Category Archives: Uncategorized

OK, here’s how to make the greatest cheese and ham toasted sandwich known to man. Start by gently toasting two slices of bread in the toaster. These need to be just slightly browned. Add a mound of grated cheese to each slice, and place under the grill. Make sure to spread the cheese right to […]

It occurred to me that the strains of the average US voice sound very similar to a mewing cat. Cats make noise when they need something. What do Americans need? It can’t be food, they’re all obese. Perhaps it’s a cry for attention? Blimey, maybe I should start writing for the Independent tomorrow.

I enjoy films. I quite like ones which other people would hate. I really enjoyed “Sin City.” Some people would say it was sickening, wrong, violent, barbaric, or any of a whole host of appropiate adjectives. I might say it was escapism or fantasy. I wonder if there’s any significance that these are nouns. I […]

YouGov peace and conflict survey As part of our efforts to raise awareness about the UN International Day of Peace (21 September), International Alert commissioned a YouGov survey to discover the British public’s knowledge and awareness of peace and conflict today. The survey was conducted in August 2006 and the results were grim: nearly three-quarters […]

Here’s a thought for the day – Swindon Surprise Maximus is rubbish. Almost as bad as the place.For a picture, click here (scroll down and click the “go” button). The Cambridge overwork messes up the coursing order above the treble, and the underwork doesn’t do much. The only music off the front is the odd […]

I’ve been on holiday. It was great. We stayed in a cottage in the middle of angulsea. I thihought it was really fun. And the log fire was tremenddous. Holidays appeal to my inner child somehow. Although the log fire was rather good fun. Except when it stubbornly refused to catch fire. Every time my […]

This is ridiculous. Read the whole thing. In the media there have been many reports of an Israeli attack on a pair of Lebanese ambulances. The above article very successfully debunks the whole thing. Could it be that the entire incident is a fabrication? All signs point to “Yes.” If so, the implications are enormous, […]

I once said to a friend that I thought Sony was on the way out. When he challenged this statement, I found myself lacking any real arguments, just waving my hands and talking about Microsoft and Nintendo and some other random factors. Luckily, there is this thing called the internet, and I no longer have […]

Here’s a controversial thought for a sunny afternoon. George Bush is not a chimp. Not an idiot. Not an imbecile. But rather a reasonably intelligent, quite well-educated chap. So let’s start from the beginning: President Bush was born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, and grew up in Midland and Houston, Texas. He […]

Here at the Consumerist is a great post. It’s a recording of a guy’s attempts to cancel his AOL account. Listen to the whole thing, it’s great. One of the best moments is when the AOL call centre operator asks to speak to the caller’s father, despite the account and credit card being in his […]

It’s nice to know that even Wikipedia suffers from argument. Perhaps a year down the line we’ll remember the overriding feature of the web 2.0 world was the tendency for flame wars and arguments. Read all about it here.

David Aaronovitch, writing in the Times, makes some good points about the Afghan war. As I read Christina Lamb’s extraordinary account in The Sunday Times of being ambushed in Helmand my thought was not “too much”, but “not enough”. More helicopters, if they’re needed. More of everything, if that’s required. We should be doing it […]

1. Lesbian, a distribution of GNU/Linux2. Heatseek, a browser designed for looking at porn. Mind you, the internet is for porn.

Recently I did a project on Image Compression. One of our test images was a picture of a woman’s head. This picture. We joked a little that this must be a particularly male subject to study, since it’d be hard to justify using a picture of a woman if there were lots of female students […]

I’ve been reading some fiction books for a change. It’s quite exciting. I read the following tomes: 1984 – George Orwell (full text online)Brave New World – Aldous Huxley I was struck by the different techniques used to control the population in each book, and, in particular, the different attitudes of each author towards sexual […]

I’ve not updated properly for a while, but this kicked me into action. It references a post by Asa Dotzler with the exciting title “microsoft security manager calls users stupid.” A couple of months ago, Mike Danseglio, the Program Manager for the Security Solutions group at Microsoft blamed users for the Windows security nightmare, saying […]

The new MS Office Ribbon is reviewed here, one of the best descriptions I’ve seen.

Here’s an interesting theory. Although opinions vary on the reliability of browser market share figures, a quick scan through all the data reveals one interesting commonality across all the data sources: IE6 market share peaked at around 95 percent sometime in mid-2004. If 95% of the world is browsing with IE 6, pursuing browser independence […]

Peer-review is the process by which scientific papers get to be published. The papers are first reviewed by a group of “peers.” There’s usually three of them, and they’ll be experts in the relevant field. Thus the nonsense is weeded out, and only papers deemed worthy enough will be published. Nature, however, have got bored […]

Who said this: Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, […]