Douglas Adams had the right idea.

The big news story today is the terrorist attack in Glasgow. Two men drove a Jeep Cherokee into the main terminal of Glasgow International Airport and set it on fire, causing structural damage to the terminal and and badly burning one of the men in the vehicle. The other man got out and, rather han being captured by police, was taken down by a punch to the face by a member of the public. Only in Glasgow. The burnt man was taken to a nearby hospital, the A&E ward of which was promptly shut down after a "suspect device" was found on the man's body.

This whole thing, in which no one died and the only injuries were self-inflicted, has turned into a major terrorist event, dominating all news reports and drowning out anything relevant. Switch to any news channel, at least in the UK, and the same images of the now-long-extinguished fire will be playing alongside messages telling you that the police are "investigating" and pointing out that fire is bad. It all comes shortly after two apparent car bombs were discovered in London yesterday.

It makes you really wonder about the society that we live in. Terrorist alerts are raised and the police and politicians are all making statements about the state of the nation and the seriousness of all this. It will no doubt be trumpeted as an example of why security measures need to be tightened even further. Police will be given bazookas and the power to abduct people and scaremongering politicians will rise to power by advocating CCTV cameras in public toilets.

This, it seems, will stop nutjobs getting access to Jeeps, petrol and matches.

Which leads me to some rather large questions. Why is everyone assuming that these people have connections to Islamic terrorist groups? They might be Middle Eastern and they may well be mad but you don't need to be Osama bin Laden to get a Jeep Cherokee and drive it into a wall. I highly doubt that these people are connected to anyone important and I suspect that the "detailed forensic examination" of the Jeep will not turn up bin Laden's fingerprints on a box of matches.

Why was the hospital evacuated? Well, not the whole hospital, as the news seems to be saying when mentioning it, just A&E. "A suspect device" is a very broad term and I suspect that if they knew that it was an explosive they would just call it an explosive. if it was found on the terrorist, why not simply take it off him? Problem solved. In fact, why was this only discovered at the hospital? Wouldn't it make more sense to search him before taking him into a public place? Or on to the roads for that matter?

And terrorist prevention measures. As I said above, this will be used to champion them and get tougher laws passed for months ahead. Do they even work now? The Glasgow incident clearly wasn't stopped at all and the two car bombs in London were discovered purely by accident. One was spotted by ambulance personnel handling an injury nearby and the other was only discovered when they towed the frakking car. Truly, a victory for the boys at Special Branch.

Anyway, this will presumably carry on for a few more days and I may mention it again tomorrow but I think I've made my views clear. Overreacting to things like this helps no one and simply hinders us in the long run. As my father pointed out while watching the news, just over 60 years ago thousands were killed in the London blitz every week and it was dealt with in a sensible fashion by authorities and civilians alike, as far as was possible and could be expected. Today, no one but the perpetrators was injured and the whole country is in a panic.


A few other notes. The battery that I needed to get my LC 475 working came today everything worked fine once I slotted it in. Having acquired a NIC for it today, I finally got my Linux box connected to the internet, turning it into a viable computer, even if the start-up time does amaze Sam. As a final point, Doctor Who tonight was awesome. Fortunately, Erin was not, as she had earlier predicted, deafened by the excited shouts of myself and Sam as we watched it. I have some quickly drawn art for today's woodle but it was done too late for me to upload it so I'll do that tomorrow.

CANCEL THE DESTRUCTOR CODES!!!!

Have you ever had one of those phrases that's in a TV show and that just makes you laugh every time you see it? It doesn't even have to be a funny line, just one that seems out-of-context or overacted. Even one that's acted very well can just surprise you. Well, I was watching Robot through with Sam and Erin today, Sam having come here after Speech Day, and we found a new one. It's all in the title and in this movie file. It works best if you a) have some knowledge of the Brigadier's usual mood and b) set it to play on a loop.


Anyway, school's over now, even if it doesn't feel like it. Perhaps it's the fact that the weather isn't really trying very hard to fit in with the season or perhaps it's because I've spent the entire afternoon messing around, as opposed to my normal habit of simply sticking in a DVD and doing nothing for the first week or so.

It looks like the summer holidays are going to be a pretty interesting time for me, assuming I can do some of the projects that I want to get done. Some of them are pretty weird but both TWToday and VersusCOM are pretty high up the priorities list. Since Sam is going to be here again tomorrow, we may record a podcast and get a woodle done, killing two birds in one day. I should be seeing Skippy later in the week, to fiddle around with that old LC 475 and a monitor that he has, so we'll be working on StreamK for both here and VersusCOM's main site while he's here.

I've kind of got into a habit of simply knocking off these posts as they are needed and forgetting about the stuff like woodles and New Word Thursdays. That's not how I want the whole thing to be and I want it to evolve over the year of constant postings and whatnot. Anyway, I need to go now because I'm having a discussion far more interesting than this post. I may relay some of it to you tomorrow. Whoever you may be.

When all else fails, counting ceiling tiles can sometimes work.

My left arm is currently almost numb. Why, you ask? Well, as my friend Garrie carried out his new/old Performa, I was laden with a printer under each arm until we reached his car. At that point, I put one in the boot and took the other for myself. I think he got the better deal, since he took the one with the power cable.


There's something wonderfully ironic about the fact that prizewinners at school are rewarded by having to sit through a three hours of the mind-numbing boredom known as a "Speech Day rehearsal". During this "rehearsal", those that have been chosen as the most talented pupils in the school who haven't gone on holiday already practice "sitting down for a long time" before a brief interlude of "walking" followed by more "sitting down".

This is normally an exceptionally dull affair, made worse by the fact that everyone else just gets to goof off, but I was fortunate this year. Several of my friends managed, by a combination of flukes, bribery and freak accidents, to get prizes this year and, by yet more flukes, I ended up sitting next to Sam during the proceedings.

Thus, a running commentary was kept on the bowing and curtsying abilities of the primary school pupils, jokes were made about a certain overachiever simply going up on the stage with a bag marked "swag" and, when we grew tired of mocking the proceedings, we simply discussed all manner of topics from Doctor Who (an obvious favourite) to the problems and wonders of old computers (another obvious favourite).

For some reason, nobody clapped during the practice and they weren't overly strict about us talking during it, so the whole thing seemed to pass much faster. The moral of the story is that, even in a boring situation, a good conversationalist can make all the difference. A book to read and something to play games on can also help. But the best defence against boredom is, according to the educational system, to be an underachiever or to be on holiday.


On a vaguely related note, something else which helps time fly is comedy sketches on YouTube (I'm not linking it; you shuld know what it is). I've just discovered the Reduced Shakespeare Company and become addicted to the Robot Hell song from Futurama, which I looked up on a whim.

Today is a good day to loot!

I spent several hours today fiddling around in the Physics lab with a bunch of friends diagnosing the problem on one old Macintosh (an LC 475, for those interested) and playing SimCity 2000 on another (an old Performa, now the property of one of those friends).

Since we had nothing better to do, four of us (Sam, Skippy, myself and a guy called Garrie), went in there in the morning armed with naught but our wits, an old screwdriver that Sam carries at all times, whatever we could Google on some nearby, working, PCs and far, far too much free time. We tried different monitors, scavenged from near and far, we poked DIP switches, we connected and disconnected hard drives, we argued over different methods of repair, we played Scalextric when we got bored.

In the end, someone searched for it online and we discovered someone with the exact same problem. Turns out, searching again now, that it's a relatively common problem; no battery, no video. I've just found the Apple page on the problem and they recommend that, having tried various things (we tried different monitors and nothing else), you should bring the thing into an authorised Apple repair centre to have the motherboard battery checked and replaced.

Well, we didn't do that. We found out that the battery could be the problem, borrowed a multimeter (an advantage of working in a Physics lab), discovered we were only getting a few fractions of a volt from the little thing and promptly went on eBay to buy a new one. With any luck, it should arrive by Monday along with some CD caddies so that I can finally get the thing working.

All present at the time of our discovery agreed that there was something wonderful about solving an elusive technical problem. Sure, it turned out to be nothing tricky, but it had been annoying us no end and the thing had been declared dead by the school. We found a way to give it life. Of course, in true techie fashion, we didn't want to just leave the matter there, but the lack of a soldering iron prevented the hooking up of several AAs we had.

No one else we talked to could understand our fascination with getting this old piece of junk to work. I'd be lying if I said that I fully understood it. Perhaps it was the thrill of doing something that others had said couldn't be done. Maybe, once we had started, we spent so long on it that finally finding a solution was like getting to the end of a long journey. It's possible that it was just a way to prove the geek credentials of which we are all so proud. Either way, we had set ourselves a challenge and we had completed it. And it felt good.

The rest of the day went by in a blur of half-understood card games played with Advanced Higher Chemistry students and conversations on Time Lords while games of rounders, which we may have been outside to watch, were played in the background. The day ended with my friends and I carrying out yet more bundles of old computer equipment. All in all, it was a good day.

The Art of Looting

I love summer. I love the weather, the atmosphere, the weeks of possibilities stretching out before me, the end of school, the excuse to buy stuff on eBay because no good games come out. But, and I may change this opinion once the holidays start, the best thing is quite possibly the last few days of school.

Those few short days, punctuated by sports activities and rehearsals and all manner of events, when everything is winding down. I love the feeling of having nothing to do, I love just being able to spend time with friends, I love relaxing and doing all the fun things I've wanted to do all term like playing that The Simpsons Scalextric track in the Physics lab or discovering why there has always been a copy of SimCity 2000 in the Computing room. But most of all, I love the looting.

You see, it's over the summer that any renovations are done to most schools and my school is no different. Having systematically been upgrading the computers systems into the 21st century, Wellington is now completely redoing the computer labs, seperating the rooms out and adding more computers to both. Naturally, this requires that the rooms as they are now be cleared. This in turn requires the removal of all the miscellaneous crap that builds up on shelves over the years.

Sam made it out of the lesson with many hours worth of early 90s educational videos, a bunch of old Mac software, a copy of Windows 95 (again, all floppy disks) and the motherboard for an early Macintosh. Jimerson, another friend, picked up a heatsink, a hard drive and the keyboard to a BBC Microcomputer. I wrestled the keyboard off him (thwarting his plans to use it for his 360 on the grounds that he couldn't break it any further) adding it to the long-defunct husk of a Microcomputer that I had already acquired.

I also came away with a couple of years worth of magazine demo discs, several textbooks including ones on Pascal and COMAL coding which I may actually use, what I think might be RAM expansion for either the BBC or a Mac, a Lego Technic kit, 3 hard drives, a copy of SuSE linux 8.1, an animation package for Macs (the school used a lot of Macs, back in the day) and a Hewlett-Packard cassette drive.

Tomorrow, I intend to add the aforementioned SimCity game to my bag o' swag along with some other games. Hopefully, I'll also get my hands on a Mac that's been sitting in the Physics lab for years. Sam, Skippy and I spent Physics examining it, in between bouts of Scalextric (marred by a jackass in my class whom I shall refer to only as "Piddle"), and we hope to get it working tomorrow. Between us, we're taking every piece of 20th century IT that isn't nailed down or plugged in.

All in all, a good days haul. I love sifting through old rubbish like that, trying to find hidden gems that are perhaps still useful or that perhaps simply provide comedy and nostalgia value. The mad scramble for the best obsolete parts merely heightens the adrenalin rush that one gets when one carries a "Hewlett-Packard SureStore T20" out of school under one's arm, with one's friends and sister trailing behind, equally laden with glorious, useless tat.

That, my friends, is the art of looting.

Why do I get the feeling that I've used this topic before?

I still need to do that presentation before third period tomorrow, so I want to get the bulk of the text done tonight. As such, I'm going to try another mini-post.

I've noticed of late that I tend to be doing a lot of posts in the "recommended sites" category, as the TWToday vernacular refers to them. This is surprisingly similar to the origin of the word "blog" in the term "weblog", quite simply a log of where the author had been on the web. These quickly evolved into online diaries and, having started as mere components of larger sites, became websites in their own right. And of course, with its prefix removed, blog has had any number of other syllables added on at either end to form v-blogging and so on.

Now there are over 70 million of the blasted things kicking around, probably not counting all the ones on social networking sites and the like. And I write one of them. One in 70 million, that's me. Assuming that each blog is fully maintained and written by one person. And assuming that that person ever bothers to update, as I've been doing for several months now. Go, me.

And of the coming months? I should have a bit more free time without school but I suspect that it might be filled up with a myriad of other tasks and projects. Still, if you don't like my blog, it seems that there are plenty of other ones out there.

iPost Mini

I really hate it when my Mighty Mouse refuses to scroll downwards. What's so difficult about down that it can manage all the other directions except that one?


I'm caught in something of a dilemma. I have a Computing presentation to complete which is technically for tomorrow. However, I won't actually have Computing tomorrow, so there's technically no need to complete it. But it was supposed to be emailed to my teacher. And tomorrow is the school Sports Day, so I'm unlikely to want to do any work after that, as minimal as my involvement in any kind of sporting activity is likely to be.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, as the case may be tomorrow evening, several hours have now passed without me doing any work and it seems like it's too late to do any now. The moral of the story is that if you do nothing for long enough, then nothing will happen.

That wraps it up for today's mini-post. Now, instead of doing that presentation, I'm going to watch an old Doctor Who serial (Robot, for those of you interested), laugh at the special effects (they tried so hard to make that toy look like a real tank, bless them) and write a sketch that I just had an idea for. Suffice it to say that it involves someone brandishing an iPod and saying "The power of Woz compels you! The power of Woz compels you!". I might also do the woodle. But probably not.

More recommended sites and apologies. Sorry.

Well, the post I had planned and mostly written for today no longer seems appropriate in light of my current mood and recent events. So what am I going to do?

Simple. I'm going to recommend Vendetta Online, a game which I've played for less than two hours and on which I've already become hooked.

I'm going to point you towards Ozy and Millie, an excellent webcomic I'm in the middle of reading.

I'm going to say that I'm extremely annoyed by this news due to the number of the times I've answered "Amazon" to trivia questions and been told that the answer is"Nile".

I'm going to tell you that tonight's episode of Doctor Who was excellent, although I suspect that it will all be erased from the timeline. Unless the Doctor regenerates, though that seems unlikely. But regeneration has been mentioned an awful lot lately... but that could just be to do with the Master... I really can't wait till next Saturday. If that sounds exceptionally geeky, bare in mind that that'll also be the first day of my holidays.

I'm going to ask you if you think you can say "an unaired version of An Unearthly Child" five times fast.

I'm going to decide to forget about the woodle for tonight and simply put one up tomorrow.

I'm going to get some sleep because I suspect that tomorrow will be a very busy day.

I'm going to end this blog post.

Short posts are easier to proof read.

Headache. Hurts. Brain no think good. Typing hurt head.

This be funny video.

iPhone look good.

This interesting as so many news organisations lead with relatively small section of unsurprising results that are related to teenage sex. This depress and amuse me.

This also amuse. Not know what "folksonomy" mean, but gives image of grizzled old guy with guitar and silly accent singing songs about... some country music cliché. I didn't know the word "blooks" either but it annoys me, even if I like the concept. No problem with "blog", "blogosphere" or "podcast" but my hatred for "netiquette" knows no bounds.

Headache's not so bad now but I'm ending this anyway. I've linked enough stuff to keep you occupied until tomorrow. It's either this or another rant about house marching so don't complain.

So this guy with a box on his head walks into a bar...

For my blog post today, ladies and gentlemen, I present a short comedy sketch that I just wrote. It may not be funny, it may not be spell-checked, but by the Spaghetti Monster, I'm going to find a camcorder and film it!

[an actor comes on stage with a large box on his head]
[he begins his scene]

Actor: Alas, my father is dead, murdered by-

[director tries to interrupt]

Director: Jeremy, just stop a second. Jeremy?

[the actor does not notice]

Actor: -my aunt in a fit of jealousy and-

[the director interrupts again]

Director: Jeremy! Stop!

[the actor now notices and turns to the director]

Actor: What? Is something wrong?

Director: You've... you've got a box on your head, Jer.

Actor: Do I? My dear chap, I think I would notice if I had a box on my head.

Director: Well... it's on there, Jeremy.

Actor: Where is it, where?

Director: On your head. Are you not having any trouble seeing, at all?

Actor: I had noticed the lights were a little dim. I thought it might be a thematic thing. Nighttime, midnight, our hero's darkest hour and so on.

Director: No, you've just got a box on your head.

Actor: Ah, could be, could be. Should I take it off, do you think?

Director: That would... probably be the best thing to do, yeah.

Actor: I was simply wondering if it was something wardrobe had done, I don't tend to pay attention to them very much.

Director: It... um... they might have... no, it isn't right. Just take off the box, Jer.

Actor: All right, then.

[the actor motions his hands as if wiping something off his shirt]

Actor: Did I get the blighter?

Director: No, little higher up.

[the actor moves his hands around his head, completely missing the box]

Actor: What about now?

Director: [getting exasperated] You missed it again, [muttering] you silly old...

Actor: Dash it all man, I can't do everything myself! Have someone take off this stupid box that you insist I'm wearing!

Director: Fine. Harry, could you...?

[he motions to the box and an assistant goes to remove it]

Actor: Hurry up, hurry up, I haven't got all day, you know!

[the assistant pulls off the large box to reveal another, smaller box underneath]

Actor: That's better! Now, get out of my shot. Where was I?

Director: [flicking through script] Uh, "alas, my father...". From the top, people!

Assistant: Adventures of Jimerson, scene 5, take 2!

[zoom out and screen fades as actor begins again]
[end]

I really want to see that film, in-joke though it may be. I may try this again in the future, if scripting inspiration strikes before blogging inspiration.

Things that Bug Alasdair #156

Ah, Wednesday. The day when time is turned upon its head, when extended morning form time moves everything forward by ten minutes until balance can be restored by removing a chunk of my lunch hour.

And then we do house marching for half of what's left.

A little summary of house marching for those not in the know:

Boring as hell.

A slightly more detailed summary may be in order, for those of you who are still interested in reading about an item near the top of that mile-long list, "Things that Bug Alasdair".

Many schools, particularly private ones, have a house system, like the one in Harry Potter (to pander to the lowest common denominator). Unlike Harry Potter, we don't have a house where all the evil children go, though Churchill seems to be filled with all the ones who are terrible at sports.

I'm in Nightingale; Curie and Montgomery round out the numbers to the traditional four. The concept of houses is meant to instill competition and friendly rivalries in sporting events and the collection of arbitrarily distributed tokens from teachers that seem to never be given out to anyone beyond S4, which is when actual academic results become important as opposed to holding the door open twice in one day.

One of the traditional competitions under this system is house marching, when the various houses line up in pairs by order of height and walk in a semi-orderly fashion behind their respective house captain*. Naturally, this is a difficult thing for many of the young children, and the older children of similar maturity, to do on their first try each year. Thus, house marching practice.

It eats up half of lunch break for a week every summer term and then they steal a Friday morning to spirit us away to a nearby stadium for a full practice before Sports Day. I have done this same routine every year for the past 8 years and I am sick of it.

I'm sick of the music that seems to taper out once you've come to a standstill only to flare back up again for another minute of ground pounding. I'm sick of seeing the little children, whose turn it shall be in the coming years, mocking us for having to put on this desperately dull display. I'm sick of the one person who can never, ever keep in time like anybody else, thinking that if they slouch and drag their feet they will somehow look rebellious. I am sick of the other person who can never grasp the concept that once you stop moving forward, you stop swinging your goddamn arm, just like everybody else who's standing directly in front of you.

Unfortunately, try as I might to avoid it (which several people with more self confidence than I did successfully this afternoon), it is a tradition and traditions must go on until somebody is offended or somebody dies. I can't imagine anyone dying at house marching, unless the person who refuses to keep in time and the person who never stops swinging their arm are one and the same and standing directly in front of me (it comes perilously close this year), and, as much as the pupils hate it and the parents don't understand it, it hasn't quite reached the point where the school has been accused of warmongering.

And so, on that anticlimactic note, today's little tirade ends. I'll probably mention it again on Friday and after the actual event on Monday. In the meantime, you may now proceed to laugh at my pathetic problems. I shall weep.


*The post of house captain, just so you know, is one created entirely to give the impression that Sixth Years actually do something.

Ah, I forgot to list options for the title

Hey, 150 posts on TWToday. 111 of them mine, not counting my woodles. I feel rather proud.

I can't be bothered doing some post about time or achievements or whatever, though it does seem like only yesterday that I started this little venture, so I'll run down my little mental checklist for my nightly blogging session.

Regular posts

Woodle

• No

NWT

• No

Great Slipper Experiment

• On hold

Possible types of post

Anniversary

• Already ruled out on account of being pointless and boring

Notes

• Not much to say unless I use topics that I want to expand on later
  

Topical

• Could mention intelligent design, due to a speech a friend of mine gave
• Discuss Manhunt 2 banning in the UK and resulting media frenzy? (Note: predict appearance of Jack Thompson within 48 hours)
  

Personal

• No, I'm still too boring

Site recommendations

• Not reading anything new, Pre-Order Pushers seems to have stopped posting

Crappy post

• Looking better and better as time goes by

Purely humorous

• Some ideas, too tired to elaborate on them at this time

Badly formatted list of stuff I didn't do

• Bingo!

Possible excuses

Studying for upcoming Maths test

• Plausible but false, even if it shouldn't be

Lack of sleep

• Unfortunately true, but overused

Blame Skippy

• The best course of action in so many situations

Claim it's fine and ignore any complaints

• Another winner, methinks!

Thus concludes this wonderfully written (and formatted) little jaunt into how my mind works when blogging. Once again, I've spent a bit too much time playing Advance Wars between the start and end of this post, so I'm just going to be done with it. By which I mean copy it into Blogger and doubtless screw up all the formatting (damn you, Blogger, why don't you just play nice with tabs?), add bold, italics, etc., put in the various links that you may or may not have clicked above and then spell check everything.

Then I start regretting that I didn't go into further detail about the Manhunt 2 ratings/ban debacle. Well, that's a topic for another day. Maybe tomorrow, if I'm not too tired after studying for that Maths test on Thursday.

I do tend to ramble on a bit, don't I?

Just when things finally started looking up, my internet connection slows to a crawl. I swear it's doing it just to annoy me.


I went out of my room earlier this evening (a rare event, but not the focus of this story) and was met by my brother telling me to run downstairs and get our mother. Not entirely sure what he wanted but mildly alarmed by his urgency and tone of voice, I dutifully made my way to the kitchen at slightly above walking pace and relayed his message. As I go, I see him scrabbling for the key for the hatch up to the loft.

I return to the upstairs landing, mother in tow, and my brother, having just lowered the ladder, points to a patch of ceiling where I can see some ripples on the surface of the paint. He says that water is coming through the ceiling and Mum agrees, telling him to quickly go and shut off the water to the new bathroom (the section that had only today been turned on, hence our discovery of the leak) in the already open loft.

I couldn't quite see it myself since, this being a dull-skied evening and my brother having sensibly turned off the lights near the leak, the whole area was a bit too dark. I saw the patch, and the drops forming on it, more clearly once I grabbed one of my torches (why I have so many in my bedroom, I do not know) and shone it on the aforementioned spot.

The whole little episode, as far as I'm concerned, was over in less than five minutes, though it will likely continue tomorrow when my mother has some stern, and loud, words with our plumbers.

But what if my brother hadn't noticed the dampness that the drips had left on the carpet? Would anyone else have seen them later, so close in to the wall in that poorly lit bit of the house? Maybe Mum would have caught them on her window-shutting run round the house before going to bed and we could all enjoy the yelling now instead of at half past seven (a rough estimate, based on no evidence in particular). Maybe no one would have noticed and the first hint would have been a large amount of creaking, followed by a swift but resounding crack, heard by my insomniac self at something past midnight.

If no one had seen it, it could have caused a fair bit of damage and a significant amount of money if even a wee bit of the ceiling fell because of mounting pressure and weight. A second's glance may well have saved hundreds of pounds.

How much has been saved by a random chance, a lucky glance in the right direction? How much more has been lost due to someone not seeing what goes on around them, looking only at where they are going and not what they are going past?


The moral of the story?

Being observant is always useful, particularly if your plumbers aren't.

Aristotle: history's most prolific prankster?

I have a friend who many ancient Greeks would have believed to be immortal, purely because he can achieve the "impossible" task of licking his own elbow. I've never been someone who trusts such ideas as this. It's always seemed to me that, if there are people who make their living as contortionists bending into the oddest shapes, then there must be people who can lick their own elbow. Long tongues and short arms must be paired together in a few people's DNA, even if it is unusual.

Whenever I hear a saying or a metaphor or a "fact" that everybody knows, I question it. There's no such thing as the sound of one hand clapping because clapping is, by definition, two hands clapping together. It doesn't sound like anything because it doesn't exist.

When trees fall in the forest, they make a big, loud sound (unless it's a very small tree). Whether or not any ears or ear like structures pick it up, those sound waves are still going to hurtle through the air, vibrating molecule after vibrating molecule.

Even moving away from philosophical questions and setting my realist agenda aside, the kind of facts that people believe and have believed since the dawn of time boggle the mind. Nothing huge or grand, I wouldn't expect an ancient Greek to know about the molecular composition of a star or even what a molecule is. They could have had apparently good evidence that for all kinds of makeshift cures and superstitions. But sometimes the depths of stupidity that even the wisest men of an era can stoop to is startling.

Aristotle, a famed Greek philosopher whose works were held in high regard and were considered unquestionable for centuries after his death, made some very silly mistakes. Maybe he could be forgiven for not accepting the idea that stars were like our sun, just unimaginably further away. His assertion that objects of different mass fall at different speed is somewhat understandable, unless you consider that he may well have been the one who originated this ridiculous myth that went unchallenged for centuries and still lingers on today, confusing large numbers of first year Physics students.

Now for the truly bizarre. He held that flies had only 4 legs and that women had fewer teeth than men. It apparently never occurred to him to try catching a fly and taking a moment to count. Catching a buzzard would be far more difficult but that simply makes me wonder where he got the idea that they had three testicles. He was married twice and, when formulating his theories on dental numerology, apparently never thought to simply look inside a woman's mouth, preferring to make faulty assumptions.

He was a genius in a many other respects but common sense seems not to have been among his repertoire of talents. Unless, of course, it was all a cunning practical joke that got a little out of hand.

People today will laugh and scoff at the lack of simple knowledge that all those ancient barbarians held. But people today are just as silly. There are people who believe that eggs will only balance on their ends during the Spring equinox. Their basis for this? They've seen it done, they've tried it themselves and it works! Eggs balance during the equinox! The fact that they've never even tried it on any other day of the year doesn't cross their minds.

It is well known that the Sun is up during the day and that it becomes night when it goes down. That's fair enough. Then it's also well known that this is when the moon comes up, going down before morning. Simply looking up every once in a while during the early evening or even the late morning will disprove this little nugget of misinformation.

Maybe disease and dietary deficiencies could have explained Aristotle's thought's on female dentistry, as woman in his time may have eaten differently and he may have actually consistently seen fewer teeth in their mouthes. But that won't excuse all the generations who came after him who didn't bother to check his work. Nothing excuses the flies feet and the buzzard's testicles, either for Aristotle or his successors. Modern people are no better, with their inability to look upwards and stop taking their facts from children's books.

Just think for a second about how much of what you "know" could be wrong. This is why you should always question any facts that come your way. I never trust that anything is completely impossible unless, like the Theory of Relativity's proof that you can't go faster than light, there's a heck of a lot of complicated maths to back it up. If someone says to you some fascinating yet simple fact, question it. Question them. Question their sources and if something doesn't add up, chances are that the "fact" isn't all that factual.

Knowledge is a wonderful thing, so long as you know what you're talking about.

May contain spoilers and whatnot

It is way too wet and cold to be June. Seriously.


TV's been dull for a long, long time. Spoilers leek out, everyone knows what's coming through constant foreshadowing and online alternate reality games, forumgoers pick apart trivia and rumour, so that even surprising twists seem a little bit predictable.

But I've just watched Utopia.

Suffice it to say, it was incredible. So fantastic, in fact, that I've spent the last two hours discussing it with Sam. We scared the crap out of my sister when we started yelling about the Silver Devastation and how the Face of Boe must be involved. Sam tells me that a mutual friend has asked to join our Skype call because he wants to "hear us screaming like schoolgirls" about the contents of the episode. Actually, that's kind of creepy but I understand what he meant.

I'm not really going to say much tonight because I haven't had time to gather my thoughts since I've spent too much time talking about Doctor Who. I haven't done a woodle for tonight either, but I'm going to let an interesting discussion in real life take precedence over this blog. I'm sure that all kinds of things will come up that I can talk about tomorrow.

Until then here's an abstract thought:

How many hours must a geek spend discussing Doctor Who before he is a geek?

Okay, it's not an abstract thought but I've got nothing else unless I steal Sam's line about respecting fire. Which I don't want to do.

So, here's a quote from The Doctor:

"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."

My iMac would make Flash Gordon's head explode

2001: A Space Odyssey provides a strange mix of anachronisms.

Artificial intelligences that have passed the Turing test are steering space ships on journeys to Saturn, communicating with the crew by printer output, if needed. Probes spinning past them gathering dozens of signals from the vastness of space are radioing it all back to Earth to be stored on miles of magnetic tape. Speaking of Earth, everybody down there is getting their news via handheld pads that update newspaper stories every hour. And are operated by a number pad. Heading back into nearer space, we run across Clavius Base, established on the moon in 1994 using all of man's greatest, most powerful technology. And some typewriters.

Oh, and the Cold War is still live and kicking. Can't forget about that.

I'm a huge fan of old science fiction and I'm willing to forgive it its quirks. I can't remember where I heard this sentiment, unfortunately (though I think it may have been a Doctor Who DVD documentary), but someone said that episodes featuring retro-futuristic technology that looks really outdated shouldn't be updated (with CGI or whatever) because they are a product of their own time
and should reflect the imagination of the time.

While I agree with the principle of this, it doesn't necessarily apply to everything. People are often divided when old shows and films have their effects updated, the CGI-ification of the original Star Wars trilogy being a prime example. On the one hand, there's the argument from above: it reflects the time at which it was made, as all creative works do. On the other hand, the addition of new effects can bring it closer to what the creator originally envisioned. This applies particularly in cases where something was done due to technological or financial reasons rather than as a matter of style.

The terrible animatronic cats from Survival come to mind. They were bad at the time and everyone knew it and very few people would object if an updated version with some clever editing was done, so long as it was optional. It being optional is very important, as George Lucas found out in the previous Star Wars example. He also got into trouble for making stylistic changes, such as the infamous "Han shot first" incident and changing the actor playing Anakin in the closing scene of Return of the Jedi.

I really need to get some more old sci-fi. Alongside my obvious Doctor Who obsession, I want to get my hands on some of the Quatermass serials, an even earlier example of classic British science fiction. Like I've said before, I'm a geek, but I am a forgiving geek. It won't shatter my suspension of disbelief if the ultimate computer ever constructed in the year 1 million has reels of magnetic tape stuck on the side and no monitor. I might laugh at the tin foil outfits of the technicians though.


Final note: you've probably noticed that Skippy hasn't been posting for a while, either here or at the MacTake, and that his NWTs have usually been late or missing. He's apparently been working on some kind of complicated webby-wimey, wibbly-wobbly thing (all those who got the Doctor Who reference get a gold star) that's taking up a lot of his time. Just thought I'd let you know.

Who I am

It was shorts and T-shirt weather a couple of days ago and now I'm freezing. Stupid fluctuations in the fabric of space-time weather.


I am bored. Really, really bored. I've got nothing to do.

Well, that's not strictly true. I have things that I could do and things that I probably should do, I just don't want to do any of them, and the things I do want to do are unavailable to me.

Well, that problem was solved by a nice, long game of Advance Wars: Dual Strike. Which took up way too much of my time and now I'm left without a topic and in a rush to get this post done.

So I'll talk about me.

A rather interesting thing happened to me today, which I believe shows much about my true personality (ye gods, it's English personal writing all over again). I've probably mentioned the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) before, since they're the body in charge of regulating my exams and school curriculum. Complicated-looking graphs that Skippy briefly showed me indicate that there must be some people reading this who know what I'm talking about.

Results for the exams I sat in May are coming out in August and the SQA has rolled out a new scheme whereby, if you register now, you can go online to get your results the day before the letter arrives. Since this has to do with time and getting stuff early and since the new series has made Doctor Who references crop up everywhere, the SQA put a picture of the TARDIS and a caption saying "JUST WHAT THE DOCTOR ORDERED" on the postcard informing me of the scheme.

Some people might think this was a rubbish attempt to seem trendy (though I happen to think it's quite clever, as this sort of thing goes). They would dismiss the front of the card and just flip over to the back to find the url of the website where they can register.

Not me.

I took one look at the card and started wondering what model of TARDIS prop it was. It has the proportions of the new series one (the original series, which had several versions over the years, tended to have TARDISes that were thinner than actual police boxes) but has a lot of scuffs and marks that I don't think should be there. Add that to the background, which has the right style but not the official graphical look, and I suspect that they just used an old police box and hoped nobody would notice.

But I did.

I also wonder if they got full permission before using it. Even if it isn't said to be the TARDIS and Doctor Who isn't directly mentioned, the BBC owns the rights to the police box design. The SQA may be getting a call from some BBC lawyers, methinks.

Normal people might wonder why they didn't say "Doctor Who" anywhere. I'm glad they didn't, since I would never have forgiven them if they'd referred to The Doctor as "Doctor Who". That is not his freaking name!!!!

It was only used a few times by accident and the character has sometimes been credited as "Doctor Who". This was the case in the new series until David Tennant specifically requested that he be credited as "The Doctor". It was used in the non-canon Dalekmania-era films starring Peter Cushing as a human inventor with a time ship called "Tardis".

Incidentally, I used Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth (one of the two films) in a game of hangman today. After a little bit of nudging, a friend of mine got it without guessing any letters at all.

So, what does this whole episode (and this blog post) tell me about myself? The same thing it tells you.

I am Alasdair Corbett. I am a geek.

The Train of Thought has left Coherency Station

Next stop, Insanity.


Yeah.

So, I might have got a little bit carried away with trying to run old Amstrad games and playing Advance Wars tonight and run out of time to think of a blogging topic. What can I say, shit happens. Yeah, that's a good thing to say.

Shit happens.

Also, did you know that if you spend an hour typing "run "disk"" on an ancient keyboard from the 80s, a modern keyboard, such as the one I'm using now, feels really soft and doesn't seem to make quite the right sound? I didn't either. So we've both learned something from this. Also, I hate "read error b".



And no, I didn't take that photo just for this post. I took it to use in a presentation for Computing, as an example of a Command Line Interface. My other example is the old Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide text adventure. I really want to play that one of these days.

For some reason, whenever summer rolls around I begin to get really into gaming (more than the rest of the year, anyway), and back into retro gaming in particular. I start buying new games that I've been meaning to get for ages. I start going back to playing old games that I never got round to finishing or that I feel I just didn't play enough. As new games start to dry up around now, I log on to eBay and buy bundles of all kinds of crazy crap.

Which reminds me, I have a box full of old Sega Mega Drive games that I need to look through to find ones that I can sell. I also have a box full of Amstrad games (I got the CPC 464, a monochrome monitor and 90 games for £20 when I bought it) that I need to sort through, having only played about half a dozen. To do that, I'll need to find some way of stopping constant read errors, so I may have to look into cleaning the drive heads.

And I need to do some stuff for the network in the house, hopefully hooking up some HomePlug devices (technology that allows the existing wiring in your house to be used for ethernet networking) so that I can hold a stable connection on some devices and finally get my Linux box hooked up to the internet without any faffing about with drivers for WiFi cards.

On an unrelated note, "faffing about" is a great phrase that isn't used nearly enough.

So I've got a lot of stuff that I plan to do. It's kind of daunting but the fact that I'm considering it reminds me that the summer holidays are closing in nice and quickly. To get to them, however, I first have to go through house marching practice (you'll hear more about that in the future I expect, it being the bane of my existence for a week or so every June), Sports Day, Speech Day and the associated rehearsals (in which we rehearse walking up on stage, shaking someone's hand and being handed a fake cup) and no doubt a myriad of other things that school life will throw at me.

Then again, the Sixth Year Revue is usually quite good, a nice little way for the leaving pupils to thank their teachers by mercilessly mocking them in poorly acted comedy sketches. And as the term closes, actual school work takes a sudden drop in importance and regularity.

I ought to forget to come up with a topic more often. I have a certain inexplicable fondness for these train of thought style posts. And it gives me an excuse to just play more games.


This keyboard still feels too soft.

Meanwhile, in history...

I haven't played my 360 in months. Now I've downloaded a load of demos on a whim and I really want to play it for the first time in a while. It's built up a decent enough library since I was last into it and I think I might buy some of the new games. If I can afford them. Stupid months of huge price reductions to clear stock for next gen, completely spoiled me, mutter, grumble...


A little bit of abstract thinking for today, since I've got nothing else to do.

Have you ever noticed that shows with time travel as a premise or a possibility will often have celebrities of old cropping up now and again? The early days of Doctor Who had episodes like this as a means of educating children about history. The science fiction stories quickly took precedent but the new series has revived the concept with its "celebrity historicals", mixing Dickens with creatures made of gas and William Shakespeare with interdimensional prisons.

Some shows are more subtle. Quantum Leap referred to the central characters brief sightings of major figures from his current time period as "kisses with history" but preferred to focus on the main plot and the ordinary people involved.

Star Trek has helped itself to Mark Twain, as has Transformers, and H G Wells seems to have had no imagination whatsoever, since The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds are presented as autobiographical so ridiculously often. Obviously, this is something of a science fiction trope and you may have noticed that all the people I've mentioned so far have been writers of one kind or another.

It's probably simply because old writers tend to influence later generations and they then want to pay homage to them. Writing has been around for so long that it's acquired enough well known figures and stories to make every little nod noticeable and the famous writers are chosen because people can recognise how our protagonists are altering events so that the writer will turn them into his celebrated literary creation.

There are some limitations on this. As a general rule, assuming that the historical figure is a major character, they must have been dead for at least 50 years, probably more. If you are planning to create a neat little paradox and influence some famous work, that work should be at least 100 years old.

It seems to me that we're now reaching the point where cinema and TV personalities have been around long enough to fit into those categories. I'm sure examples have already sprung up in shows I haven't seen and stories I haven't read.

But what about the future?

50 years from now, will there be a science fiction show dealing with Gene Roddenberry's encounters with pointy-eared aliens and green-skinned women?

Will my great great grandchildren watch as their heroes travel back through time from a Western themed party and impress Joss Whedon with their spaceships?

How far into the future must humanity venture before we are told of how a carelessly discarded antique Donkey Kong arcade cabinet inspired one Shigeru Miyamoto?

It's just a thought. Personally, I think I was spurred to greatness by a chance encounter with an aspiring writer from the 25th century. It'll turn out that his girlfriend is my descendant and we'll all learn a moral lesson about trying hard. Then I'll beat him up and take his sports almanac.

Bucking the trend isn't all that hard

Human beings love to give special meaning and symbolism to arbitrary things. A cluster of stars, when viewed from our little corner of the universe are deemed to look like a crab or a hunter by an ancient Greek, who was probably drunk at the time, and millennia later people are planning their days, planning the future of corporations and nations, on the basis that the "hunter" is pointing at the "crab" via Mars. Or something.

Meanings are also assigned to numbers. Third time's the charm, 13 is unlucky, 666 (or maybe 616 or even 665) is the number of the beast, or maybe it represents the Roman Emperor Nero, no one really knows, and 7 rears its ugly head all over ancient mythology and the Legend of Zelda games.

The only reason that we even have a base 10 numerical system is probably that our ancestors simply started counting on their fingers.

And so, by a quirk of evolution, we are led to the significance of the number 100. People who live to be 100 can ask for messages from the Queen, 100 years after something important happens, big celebrations are thrown, and anybody who does 100 of anything on the internet has to do something special when they hit the magical three digits.

Not me. No, I'm a trendsetter. A lazy trendsetter who's doing his special post at number 102.

It's an abundant number, the atomic number of nobelium and the emergency telephone number for fire in Israel. It's also largely irrelevant to this post but it provides a convenient means to justify that whole bit above.

There's no real topic for today so I'll just say that, so far, I've been enjoying blogging each day on TWToday. Sure, sometimes I'm unhappy with what I write but other times I feel that it's brilliant. Even if those feelings are unjustified, none of this would have been written if I hadn't been determined to keep up and prove to myself that I could do it.

I'd thank someone other than myself, but I'm the only one who ever does anything around here.

Hey, I found a use for these thingies - {}

My 101st post at TWToday, eh? That sounds like an excuse not to have a real topic if ever I heard one.


Actually, no. It isn't. I'll do all kinds of self-reflective stuff tomorrow. Or maybe I won't, since I'll be spending the evening trying to fix the hard drives on the PC that just died downstairs. Tonight, however, I have to write a letter to submit to my headteacher, explaining why I want to waste my time and effort doing menial tasks around the school for nought but a badge on my tie be a prefect.

That should make for some good mockery. Let's find out.

Sunday 10 June 2007
[Not when I'll actully have written the bulk of it, but an early date makes me seem prepared and eager... I assume]

Dear [Headteacher's name omitted to make it seem like it's important information and that there are enough people who read this to make it worth keeping a secret],

I would like to put forward my application for the position of Prefect for my Sixth Year [Translation: my parents would like me to put forward my application for the position of Prefect]. I have attended Wellington School since 1994, joining at the nursery level soon after Wellington began accepting male pupils [one of the few bits that isn't a lie, but it's not really relevant anyway].
Throughout the 13 years I've spent here, I have maintained a record of good[ish] behaviour and have had consistently high academic results [I'd give examples here, but I really hate to sound arrogant {and yes, you read that right; I don't want to sound arrogant}]. I believe that this sets a good example for younger pupils [most of whom I consider to be jerks in need of a good ass-kicking], something which is an important part of being a prefect [or, at least, I think it is. I'm not really sure what being a prefect involves].


It should probably continue on for longer but I haven't got it finished so you'll have to make do with that.

No matter how hard I try, I just can't get into the right mindset to describe myself in huge numbers of buzzword-laden sentences, listing all the things I've done in my life as if they were huge achievements. I suspect that that may be a problem in later life, but, being a teenager, I have the right to assume that I will simply deal with that in later life.

I hope you've enjoyed this little diversion. For some reason, I find it far easier to mock this sort of thing than to actually do it, which I like to think says more about this whole idea than it does about me. After I have the final draft ready, I might do this again, even if it's just as some additional thing. Apologies for the formatting.


There's no Great Slipper Experiment update for today (I think it's today that I'm meant to do them) since this blister is still bugging me. Even if it wasn't, it's warm enough now that I'm going without socks for most of the day, let alone shoes. I may just postpone the whole thing till winter.

Oh, and Skippy? Where are those @!$%*&% visitor numbers I asked for?!?!!

Meditations on scrolling

I've spent hours today lying on my hammock, reading 2001. "Summer monsoon", my ass.


I have absolutely no idea how I survived before the invention of the scroll wheel.

Seriously.

Not a clue.

The scroll wheel, or ball, as the case may be, is such a commonplace thing that it is very easy simply to take it for granted. The Apple Mighty Mouse is a very nice bit of kit but that scroll ball spoils me, to the point where I become incredibly frustrated when it gets dirty and starts to stick a bit.

I notice it most on web pages, where scrolling down, far more often than up, is an essential part of, you know, actually reading the web page. If it weren't for the proliferation of the Internet, scroll wheels as we know them may not exist. And that would be a tragedy.

Take a second to think about what your scroll wheel does for you.

It goes above and beyond the call of duty in not only allowing convenient scrolling, but also being the basis for a third button with which tabs may be opened and fast scrolling accessed. In games, it can be used to select any number of things, from rocket launchers to pikemen, not to mention the zooming of sniper rifles and the control of camera angles.

While watching Farscape in a not-necessarily legal way (I'll buy the DVDs if I like the first few episodes [which I do, by the way; it's a very good show]), I've noticed that using the scroll bar on any other window freezes the streaming video (but not the sound) temporarily. The scroll wheel means that I can surf the web without interruption. I'm not entirely sure why that happens, but it does and I'm glad that there's a way around it.

The scroll wheel is an essential part of technology today, allowing flexibility and laziness that were unknown to the previous generation of input devices. Think about that, the next time you come across a long document or need to move to the bottom of a long list.



On a completely unrelated note, Blink is now one of my favourite Doctor Who episodes ever.

On another unrelated note, I've just remembered that tonight was meant to be my 100th post. And I did it on the importance of the scroll wheel. Kind of sums up this blog doesn't it? Oh, well. I'll do some reflective stuff tomorrow. Seems like commemorating the 101st of things is becoming a tradition by accident around here.

Woodle: Stick Guys I (or Stick Guys III of Scotland)

Etching and scribbling by Alasdair Corbett.
Reference to the Stuart monarchy by Alasdair Corbett, who suspects he should probably have gone with a Final Fantasy reference instead.

Why is the title always the hard part?

Things that can put you off typing:
1. Seeing dried blood on your keyboard from when you sneezed with a bleeding nose last night.

And with that wonderful image in your heads, I'll get on with today's post. Actually, I'm gonna go get a damp cloth or something first. . .​​;......;;l;............;.;..;./;/.l.;.'/

Can you guess what keys the blood was on?


So, anyway, I'm in a good mood. It's relatively early in the day as I'm typing this and summer has finally arrived, so it's still light outside and nicely warm. I've spent all day either doing easy school work, playing video games or lying outside on nice, warm grass in the nice, warm sunshine.

For someone who spends an inordinate amount of time inside or on a computer, I am very fond of summer. Perhaps it's the weather, which makes going outdoors a possibly relaxing experience. Thanks to the fact that the term "Sixth Year" so far seems to be interchangeable with "Skive Year", this allows for conversations at school that don't take place in a small, crowded room where everyone's yelling.

Perhaps it's the inevitable holidays, with their promises of marathon gaming sessions, a total lack of school work and the chance to work on things that have been put off for the weeks and months prior. The beginning of the holidays also coincides nicely with the end of hay fever season, another bonus.

Perhaps it's all the events that happen in summer, such as the new E3, which brings with it several days and nights of trailers and tantalising tales of upcoming titles (or the old one did; the new one remains unproven), exam results are dropped through the door bringing with them disappointment or the promise of presents. Even going on holiday doesn't seem quite so bad when it looks like it's not just going to be your immediate family accompanying you.

Whatever the reason, I like summer. I also like winter and I'm not entirely averse to spring and autumn but summer, synonymous with holidays and fun, is quite possibly my favourite time of year. Maybe it seems best when I have memories of it behind me and hopes for it in front of me, but only time will tell.



I'm not in a good enough mood to do the NWT that I promised yesterday but I will have a woodle up for tomorrow, even if it's not the one I had planned. Because the guy I asked to draw the woodle after a long conversation about it claims to have no knowledge of it. He's more or less insane, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Also, while it is my 100th daily TWToday post tomorrow, thanks to an additional one I did a while back, this is technically my 100th post here. Then again, that's not counting various woodles and the odd NWT that I've put up.

The magic box stores TV!

Bad times to find out about a bleeding nose:
1. When sneezing.


It's a funny thing, I find myself no longer watching TV. I'll very often record stuff I want to watch and then not watch it later. Sometimes, this is because some rather ignorant and inconsiderate people decide to simply delete my stuff without asking. Equally often, it's simple lack of time combined with laziness. I'm not quite sure how I managed to be too lazy to watch TV, but I suspect that it makes me one step away from transcending to another plane of existence, in which I shall dwell as a being of pure laziness.

I used to avidly follow various shows. I used to watch Star Trek Voyager and then Enterprise, I've been a fan of all things Stargate for years, Battlestar Galactica also held my attention for a while. I was a follower of House since it started in the UK and I still greatly like the show. I just don't watch it now. I'm still relatively up to date on the episodes, but since I introduced it to Sam, he's been watching US episodes online and threatening me with spoilers. The Star Trek franchise is off the air for now, but I'm not sure if it could hold my interest. I had the season finales of SG-1 and Atlantis (series finale, in SG-1's case) sitting on the Sky box's hard drive for weeks until some imbecile deleted them. Battlestar Galactica built up for a while then fell completely off my radar.

I'm not sure whether this says something about me or the state of television in general. I never channel surf now, because it's simply not worth the effort. If something I really want to watch is on, I can record it if the time is inconvenient or just watch it. But so much of what's on TV is rubbish, it's just not worth trying to find something new without prior knowledge.


What was the purpose of this post?, I hear you ask. I don't really know but it's done something rather useful. I am now an awful lot more resolved to watch what I have recorded and track down that which has fallen to button-happy deletionists.

This blog started, after all, as somewhere to toss out my ideas and get them straight. It's been rather helpful in that regard tonight. Even if the paragraphs have been winding and the whole thing rather dull to read.