I have 2 adult concessionary memberships for sale at face value. £33 for the adult tickets each. I'm waiting on confirmation as to what happens over the room we have booked, whether it has to be taken with the tickets too.

Also I think if you want to have the tickets and you don't qualify as a student, senior citizen or disabled then you can just pay the extra and upgrade. I'll find out :)

Please leave a comment if you're interested. I take payment by paypal or bank transfer.

Liz Ashton

This evening, for the first time, one of the cats managed to throw up on the linoleum bit of the kitchen floor, instead of the carpet!

http://www.terrypratchett.co.uk

Transworld have launched their new Terry Pratchett author website. The new site includes news, character information, books, competitions and a new forum moderated by Discworld Monthly editor Jason Anthony.

I have two 1Gb DIMMs of PC2700 (333MHz) DDR memory, which I've just wasted £20 on. (DDR was all the rage about 4 years ago.) Unfortunately, they are ECC memory, meaning they are incompatible with the majority of consumer-grade motherboards. Nevertheless, it's just possible that somebody out here might have a use for them? Drop me a line if so...

http://www.2minutechallenge.org/

2008-07-25: The 2 minute challenge: short films about the importance of computer science - http://www.2minutechallenge.org/

Linux hasn't claimed to be Linux in response to OSI queries since 2.6.24, so this is an interesting sidenote but basically irrelevant.

There is a story on the Inquirer website that rights to sell the iPhone 3G may pass from O2 to Orange sometime in the not too distant future.

I have to say that the resulting phone really needs to be renamed. To Cox's Pippin, since it'll be an Orange Apple.

L'Inq here

http://www.totkat.org/2008/07/bye_bye_stephs.html

Steph's closes its doors for the last time on Saturday night (thanks for the heads-up on that J), so we went for dinner there last night. Man, was it busy! I had garlic bread with Stilton, chicken and bacon pie and the "famous" bread and butter pudding ("please be aware there is a 40 minute wait if you order this") for dessert. And then felt really pretty ill on the train on the way home and pretty horrible this morning.

I've been sipping tea a bit and had some plain toast so far today. Hope my stomach is settled enough for our cycle ride tomorrow (not gonna say where we're going in case I jinx it somehow). I'm a bit apprehensive about the trip as it is quite a long way and the route isn't exactly flat. I'd love to complete it, but there are opportunities to get a train home pretty much all along the route so there are lots of get-out points if it is just too much for me. The weather forecast has at least improved from "thunderstorms" to "slightly cloudy"; which is a good thing.

The St Trinian's school song segueing into Lili Marlene.

Anyone got a worse one?

http://withouthotair.blogspot.com/2008/07/performance-data-for-gwiz-in-london.html

This article is by Kele Baker and David MacKay, based on data collected by Kele

The performance of the G-Wiz varies with driving conditions and the weather. The G-Wiz can be driven on 'high' or 'low' power. The lights may be on or off. And the efficiency of the battery appears to depend on the temperature. The graph shows data for 19 charging events: the distance travelled in miles is on the horizontal axis and the energy required from the grid to recharge the battery (measured at the socket with a Maplin meter) is on the vertical axis.

The best performance was 16 kWh per 100 km. The worst was 33 kWh per 100 km. The average was 21 kWh per 100 km. This number can be compared with the energy consumption of an average petrol car doing 33 miles per gallon, which uses 80 kWh per 100 km. In money terms, the electricity cost of the G-Wiz is 2.1 pence per km (assuming 10 p per kWh).

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/07/washington_post.html

From this article, published last April:

Batiste confided, somewhat fantastically, that he wanted to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, which would then fall into a nearby prison, freeing Muslim prisoners who would become the core of his Moorish army. With them, he would establish his own country.

Somewhat fantastically? What would the Washington Post consider to be truly fantastic? A plan involving Godzilla? Clearly they have some very high standards.

I'm sick of people taking these idiots seriously. This plot is beyond fantastic, it's delusional.

http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/dnssec-paper-15jul08-en.pdf

2008-07-25: DNSSEC @ ICANN: signing the root zone: a way forward toward operational readiness - http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/dnssec-paper-15jul08-en.pdf

Aw, man. I did a marathon data processing day yesterday with collaborator bloke, and by the middle of tai chi was actually having problems staying awake. Then on the short journey home I nearly got run over by men on about 5 separate occasions, most of whom were taxi drivers. (Why is it always men? Is there some sort of secret men's society for the killing of feanelwa? I have only been nearly-killed by a woman once, though she was one of the worst drivers I have ever encountered, but men seem to do it at least one a week. You guys come with eyes attached, right?)

I think my concentration span is getting slowly better, but I am exhausted. I need to spend a day not having to concentrate on anything for very long.

My BM's other foot is officially broken & he's off to see a specialist so they can try to work out why he keeps breaking bones next week. 

However, his old local has a beer festival this week so he has been applying beer internally which as all real blokes know cures every ill known to bloke kind .

... I promise to only mention my impending wedding once every 7 minutes and 39 seconds

http://thelawwestofealingbroadway.blogspot.com/2008/07/classis-silly-season-non-story.html

Here's a cracker from the Daily Mail :-Judge Story.
It's got the lot - synthetic indignation, the crime of the month (knives) the how-dare-he judge. Best of all is Lyn Costello, the 'co-founder of the Mother's (sic) Against Murder and Aggression campaign group' (is there a Mothers For murder and aggression group? If not, why not?) who said that the judge should lose his job.
"Whatever the case, clearly the public don't want him carrying it."

No, dear. Not the public. Just you.

Walter Moers: Rumo

Paperback: 688 pages
Publisher: Vintage; New Ed edition (3 Nov 2005)
ISBN-10: 0099472228
ISBN-13: 978-0099472223
Category(ies): Fantasy/YA

( The review ) Another delightful novel for early teens of all ages.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/07/arrived_alive.html

I am in San Diego. I hesitate to say I'm at ComicCon because I haven't even picked up my badge yet — I am only just in the vicinity, and not even in the right hotel yet.

I really shouldn't have asked about travel disasters. Let's just say: 63 hours in transit, three canceled flights (including a 4 hour tour of the taxiways at JFK on a 767 that never took off), a diversion via Dallas, two fucked-up hotel reservations, and a rainy night in Brooklyn. On the upside, I got bumped to business class by Air Lingus and first class by American — a twofer on one trip that probably tells you my luck is wandering aimlessly through the twilight zone.

More later. Right now, I'm about to go into vampire emulation mode for about twelve hours before trying to reconstruct the smoking wreckage of my schedule.

PS: the Luggage followed me. It is currently lurking in the shadows of this echoing shadowy conference suite that they've parked me in, gaping ominously ...

http://www.shadowunit.org:

"Therapeutic Policy"

http://www.shadowunit.org/vigil7.html

Cannot describe extras today, I has the dumb

I was looking at the Inbox Zero project today. In one of the presentations he asks people (as rhetoric) "What do you like to do?". This is a question I've always had difficulty with.

"What do you like?", that's easy enough: blackbirds, blackberries, the shape of deltas, music, blue, weeds in rivers, lightning, etc. The easy thing to do is attach some kind of default verb of sensation to the front. But I like music much more than listening to music, I like it that I live in a world where there is music, the idea of music, even music I'll never hear and am unaware of, that's good. And I'm not sure how you "do" the shape of a river, or a map of Siberia. I sometimes wonder if this is why there are so many photographs of pretty things in Flickr, because people like pretty things, and want to "do" them.

So what do I actually like to do, rather than things I like that I can put an active verb in front of?

I like to breath. That's really good. I know that sounds trivial, but it's really the best thing to do: particularly if you do it well. There's nothing quite like breathing.

And I like to drink water when I'm thirsty, so as not to be thirsty. And to relieve myself after the above. In the west we're lucky that there's very little politics to drinking water, and it's ubiquitous, and nobody's privatised air yet, and we're got over destroying it over here (by destroying it over there), so you can drink water, and breathe without discussing it endlessly, or consulting the legal situation, or knowing whether it's high class or low class water/air (unless you're extremely neurotic), or reading a healthcare manual, or anything like that. Food and sex are good, but they're not quite as unencumbered. There are always half a dozen "professionals" lurking on your shoulder in the space vacated by God and Satan. And Ruth Kelly. And John Humphries. And whatseherface off of Newsnight. And Boticelli. And William Blake. And JS Mill. And the professionals probably have scales with them (both to weigh and to balance), and calipers, and thermometers, and video cameras, and databases, and logical arguments, and undeniable axioms, and arias, and oil paintings, and Eppendorf tubes, and the square root of pi. Kind of sucks the fun out of those a bit, really. Oh, sleep is good too, particularly when you're not dreaming, in part, because there's none of all that shit.

A bit lame for a CV, though. "Interests/Activities: breathing, sleeping, drinking water".

http://thelawwestofealingbroadway.blogspot.com/2008/07/recommended-reading.html

The nonpareil ambulance crew blogger Tom Reynolds has posted this. Every magistrate ought to read it, just to add one more piece to the complex jigsaw that we attempt to solve when dealing with domestic violence.