Dropsafe

Farnborough Air Show [farnborough.janes.com] [www.farnborough.com] is upon us once more, and the window by my office desk is populated by dogfighting aircraft and demonstrations of technique that scare the pants off you…

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Apparently it’s too dangerous for politicians to remain in parliament without Big Ben being exploded to fall on top of them. Apparently (irony abounds) the current concrete defenses could act as “dangerous missiles” if they get blown up. No shit, Sherlock? The expensive solution: put up steel barriers that will destroy the look of the…

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So this photography student in Seattle is out taking pictures of local landmarks, when… The police officer had failed to rebut my arguments, but he was definitely being a lot nicer now (which was quite welcome). He’d been explaining how the SPD are required to investigate all calls, which I said I understood, but I…

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Read [www.livejournal.com] – I can’t decide whether I consider this a point in his favour, or not. On the whole I suspect that I do consider it a point in his favour, but my estimation of him as a man is so low that standing on top of any sort of ladder will not suffice…

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expensive day: eyetest done (fix the left axial misplacement on my left lens, glaucoma and retina check, grill the optomotrist, the works) and new glasses (polycarb rimless) and sunglasses (bikeproof black rims with rayban-green lenses) on order, six new business/casual shirts, new vests, four new belts, two pairs cufflinks, other oddments, some basic groceries, and…

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Hmmm… A pair of Indiana-based Americans visit me, and Reagan dies. Another Indiana-based American visits me, and Brando dies. Is this a curse? Indiana versus old actors?

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…and so the security-geek’s event correlation thread kicks in once more; over the last three weeks I have seen two separate old Tears For Fears get playtime on various of the music channels on TV, as well as a rerun of a Top of the Pops appearance doing Mad World. “Aha!”, sez I, “this behooves…

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After four nights of visitors the house needs a cleanup, the garden needs a flamethrower and weird booze abounds such that I don’t know what to do with it. Well, that’s a lie. “Drink it” is probably a good start. Valerie was astonished – nay, horrified – that I had never before encountered something called…

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It’s been evident to me for some time that my iBook is caching the WEP Key for my home network, elsewhere than in my KeyChain; indeed my keychain can even be locked and yet my iBook will merrily reconnect to my home network when I get back frmo a day at the office. Does anyone…

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…and so do I; after having a 20 minute introduction to it c/o Darren Moffat midweek, I am positively enthused about DTrace. The Register article [www.theregister.co.uk] suffers from having to explain DTrace to ordinary people; for Unix geeks it is probably fastest to say: It’s the bastard offspring of an unholy three-way union between your…

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This is not what you think it is. Well, strictly that’s not correct – it’s about precisely what you think it is; just that it’s not. It’s a hilarious 17 minute FoxSearchlight short that demonstrates above all else that some Americans really do understand irony. Finally. Also: when in doubt, hit the power switch. [www.foxsearchlight.com]…

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Welcome to Bush Is Lord. [bushislord.com] open-source interface for ISBN retrieval [www.isbn.org.uk] Many online booksellers provide an ISBN lookup service, but the bibliographic information on the results page is mixed in with the graphics, text and code required to provide for the sale of the book. Some companies provide access to the raw ISBN data…

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