Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Seth Godin is a bloke I have a lot of time for; he gets a lot of things very right. However, I’ve rarely seen anything I agree with more than this post about patience and persistence. Read it, it’s really good.

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Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Daniel Dociu is Chief Art Director for ArenaNet, who make the Guild Wars game. There’s an article on BLDGBLOG featuring his art. You need to see it. Go look.

I don’t think I’ve my mind as thoroughly lit up by artwork in years.

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gothwalk: (Default)
( Feb. 25th, 2008 08:43 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Whenever I’m interested in a new area, my first reaction is to hit the web. Usually, I find what I’m looking for not on wikipedia or about.com or any organised information site, but on various blogs. My next reaction is to acquire as many books on the topic as I can, but I’m trying to go for the library option on that instead. The latest interest to get hit this way is gardening, and specifically what I consider to be real gardening - herbs, fruit and vegetables.

So here are some of the blogs that I’ve been reading and enjoying over the last couple of weeks.

My Tiny Plot details the progress from a small allotment plot up through several more plots of land, to the current series on landscaping a garden for food production. There are plenty of photographs, and a good bit of useful and encouraging detail.

Henbogle deals with hens, woodwork, recycling, and gardening - a solidly interesting mix.

Future House Farm has similar topics, and a bit more emphasis on fruit.

One Straw: Be The Change deals more specifically with sustainability, both in farming and in the wider world. It’s fascinating reading.

Tiny Farm Blog deals with organic market gardening. There’s a post a day, regular-like, and I’m particularly enamoured of the pictures that have deep snow and cold. Not that I’m going to have to deal with that anytime soon…

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Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

So I was in at a little after half-past eight this morning. My machine had slowed to a complete crawl, so rebooting was the first thing. After that, I set into some work that needed doing, but found that there was something wrong with some javascript. In starting to debug the javascript, I found that there was something wrong with the session management on my local copy of the development environment. In trying to fix that, I found there was something wrong with my local installation of Cold Fusion. Then I had a meeting. Then I fixed the local install of CF, fixed the session management, grabbed some lunch and got back to work, fixed the javascript, and went to work on some CSS. Found I couldn’t reach the files. And now I’m waiting for the network administrator to fix something on the network so that I can get to the files I need.

Total time in work: five and a half hours. Total useful work done: ten minutes. I hate days like this.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

So, a wee while ago, Google bought Doubleclick. As the rest of the market realises what’s happening, there’ve been howls of indignation, and the amusing notion of Microsoft complaining that that’s anti-competitive. The Financial Times, however, first took a while to notice, and then produced this article, which has got to be closing on award level for incoherency and poor research. For incoherency, I give you:

Google plans to acquire the oddly named Doubleclick - most web adverts land you in an online casino with one or sometimes zero clicks - for $3.1bn.

and for poor research or perhaps complete loss of contact with reality:

The real questions are why Google wants to be in advertising, and whether agencies such as WPP should be worried. Google is good at wacky stunts and has unusual office furniture, both advertising staples, but its laid-back computer engineers probably lack the necessary lunching skills.

That’s a hangover-written article if ever I saw one, and the editor must have still been drunk.

gothwalk: (Default)
( Apr. 26th, 2007 04:27 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

In Firefox, and now Internet Explorer as well, you can open a new tab by holding down the “Ctrl” key and hitting “t”. In Dreamweaver - my production environment of choice - open files look like tabs. So I keep on hitting ctrl-t in Dreamweaver, when what I mean is either ctrl-n for a new file, or ctrl-o to open one. The nearly-the-same-but-not-quite tabs are driving me nuts.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

The Cumbrian tourist folk have decided that Wordsworth’s poem about daffodils needed updating. Hence, they’ve repackaged it as a rap video by a giant red squirrel. You really need to see it to believe it (needs sound). While I’m thoroughly boggled by it, I have to admit that it’s damnably convincing as rap.

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gothwalk: (Default)
( Apr. 5th, 2007 09:35 am)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

This is aimed mostly at Dubliners, but if you live anywhere that I might turn up, feel free to tell me about your local purveyors. I’m planning a series of collage-style projects, and I need stuff to go into them. I’m thinking of old postcards, newspaper clippings, doorknobs, hinges, toy soldiers, cogs, old hand tools, railway tickets and, well, similar junk. Does anyone know of “antique” shops, flea markets, car boot sales, or the like that sell this kind of stuff? Ideally, I’m thinking of rummage boxes marked “Any thing in this Box £1″, but that might not happen anymore.

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gothwalk: (Default)
( Feb. 5th, 2007 05:50 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

So we were having some trouble in the new residence with the plumbing. Namely, the toilet was backing up. This isn’t pleasant. We had a plumber, who’s a friend of the landlord’s, and familiar with the pipes, come out and look at it. He expected it to be a pretty simple job, since it had happened before, and was a fairly quick fix. So he scooted out into the back yard, pulled up a cover, and attacked the outlets of the junction there with a plunger. Nothing moving.

More tools, he said, and came back the following evening with same. He attacked it with such vigour that the tools (plumbing rods, with a plunger on the end, for those familiar) got stuck. Badly stuck, as in, he had to call a burly relative to come and help him extract it (I was stuck in work). He scratched his head a bit - as did I when I got back in the evening - and we tried to figure out what the hell could be wrong with it. Some water had come up through floor tiles in an unexpected part of the premises, so we figured that would be a good place to start the next time. Armed with that, and information from the landlord that there was a manhole cover in an alleyway behind the garden wall, we went at it on Saturday morning.

I met more neighbours in one morning there than I did in four years in Hollybank. We went in and out of alleys, people’s backyards, over walls, peering down into manholes and shores and vents, and learned more about the plumbing of Portobello than anyone should ever know. Nothing moving.

We pulled up the tiles where the water had come up, and some more tiles hidden under them, and some cracked tiles under that, and arrived at an unknown and buried vent. We plunged that and checked the outflow from various drainage systems, and tried to figure out what the hell was happening. There was clearly a connection between the cover at the back and this newly-excavated vent, because if you plunged the back yard one, the other bubbled and spat - but not vice versa. Water run into the new vent drained without trouble, and every single waste pipe in the place, except the toilet, was fine - but there was equally clearly no problem between the toilet and the underground plumbing.
On the verge of giving up, and muttering vengefully about Dynorod, compressors, and advanced spelunking, we wandered outside to poke once more at the original suspected source of the problem. One touch of the plunger, and suddenly, it began to flow, and was clear within seconds. Triumph!
It was aliens, mysterious Victorian sewage valves, or a masochistic plumbing system which just wanted to be beaten for a while. You choose.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

It’s a minor quirk in what’s otherwise a much improved browser, but I’d  love to know who took the decision to move the “refresh” button from the left of the URL bar to the right in Internet Explorer 7. It means that I lose a few seconds looking for it every single time I go to use it - and then when I get used to it, I can’t find the reload in Firefox or Opera. At least F5 still works…

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’m a complete neophyte in the world of cars, but I would have thought something as complex would come with an owner’s manual. You get manuals with can openers and teapots. But there wasn’t one when it arrived, and searches on eBay and indeed, the web in general, are telling me that no manual exists for a Seat Ibiza after October 1999. The car in question is a 2000 registration, though.

For that matter, the manuals I’m finding for older models are published by Haynes, not Seat. Am I using the wrong term? “Owner’s manual” seems pretty simple…

For what it’s worth, I’m not looking to take it apart, or anything - just how to check the oil, set the clock, and other simple stuff.

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gothwalk: (Default)
( Nov. 22nd, 2006 02:16 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

The new office, now that it has blinds and we can take down the cardboard radiation shields we needed (the southwest-ish curving wall is all glass) is getting better. There’s still a lot of white and steel around, though, leaving it looking very cold. We’re considering getting some plants in.

My immediate reaction is to look for a bonsai tree, but they’re hard to take care of. Anyone got any recommendations for something pleasantly leafy, which requires very little care, and won’t trigger allergies? We’ve a lemon geranium at home I could snag some cuttings from, but I know it’s a common allergy plant.

gothwalk: (Default)
( Oct. 31st, 2006 04:40 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

So it’s getting decently autumnal out there, and I’ve finally given up on the sleeveless jacket. However, I’d like to get a decent look at this autumn thing before it goes away, and therefore Nina and I are going to take a walk up the Dodder as far as Bushy Park this Sunday. You’re welcome to come along.

The plan is to leave the house at about 12:30, and walk down Sandford Road, then through Milltown to the Dodder. After that we’ll be following the north bank right down to Bushy Park, and poking around there for a while (there’s a peculiar little hexagonal folly in among the trees there). If we’re feeling energetic, we might walk back as well, and if not, public transport will be availed of.

It’s about a three, four mile walk, and most of it is right by the river. Anyone interested, drop a comment here, or turn up at the house at 12:30 on Sunday 5th of November. We’ll be trying to leave fairly well on time, but if you’re late, jog after us. :)

gothwalk: (Default)
( Oct. 17th, 2006 10:45 am)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

And indeed, where in this part of the city is good for lunch? There isn’t the same selection of sandwich and coffee shops as Dun Laoghire (or if there is, they’re cunningly concealed). The ideal is a baguette and coffee for five euros or under. A sandwich will do instead of a baguette, and other options will be considered. Somewhere I could sit down for an hour would also be useful, as eating in the office means eating at my desk; we don’t have the nice kitchen table from the old place.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Operation Move completed successfully while I was away, and the new office seems to be entirely bearable. We’re in Harmony Court, on Harmony Row, which is about three blocks east of Pearse Street Station. Therefore, if any of you fine people are available for purposes of lunching (I believe I can meet employees of the Great AI somewhere halfway) in the area, do let me know. Within sane parameters, I can decide myself when lunch should occur, although appointments later than 13:30 are likely to include me staring silently and hungrily at you until food arrives. Usual contact methods apply - or since I have a very fine window seat, you could just stand outside and wave.

gothwalk: (Default)
( Oct. 13th, 2006 07:46 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

We’re back, alive. Very tired, and have acquired colds. Fantastic trip. More details when brain clears. If anything significant has happened in the last 18 days, please let me know, as there’s no way I can catch up on that length of LJ and blogs and such.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Yesterday, after lunch, winding down through a long series of formatting problems on the current project, I found some odd gaps in table cells. For some reason, places where we had nicely formatted tabular data with images in some of the cells, there was a gap of two pixels at the bottom of the cell. I flexed my (by now, reasonably well developed) CSS muscles, and went to work. Some hours later, I was still staring at it. I cut it down to a bare bones test case. It still happened. I ripped out every single bit of CSS individually, margin, margin-bottom, padding, padding-bottom, and it still happened. And eventually, trying ridiculous things, I found it.

It was the gods-bedamned doctype. 6 hours work. One line of code.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I spent a total of about 12 hours trying to get some oddities of CSS in IE - z-index and stacking order - to work as I wanted them to in Internet Explorer. Essentially, any block element in the code defines its own stacking context for z-index purposes, if it has a position set. So if you’ve dropdowns from a menu bar across the top, they’ll vanish behind any divs with position: absolute or position: relative defined later in your HTML source. And since those two are pretty nearly essential for any kind of layout, that causes problems.

The solution? Rearrange the code so the menu is in the html source after the content, and use CSS to position it correctly. Brute force and ignorance, yes, but it works. And it has the added benefit of placing your content further up the code for search engines, if you consider that important.

I award myself 100 DKP and a biscuit, and proceed to the next problem.

gothwalk: (Default)
( Aug. 22nd, 2006 12:40 am)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I used to have a love-hate relationship with insomnia. I used to hate being tired and unable to sleep, but I used to love the stuff I produced when I wrote in that state. Now nothing’s appearing, writing-wise, and I still can’t sleep. Here, for you edification, is a list of things I have done recently.

  • Produced an excellent Yorkshire Pudding
  • Eaten an excellent Apple Crumble
  • Started to download Anarchy Online to give it another try
  • Got a link to dukestreet from cheapassgamers.com
  • Begun building a new area of my campaign world
  • Talked to a lot of people online about world building
  • Read a huge number of Doctor Who novelisations
  • Drawn some fine maps
  • Started doing a rather technical perspective drawing
  • Realised I need a t-square and some set-squares, and have neither

… and I’m still not sleepy.

gothwalk: (Default)
( Aug. 11th, 2006 03:40 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Working with cross-browser CSS is like being released, blind-folded, into a large maze with mobile walls. While you make your way through it, you are occasionally beaten with sticks. Sometimes, the beating stops. You can’t always identify why.

I enjoy working with CSS. I must be a masochist…

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There’s a fascinating article on the BBC site which suggests that cities, becoming more and more independent from the countries that host them, could give rise to new city-states. London mayor Ken Livingstone is quoted as saying:

“Having been to Singapore and seen how successful it was I think anything short of a fully independent city state is a lost opportunity, with its own foreign and defence policies thrown in.”

I’ve always been a fan of the notion of city-states, and the concept that they might make a return is very interesting.

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gothwalk: (Default)
( Jul. 7th, 2006 07:48 am)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Someone left a cap here after the barbecue. It’s black, has a hard felt peak, and a braid across the front (which appears to be rather unusual in origin). Anyone missing same?

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gothwalk: (Default)
( Jun. 20th, 2006 12:02 am)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Your own old diaries may be simultaneously the most embarrassing and most fascinating thing you can find.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

As I write, a page on The Wizard of Duke Street is coming up as the number one result for searches on “doctor who doomsday” on google. Being as this is currently the hottest rumour in the Doctor Who world, this pleases me immensely. That link is spoilerific, mind.

gothwalk: (Default)
( Jun. 15th, 2006 08:47 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I went pretty much straight into the garden today when I got home, uprooted most of the old rocket and planted more, and also planted some dill and parsley - in containers this time, so I can keep a closer eye on them. I aso separated out several supermarket-bought basil plants, and put them in pots of their own - I’ve been carefully watering them for some time, rather than just eating them, as is my normal procedure with basil. I watered everything, and muttered impatiently at the strawberry plants, which have lots of green berries. Some of them are getting to decent sizes, but none are getting red, except for one on the Alpines, which got to the fully ripe stage earlier in the week. The strawberry was very good, and so was the gardening. I think I might be starting to get this gardening thing.

I’m letting some of the rocket run to seed, to see if I can actually get seeds back from it. This, I gather, is how plants work, but having stopped and thought about it for a while, I have had to admit that I have never seen it work with anything smaller than a chestnut tree. And, of course, I’m not yet old enough to have grown a new tree from a nut grown on one I planted before. Rocket, being as it goes from seed to flower in about six weeks, is a considerably easier proposition, at least in the time scale.

I started to reread Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance today, for the first time in about three years. Given that I read my old copy once and sometimes twice a year until it fell to pieces, it’s about time I picked it up again. It’s already having that effect of making me think. I understand that this is an effect that some people get from Gödel, Escher, Bach, but I’m not geek enough for that - Zen is about people, not numbers. This is connected in some way with the gardening, although I’m not sure I can explain it.

Zen follows on the heels of Ash: A Secret History and The System of the World, both of which will be reviewed on dukestreet.org when I get my head around them. A quick summary will go: both were excellent, if heavy on the wrists while waiting for buses.

Plans for the weekend, apart from the Starbound Economics Forum (is anyone actually coming?) involve more gardening, in preparation for the barbecue (more lawn trimming, patio weeding, and some general cleaning up) and an amount of housekeeping.

gothwalk: (Default)
( Jun. 11th, 2006 02:40 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve started putting together a set of pages on Black Satchel about our upcoming trip to India. Not a huge amount there yet, but I’ll expand it between now and then, and add a full account with photographs when we get back.

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gothwalk: (Default)
( Jun. 7th, 2006 12:03 am)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

If it doesn’t get cooler tonight than it did last night, I’m going to have to consider sleeping in the garden.

gothwalk: (Default)
( Jun. 6th, 2006 12:06 am)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

… whoever worked out the code for embedding sound on webpages. If I ever meet them, I have every intention of slapping them.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There’s a pile of stuff sitting around on my hard drive that could be on the web. It’d be useful for backup, aside from anything else. There’s stuff from my various D&D campaigns (not the DM notes, but background and handouts), short essays on various topics, photographs and other odds and ends of data. I’ve a few notions for things I want to write in php as well. dukestreet.org isn’t really suitable for this stuff - I want to keep it as it is, for the most part.

So I need a domain of my own for… stuff. Tempting and all as drewstuff.com is, I’m sure I can do better. Have you suggestions?

gothwalk: (Default)
( May. 29th, 2006 02:36 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Somewhere over the weekend, the concept of an ambient novel arrived in my mental lexicon. However, I’m not sure who mentioned it. I’ve checked the usual suspects - Cybermind, some of the more brilliant thinkers on my LJ friends list (two of whom are brother and sister, come to think of it), and so on, and I ain’t finding it. Web searches bring up only references to Digital Leatherette. Own up, who brought this to my attention? It’s following me around, nipping at my mental heels.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Heh. Apparently, according to Mary Ann Davidson, the British are natural hackers.

She claimed that the British are particularly good at hacking as they have “the perfect temperament to be hackers–technically skilled, slightly disrespectful of authority, and just a touch of criminal behavior.”

gothwalk: (Default)
( May. 27th, 2006 12:14 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

One of these days, I am going to learn that I am not good at sitting down to work on my own stuff from early in the day. I’ve just put in three hours work on various websites, bits of writing, research, and so on, all of which is stuff I like doing, and it feels like hard work. Yet if I were to try the same thing in the evening - or even in late afternoon - it’d go far better.

However, some useful stuff done this morning, and I’m going to go read for a while, and try some more later on.

gothwalk: (Default)
( May. 21st, 2006 05:58 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

“In my opinion and experience, not fiddling with your consciousness is like owning a bike but only riding it on the pavement.”

– Warren Ellis.

I like that a lot.

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gothwalk: (Default)
( May. 19th, 2006 09:01 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

A new bookshop, one of the Hughes & Hughes chain, opened today in Dun Laoghaire, with a Costa Coffee branch upstairs. It seems like a thoroughly decent bookshop - decent range of books and magazines, plenty of non-fiction (the travel section in particular was really impressive) and chairs here and there, which I always consider important. It certainly knocks the local Easons into a cocked hat, and the only other bookshop in the town is the well-concealed Dubray Books, on the top floor of the shopping centre. Dubray don’t carry magazines, though, and the long narrow layout isn’t as attractive as H&H’s semi-open, semi-rooms approach - similar to the UK branches of Barnes & Noble I’ve been in.

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gothwalk: (Default)
( May. 15th, 2006 04:46 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’m looking for a pub or coffeeshop in which to hold the Starbound Economics Discussion. Necessities: Decent sized tables, staff who don’t mind strange discussions with papers and laptops, city centre location, quiet on a weekday evening or a weekend afternoon. Food would be a bonus, but isn’t necessary. Wireless intarwub would also be good, but again, not necessary. Your suggestions?

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Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

  • Move shelves downstairs
  • Move stuff downstairs to put on shelves
  • Dispose of leftover stuff upstairs, deemed unworthy of shelving
  • Move old desk into shed
  • Fetch strawberries looted from freecycle list
  • Plant strawberries
  • Redesign dukestreet.org in more civilised colours.
  • Mow lawn, plant some more rocket, weed herb bed
  • Schedule Starbound Economics discussion
  • Write like mad for Kingfisher’s Way, as pesky players now thinking too clearly
  • List more businesses on inranelagh.com, and pester people unmercifully for links

I think that should be enough to be getting along with…

gothwalk: (Default)
( May. 11th, 2006 01:26 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Either I’ve been remarkably unobservant so far, or a decent sized flock of swallows just made landfall. I can see about thirty of them looping and diving outside, and I’ve seen none so far this year.

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gothwalk: (Default)
( May. 8th, 2006 03:11 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Is it bad when a track comes on Winamp’s shuffle, and I think “Jethro Tull… no, Thin Lizzy? Ah, Iron Maiden.”. But honestly, there are definite likenesses. Really.

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gothwalk: (Default)
( May. 1st, 2006 10:20 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been reading about permaculture - my gardening this year looks more successful, although I must learn to distinguish young chives from grass, which is more difficult than it sounds - and food for a good chunk of today. Google’s “define” fuction has been hit pretty pretty frequently - it’s my favourite use of google, and I’m just realising that not everyone knows about it. Type “define: seed ball” or “define: pomelo” or whatever into google, and it’ll return as many neat definitions as it can find. Incredibly useful for the quick wtf-is-that questions.

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gothwalk: (Default)
( Apr. 23rd, 2006 11:06 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Fall Down Six Times: An essay about possible futures.

In The Wake Blog: A collective manual for outliving civilisation.

Village Blog: More post-civilisation stuff. I can’t explain why I’m fascinated by this stuff. Maybe it’s because I’d probably get on okay if civilisation crashes.

And a sort of direct opposite: World Changing.

In like vein: Open The Future.

Finally, Warren Ellis is doing new and interesting stuff with Die Puny Humans - you’ll need to register to see it properly, though.

gothwalk: (Default)
( Apr. 7th, 2006 11:05 am)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Go to Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three neat facts, two births and one death in your journal, including the year.

Facts:

1839 - John Herschel takes the first glass plate photograph.
1947 - “First actual case of (a computer) bug being found”: a moth lodges in a relay of a Mark II computer at Harvard University.
2001 - 01:46:40 UTC - the Unix billennium.

Births:

1466 - Ashikaga Yoshitane, Japanese shogun (d. 1523)
1754 - William Bligh, British naval officer (d. 1817)

Deaths:

1976 - Mao Zedong, President of China(b. 1893)

Not, in all, terribly interesting…

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gothwalk: (Default)
( Apr. 6th, 2006 02:37 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Does anyone nearby have a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog - any edition - that I could take a look at? I don't necessarily need to borrow it, although that would be nice.

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gothwalk: (Default)
( Mar. 27th, 2006 04:16 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

What's the best way to go about learning the phonetic alphabet? I've just realised, trying to explain in text to a Canadian colleague, that trying to render a Northern Irish accent in the mundane alphabet is wholly impossible. The greeting that you'd write as “How's you?” gets mangled into “Hyee's yi-e?”, and still doesn't convey either the sound or the fact that it sounds pleasant.

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»

V

( Mar. 26th, 2006 07:36 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

V for Vendetta is what an angrier Yeats might have produced, had he unfettered access to a museum.

Yes, it is that good. It has shot straight into my top ten films ever, and may even occupy the top slot.

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gothwalk: (Default)
( Mar. 22nd, 2006 09:37 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

is carrying out an interesting experiment in adventure design. Go have a look, and consider buying in.

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gothwalk: (Default)
( Mar. 22nd, 2006 01:19 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I do wonder what happened to the negative parts of the various seasonal traditions - the kids who didn’t get Christmas presents because they weren’t good (or got coal, or sticks, or whatever), the ones who didn’t find Easter eggs, and so on. They seem to have vanished entirely.

I was reminded of this by an overheard conversation in a supermarket today wherein two (well-dressed, well-spoken, polite) kids were discussing blackmail tactics to get the maximum possible number of Easter eggs out of their relatives. The small boy was good on the numbers, but weak on motivation (his concept of beating up his older brother seemed doomed to failure, for instance), and the small girl had them down a lot better, having already concealed pictures of “Mary and George” in safe places for a later exchange against a chocolate currency.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Last night, after an excellent run through the delightful Zul Gurub, Wormson finally made level 60 in fine style. His final levelling quest involved a giant demon and a huge mechanical chicken, which, as pointed out, entirely appropriate.

Screenshot, also provided by , is here.

Gonna have to update that icon; it's from about level 18…

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gothwalk: (Default)
( Mar. 14th, 2006 11:47 am)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Here's something quite bizarre. Ambien, a sleeping tablet, can apparently make your brain confuse sleeping and eating, such that side-effects include sleepwalking to the fridge and raiding it, possibly even going about cooking. One woman made it to the kitchen in a full body cast while on the drug.

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gothwalk: (Default)
( Mar. 13th, 2006 07:41 am)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I've been trying to think of ways to write about P-Con that won't seem horribly name-dropping-ish, and I'm going to have to settle for explaining that Irish cons are really small, most people are there to see friends, and with an author to attendee ratio of about 1:10, it's very possible to get more face time than at larger cons.

So, P-Con was really excellent. My criteria for a science fiction convention go like this. I have to enjoy it. Check. I have to come home with books. Check. I have to have discovered a new author (or works by one I know that were previously unknown to me). Check, check. I have to have lost track of time at some point. Check. And I have to have had my mind blown at some point. Check.

On the Saturday, I had some extensive and excellent conversations with about Starbound and writing/world-building in general, which helped clarify a lot of what I was thinking, and attended a couple of useful and interesting panels, including one where Peter Morwood had a go at hacking his fingers off with a sharp sword. The Nike Swoosh he has acquired on his right temple has nothing to do with this. After the panel end of things was over, we meandered down to the pub, quizzed Diane (Duane) about the progress of the Big Meow (to which self-publishers all over the world are paying attention) and learned about the use of Hermes scarves as a weapon of the mind.

And then we wandered off to dinner, and I found myself discussing gadgetry, cats, and the food of the Indian subcontinent with Peter, Charles Stross, and, rather stunningly, Patrick Nielsen Hayden. It took me half the meal to work out who Patrick was, which was probably better than finding out at the beginning, and sitting gobsmacked for hours. Back to the con hotel bar, and eventually home (actually at a reasonable enough hour).

Sunday was quieter, but included a panel with James Hogan, in which he expounded on alternate solar system formation theories, and left me sitting going “Woahhhh….” in a way that hasn't happened in a long time.

Overall: Most excellent convention. Very pleased.

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gothwalk: (Default)
( Mar. 9th, 2006 01:25 pm)

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Mostly for my own attention later, but I suspect other people will like this too: Li Qingzhao

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