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.