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- After spending most of Christmas eating and drinking, I decided it was time for some exercise, and set out after lunch today to try out one of my new presents - a pair of Goretex Windstopper cycling gloves from Grandma & Grandpa. I loaded the bike into the back of the car, and headed up to Dunkeld, through Strathbraan, and up Glen Cochill to the car park opposite Griffin Forest, high above Aberfeldy. As usual, I had a list to ignore for the day, comprising of Boltachan Burn, Lundin Farm and Carn ... |
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- Some kind people have put the BBC's "The Office" Christmas Episodes, which were broadcast on the 26th and 27th of December, online using a system called Bit Torrent. I'm new to the concept of Bit Torrent, but as best I can tell, you download a Bit Torrent program, and then use it to simultaneously download the show from other peers and upload the show to others. You can google "Bit Torrent" to find the appropriate program; I'm using this program, which is as simple as can be. Once you've done that, a site called Suprnova (http: |
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- We're on travel and we're on limited internet access but we'd like to wish everybody a great holiday and a peaceful New Year! - ST/EA... |
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- Found this nice tool today for estimating the PageRank value without the IE toolbar (well I would love to use Opera or Mozilla for this thing aswell... but Google doesn't really care about us...) I still have to validate this... |
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- Here on Samizdata we quite often give a mention to sport, having paid attention to the Soccer World Cup of 2002, the recently concluded Rugby World Cup, the University Boat Race, and cricket matches between England and Zimbabwe if only to keep on reminding the universe of the ghastliness of the current lunatic government of that unhappy country. Jonathan Pearce also writes here from time to time about various interesting and diverting sports. Most recently,... |
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in würde... (Dec 27 2003 23:35 GMT) - partygespräche: kinder und hauskauf. partyende: mitternacht. |
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Holidays (Dec 27 2003 23:35 GMT) - So these are the seasonal holidays. Lots of food have been had. The traditional goose on the 25th and venison of the extremely tender variety on the 26th. And then there's of course my new iPod. I named it よ |
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- allergies. always there to annoy you. |
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- No, I'm still not fond of Christmas. But that doesn't mean I don't take Christmas pictures. |
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- Last post by James on 18:39 27/Dec/03 - Nobby Stiles's autobiography. Nice! |
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- Last post by Simon IUFGN on 21:07 26/Dec/03 - Haven't any of you lot been betting on the nags? |
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- Next 20 Years Rant (Delivered by Bruce Sterling at "The Next 20 Years", Austin 1998 edition, at La Zona Rosa, 9.17.1998). Suppose you could take a laptop down to Austin's highways at rush hour. Suppose you could hold that laptop up and push a function key. |
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- As you may have noticed, the festive season has seriously interrupted Samizdata.net's usually inexhaustible flow of content... I expect our collective hangovers and Christmas bloat will start wearing off soon... |
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- On my way out of the city, I asked the taxi driver if he had a tape instead of listening to the radio. It's an old habit I'd gotten out of. Not only did he have a tape, he had a huge shopping bag of mix tapes and a veritable doctoral thesis on African m |
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- The Boss and His Band were BACK in 2003: Springsteen and his E Street Band made $115.9m on 47 shows,... |
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- Foiled terrorist plot or major freak-out? The American and French press have been abuzz with the story of three Paris-Los Angeles Air France flights cancelled because of hijacking fears. On the American side, the story got play in the Washington Post and several Reuters pieces, but most of the details seem confined to the French press. Le Figaro describes the initial events that led to the grounding: Suspicion resting on Air France flights appeared at the start of the week, when American intelligence services intercepted a "chat" (dialogue over the Internet) between presumed islamists. |
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Utrecht (Dec 27 2003 23:31 GMT) - On Saturday I went to Utrecht, home town of Marrije Schaake, the wonderful English-language book blogger who had sacrificed a precious day out of [Inter]national Novel Writing Month to show me around her city. Utrecht is about half an hour's train ride south of Amsterdam, and everyone from Amsterdam seemed to be going to Utrecht with me. Holland has zippy bright yellow trains that look just right under the leaden November skies, and I enjoyed my first glimpse of the Dutch countryside, squeezed in for five minutes between endless Amsterdam suburbs and endless Utrecht suburbs. It was all misty green fields with grazing cattle, a sight that would have looked just like a steam-pressed Vermont if not for the occasional windmill, the total absence of orange plaster reindeer, and the stately canal that ran along the railway, with banana-shaped barges each pushing along a fearsome bow wave. Utrecht looks like it was built in two phases - the first sometime in the seventeenth century, and the second in 1962. |
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- I knew that those troublemaker sunspots were rotating back into view this week, but I was still afraid to get my hopes up too high. The gate agent saw the geeky glint in my eye and was kind enough to reassign me to a window seat on the northern side of the plane. I was going to try to see the aurora. My last image of America was a silent television channel showing images of Michael Jackson and saying something about an arrest warrant. I thought to myself "boy am I glad I don't have to deal with this". |
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- Tomorrow morning I leave for Boston, where I'll have a fish supper with the curious frog (curious enough to slog all the way out to Logan!) before boarding a late evening flight to Reykjavik. From there on, it's another evening flight to Amsterdam, and from there a string of adventures that I hope to write all about on the site. The better half has lent me her digital camera, I've got a fresh new battery in the laptop, and I have firmly vowed not to touch email or the web except for purposes of updating this site. So for the next two weeks, this will be a write-only medium. |
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- The John Titor story has now popped up in a BMX discussion forum. Read the thread and decide for yourself if these guys wear helmets. I'm curious about how often specialist forums get invaded by these kinds of off-topic ideas, and more generally about the symbiosis between blogs and discussion boards. My own sense (based on my log files) is that the latter have a ton more readers, but I don't know where to find hard data. There's a thousand (really pompous) PhD dissertations waiting to happen in the space connecting IRC, blogs, email, mailing lists, discussion boards, and the commercial Web. |
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- The War to End All Wars ended eighty five years ago today. One and a third million dead in France, a million and two thirds in Germany. Seven hundred thousand lost in Great Britain, in Russia nearly two million, in Romania two hundred thousand. Seventy thousand Canadians, one hundred thousand Americans, a quarter million Grecians Greeks, a third of a million Turks (who themselves exterminated a million and a half Armenians). In a century full of evil, the Great War still manages to stagger by the magnitude of its futilty. |
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- Longtime readers of this site will know that I'm a sucker for dangers outside the realm of ordinary experience. Whether it be comet impact, devastating hyperfloods, giant killer earthquakes, enormous creatures underneath the sea, the failure of the Atlantic conveyor, evil undead food crops, megatsunamis destroying the East Coast, or biosphere-devouring nanotechnology, you're likely to find me worrying about it on this site, whose last post will read "I... told... you... so". |
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- Mary Renault: The Nature of AlexanderPsychological biography of an ancient and often malaligned ancient warrior-king. (****) |
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- The text is based on John Dos Passos' book, The Big Money. |
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- Never let it be said that the internet has not brought literacy to a generation blighted by MTV and progressive schooling. As if to prove my literary worth I now present:What I read on my holidays, by Rufus Cartwright, aged 26 and 3/4The Book of Eels Tom FortThis book is an extremely engaging work of popular science, exploring the history of eels. I have long been fascinated by the fact that all eels are born in the Sargasso Sea, and This book really digs into the history of how that was discov ... |
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- Never let it be said that the internet has not brought literacy to a generation blighted by MTV and progressive schooling. As if to prove my literary worth I now present:What I read on my holidays, by Rufus Cartwright, aged 26 and 3/4The Book of Eels Tom FortThis book is an extremely engaging work of popular science, exploring the history of eels. I have long been fascinated by the fact that all eels are born in the Sargasso Sea, and This book really digs into the history of how that was discov ... |
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- Thomas left this morning around 1am - the last time I will see him on my break in Denver. He is so funny - always starts sitting far away from me and then gets closer and closer before he wants to go to the bedroom. I stayed in bed today until around noon, just reading "Search for Pope Joan." Really, really poor scholarship - but hey, it has enough to keep my interest for a bit. I also continued studying for the GRE. |
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- www.romanvenable.net: Weblog www. romanvenable. |
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- We went to see The Return of the Kings...only thing being said by me right now is that it was good. We then went to dinner afterwards and had a wonderful server. She was so nice. I hate onions and did not see that what Master ordered me had onions. |
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- We went to see The Return of the Kings...only thing being said by me right now is that it was good. We then went to dinner afterwards and had a wonderful server. She was so nice. I hate onions and did not see that what Master ordered me had onions. |
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- What was the best thing which happened to you personally in 2003?My baby boy Storm Alexander was born 7/18.Drew Curtis, FarkProbably the birth of my niece, Victoria, in May. She's the first offspring of me and my siblings, and I was overwhelmed by the experience of seeing this brand-new person whom I just knew, in some deep-down visceral way, belonged to me, was a little bit a part of me. I never expected anything like that. |
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- But yeah, the dinner was good and Joe embarrassed Ian and me (but mostly me) at the pool table. I got warm socks, emo hoodies, the first season of Highlander and as many copies of Finding Nemo as I have hands. Mom was at least a little taken in by our we-got-you-DVDs, what-you-don't-have-a-DVD-play oh-well-you-get-this-present-t gag, and that was good. In grand Brendanian tradition, I forced Blankets on Ian and Daredevil: Yellow on Caitlan, things with which they seemed cool. |
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- While home for the holidays, Dad handed me a copy of a book inscribed to him by one of his former medical students: The Muse Asylum by David Czuchlewski. I started and finished it that same evening: An engaging, deftly written first novel that—being about people recently out of college finding their footing— |
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- Hey neat, I have something in common with James Marsters. |
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- تمام وسايلی که روزانه در تهران و شهرهای ديگه به بم ارسال میشه احتمالاً مايحتاج يک روز اين شهر ويران را هم کفاف نمیده. به اين مردم فلاکت زده هر چه در توان داريد کمک کنيد. به خودتان کمک کنيد. بعداً میتونيد اگر خواستيد حسابهايتان را با هر که دوست داريد تصفيه کنيد. فعلاً مردم بم به اين وسايل بيشتر از هر چيز احتياج دارند: |
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