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Home > Weblog w/e 19.1.2002
| Saturday 19 January 2002, 23:55 GMT | |
| X-Ray Milky Way. Still more eye candy from Astronomy Picture of the Day. | |
Over at Wherever You Are, Vaughan
draws our attention to this
profound statement from Miss Alabama:
"I would not live forever because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever."Er, yeah... |
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| A novel approach to the problem of curing politicians of their addiction to standardised testing in schools. No doubt if this proposal was ever enacted it would produce some very interesting results. It'd be even more fun to see a certain US politician who made it into office before this idea was proposed - I think we all know who I'm thinking of here - take an exam which purports to measure intelligence. [Via Rebecca's Pocket] | |
| What Is "A Bastard?" Kris has the answer. | |
| Basil Brushless. Brrrr. [Via Rens stuff 'n' nonsense] | |
Heterosexual Fashion
Advice.
Things Men need To Know About StyleThere's much more where that came from. [Via Scalloblog - see entry for 16 January 2002] |
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| Friday 18 January 2002, 23:50 GMT | |
| The Mother Of All Typos? [Via the null device] | |
|
Nonsense rules at Football Association. Last
September. Earls Colne Reserves were beating Wimpole 2000 by a score of
18-1 in an amateur cup match, so referee Brian Savill turned round and
scored one for Wimpole. Players and spectators alike greeted the
gesture in the spirit it was intended. Essex County Football
Association complained, so the FA suspended Savill for seven weeks,
leading him to resign in disgust. It's good to see the English tradition of bureaucracy winning out over common sense is still alive and well. [Via [parallax view]] |
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| Thursday 17 January 2002, 23:05 GMT | |
| I was going to comment on a recent article
by Dan Gillmor suggesting
that the excellence of search engines means that registering a
memorable domain name is much less important than it once was. As it
happens, before I got round to it Tom over at plasticbag.org did a first rate job of
explaining why
Gillmor is wrong. I'd add one further point: this is all very nice, but it's a very web-centric solution. Won't we continue to need domain names for lots of other purposes? Won't it help if our email addresses bear some relation to our domain names? |
|
| Attractive and unique koala bear fashion accessories. Probably not what you were expecting. [Via dutchbint.org] | |
Coming Attractions.
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| Wednesday 16 January 2002, 22:25 GMT | |
|
The Osbournes. Fly-on-the-wall documentaries are
pretty humdrum in the wake of Big Brother, but this could
be different. It's the story of a family. Ozzy Osbourne's
family. Said his wife Sharon: "I just thought America needed to see what a normal family was really like." Well, for some values of the term "normal" at any rate... [Via blogjam] |
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| Facial Hair. Damn, they're on to us! [Via Wibbly Weblog] | |
| Bob Cringely reckons Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have very different ideas of what constitutes success. | |
It Started Down
Below. Davezilla relates the tale of the
cannibal hamster.
The strike lasted approximately fifteen minutes. Hunger overtook the hapless beast and he knew what he had to do. An act so unspeakable that his human overlords would be forced to recognize him once and for all as a thinking, rational being. With a problem. |
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| Tuesday 15 January 2002, 23:40 GMT | |
| How I was Politically Educated by The Prisoner, by Megan Shaw Prelinger. You could pick many worse shows to warp your political views as a teenager. (God alone knows what, say, Footballers' Wives will do for your political development!) [Via charlie's Journal] | |
| I
saw a very puzzling report on
Channel 4 News this evening. Civil
servant Suma Chakrabati has just been appointed as Permanent Secretary
(that's to say, the administrative head) of the Department of
International Development. His appointment has been criticised by the
Tories because he's
agreed a contract which says he'll work a 5 day, 40 hour week
and be allowed to work from home every other Friday. The Conservative
shadow of Chakrabati's boss says that the taxpayer won't get
value for money from Chakrabati and it's inappropriate for someone
in a "top job" to work such short hours. I really don't see the cause for comment here. It seems to me that staff at all levels should be encouraged to work more flexibly, in the interests of finding a balance between work and family life. How is the traditional culture of long working hours ever going to change otherwise? If a man can't do his job on 40 hours a week, is it because he's unable to delegate, or is it just that the job needs splitting in two? Or is it some macho competitive thing? The only troubling aspect of this story for me is that Chakrabati, as a senior public servant who had been selected for a top job, probably had a lot more room to negotiate than did someone lower down the civil service scale, who might simply be told "take it or leave it" when the standard contract was offered. I trust that Chakrabati will take steps to ensure that his department's staff will enjoy same flexibility in working hours he does, and that he'll frown on middle managers who try to create a culture of long work hours. |
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| X-Ray Milky Way. More eye candy from Astronomy Picture of the Day. | |
| This picture cries out for a suitable caption. | |
| Monday 14 January 2002, 22:35 GMT | |
| Having a bad day? Blame Someone Else. [Via dutchbint.org] | |
| Every virus outbreak is followed by news reports solemnly claiming that this latest virus cost X million dollars. It turns out that - surprise, surprise - nobody can figure out how these figures are arrived at. [Via Boing Boing] | |
| Over at I Must..., Patti tells the tale of the Chicken Game she and her sister play. Me, I rather like her sister's latest entry in the game. | |
| Welcome to Slate UK. Only, we're not going to actually put up a separate site. And please don't tell our journalists' bosses that they're moonlighting. Could they be any more hesitant? [Via Haddock.org] | |
| ActiveECG. Monitor your cardiac rhythms while updating your PDA's diary. Presumably once the Handspring Treo PDA/GSM phone comes out they'll add a software module to have it call an ambulance for you. [Via Off On A Tangent] | |
| Sunday 13 January 2002, 23:15 GMT | |
You've probably heard
about the two Seattle residents who have already started
lining up to see Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the
Clones, even though the film doesn't open until
May. They've declared that this is an attempt to
"capture the art of waiting" as opposed to, say, deeply
sad. Two things you may not have known:
|
|
| 101 Things You Do Not Want Your System Administrator To Say. [Via /usr/bin/girl] | |
| Return of the
Strike. Donald Macintyre reminds us that despite a
rash of industrial disputes, Britain is a long way from a return to the
Winter of Discontent. What makes the rail dispute so frustrating is that ministers are expected to come up with solutions when, technically, they still have no direct control over Railtrack or the franchisees. It might have been better had Stephen Byers been a touch more radical and just renationalised the whole damn industry again. Not that nationalisation is an answer in itself, but it would at least have given him the power to restructure things properly. If he's going to get the blame for the state of the railways come 2005/6, he might as well at least have had the chance to really bang heads together in the meantime. [Via Grayblog] |
|
A couple of years
ago, Alison Brooks posted a rather wonderful set of
extracts from versions of The Lord of the Rings by
alternate authors to soc.history.what-if. For
example, here's Raymond Chandler's take on Gandalf's
meeting with Frodo about the power of the One Ring:
"Frodo Baggins?" said the old man in the doorway, rain dripping from his oversized hat with all the ease of a dwarf burrowing after gold.Among the other writers recruited to the task: Ian Fleming, P G Wodehouse, Bernard Cornwell, George MacDonald Fraser and ... er ... Gene Roddenberry: "The Halflings, cap'n, they will na take the strain"[Via rec.arts.sf.written] |
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