, referring to Monopoly. Pretty much everybody I know doesn’t play Monopoly by the correct rules, as laid down by Waddingtons. And how many arguments does this cause? It’s unbelievable!

What’s even scarier is the number of people that honestly believe that their particular variation of the rules is actually correct – be it “£400 for landing on Go” to “free parking jackpot” to “capital punishment”… I’ve seen so many of them (and studied many more popular variations)…

…but one thing that is particularly common to these variations is that they usually exist to increase the bias of luck to a game which, ultimately, in my opinion, already has too much luck in it! But why? Are people scared of thinking or something?

Leave a comment: how do you play? What variations do you play by? Or are you a fellow purist?

I’m Still In Aber. Yay.

[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]

I’m still in Aberystwyth, which I thought was a good thing even before people who don’t have the same benefit complained [Alec complaining, Ruth complaining, Adam complaining] about it. Aberystwyth is great this time of year – it’s still a little too early for the tourists to arrive, but it’s warm and sunny and feels like springtime.

Sadly, I still have heaps of work to do – Simon, my boss, is breathing down my neck… not to mention the fact that I need to pretty-much finish my dissertation over the Easter break. And an assignment. And start my revision. And train for Malawi.

As Claire reported, we went for a picnic up Pen Dinas at the weekend, followed by an evening of board games in Rummers and back at The Flat. The game we played in Rummers, ‘NTropy’, is really particularly good – you have to build unstable structures with sticks such that other players are …

All We Need Is A Microsoft-Hating US Judge And…

[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]

[further fragments of this post were recovered on 12 October 2018]

First, some info for the non-geeks out there, so you can truly appreciate the irony in what’s to come:

Lindows – manufacturer of a distrubution of Linux which is designed to be easy to migrate to for former Windows users – have been in court with Microsoft in the US for some time, who claim that their name infringes upon their trademarked name, Windows. The courts haven’t been friendly to Microsoft extending their tentacles in this way so far, and so Microsoft have mostly been trying to buy time, stalling proceedings, while they bring the case to courts internationally. The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxumberg have already caved-in and declared Lindows illegal (interestingly, it’s now being marketed in these countries as Lin—-, pronounced Lindash, which Microsoft also claim they own).

Okay, now you non-geeks are up-to-speed:

Just announced – Lindows are taking …

Windows XP Box

This is scary. This guy’s managed to build a mini-ITX Windows XP box… inside a Windows XP box (by which I mean one of those boxes in which they ship copies of Windows XP). It’s a full working computer (well, it runs Windows, but you know what I mean) inside the box that originally contained the copy of Windows which is installed upon it.

Click here to see pictures and a how-to guide, in case you want to do it yourself.

Hooray! I’m Sexy! Official!

Just got a text message from Liz:

Stay sexy! Lx

Not sure if that’s supposed to be for me or not… hmm……

Update (20 March 2012) – Crosslink: Not long after I originally wrote this post, Liz wrote about sending these texts out.

Update (23 March 2019): To commemorate the 15th anniversary of the “Stay sexy!” text, I sent some out myself! But because (a) I’m more of a coward than Liz and (b) we’re all a decade and a half more grown-up now, allegedly, I pre-empted everybody’s inevitable concern by setting up a sort-of-explanatory page about it in advance.

Update (14 February 2025): Hey, it’s Valentine’s Day! Let’s remind everybody they’re sexy, again.

Nightmare!!!

A (1) nightmare and a (2) just-plain-freaky dream last night. My brain’s playing up:

1. Claire and I, older, are in a train. She has a heart attack; I try to get and then, failing that, provide, help, but fail to and she dies. Then I woke up.

2. Strange semi-futuristic post-apocalyptic world, reminiscent of The Postman or Dark Future (anybody else ever play that?). I, among with many others, are slaves of a desert-dwelling tribe, having been kidnapped by them. We are beaten and mistreated to keep us under control. Don’t remember much more than that.

Liz had a nightmare last night, too. Maybe it’s something in the water?

A Week Less Busy

Phew. Survived running the tech. support side of the Student Skills Competition. Winners were mostly what I’d have expected. The technical side all went pretty much to plan, albeit with a lot of stress, mostly caused by teams bring in presentations on CDs etc. at the last miunute, and expecting me to be able to make them work before they needed them and run the rest of the backstage bits as well. Couldn’t have done it without Kit and Claire helping.

It was a lot of fun. Plus, we got to raid the judges buffet lunch and eat delicious pastry-and-cheese things.

The letting agency are complaining that the rent hasn’t been paid yet. I wish my bank would sort themselves out, allowing me to pay the buggers. Ah well; everything’s sweet so far.

Paedophile-Luring And Artificial Intelligence Ethics

[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]

[further fragments of this post were recovered on 12 October 2018]

Fun in the sun.

Kit and I had an idea for something like this a while back, and we were wondering if it constituted entrapment: after all, under UK law, it’s illegal for a human to attempt to trick another human into committing a crime, as it cannot be determined whether that person would have committed the crime of their own volition… but here’s the catch – is it legitimate for a machine, working on behalf of a human, to do the same thing?

That’s what’s likely to be the crucial issue if this scheme to trick ‘net paedophiles into giving information to computerised children [BBC] provides evidence in court (not just leads, as is the case so far) towards convicting people who are ‘grooming’ children on the internet.

Personally, I’d argue that – in this case – the machine is a tool of the human, just like chat room software is a tool of humans. I don’t see the difference between me using chat room software, pretending to be a kid, luring paedophiles, and providing tips to the police, and me writing a program to do the same for me. It’s …

Little Balloon Animals

Little balloon animals;
Pretty little things that catch your eye,
After a few drinks, money changes hands.
An evening’s entertainment for the price;
Of a lager or wine or a whiskey on ice.

Little balloon animals;
Craved when you were a just a boy,
Now in control; new in your palms.
Smooth and warm from the artist’s touch;
That in your youth you wished so much.

Little balloon animals;
Like gambled money – never forever,
A discarded sliver of latex.
A moment of loss, perhaps regret;
A little time alone,
Then nothing.
Forget.