Dropsafe

I sometimes wonder whether Stephen Fry thinks he’s the reincarnation of Oscar: [news.bbc.co.uk] Whether or not the CIA considered that an option, Stephen Fry demonstrated another potential weapon of mass destruction. When asked whether he had any sharp objects at Heathrow airport, he replied: “Only my tongue, sir.” …with many other quotes of light amusement…

Well I have at least three current/former colleagues from Sri Lanka, one of whom has heavy ties with the local fishing industry. I also have friends and colleagues living in / visiting the area. My thoughts are with them. Reports are not good, the BBC is all over it this morning, having made not much…

Whilst my iBook is being repaired, I have the opportunity to try out a 15″, 867MHz G4 Powerbook as a interim machine. In almost every way it is nicer, other than (1) formfactor convenience – which, let’s be honest, is the point of the 15″ so it’s a bit churlish to complain about it –…

Wishing you all a Happy Kwanzaa and a prosperous Newtonmas, and my hopes that in 2005 George W Bush gets impeached the world becomes a safer, happier place. – alec

Planning for the next motorbike tour is still in progress; fruits of my research are outlined for review below. The general plan is to pelt up to Nordkapp as quickly as possible, dawdle back along the Norwegian coastline, and then use Denmark and Germany to get rapidly to Switzerland and thence France, do the Alps…

Cynthia’s now ridden from the New Forest in Hampshire, to Angkor Wat at Siem Reap in Cambodia. She posted this e-mail to her maillist: Miles ridden: 10,315 Miles actually travelled: the above plus around 18 hours flying and 72 hours on ships. Number of countries: 15 Number of days: 110 Favourite country: Laos Worst day:…

I drove through the gloom to SPC Motorcycles in Alton on Friday night, to see Charley Boorman talking about Long Way Round; it was a good evening which (given the turnout) made £2200-ish for charities, local and national. A few bullet-points from the evening: His next project appears to involve doing the Dakar rally with…

The Economist Christmas Issue is now out. If anyone ever wants explanation as to why there is usually an ever-increasing pile of issues of this magazine in my house, this is the annual opportunity for you to find out.

The box arrived via UPS on Wednesday afternoon. It’ll go off for repair today. More updates as events warrant…

As I have posted before, there are Referrer Spammers around nowadays, the idea to pollute Blog referrer-logs with URLs that some third-party wants to advertise, in the hope of bumping the latter’s pagerank in Google, etc. I don’t publish my referrer logs, so this information gets black-holed from the point of the spammer; they are,…

To quote [www.guardian.co.uk] :- Just outside Crossgates on the A44 is a large notice which proclaims: “Llandegley International Airport, 2.5 miles”. However, at Llandegley there are only low mountains and lightly wooded hills, among which it would be difficult to land even a light aircraft. Does anyone have an explanation? AG Price, Oldbury, Midlands. I’ve…

Regarding my previous posting, here’s a the exchange that went down last night, edited for HTML and to remove excessive inclusion of old text. For some reason, the word arbitrary is stuck in my head, but I can’t fault the speed of their (admittedly faintly impersonal-feeling) response, or their apparent willingness to accomodate my (erm)…