Brain hurts...

...and eyes are broken.

Noels oblige

Entertaining report on this year's Ig-Nobel awards.

Florida Election Ballot

Florida Election Ballot

What is red mercury?

As cited by John below. (Just figured out how these new titles work.)

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power

Excellent - hope this one takes off: How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power.

Homage to Gaudi splits community

Anyone else seen this interesting storefront up Muswell Hill way? Personally I'm not sure if the style makes the Catalonia - North London transfer that successfully...

Guardian Unlimited | Life | Guardian life bad science

bad science - inspired by John's dirty bomb debunking...

Laurel Canyon

Saw Laurel Canyon on vid last night. Entertaining movie - hadn't heard of it before.

Blogger templates

I've revisited some of the blog settings - there's now a title field for posts and I've enabled the new "official" blogger comments rather than the third party system that was in place.

House painters star in Tate show.

Shameless lift from the popbitch mailout. Definitely worth watching though - I deliberately avoided the drama thing last week...

Radiation bombs are a government fantasy

Last week’s BBC drama about a dirty
bomb in London has helped keep everyone
terrified about terrorism.

But a forthcoming documentary shows that
dirty bombs are actually a fantasy. The
Americans should know: the CIA tried for
years to make one, before realising that
blowing up radioactive material won't hurt
anyone. Radioactive dust disperses so
quickly you'd need to be exposed to it
for about a year before any real
damage occurred.

The documentary, The Power Of Nightmares,
shows how politicians are using fake stories
like the dirty bomb to keep people scared,
and themselves in power. It also demonstrates
that the claim that Al-Qaeda is a global,
hidden, terror network is also a myth.

So what channel is this BBC-debunking
documentary showing on? Er, BBC2.

The Power Of Nightmares. BBC2, 20th October, 9pm.

Too much US politics thinksme. Try The Adventures of Superman instead....cool adverts too....

Quite interesting perspective on fallout from Iraq war from a pretty right wing perspective. Though, like a lot of these wankers, he seems to have conveniently forgotten how up for it he was 18 months ago.

I've enabled my webserver to serve content from user directories (ie http://fitzroytuesday.homelinux.net/~mainj/test.html) - drop me a line if you want some free webspace!

This is quite good - Purple States. Shows republican/democrat vote distribution not as red and blue states but as different shades of purple. Trouble is, i'm too colourblind and can't tell with any certainty which ones were for bush and which ones for gore (it's based on last time round I think).

Cripes!

Britain's 15-year-old girls are amongst the world's
least likely to succeed. They drink more alcohol than any other
15-year-olds on the face of the globe. They are the world's third
largest dope smokers, the fourth most obese and the fifth best at
watching telly.

Makes you proud...

If America were Iraq...

70 things you might not know about Leonard Cohen

One for you Tom? Saint Clinton

How about this for completely fucking bonkers?

P2P outfit sues RIAA for copyright theft

this thing tonight - is there a guest list or something?

looks like php and mysql don't like each other out of the box (on fedora at least)...

idokorro mobile : Blackberry and Nokia SSH Telnet & Wireless Windows Administration. This is extraordinarily cool. Shame it's not free ;-)

new webserver back up online - had a few technical probs with the old platform so have moved to Redhat Fedora 2.0 running on a different machine. this new setup should be a lot more stable (fingers crossed) so should be able to start doing stuff with it this week. not sure what though...

This flikr thing looks useful...

Jings! Crivvens! Help Ma Boab! It's the Scottish Parliament website in Scots...

Had predictive text messaging explained to me last night. Amazing! Has everyone else known about this for aeons?

Why we're all doomed: Republican Voters Speak Out About Bush, Iraq War. Don't be fooled by that misleading title into thinking they're all speaking out against the war.

This seems to be the best poll website for the US elections. As with everything in that country, all of the polls and sites are highly partisan and biased, but this one seems pretty reasonable.

This looks quite interesting - Ingenious

A friend of mine runs this very good short stories website. Well worth checking out - he is almost earning enough from advertising revenues to give up his IT job.

Couple of good ones from the education guardian email newsletter - the multi-disciplinary environmental MA at Oxford, and the maths problem that would render internet encryption useless.

By the way, the reason I can't go next Tuesday is that I'm going to this IPPR Vote USA event, if anybody fancies it.

second tuesday tomorrow
However, I can't make it - going to the cinema. In fact, all of this week and next week don't look too good for me. So either go ahead without me, or can we reschedule?

How was holiday John?

One of the world's greatest unsung heroes? | Metafilter This is very interesting, never heard about this before. There's a *fantastic* Einstein quote just over half way down the thread...

GITS2

Retro vs. Metro - the Great Divide, why the retro states, representing a third of the population and standing for reactionary political values, run America instead of the more progressive, liberal metro ones.

I believe this was mentioned last time we met - House Price Crash.co.uk. (Sorry, homeowners.)

Fitzrovian Tuesdanians - do you fancy coming along to this?

How To Get Published - September 15

Colin and I have been involved in putting it together, and could do with all the support we can get. It should be a genuinely decent event, with food and drink and literary chat. You don't have to come for the whole afternoon, but the evening networking should be good.

Good economist piece on Poverty in America.

Here's some more on it: ROGUE FARM

My brother in law has animated a short film, which is being shown at the ICA on Saturday.

Interesting Metafilter thread on a familiar topic...

Webserver: progress report

Locking down security is progressing well - should be internet ready by end of the bank holiday if I can devote a few more hours to it.

Next steps will be to setup user accounts and access rights for individual users (if anyone is interested). Can then offer free webhosting plus PHP and MySQL access, and start thinking about setting up a more sophisticated blog.

Could also start thinking about acquiring a proper domain name - I reckon fitzroviantuesdays.com will come in at ~ $25 per year. This would allow me to set up a mail server on another machine for username@fitzroviantuesdays.com addresses...

Life is too short
My friend's doing the marketing for this great ormond street fundraising campaign. They hope the webpage will spread virally - but it revolves around people getting sponsored to wear jeans to work (?!?) - and most people I know can do that anyway. Most of their supporters are middle aged women, so if you know anyone suitable, please visit the page and forward on the link. Ta.

Extreme Gravity Racing Series. The Volvo entry rocks!

Webserver - next steps.

Have taken fitzroytuesday.homelinux.net offline for the time being as want to ensure the security is locked down properly.

Once I've done this the next thing will be to think of something to do with it - has anyone got some ideas?

It will be straightforward to register a proper domain name (fitzroviantuesdays.com!) to point at the machine - in fact it shouldn't be *too* difficult to have the apache server running multiple websites on multiple domain names, if anyone has any pet projects...

OK - apache webserver up and intermittently running at http://fitzroytuesday.homelinux.net/ Now I just need to work out how to add content to this thing!

wish i'd thought to scan mine...

Re-edited my links below and they seem to be working OK-ish. Anyway Claire, Jenny-Pops and myself are staying here next week. Highly exciting - never been to the Isle of Wight before...

Just created an account with DynDNS.org. Should be able to post the address of a Harringay hosted website sometime in the next couple of days (DIY permitting).

I see yahoo are getting into RSS now...

About fucking time...

I'm sure I mentioned this before, but BLOG:CMS is software for setting up your own blog site. You need PHP installed and MySQL running (as well as web server software obviously!) Only 1 Meg download....it's pretty cool.

Here's a picture of it running, and another which shows what it looks like just with a different stylesheet (or "skin").

Skye bridge tolls cause unfortunate acronym. Still the highest bridge toll in Europe, but going to be removed before the end of the year it seems...

George Bush, in his wisdom, promotes hydrogen power as an alternative to oil. Hydrogen power is non-polluting and easier than invasion!

I've still got loads of Gmail invites....anyone know anyone who wants one?

Programs that may behave differently in Windows XP Service Pack 2 . Golly there seem to be quite a lot of these...

Yes, a very good Fitzrovian evening.

Here's a link to a paper on Mindfulness in plain English which is well worth reading.

Ah yes, the five tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and 'umami', coined by the Japanese inventor of monosodium glutamate.

Also, Kobe beef, produced by feeding cows beer and giving them sake massages.

Good to get the Fitzroy sessions back on track yesterday. Topics to follow up: John's mindful buddhist conversion, hydrogen power, flavourless tea, Skye bridge, er... memory not serving me well this morning, like John and his pin number.

Talking of tea, I take it you've all seen nice cup of tea and a sit down?

Mobile blogging via blackberry - I'm on the top deck of a no. 38, just going past the ritz...

Proof of concept mobile blogging from my blackberry. I'm writing this on the top deck of a 38...

Oh dear - ThankYouTony.com.

Pub II

OK - suggest next Tuesday (17th) in the Princess Louise (just near Holborn Tube) from 7pm. Who's with me?

Most Scots believe life is sweeter south of the Border

I liked Where Are You Now, When We Need You Most, Rage Against The Machine? And Jim Anchower is always good.

Good one in this week's Onion: Kerry Unveils One-Point Plan For Better America (ie, the removal of George Bush).

I also liked 'US Military Clears A-Team of All Charges' - after 30 years on the run.

Pub

Anyone up for a Fitzroy gathering at some stage? Been a while now...

Peer-to-peer networks carry surprising cargo - ZDNet UK News

The Daily Mail Watch - watching them : watching us

Monbiot in Grauniad today, slagging off climate change deniers like David Bellamy. Also inlcudes this interesting take on modern prosperity - "A recent study by the New Economics Foundation suggests that the costs of crime have risen by 13 times in the past 50 years, and the costs of family breakdown fourfold. The money we spend on such disasters is included in the official measure of human happiness: gross domestic product. Extract these costs and you discover, the study says, that our quality of life peaked in 1976. "

Lastminute.com to axe 350 jobs. "Lastminute chairman Allan Leighton said the company, in common with other travel operators, had been affected by a growing tendency for consumers to book their holidays later than usual." Eh? wasn't that supposed to be the whole point?

Richard Herring is performing at the "Pod Deco" in Edinburgh. The Pod Deco is the old Odeon on South Clerk Street. I always feel a bit wistful for Edinburgh at this time of year.

Further to the webserver project, I tried installing Suse10 on a 500MHz Celeron Sony Vaio with 64MB RAM and the YAST installer tool reported not enough memory! Bah. It did give the option of enabling swap space but I couldn't work out how to make it run fdisk (or similar) to set a swap partition.

Am going to try again with Gentoo 20004.2... Does this sound sensible or is there a better distro for low end machines (Seumas)?

I've just rediscoverd the The Postmodernism Generator, after reading about it last night in Francis Wheen's mumbo jumbo book. It generates entire essays, complete with footnotes, author etc.

A couple of cultural items, plus a possible project...

First off, "Hear my Name" by Armand Van Helden. Absolutely superb house track. The video is quite good as well.

I've been playing a downloadable game thingy while on the bus which I can reccomend - Ancient Empires by Macrospace. Very similar to the legendary Advance Wars.

On the project front, I've realised that my broadband router supports Dynamic DNS which means that I will be able to host an (internet visible) webserver. To this end I'm looking at setting up a low end end machine running linux and apache. Not sure when I'll get round to doing this but once its in place it could be a new home for Fitzrovian Tuesdays (fitzroviantuesdays.com anyone?)

2nd Tuesday...

is next week. Anyone up for Fitzroy-ing?

I have just returned from here and here. It were great.

I haven't got anything new or important to say other than fucking hell I hate George Bush even more than I did a week ago.

End of the Routemaster

Wind farms etc...

Just got a flyer for this through my letterbox this morning. Not sure what to do as it is beginning to look like the whole windfarm thing is a bit of a racket, really. They do look nice though.

William Shatner sings Pulp's Common People. Or speaks it anyway.

Lookout V1.2. This is quite good. Much better than Outlook 2003's woeful search facility anyway...

I'd like to think this is true:

'NEWSWEEK reports that President Bush, appearing before a right-to-life rally in Tampa, Florida, on June 17,'04, stated: "We must always remember that all human beings begin life as a feces. A Feces is a living being in the eyes of God, who has endowed that feces with all of the rights and God- given blessings of any other human being." The audience listened in disbelief as the President repeated his error at least a dozen times, before realizing that he had used the word 'feces" when he meant to say "fetus."  '

NTK's pedantic webpage mistake feature now has a website: Doh - Broken web pages, but in a funny way

 
One think always puzzled me about Stephen Hawking Is he a genius whose work will go down in history (e.g. like Bohr, Heisinger, Einsten, Schroeder etc) or is he just one of a thousand or so leading contemporary theoretical physicists who happens to go round in a wheel chair?

419 scammer operates out of Edinburgh scheme.

Hopefully going to get the OK to donate a load of our (ie my work's) older kit to these guys. All seems very worthwhile - and they promote open source!

This appears to be real - Powell goes disco for Asean forum

My brother got me Mario Golf Toadstool Tour for my birthday. It rocks...

child pimp and ho costumes for sale. That's the nephews' birthdays sorted, then...

Cassini-Huygens: Multimedia-Images-Latest Images

BHODemon 2.0 Useful if you still have to use IE....

Oxfam - Conflict Campaign

Wild parrots settle in suburbs

This is first tuesday today, right? We're not due to meet until next week?

Hubble discovers 100 new planets

How cool is this? I'm amazed it's not bigger news as the implications are pretty stupendous ie "The discovery will lend support to the idea that almost every sunlike star in our galaxy, and probably the Universe, is accompanied by planets."