Dropsafe

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

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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

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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?

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…in a crumbly old books sort of way; a list of occupations as seen by insurance brokers, and how much risk is associated with each. article: [secretplans.org] image directory: [secretplans.org] I have a small interest in something similar [www.dtc.umn.edu] [home.ca.inter.net] [homepage.usask.ca] so I may be predisposed to liking this sort of thing.

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this is just too much weird fun; a bit like conway’s game of life meets a terry gilliam cartoon. http://www.lycettebros.com/automata/auto.htm

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I saw my friend Chris [www.csamuel.org] and his wife Donna [www.donnawilliams.net] weekend before last; stopping Chez-Muffett for breakfast off the flight from Chicago, I served them a breakfast of grilled lamb chump steaks, bacon, mushrooms, and well… an enormous mixed-grill basically. Chris looks fantastic, having dropped 2 Stone / 12Kg and dumped a whole pile

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So, up in Preston I ran into Paul (otherwise known as Gun-Mad Paul, since there were many Pauls in Aberystwyth and therefore modifying local custom people became widely known by nicknames: Gun-Mad Paul, Strange-Behaving Dave, Blue-Haired Elaine, and so forth) – who aside from having an encyclopaedic knowledge of firearms is also a toxicologist, and

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what worm threat? [news.bbc.co.uk]

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So: the DRZ and I did a brief round-trip of England this weekend, to attend the baptism of Alexandra Grace Palmer, the newly minted daughter of friends for whom I had the honour of serving as best man back in – what – 1999? Setting out on Saturday at 1030 I was already late for

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everything you non-brits need to know about clapham junction – [en.wikipedia.org] – and remember: the h is almost silent / unvoiced.

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I went to Infosecurity 2004 last week, with my colleagues, Gilles Gravier and Tim Graves – basically to see what’s what in the wider world of security. Tim and I’d barely set foot inside the door before being accosted by a lady from Microsoft, asking us whether we would find the bundling of a firewall-by-default

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for anyone wondering what the previously-cited bird is, in the picture at [www.crypticide.com] – it is a Nuthatch, a tree-dwelling, woodpecker-like, native British bird, although not a true woodpecker. It has unusual and heavily-clawed feet, permitting it to climb both vertically up and down tree trunks, in search of food, bugs, etc. Update: Nice link:

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