In Uncategorized on August 19, 2002
what on earth does gouranga mean?
the word is plastered
across motorway bridges all across england and its only recently occured
to me that it’s not a bridge maker and if it’s a marketing campaign then
it’s been going a long time without any payoff. it seems to be
a word which, so the Hare Krishna movement believe, has simply to be said
to make things better. To spread the “word” around, packs of plain-clothes
Krishnas have been decorating motorway bridges and junctions with the letters,
or sometimes just painted graffiti.
i think it would be more fitting if it meant “to be puzzled” but i’m happier now i’ve sussed it out. gouranga.
In Uncategorized on August 19, 2002
to balance out the non-recommended guest house below and restore my karma level i’ll put in a good word for holly bush house
in lymington which doesn’t look any great guns in the blurry pictures on its web page but which
is actually lovely, clean, modern and friendly with a gorgeous garden and
is within crawling distance of about a zillion pubs.
In Uncategorized on August 19, 2002
i’m back from my wanderings.
has “non smoking” become the standard for hotel rooms or not? every
hotel i’ve stayed in for absolutely yonks has been non smoking by default,
so much so that it’s dropped off my list of things to ask. salisbury tourist
information get no brownie points whatsoever for recommending the byways guest house
to us. we could have lived with the royal portraits on every vertical surface and the misworking plumbing
system (it must have been broken – they couldn’t have intended to switch
the radiators on in the middle of a baking august night, could they?) but the room that smelt like an ashtray did my head
in literally as well as figuratively.
i don’t like planning ahead on accommodation too much, what if we decide
to change our travel ideas mid journey like we did this week? i like the
holiday feeling of having more degrees of freedom than usual – we could go
anywhere and see anything that comes to mind – but it’s a bad idea when you
pick a busy cathedral city and end up sleeping in an ashtray.
(darren wants me to add an additional plumbing complaint about the loud crap
shower – i’ve never heard plumbing so loud and on my part the shower looked
too manky to get in anyway. oh and notes taped to the wall saying “run tap
for several minutes to get hot water” do not inspire confidence in guests.
and also we should have realised that something was off when they insisted
we pay the bill at the beginning of our stay. i don’t want to make it sound
like the bates motel and it did partially redeem itself by serving a decent
breakfast but i shan’t be taking a room unseen and unprebooked again if i can avoid it.)
In Uncategorized on August 9, 2002
i’m off for about ten days, see you then.
In Uncategorized on August 9, 2002
this year’s 5k winners have been announced (the entry (whether it is a page or a site) must collectively total less than 5k in size.
). i like the entries that actually do real webby type things rather than just the “oooh that’s pretty” ones. the scale model of the solar system and window pong get my votes. window pong also wins the best use of pop up windows ever award from me.
In Uncategorized on August 9, 2002
it’s good to see the rss headline
syndication format becoming more prevalent by the week lately. many weblogging
tools have added support for creating rss feeds from their weblogs recently
and bloghog is the latest aggregation webtool to appear and will show the latest headlines from your favourite weblogs to you.
nothing seems to have changed much in rss since it appeared as part of “my netscape”
three years ago though (apart from the fact that my netscape doesn’t seem to work
with rss any more that is). headline aggregators still crawl the web at intervals
looking for updated feeds. this incessant crawling is driving me nuts,
it seems so inefficient, every aggregation tool crawls for its own updates
and maintains its own directory of rss feeds.
i’d like to see (in a “haven’t got the time
or energy to write at the moment” sense) a combination of blogtracker
with bloghog. both tools are only concerned with updates to weblogs but whereas
bloghog crawls through all the rss feeds it knows about every hour to see
who has updated (and seems to get it wrong quite a lot as of yet) blogtracker
uses weblogs.com
to figure out which weblogs have updated lately. and weblogs.com know who
has updated lately because webloggers tell them via a “ping” method that’s now built
into many tools too.
of course you can regard weblogs.com as a central point of failure.
if it ceases working then blogtracker and other weblog services that rely
on it also fall over like dominos. and if the people who run weblogs.com
decide to pull the service entirely but hang onto the domain there are a
load of webtools that need recoding to work with a replacement.
it feels like there ought to be something between pull (aka crawling
for updates) and push (aka pinging with updates), some kind of unfailing
automatic door.
In Uncategorized on August 9, 2002
i adore the term markover. it’s right up there with automagically in my favourite neologisms list.
In Uncategorized on August 8, 2002
this bar code generator is popping up all over the weblog world at the moment and has reminded me to look out an explanation of how bar codes work.
i
started in on a long explanation of fun games to play with decoding grocery
barcodes here but then decided that this was probably only defined as “fun”
in kirstyworld and even then only in the depths of the war against boredom.
you’ll never know. it’s probably for the best.
In books read on August 8, 2002
[these comments are taken from a mailing list discussion and are both out of context and contain spoilers]
[on the prologue]
I have a general dislike of prologues. I tend to feel authors use
them to inject some excitement into a dreary start of a book and often
confuse me with something that isn't relevant for another 457 pages by
which time I've forgotten it.
I liked this prologue ok though, apart from the time lapse between it
and chapter one it wasn't told in a different style and I didn't get
confused. Whether it contains important things that I'll have
forgotten by the time I get to page 457 is yet to be seen though.
I felt it was a reasonable introduction to Joe, portraying him as a
hardworking honest family man and it waylaid some of my reservations
about the book. I had an expectation from somewhere that a game
warden character would be a very macho hunting, shooting and leaping
tall buildings in a single bound sort of a bloke and was glad to find
that this wasn't what Joe seemed to be.
[on why joe investigates]
To me the fact that Ote had ended up on Joe's woodpile after their
altercation in the prologue was enough of a reason for Joe to want to
look further than the others did. There also seemed to be something
off to me about the fact that the fourth man at the camp ended up
nearly dead, it seems a bit too neat to me and to Joe.
As I think Donna has mentioned already I'm having trouble with the
term "outfitters" not being preceded by "gentlemen's" and that no one
has had a fitting for a three piece suit yet.
I'm unclear as to how much Joe is investigating in a professional
capacity and how much of what he's doing is amateur sleuth stuff.
He's able to send samples to labs for analysis (oh yes, the bit where
his sample went missing was the point that I felt that Joe really had
a reason to think something odd was going on) (and isn't "scat" a
great term, it sounds lovely and polite to me compared with every
other synonym) and search property on the Sheriff's say-so but I don't
get the feeling that he's a proper cop.
On the whole I feel that the fact that everyone else wants the
investigation tied up post haste with the minimum of explanation is a
fair enough reason for Joe to sense that something is up.
[on the quotes]
I'm afraid that on the whole I tend to ignore these type of chapter
toppings in nearly all books. I've picked up a hint that endangered
species are likely to feature later in the book but that's about it.
My brain does some kind of skipping thing over things that don't look
immediately relevant and I find I'm reading the next chapter without
really thinking about what I might have missed out on.
Purchased on 19th July 2002.
In Uncategorized on August 8, 2002
europe is getting new weather satellites
at the end of the month which is supposed to mean that the forecasters get
clearer images to work with and the rest of us get better forecasts. i reckon
i’ll probably stick with the generic method of forecasting where i presume
the weather today will be much like yesterday.
nocto