Dropsafe

One of my neighbours is a British-Bike aficionado – having ridden most of them since 1950 – and a book from his library surprised me by saying that not merely was the original horizontally-opposed boxer motorbike engine a British design, but it also suggested that the design’s greatest modern exponent – BMW – licensed its…

[news.com.au] Rumsfeld bans camera phones From correspondents in London May 23, 2004 MOBILE phones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in US army installations in Iraq on orders from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, The Business newspaper reported today. Quoting a Pentagon source, the paper said the US Defence Department believes that some of the…

[www.salon.com] May 25, 2004 […] my attention wandered to the film’s soundtrack, the last resort of the jaded and popcorn-less. Soon, from the score’s generic, thundering drums and sawing strings arose a lone female voice chanting in a nameless tongue, pouring out her melodious lament like a widow over a fresh grave. If “Troy” were…

Does Solaris 9 still include drivers for SCSI half-inch tape drives of the 6250cpi vacuum-fed variety? I know I should go look this up but I am rather bogged down at the moment…

[zdnet.com.com] Microsoft has launched an effort to produce a version of Windows for high-performance computing, a move seen as a direct attack on a Linux stronghold. High-performance computing once required massive, expensive, exotic machines from companies such as Cray, but the field is being remade by the arrival of clusters of low-end machines. While the…

Somehow I cannot envision this ever working in the UK; there are too many petty-minded folk over here. [blogs.motorbiker.org] In one of the busiest shopping streets, boulevard Haussman (where the Galeria Lafayette is located), some 50 motorcycles arrived at 8 o’clock in the morning and took up all car parking spaces on the roads. Half…

so, shortly before going on vacation my ibook video went on the fritz again – sporadic flashyness, shimmering-waves of grey and occasionally absolute deadness – so i phoned applecare for the second time in two weeks, fought my way through the inane frontline of call management people, and had a box delivered for service. called…

Having seen Dan Lacher’s posting about coffee, just as an aside I have used the following technique [www.sweetmarias.com] to roast green coffee beans (using a £15 / $20 hot air popcorn popper) at home; the results are variable, but improve with practice and it is good fun so long as you do it outdoors. 😎

memories: the hyper-enthusiastic b&b owner in canterbury. canterbury cathedral at night the last post at ypres lobsters and oysters in honfleur the bayeux tapestry the german gun battery apple sorbet the vietnamese history channel filmcrew omaha beach for hours and hours and hours the exceptionally cute redhead the laundry incident velcro, bungees and burping your…

ha bloody ha. [news.bbc.co.uk]

well, i am back. 1700 miles through france and belgium on my dr-z400s with a homemade luggage rack. and i am intact. canterbury, ypres, honfleur, port-en-bessin-huppain, vierville-sur-mer, vierville-sur-mer, paris, paris, reims, reims, leuven, home. more later, when i have recovered and fixed the leak with my washing machine; images which – in reverse chronologcal order…

Am I the only person who receives weekly invitations to present at various IT-related conferences around the world, the suggestion being that I pay the sender lots of money for the privilege of doing so? Are these mundane spam that everyone else also gets, or am I trancendentally standing upon some higher plane of spam?