(no subject)

Been awfully busy this week.

Tuesday morning I turned on the computer and got a "SMART error: your drive with all the MP3s, videos, work and documents on it has gone wrong. Backup and replace."

So I downloaded IBM's disk monitoring software, which said "Yup, the drive's on the way out, go and spend £100 on a new one."

Fortunately I managed to pick up an 80GB drive for £76, which still amazes me somewhat because my first drive was 40Mb in size. And that was pretty huge.

I spent Tuesday night swearing in frustration because I got the new drive connected ok (except for one cable-upside-down error) but the old one was now no longer responding. After 2 hours of this I gave up and went to bed.

Wednesday I had Marianne (my first girlfriend) visiting, along with old uni friends Billy and Susan. We spent the evening relaxed and chatting, although Erin and Marianne enjoyed swapping "isn't he a terrible boyfriend" stories just a little bit too much.

I dashed home yesterday (Thursday) to grab a Lo5r book for the game and decided to do a quick boot of my machine to check email. Miraculously it came up with the dead hard drive working (albeit making horribly clunking sounds every few minutes). I managed to copy everything off without a problem, which cheered me up no end as I hadn't been looking forward to reripping 130 CDs and downloading all the cool stuff I've picked up over the last 2 years.

I need to make it to Equilibrium, Adaptation and Solaris at the cinema this week (Solaris and Adaptation seem to only have 2 weeks runs). I'm hopefully seeing Adaptation tonight at the Odeon, although that might become Equilibrium depending on mood at the time.

And the mainframe seems to have finished my compile, so it's back to the grindstone for me!

(no subject)

"The central problem of politics: Do you paint simplistic pictures that make people act (and leave them with too simplistic a view of the world) or do you paint baffingly shaded and contingent scenes that leave people paralyzed by indecision?"
- Brian Eno

(no subject)

It's amazing how easily I get distracted. While waiting for the mainframe to catch up with me, I've been writing up a brief explanation of how the stock-market works (or not).

I've been using the comics market as an analogy, partially because it behaves in a similar way and partially because it's easier to understand.

So I started writing out a description of the comics boom/bust of the early 90s, only to find (when I came back from lunch) that I had digressed significantly from my original plan and was attempting to explain things at that level rather than leaving it to later.

I'm convinced that when I'm writing I'm not actually consciously thinking.

(no subject)

More and more I'm convinced that programming isn't about breaking down processes into their component parts/instructions and then implementing those instructions in a language understood by computers.

That, after all, is dead easy.

Programming is all about knowing the pitfalls inherent in any system, how to work around them, how to spot the errors quickly and what solutions fix them. It's about being an encyclopedeia of workarounds.

It's just not cricket

Cricket commentator for the Guardian Online section has a bad day. Spends most of this morning's report telling people about it, in between occasional reporting of the cricket.

Absolutely fantastic.

Go here and read it.

Mobilisation alert

Right, you bastards, if you like action movies (and you live in the UK) then you owe it to yourselves to get your arses down to the cinema and watch Equilibrium now. It's quite simply the most kick-ass film I've seen in a dogs age.

It's not the worlds best film, but it's simple, to the point and very effective. And if you don't giggle like a crack-fiend during the fight scenes, you don't deserve to live.

Full review to follow when I've had more sleep, but in the mean-time, I'll just say that as far as gunfights in a lobby go, it's got one better than The Matrix.

(no subject)

This is fantastic.

Some snippets from the worldview it describes.

Complicated explanations are suspect
The world is simple, and there must be a simple explanation for everything

If it's good for you, it's good
Society is everyone else.

You're special
Bad things shouldn't happen to you.

Certainty is strength, doubt is weakness
Admitting alternatives is undermining one's own belief.
Changing one's mind means one has wasted the time spent holding the prior opinion.

Testing Testing

Just wondering how mant people actually read this...

Please respond with how often you read this journal. I'd make it a poll, but I know that some people read it but don't have LJs.

Oh, if you're not an LJ user, please say who you are, to save bafflement.