Strange to see something I'd always thought of as a soc.bi meme having escaped into the wild (or into the Guardian, anyway): Fluffies on the run as spikies win battle of the streets...

Again, late in the day and no proper "creative writing" done. I've managed to work out how to get Notes to forward my email while I'm away, but there's still so much stuff I can't get it to do...

And no, in spite of sorting out my bookmarks here, I've no great list of exciting links to zap in...

Just (re-)read:

Edge of Time by David Grinnell -- pulp skiffy of the "they don't write them like that anymore" persuasion, but fun if you can ignore the way he treats the main female character...

Our government, and Straw in particular are getting worse and worse, and there seems to be less and less that we punters can do about it. Hugo Young, writing in the Guardian today points out that the changes in the race relations act are a license to discriminate against people purely on ethnic origin: Ministerial double-talk simply masks a racist law.

Talking about busy weekends, here's a link to where I didn't spend Easter this year:Paragon - Eastercon 2001. The combination of not knowing what I'd be up to and the (perceived) inacessibility of the site meant that I never joined, and when it came closer to the time I was most definitely in two minds about going. However, given how much sleeping I did that weekend in Edinburgh, it's certain I would have been totally wrecked by the con.

Back again after another weekend in the Frozen North. Lots of stuff, so not much time to write about any of it (that'll come later, no doubt).

In the meantime, links to a couple of useful search engines to go with Alltheweb mentioned below: Intelliseek Web Search and IXQuick.

The train last night was pretty 'orrid: no bar, no water, no heating, a half hour delay before leaving, and then woken up at six thirty to find that we weren't almost in London, but running nearly an hour late ... On the bright side, the lack of a bar meant I didn't have a whole bunch of cigarettes, nor sit up chatting to weird people well into the small hours, like I did on Friday night.

This is meant to be funny in a "cutesy animal story" sort of way: Beet Pulp Safety Warning. I'm not sure that it is, but in keeping with new flexible principle of logging links that folk chuck in my direction...

Um, actually that wasn't the link I meant to put there: this one is probably less humorous, and somewhat more gross, but: dogs in elk.

Stuff that I hope will find its way onto my "to read" list sometime in the next year: Researchers use space technology to decode ancient texts. It'd be a shame if after they recovered the text on all those scrolls, they turned out to be stuff we already had (or 1st century CE business accounts, but they're at least of use to historians).

It seems there's another author who's initials are TP, has a love of footnotes, and has an Orangutan where you'd expect a human...Thomas Love Peacock...

Something new for the 'must read' list, I guess.

Well, close of play on another week, and all I have to do is fill the time between now and 23.55 when the Caledonian Sleeper takes me back up to Edinburgh.

It's been one of those weeks, with fairly long periods of almost-inactivity (poking around the site looking for things to fix and doing far more browsing and newsreading (Google is too frustrating for words -- I can read, but not comment) than I'd really like to be) interspersed with sudden rushes to fix things that have been somehow missed in testing, a bit of playing around with my 'stealth redesign' (which will come to nothing now, as the site's being officially redesigned RSN) and playing with the 'anti-cancer' computational chemistry distributed computing project (our team is Somebody set up us the bomb!!).

Actually, I've UD to thank for rather a lot. First off, it rekindled my interest in the molecular modelling stuff I used to work in (it was weird hearing folk at work talk about Superoxide Dismutase and 'de novo' structures), and was the immediate cause of my most recent attempt to catch up with the folk I worked with in Biophysics in Leeds in the late 80's and early 90's. Secondly, it was the reason I finally stirred my stumps and networked the machines at home, complete with a proxy server and a remote display system.

And finally, when I spotted a name I didn't recognise on the team (and nor did our Glorious Leader), I did a websearch on them with alltheweb, and found they had a weblog, which led to this paragraph... And not long after that, I found out we worked in the same building, so it wasn't really a mystery after all.

I guess I should stick in something about Site5.com here, too. Or maybe (mercenary thought) I should wait until I do the "affiliate" thing...

Talking about site5, finding out about them was the immediate impetus behind going off and registering some domain names so that I could start the prject known as "akicif". This seemed like a really good idea when I first thought about it, but I'd an attack of angst about it earlier in the week, and thought it could look really bad if seen the wrong way. So, the whole thing's on semi-hold again until I can sort out just how altruistic it really is.

Current Reads

Just finished Freedom and Necessity, which has a lovely sort of Quincunx-y Tim Powers-y feel to it. Also, started reading an introductory book on MySQL and PHP (called, funnily enough, MySQL and PHP from scratch...)