If all works out, I shall be moving to my new flat in Guildford this week. Hence, more white-van-man antics.

Step 1: Hire a Bigger Van

Step 2: Drive around and around..

Step 3: Collapse

Ok, I admit it – I’ve got a facebook account. I don’t really collect contacts, but people seem to add me occasionally, so that’s ok. And the status updates provide a little amusement sometimes (names changed to protect the guilty):

#### is hungover beyond belief but at work….
#### is enantiomerically pure.
#### is waiting for the days when sex for money will no longer be illegal.
#### is sure she failed the fucking bollocks that is inorfuckinganic chemistry.
#### is preparing to get wasted at Sugar!!!

Writing about: E–learning Research: blog styles for better academic writing, 30/05/06, transversality – a geophilosophical journal

Most of the time I write my blog entries for my own use, with a few other readers in mind who all use Firefox, so I’m not that bothered about Internet Exploder users. I’m also not interested in how my texts appear out of context in RSS aggregators, so it doesn’t matter that they lose their additional formatting in such systems.

I’m always interested to see the approach taken by the E-Learning Advisors (employed to advise the faculties about the use of e-learning technologies) at Warwick. This is a case in point; Rob O’Toole has formatted his blog to define semantic elements using CSS, so for example a definition is prefixed with *Definition:*.

The problem, of course, is that RSS readers and aggregators, and screen readers do not respect CSS styles. CSS is a description of layout, not of meaning. Just as the web is moving to a separation of content and presentation, Rob is explaining how to take a backward step and tie meaning to presentation, and simultaneously deny meaning to 90% of web users (using IE), anyone who wants to aggregate his work, and anyone who uses a screen reader.

I had left a comment explaining this, primarily as a caveat emptor, but evidently constructive feedback isn’t welcome.

Writing about: Flickr: Photoshop Tennis

For those who dont know, Photoshop Tennis is a game whereby someone chooses a starting image, it could be anything, though generally a decent sized high resolution image usually works best, and then people edit the image following the guidelines that the person who posted the original image lays down, then post their image, then people edit the edited image and post their creations, and so on, the game ends when people stop posting new edits.

There are no winners in the game, it is an exercise in collaborative creation, and often quite cool pictures can be created in this way. And though the group is called Photoshop Tennis, you dont need to use Photoshop to participate, any decent image editing program will do.

Absolutely brilliant :-)

Writing about: Wired News: The Wikipedia FAQK

Well, Wikipedia exists in a state of quantum significance flux. It’s simultaneously a shining, flawless collection of incontrovertible information, and a debased pile of meaningless words thrown together by uneducated lemurs with political agendas. It simply cannot exist in any state between these two extremes. You can test this yourself by expressing a reasonable opinion about the site in any public space. Whatever words you type, they will be interpreted by readers as supporting one of these two opposing views.

I like the idea of wikipedia. Really. But this piece by Lore Sjöberg really sums it up well…

... Use a Data Table

I used to know how to do this, but then forgot i) how to do it, and ii) what it was called.

You can fill a range of cells in Excel to the output from whatever arbitrary formula you would like, by making a list of input values, and the output formula at the top. This is useful because you can have the output being the result of some worksheet which is too complicated to manage in a single formula. The inputs can be applied to any cell you want.

So. 20 minutes of joy trying to navigate MS help and Google before I found what I needed.

Writing about: http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/essay51.htm

There isn’t a single great work in the history of civilization, no novel, symphony, film, or song that was completed as a 1/5th time-slice between e-mail, IM, cellphones and television.

(_via_ John Dale)

Well put, and so true. I know that when I want to really get on with the thesis, I quit the browsers, Set my messengers to Busy and actually really don’t talk to anyone who ignores that. Some things can be multitasked, most can’t. Or rather, can with a timeslice of > 1 h :-)

Apparantly, a power cut at Warwick University has led to “multiple electrical failures” in the IT gear there, and users should expect “major disruption for the next week.”

This really isn’t acceptable. The supply of clean, reliable power for a machine room has been a fundamental priority for decades, and Warwick still can’t get it right. I’m sure that ITS will pass the blame for this catastrophe along to Estates, but that is really avoiding the problem. It is up to the customer ( i.e. ITS) to make sure that they get the services that they need, and that these services are trustworthy.

This post is not a dig at the ITS staff who I’m sure are at this very moment doing their best to restore a room full of smouldering piles of hardware into a shiny network. Rather, I feel that this event is yet another indication of management failure, either within ITS or within the university more generally.

Perhaps the decision was taken not to invest in adequate UPS/generator capacity. But if you add up the total lost productivity from a university having no network for a period of days, I think that the cost of a more substantial power supply becomes good value.

This is a “Circle of Fifths”, which shows the interrelationships between major and minor scales, and their key signatures. I’ve recently been playing quite a lot, and it struck me just how much I’ve forgotten. So, I made this to help out. There’s also a printable PDF version too.

So, a while back I signed up for Audioscrobbler, now Last.fm – it’s a music network site and some more. But I mostly found it interesting because it can keep track of the music you’re listening to. In fact (good grief) it seems to be a year to the day since I joined up. And here are my all-time (for the last year) top artists, of the 6137 tracks that I’ve listened to…

*Rank*	*Artiste*	*Times Played*
1	ABBA	262
2	Schiller	191
3	Antonio Vivaldi	157
4	Johann Sebastian Bach	146
5	Evanescence	119
6	Guns N’ Roses	117
7	Roxette	108
8	Enigma	103
9	Ladysmith Black Mambazo	98
10	Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart	82
11	Moxy Früvous	81
12	Buffy – The Musical	78
13	Blank & Jones	76
14	Queen	66
15	The Beatles	64
16	Kraftwerk	57
17	Tom Lehrer	54
18	Madonna	51
19	Britney Spears	50
20	The Prodigy	49
21	Radiohead	48
22	Fettes Brot	46
23	Alanis Morissette	45
24	Nina Gordon	43
25	”Weird Al” Yankovic	40
25	Goo Goo Dolls	40
27	N.W.A	39
28	Dory Previn	38
29	Avril Lavigne	37
30	Metallica	35
30	Hans Zimmer	35
32	Michael Jackson	34
33	Sugababes	33
33	The Beach Boys	33
33	Natalie Imbruglia	33
36	Rammstein	32
36	The Dust Brothers	32
38	Faithless	31
39	Eminem	30
39	Girls Aloud	30
39	Annik Rubens	30
42	Bon Jovi	29
43	Jaia	28
44	Led Zeppelin	27
44	Robbie Williams	27
44	Georg Friedrich Händel	27
47	MC Hawking	26
47	Sheryl Crow	26
47	Adam Kay & Suman Biswas	26
50	Aphex Twin	25