May 2009
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Month May 2009

Crows, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Crows are the color of anarchy and close up they’re a little scary. An eye as bright as anything. Having a pet crow would be like having Voltaire on a string.

Ballard Quote:

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.

Basic Tech V – Mostly Harmless

The title of the fifth book in Douglas Adams’ series, “Mostly Harmless”, comes from a fictional description of the earth as a civilisation. It’s a great pairing of words – the innocuous framed with a hint of threat. Isn’t that what the world of programming is like though? It’s ninety-five percent unthreatening typing activities, with a [...]

Basic Tech IV – So Long, and Thanks for All the String[]

Yesterday was Towel Day, which is an unofficial holiday to mark the anniversary of the death of Douglas Adams. I had no idea when I started writing these blog posts that there was such a thing, and it’s not why I chose to title them after the novels in Adams’ Hitchhiker series. But it is [...]

The Mean Streets of Heaton

As you might know, I’ve moved house. This new house I live in has a cat, which I’m looking after tonight. So, the first chance it gets, the cat does a runner and I’m left shaking the box of cat kibbles in the back garden and feeling like an idiot. Ten minutes go by, then [...]

Basic Tech III – Life, NCL.AC.UK and Everything

I realised today that I could have titled this “Life, the University, and Everything”, which would have worked a lot better. Hey ho. The grandiose title of this piece could be read as a sign that I’m going to write about things other than relevant to the course. In general, I’m going to steer clear [...]

Old Video, New Post

I’m putting this up because my mum told me she liked it. Thanks! It’s a video made with the programming language Processing, inspired by the work of Douglas Coupland.

Basic Tech II – The Poptart at the End of the Universe

I’m eating a lot of pop tarts at the minute. So let’s have a quick diversion into the history of pop tarts. Pop tarts are a form of sugary pastry sold by Kellogg’s. The achieved a small amount of notoriety in the early 1990’s, in the UK at least, for burning the hands of a [...]

Pop-tart of War

According to wikipedia, the US Forces dropped 2.4 million pop-tarts on Afghanistan in 2001. Currently, you can only buy two out of the total of forty-three flavours of pop tarts in the UK, those being Chocolate and Strawberry. There is no information on wikipedia as to what flavours native Afghan’s received in 2001.

Basic Tech I – (The Hitchhikers Guide to Regex)

The current state of my Basic Techniques project is this: It doesn’t work. However, this is a defeatist attitude. Not quite as defeatist as I’ve been considering (it doesn’t work, I’m never going to understand regex, and I’m going to stop bothering with programming being the other considered viewpoint). On the other hand, sometimes the [...]