• SCO and Defacement

    That the defacement has occured is old news. That it appears (to me, via my browser, at the time of writing ie: 1839h today) still extant more than six-and-a-half-hours after hitting the front page of [www.theregister.co.uk] – to me, this does not bode well for the company. I personally feel that such operational slackness may…

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  • ooh! ooh! cillit bang in all its glory!

    Someone has put the advert up for viewing at [www.geocities.com]; alas the really poor dubbing of the original advert is much less evident after video compression. My readers from across the pond probably won’t see what is so funny about this, but the joke is that (from a UK television vantagepoint) it is so qualitatively…

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  • After Cillit Bang…

    After Cillit Bang, comes Oxiclean Kaboom! from (it seems) an entirely other manufacturer. Is this a new naming fad? Should we rename Solaris to be Sun Microsystems Zot! or similar?

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  • The Effect of Country Music on Suicide

    Amusing: [www.questia.com] Abstract This article assesses the link between country music and metropolitan suicide rates. Country music is hypothesized to nurture a suicidal mood through its concerns with problems common in the suicidal population, such as marital discord, alcohol abuse, and alienation from work. The results of a multiple regression analysis of 49 metropolitan areas…

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  • some meaningless statistics

    distance travelled: 107 miles start time: 0733 end time: 0910 elapsed time: 97 minutes average speed: 66.2 MPH Not bad.

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  • Arabic Translation: Update

    Regarding a previous posting, I have this from Tad (Hello Tad!) via Gene: Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 13:26:35 -0800 From: Tad Davis <tad@bbbbbbbb.com> To: Gene Saunders <gtsaunders@aaaaaaaa.com> Subject: Re: Arabic translation It’s likely a flirtatious note for the female customers who come along and glance at the scribblings: حابيبي habibi (my love) appears four…

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  • Fountain Pen Information

    A friend of mine who neither blogs nor particularly reads blogs unless prompted, provided the following advice over a couple of e-mails; I thought it may be of interest to some other people. She writes: True confession time: I own dozens of fountain pens. I have them declared on my insurance, in fact. I have…

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  • Pen Category

    Well this seems to be an interesting topic, so I have added a new category; for indexing purposes, here are the links to the original articles. [www.crypticide.com] [www.crypticide.com]

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  • Trains, Pens, Arabic and Germans…

    Well, I’m writing this on a train at Waterloo, waiting for the pull-away homewards after a long day in London; the afternoon has been filled with a rather exciting customer gig that involved 90 minutes travel to the office, 30 minutes of e-mail, 2 hours of meeting and 2 hours of debrief and planning –…

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  • British Pharmacopoeia

    This is one of those books which every Briton knows exists – being the BP that is suffixed to the name of prettymuch every generic medical compound sold in the UK… …but the funny thing is that I never looked it up before, and bizzarely [www.amazon.co.uk] doesn’t list it; the American site does: [www.amazon.com] British…

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  • in minor news…

    Suzi (the cat) is walking around looking like she’s been in a duel, or a very small knife fight – two diagonal slashes across her nose, from a scrap with another cat. Deep, but being tended and healing. The BMW is now up to 840 miles, and loosening up nicely; over the weekend I did…

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  • Bray on PodPVR

    Tim writes: [www.tbray.org] Would it be an oversimplification to say that Podcasting could turn the Net into a great big PVR? …to which I say, “yes”. As oversimplifications go, I suspect that is one. In the UK, we’d possibly also call it a “pseud”. In respect of the proposition: you can’t always find what you’re…

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