Life Less Literary

Christmas, holiday, no time for computer.

Music: Ronald Shannon Jackson, God and The Cardiacs.

See you all soon!

Heh heh. I’m now an Amazon associate! If this earns me enough gift certificates to buy all the Edward R. Tufte books by next Christmas then I’ll be a very happy man

(also courtesy of NTK)

Some great (kazoo) music, no, really! Check out Zooloop and Zoodub; and The Little Spanish Fleabox is a nice version of the music on (theme 1 of) Entropy8Zuper’s site for Fractal.

Yatta! Hahahahahaha

Had a… slightly tipsy… slightly queasy… night at Century with Mark & Gordon. Mitch turned up later as well.

And then… strange, interrupted sleep. Woke up early but tried to sleep on, and got involved in the most realistic and compelling dreams. And… I woke up from the dream. But it turned out I had woken into another dream. Then I woke from that. And then from that. In the end, I had woken up so many times that I was completely disorientated. How was I to know that the two women outside on a ladder cleaning my window weren’t real. And when they came into my bedroom and sat down for their tea-break, and wouldn’t leave despite my protestations that I had to get up (”where we gonna ‘ave our tea-break then, eh?”)… I couldn’t have know that it was another bedroom that existed only in my head. I was amazed when I finally did wake up to realise that none of the previous wakenings had been genuine, and only now, finally, after 2-hours of repeated awakenings, was I finally in the “real” world.

When I walked into the living room at 6am, that moon was the first thing I saw again.

Some fascinating peeks at history in the making, as well probably more bytes of crap than there are atoms in the universe, at Google’s new 20 year usenet archive. 20 years doesn’t feel like a long time, but some of this stuff… first mention of the IBM-PC anyone… just seems, well, from another world. But then when we hit 1994 it all seems like yesterday (albeit a yesterday that I lived several houses and a couple of PCs ago with a much slower internet connection running under DOS and occasionally, when I could figure out the TCP/IP stacks, Windows 3.1). Gawd, the Green Card spam. That was a story which went round and around for ages. Seems such small fry now.

Next thing, of course, is to look out all my old posts - much tech-heavier than I seem to remember at the time, although one or two from the Demon newsgroups have resurfaced including my favourite ever flame and my very enjoyable argument with Demon’s Malcolm Muir, who I later found to be lying on all counts (Demon was sold to Scottish Telecom a few weeks later, and I subsequently met someone who had worked at Demon at the time and confirmed the “server crash” collapsing floor story).

(apologies to Guy for lifting this from my email to him)

S’funny, while I was lying awake this morning, I had a 7-year old Caustic
song, which I’d previously almost forgotten, going around my head, and
despite the occasional clumsiness of Arthur’s snarly-mumbled lyrics it
perfectly sums up my feelings about England on a day like today “feels warm
against the cold”…. “our smiles as short as winter’s long”.
Here it is
(sorry about crap quality, it’s
the only version I have digitzed, and I can’t be bothered hooking up the
tape player to make it into an MP3)

‘Nother gorgeous Flash site: http://www.fakepilot.com/

wow - just noticed the perfect crescent moon in the dawn sky, just through the window next to me