Dropsafe

I went to the Castaway Theatre Company’s production of Treasure Island this weekend, visiting Jim and Catrin and ran into old friends Alan (notorious author of AberMUD and the ZX-Spectrum game “Blizzard Pass“) and his wife Telsa; Alan had a new toy, a Nokia 770 which I can only describe as a mini-terminal-tablet-web-browser-PDA-thingy which has…

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I was safe in Wales, but my friend Steve was 40 miles away in Oxford: It was 6:02am this morning. I was awoken by the rattling of my house’s roof tiles and the creaking of the roof timbers. My immediate reaction was “That was a shock wave!” I knew that it had to be quite…

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Amusing: [www.signal15.com] So, I’m in Milwaukee at ye olde Holiday Inn Express. They have a wireless internet connection here and it’s been suckin’ all night, like I couldn’t even do anything on it. I suspected someone running a p2p program and taking up all of the bandwidth, so I fired up ntop to analyze the…

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Driving back from Droitwich this evening, along the A417/A419, the road rose up from the fog-laden M5 and the fog broke just as I drove past the Air-Balloon Pub, near Birdlip; the sun was just setting and there’s a beautiful vantage point looking down over the county, and I surprised myself by having the wit…

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I’m just back from Aberystwyth – more on that later – and whilst popped into a store I heard a very familiar track on the radio… Apparently Nizlopi’s JCB Song is tipped as a possible #1 Christmas single, and gets released in the shops tomorrow. If you’ve not seen the animation yet, here’s the direct…

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The music industry is to extend its copyright war by taking legal action against websites offering unlicensed song scores and lyrics. The Music Publishers’ Association (MPA), which represents US sheet music companies, will launch its first campaign against such sites in 2006. MPA president Lauren Keiser said he wanted site owners to be jailed. He…

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Really, how does this sort of thing help the world at large? [www.christianvoice.org.uk] What is Islam? Politicians, the police and Islamic leaders have portrayed it as a religion of peace in which terrorism is an aberration. Multi-faith diehards insist that it is one of many paths to salvation, or that the Allah of Islam and…

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As reported and promised back in September Stan Freberg’s excellent and faintly nostalgic standup set is available for listening this week at [www.bbc.co.uk]

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A 3rd-form British Schoolroom in 1980: Dominic Byatt: (distraught, age 13+) “It’s terrible! John Lennon’s been shot! He’s dead!” Alec Muffett: (age 12½) “Who?” Really, it’s true. At that age I had no concept of Lennon outside of the Beatles, and frankly I still don’t. I find “Imagine” to be a tedious song, not least…

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Those three letters that you see so often on zips: Mr. Yoshida called his philosophy the Cycle of Goodness. It means that “No one prospers unless he renders benefit to others”. According to his philosophy, Mr. Yoshida believed he must manufacture only useful, high quality zippers that would benefit, or enhance, the end-use goods in…

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The BBC view of The Daily Show: Politicians in the US are desperate to be on the satirical programme called ‘The Daily Show’ because it has solved the problem of getting younger voters to tune in. Audio: [www.bbc.co.uk] Linked from: [www.bbc.co.uk]

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