<insert crazy ramblings here>

Sugar Reef bar has a January sale on, with 50% off food and drink (after 7:30, if you bring a voucher, one per customer per evening).

So I was a little surprised when one of the people we went with was late, as he'd stopped for a burger. I wasn't surprised when my (burnt) chicken burger turned up an hour and a half after I'd ordered it. Without the bacon and cheese.

Small wonder it was half deserted.

I've not managed to keep up with the meagre new year's resolution of a drawing a week for two weeks. But I have been creative. I've learned to knit, and done one doodle. And what the heck, I'll include a meme too.
( Doodle for event )
( Onion Scarf )
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know any male knitters. We came up with a theory that men find perling easier than knitting. It's 100% true (Based on a sample size 2).
( Band Meme )

Seems everytime I want to upload a photo Zooomr's not available. I join the exodus, but can't be fussed. So photobucket will do as a quick holder.

Just spotted a really useful clipboard feature in the text editor I use.

I supports: Cut, Copy, Paste, and Swap.

Swap the highlighted text with the clipboard text. Genius!

--

What would Richard Feynman do?

“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing…”

“The gravitational force is weak,” he said at one conference, introducing his work on quantizing gravity. “In fact, it’s *damned* weak.” At that instant a loudspeaker demonically broke loose from the ceiling and crashed to the floor. Feynman barely hesitated: “Weak — but not negligible.”

Seen at Bad Science.

The two biographies about him are great. Essentially a series of anecdotes about him, told by one his mates.

--

The XO is the "lowest power laptop ever made, its the greenest laptop ever-made, it's the only sunlight readable laptop on the market, it's more rugged than a Toughbook, it's in the Museum of Modern Art for it's look ... 15 times lower [in power consumption] than any other laptop on the market. The Mesh networking extends the reach of a single access point as the wifi signals can hop from laptop to laptop to reach the children living the farthest from the school. ... we can run off of solar during the day and handcrank at night for an additional $25 or so per student – this is one-time expense – the solar panel and the crank will last 10 or perhaps 20 years. ... The XO batteries last for 5 years and cost less than $10 to replace. Finally, the XO is the greenest laptop ever made.

From Groklaw's interview with the founding Chief Technology Officer of One Laptop Per Child project.

This thing sounds seriously nifty. I hope they do the Give One, Get One scheme in Europe at some point.

Woah, Joss Whedon wrote a webcomic starting in July, and I've only just heard of it!

It's a rather surreal funny SF comic following a band called Sugershock.

That's not the official site but the "Dark Horse Presents" Myspace page it's from has really crappy navigation.

There's three issues out so far, and may be more to follow.

seen via a webcomic 2007 top ten.

Cross posted to Snarkoleptics.

A new comic book shop opened in Finsbury Park about 2 months ago, right by the station, and I only just noticed.
That's probably because while I read a lot of webcomics (and by their books) I don't tend to read too many trade paperbacks. I've started getting into it and, there's three series I'm reading at the moment.

The 99 - Teshkeel Comics. Described as "the world's first superheroes based on Islamic culture and society." So far each of the issues centres around introducing one more of the cast, each of whom based on the 99 Attributes of God. It looks like it'll be an X-men style team effort. It's set in America, but so far most of the cast come from the rest of the world. All in all, it's a basic superhero team story but from a slightly different view point.

Necessary Evil - Desperado. A high school for super villains, "in the tradition of Harry Potter and Sky High". At points it feels like a lame magic high school drama: The "treasure hunt" they are sent on as their first piece of homework. However these moments are somewhat offset by the deliciously amoral moments in there: A girl who kills a teacher, in retaliation for a slapped wrist.

Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now - IDW. Basically 6 of his short stories are being turned into comics. You can read, or listen to, the stories online first. I like the stories, and the comics are going well. In particular, the layouts of "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" are great. Some clever panel sizing and ordering really helps the timing and enhances the chaos.

Grr! I've just spent about an hour and half trying to book tickets to Canada.

I was thinking about visiting some friends out there and was told today that aircanada.com had a sale on that finished today.

I visited aircanada.com, entered the flight details and got a price. I thought I should compare it, so looked a couple of other flight sites. By the time I'd come back my session had expired.

So I went back to the start and saw the section on air miles. I haven't flown transatlantic recently so I looked into that and decided I should probably get a bmi card, rather than aircanada's own one. Of course this meant the site timed out.

Back to the beginning again. And this time, when prompted, I tried to create an account on the site to save all my information, so I wouldn't have to enter it again. It wouldn't accept a UK mobile as the contact number, and I have no landline at the moment. Meanwhile, timeout.

Restarting again, I got as far as the payment section, and found that they have implimented "Visa Secure services" which means that the only way to pay is to agree to the terms and conditions of this market^h^h^h^h^h^h security exercise. I read them, clicked acknowledge, and Visa returned me to an aircanada timeout screen.

Round and round the Mulberry bush. After restarting and entering my credit card details again, and passing Visa's Security, I get taken back to aircanada page telling me that they cannot accept payment as the price has changed. It looked the same to me so I asked for assistance on the site, and some called me straight away (I'm glad the time diff is minus 5 hours). He said that the prices are all dynamic and are updated if someone else books a seat on the same flight as you. I pointed out that what with the sale the price hadn't changed. He told me to just enter my card details again, but I had been timed out.

At this point I took a brief break from aircanada. As, after entering my card details so many times I realised my card was about to expire, and I didn't have the replacement yet, so I called my card issuer. It seems they still have my old address and daft me hadn't noticed the statements not arriving (I pay the full amount by DD, and only use it rarely anyway). So I asked them cancel the card they'd sent to my old address, and send me another new one to my new address.

Back to aircanada, enter flight details, payment details. Card declined. Sigh

Back on the phone to the card issuer. It turns out that the last person I'd spoke to had changed my address on the system, cancelled my current card, and left the card sent to my old address active. Grr! They can't reactivate cards, and aircanada don't take debit cards. I couldn't reach my parents, so started begging round the people who'd stayed late at the office, offering to pay cash tomorrow. One very nice guy agreed to pay with his card.

Time to fill in the aircanada site details again, this time with his card. However he got the Mastercard secure verification screen pop up. He failed. He thought he'd used the wrong phone number first, but it wasn't that. Then he spotted that the post code field wasn't long enough to cope with London post codes, and had missed the last letter. So he deleted the space, didn't change the phone number back and failed for the third time. Which blocks you from using your card online.

He kindly filled in the details again with another card, while on the phone trying to unblock his first card via the 0844 number provided (they couldn't, he may never be able to use that one online), and it went through!

So I make the 8 times filling in flight information, 5 credit card number entries, and 4 phone calls. Hasn't the internet made our life so much easier?

Aaron Diaz has published a transcription of a recently uncovered cave painting, believed to be by a member of the species Homo Erectus. It appears to be thorough refutation of the 'Quickening'. A theory that based on the following premise:

"It took more than a million years to develop fire and the hand-ax, and yet Klomp believes simply because it took only 2,000 years to develop bows and arrows that new inventions will spring up in even shorter timeframes."

Dresden Codak is an gorgeous, surreal webcomic that often riffs on science, philosophy, and the singularity.

Over the weekend Schlock Mercenary has been delving a little into the origins of Schlock's species. I'm fairly sure the biological history of the amorph wasn't worked out at the beginning of the strip.
So I'm wondering how long he's had this retcon planned?

X posted to snarkoleptics

There was a bit of a Anti-Patterns discussion at work today. The article is a big list of bad software development practices, with amusing names. Like "Continuous obsolescence", "God object", and "Reinventing the square wheel". The conversation was of the "How many of these do we do?" sort.

The polar opposite of which is The Joel Test. A list of good practices for a software house. I won't tell you what we scored, but we probably hit a higher percentage of the anti-practices.

Seems to be a large fire out west London way. It looks larger than Bunsfield did, but it's probably just closer. Nothing on the beeb about it yet.

Edit:
purplecthulhu points out that the London Fire service have website where you can find out where the latest large incidents are.

EvilJ point's out that the Beeb have news now

Quoth iBon:
"It is not yet clear what has caused the blaze, say fire crews."

....... Although a combination of oxygen, heat and fuel might be the most likely explanation.......