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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Matthew's LiveJournal:
| Friday, November 20th, 2009 | |
| 10:39 am | UPSs... A while ago, I acquired an APC Smart-UPS 1000 (from a clear-out at my Dad's office, IIRC). At that time, I needed a new battery, which I got Hardware Support at Cambridge to do for a very reasonable sum. I appreciated its value again today, when the plumber accidentally tripped the circuit-breaker; I was able to shut ming down cleanly.Sadly, the battery is going to need replacing soon, I think - the last few weeks it's had the "replace battery" light on nearly all the time (although turning it off and then on again makes it seem happy for a day or so). Annoyingly, while we have a spare USP (an APC Smart-UPS 750XL, which I think is a newer but less potent model), it is also in need of a new battery. My question is - how should I go about getting the battery replaced? There isn't a convenient Hardware Support group here I can ask... |
| Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 | |
| 5:21 pm | Drugs I know drugs policy has been in the news a lot recently, and possibly there's a whole other post on scientific advice to government. Nonetheless, I have been of the opinion for a while that prohibition isn't the answer to "the drugs problem", despite having never partaken myself. This short rant seems to cover quite a bit of the ground pretty well. |
| Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 | |
| 11:57 am | opposite-shift Over dinner last night, we talked a little about RSI. One thing that came up was that using the shift key and another key at the same time with the same hand (e.g. left-shift + q) puts your hand in a funny shape, and often makes RSI worse. People taught to touch-type don't do this, but others do. It occurred to me that you could get some bit of X to only make opposite-shift work (at least for letters, sorting the punctuation characters out might be a bit harder), and this would fairly rapidly educate typists to DTRT. How hard would it be? |
| Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 | |
| 8:15 am | *sigh* Theft of cabling in the Berkswell area has buggered up the train service today. Just what I needed... |
| Friday, October 9th, 2009 | |
| 7:43 pm | fan-assisted ovens Our new oven is fan-assisted, but we have no destructions for it. Food packaging always says "for fan-assisted ovens, RTFM"; is there a good rule-of-thumb we can/should use instead of TFM? |
| Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 | |
| 3:05 pm | Yes/No/Tickybox Since SQL has not been my friend today... Poll #1455301 Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 44 Do you hate ternary logic?
View Answers True False Unknown Aymara speaking logicians murdered my ancestors, you insensitive clod! |
| Monday, September 7th, 2009 | |
| 9:34 pm | "Mushroom" pate Following a discussion on #chiark...Poll #1454504 Mmm...fungus Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 109 Do you cut the mould off (non-blue) cheese, and then carry on eating the cheese?
View Answers Yes Only if I'm desperate No I don't eat cheese No opinion Other Do you cut the mould off pate, and then carry on eating the pate?
View Answers Yes Only if I'm desperate No I don't eat pate No opinion Other |
| Thursday, August 27th, 2009 | |
| 2:23 pm | [angband] Finally! ( also, previously )I've finally found the first of the dungeon spell-books, which I would normally expect to have found long ago. Temporary rPoison is very handy (as is temporary double-resist of the other basic breath types). I'm deeper than all but one of my previous characters, which may account for a feeling of being slightly under-powered; an excellent missile launcher would really help there. Comments welcome, as ever. ( YACD ) ETA: I note that this is now the best I've done on the new beta. ETA2: Amusing, I just descended a staircase, and was insta-killed by a room full of inertia hounds. |
| Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 | |
| 8:42 pm | Open Government It seems that the UK screwed up, and so the Video Recordings Act 1984 is currently unenforceable (and will be for 3 months, while we formally notify the EU). The Minister for Culture and Tourism, Barbara Follett MP, wrote to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, telling him this, and advising him to try and suppress this information. Wikileaks has the letter here. ETA Beeb article |
| Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 | |
| 5:20 pm | What's an epidemiologist? A discussion with the dentist yesterday leads me to wonder how many people know what an epidemiologist is. If you could fill in the following poll, that'd be grand (and please don't look it up just so you can tick "yes" below :). If you're not sure if your understanding is correct, then Wikipedia will help. I apologise for the dreadful typos in the poll; sadly I can't edit them now. Poll #1445916 Epidemi-what? Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None, participants: 127 Do you know what an epidemiologist is? Yes I think so No I thought so, but I checked and was wrong No more than "someone who does epidemiology" ...but solely or largely due to my interactions with Other How much education have you done? To end of high school / O level / GSCE / equivalent To end of college / A levels/ equivalent Batcherlors degree / equivalent Masters degree / equivalent Clinical degree / equivalent Doctorate / equivalent None of the above Other What area of study was the majority of your most advanced education in? Physical sciences Biological sciences Clinical sciences Other sciences Arts (visual, performing, other) Humanities Other |
| Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 | |
| 4:20 pm | [angband] Progress, again cf. the previous char. to reach this point, at rather more turns. I've done much less well in terms of loot, though; the lack of the Resistances book is making life difficult at the moment. The CD below the cut is more recent than the snippet above; I'm still on less turns than position 10, however. ( YACD ) |
| 11:57 am | |
| Monday, August 3rd, 2009 | |
| 11:42 am | plug adaptors Dear lazyweb, If I wanted to go into town and buy a plug adaptor for a South African socket (into which I can plug my UK plugs), where should I try? Tesco (where I've bought similar things in the past) seems to only have US and European ones... ETA: I've ordered one from the intertubes... ETA: ...which has arrived :) |
| Thursday, July 30th, 2009 | |
| 5:10 pm | Today has been a bit frustrating - parameterizing the current model is being more time-consuming than I'd like, and either my hayfever is much worse as of last night or I'm getting a cold on top of it. I'm not really posting to whinge, though, but rather to point you at this entertaining cartoon |
| Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 | |
| 11:58 am | "excepte necessitie otherwise require" The Sacrament Act 1547 established that communion should be given in both kinds (i.e. bread and wine), "excepte necessitie otherwise require"[1]. In response to government advice[2], the Archbishops of Canterbury and York have advised that Communion should be given in one kind only for the time being. This struck me as slightly odd advice, so I went and looked at PubMed. There isn't a great deal of literature on the subject, but there are a few papers from the late 1980s, when there was concern regarding transmission of HIV. For example, this article from someone working at the Public Health Laboratory says "No episode of disease attributable to the shared communion cup has ever been reported. Currently available data do not provide any support for suggesting that the practice of sharing a common communion cup should be abandoned because it might spread infection." Maybe the HPA has more up-to-date research on the risks involved? I wonder if the advice was based on the idea that there is no cost whatsoever involved in people receiving in one kind only, so even if there is no evidence of risk reduction, "it can't hurt"? It strikes me that the effort would be better spent in encouraging people who have (or have recently recovered from) flu-like symptoms to stay at home - an infectious individual is going to transmit flu more readily to the people they sit next to in the pew than they are to people via the chalice. [1] picking out the nuances from Sixteenth-century legalese is left as an exercise for the reader. [2] page 19 of the PDF downloadable from that page |
| Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 | |
| 9:28 am | You know it's going to be one of those days when... ...you're making lunch, and you only notice the bread's mouldy when making the second sandwich :-( |
| Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 | |
| 1:52 pm | The same faith? Dr Nazir-Ali, bishop of Rochester, says to the Telegraph about those Christians who think homosexual relations are OK "We believe that God has revealed his purpose about how we are made. People who depart from this don’t share the same faith. They are acting in a way that is not normative according to what God has revealed in the Bible. The Bible’s teaching shows that marriage is between a man and a woman. That is the way to express our sexual nature." At the FoCA meeting a week or so back, John Broadhurst, bishop of Fulham said "I now believe Satan is alive and well and he resides at Church House". I find this attitude rather astonishing. Christians disagree on a range of important issues like stem cell research, abortion, whether war is ever justified, how to deal with poverty, etc. without anyone suggesting seriously that we should schism over them. And yet if you disagree as to whether homosexual relationships are sinful or not, you're not a Christian? It makes you wonder what our collective priorities are :-( ( obviously this calls for a poll :) [largely aimed at the Christians on my fiends list] ) Feel free to comment, but please try extra-hard to be polite! The Remember Rule 163 got rather too bad-tempered in places. |
| Friday, June 26th, 2009 | |
| 9:35 am | Friday with lots to do => silly poll Poll #1421369 Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 26 Google are: also...
View Answers google^W skynet is going to kill my descendants, you insensitive clod! I'll be back! Whisky Tango Foxtrot??? |
| Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | |
| 6:06 pm | Remember Rule 163 I would like to remind everyone of rule 163 [0]. It exists to protect a vulnerable minority who are regularly subjected to abuse and intimidation by a more powerful group. That intimidation and abuse nearly always goes unpunished unless injury results, and if this minority are killed and a prosecution occurs, the penalties are relatively small. I'm talking about cyclists. Rule 163 states, amongst other things "give motorcyclists, cyclists and horse riders at least as much room as you would when overtaking a car", which is sadly not very clear, but is helpfully illustrated:  It is my experience that many many drivers ignore this rule entirely if obeying it would mean the slightest delay to their journey. When you're in a car, please remember rule 163, and give cyclists plenty of room; if you're not driving, encourage the driver to do so, especially if they are a professional driver. When commuting, I find I often have an unpleasant choice to make - either I cycle in the primary position, in the center of my lane, and get shouted and honked at and overtaken dangerously by some drivers who want to punish me for holding them up, or I cycle in the secondary position (about 1m from the kerb) and get people squeezing past with inches to spare because they are trying to overtake even though there is oncoming traffic and it's not safe to do so. This is quite frankly unacceptable. On one evening cycle home, one taxi driver passed me twice (I overtook him while he was queuing in traffic). On both occasions, he sounded his horn repeatedly, revved his engine hard, and overtook dangerously close - if he'd misjudged it, or I'd wobbled, he would surely have hit me. I complained to the council's taxi licensing officer who said he'd do nothing unless there was a prosecution. The police/CPS won't prosecute unless a cyclist is injured, so taxi drivers can (and do) behave dangerously around cyclists they don't like without fear of any comeback. There are a few further points I'd like to raise: Cycle facilities are often worse than useless. The recommended width of a cycle lane is 2m; almost none that are not also bus lanes are this wide. That means that motorists overtaking at the white line (which many of them do) are passing at much less than the Rule 163 distance. Furthermore, the surface of these on-road cycle lanes is often poorer than the rest of the road, and they fill with debris from the road. I often cycle just outside these sort of lanes for these reasons. Shared-use paths for pedestrians and cycles are dangerous, for both cyclists and pedestrians; indeed there is research showing they are more dangerous to cycle on than the road proper. If you cycle much faster than walking pace, there is a risk of collision with pedestrians who meander across the shared-use path as if it were a pavement, and for all cyclists, there is a risk of collision wherever the path crosses a side-street - it seems that drivers don't expect to meet cyclists at these points, so fail to spot them. Indeed, I'd go as far as to say that many cycle facilities actually make cycling more dangerous, as drivers are more likely to bully cyclists using the road if they see such a facility that the cyclist isn't using. Accordingly, I'd like to remind drivers that cyclists are not obliged to use these facilities, and you should not shout at those that choose not to. As I say above, often the cyclist is safer on the road. More generally, though don't intimidate cyclists who you feel are delaying you. Cyclists are perfectly entitled to be on the roads, and are a vulnerable group of road users. If you feel a cyclist has made an odd decision about whether to use a cycle facility or not, whether or not to wear a helmet, or whatever, consider that they are entitled to make their own minds up about these things, and have probably given the matter more thought than you have. Shouting "helpful" comments to them is bullying. Finally, and it shouldn't need saying, driving dangerously to intimidate or punish cyclists is immoral and illegal. Don't do it! I should be able to cycle to and from work free from people threatening to kill or maim me with their vehicles. In an ideal world, there would be effective sanctions against dangerous drivers who collide with cyclists, even if the cyclist is not seriously injured. In practice, this doesn't happen, and even when drivers kill cyclists, they not infrequently escape being charged with any offense. So yes, remember rule 163, and give cyclists a chance! ETA This DfT article is quite sensible. [0] No, this isn't a joke about rules about porn on the internet |
| 12:54 pm | Who will be the next Speaker? There are 10 MPs trying to get the job, under the new selection system. Which will it be? Poll #1419398 Order, order Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 45 The next Speaker of the House of Commons will be:
View Answers Margaret Beckett Sir George Young Ann Widdecombe Sir Alan Beith John Bercow Richard Shepherd Sir Michael Lord Sir Patrick Cormack Sir Alan Haselhurst Parmjit Dhanda I've no idea I don't care Other ETA: the ordering above is the order in which they are to speak this afternoon, according to the BBC. |
7 (15.9%)![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
