nocto

oooh, more night sky activity. jill reports that:

There was a huge explosion on the sun today which means that during the next two or three nights we might get to see spectacular auroras or northern lights here in the northern hemisphere, maybe as far south as France.

i’m going to be keeping a eye on aurora watch because i will be wandering around dark lanes if i have a chance of seeing the northern lights down here in yorkshire.

it’s just started raining after what seems like months and months of clear skies. go away evil sky obscuring clouds.

i just put some new memory in my computer, it’s still about half as clunky as hell. it now has 24 576 times as much memory as my first computer did.

[actually, add another factor of 32, i'd forgotten my zeroth computer, i think it got returned to the shop though so i'll ignore it.]

i think we got the bbc b for christmas nearly twenty years ago, that means my computer memory has doubled every 16.5 months which is pretty bang on with moore’s law i think. (even though moore’s law is on about something else, transistors on circuit boards doubling in number every 18 months i think.)

of course my memory trebled just today, until this morning my memory had only doubled every 18.6 months, damn for discovering the figures made a better story before the upgrade after the fact!

i was merrily reading about today’s kids playing yesterday’s games…

pong, ok, it was never terribly exciting; handheld football, yep, pretty much ditto; donkey kong, well that was pretty damn good but the point about the pole dancer is a good one; tetris, whoooooaaaa! kids don’t know about tetris? tetris isn’t still one of the best games ever to light up your pixels? yikes.

i am a product of a bygone era.

[found via jwz]

of the “nation’s top 100 best loved novels” as figured out by the bbc’s big read project, i’ve read 39, which i didn’t think was too bad going. there’s quite a few more books in that list that i’d like to have a read of sometime.

of the top 21 that are currently battling it out on saturday night tv though i’ve actually read 17. that’s 81% which seems to be pretty good going to me so i don’t feel quite so bad about missing out on the likes of middlemarch, emma and far from the madding crowd. plus i thought my childhood reading was a bit heavy on enid blyton but it looks like i totally missed the best of her as i’ve never read the magic faraway tree.

the four titles in the top 21 that i haven’t read are:

• birdsong – i’ve actually had this for ages and ages and have read the beginning but got torn away from it by other things, must get back to it. definitely one i plan to read.
• gone with the wind – are people voting for this based on having read the book or having seen the film? i’ve never had the vaguest desire to read this, or to see the film, and haven’t got any now either.
• lord of the rings – much the same as for gone with the wind really though i think this would have done pretty well without the films but i still feel the films are garnering votes rather than the books. i’m enjoying the films but have little interest in reading the books.
• his dark materials – this trilogy sounds pretty good to me. i’m not sure it’s entirely my cup of tea but i’m planning on tasting it and finding out.

i’m torn in about ten directions on which of the 21 is my best loved book, currently i’m cheering on wuthering heights but it’s a hard decision.