I’ve hinted in prior blogs about being an avid reader (and subscriber) of the great British magazine, Viz.
One of the things that appeals most to me is the outright stupidity inherent in a lot of the material in it.  The “Top Tips” is always a favourite, however I’m a massive fan of “Letterbocks”.  It’s never clear whether any of the letters written in are real reader submissions, whether it’s all stuff dreamt up in Viz Towers, or a combination of both.  What I definitely love though is the sheer arse-wittedness …

My mathematics career (if you could even loosely call it that) was never likely to be stellar, I’m afraid.  I muddled along OK for a while, taking in probability & basic calculus** pretty well, as well as imaginary numbers & matrix transformations.  It got a little bit thicker in amongst trigonometric calculus, but I managed to hang on for long enough to get into uni – amid the endless cries of “But we’re never going to ACTUALLY USE this, are we?” from many of my contemporaries.  Once at university I …

For some reason I was recently alerted to a new word for my vocabulary.  Ordinarily this is an opportunity to be relished, and customarily this initiates an intesne but short-lived campaign for me to try to work my newfound linguistic extension into the earliest possible conversational window it will fit into.  Unfortunately options for this word are more restricted than some others.  The word in question (and please don’t ask who I was talking to or how this came up, because I genuinely don’t remember) is “feague“.  Wikipedia cites a …

On Saturday afternoon (about a month ago now) when Housemate James & I returned from our mission to Essex, we got into Liverpool Street Station and thought, “We’re in no particular hurry – lets wander about and have a look at some of the buildings in The City, for a change”.  So we did.  It’s not a part of London I get into very often, and being that of a weekend the place is pretty much deserted it’s not altogether unpleasant, either.  Though you could tell it’s a place where …

In a followup to my story on keyboard/hand hygiene, I’ve been noting with growing concern the state of my office keyboard, and idly musing to myself “Hmm, I must do something about that”.  As with many office drones in this day and age, my Lunch Hour typically consists of running downstairs to the nearest sandwich bar, grabbing a coffee & something, then bringing it back to my desk to devour at my keyboard whilst jamming as much websurfing into the remaining part of the half-hour I allow myself (on the …

(Apologies in advance: this post largely concerns the Microsoft Songsmith meme, which I’ve only just found out about and am emailing at 1:03am because it seemed more important than sleep.  If you’ve heard it all before then feel free to ignore this and carry on with your life.)
OK, so those wacky boffins in at Microsoft Research have developed a new product called Songsmith — the idea is that you sing the melody line of your new song into your PC, and it calculates a supporting chord structure and accompaniment around …

Would you believe that our morris dancing team was asked if we were available this weekend to appear in a rap video? Good lord, even typing it makes me feel 50 years old…

In the absence of any other tangible way of measuring one’s progress through life, I thought this might be worth reporting.  Although I’m not 100% sure what prompted the Sean Connery-eqsue subject line, but letsh not focush on that, hmm?

This afternoon my Friends list on Facebook (I’m assuming that, at this point, you know what that is?) ticked over to reach 800 people, so to commemorate it I thought I’d put up a blog post.  This sort of thing’s important to note for posterity when, in 3 or 4 years’ …

As in, Twitter, the digerati-popular and equivalently lauded/derided “micro-blogging” service.  Sort of reminds me a bit of Douglas Adams‘ description of the Belcerebon people of Kakrafoon: a race whose enlightened civilisation was reduced to a gibbering wreck due to an intergalactic sentence passed on their world such that instead of being thoughtful and contemplative they instead had to talk endlessly and constantly about every miniscule thought & bit of trivia that popped into their brains.  By providing people with the ability to express themselves in a maximum format of 140 …

2 things really.
1) I didn’t think the phrase “elk-bothering stilts” should go unblogged (i.e. “Go strap on your elk-bothering stilts, and let’s go bother some elks!”)
2) the bloke in the following photo isn’t me: he’s in the USA, and his hat’s the wrong colour.