OutSider Weblog

Tuesday, October 23, 2001

The first casualty...

Our Beloved Government weren't the only people using 11/9/01 to bury dodgy stories. According to this piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, the final Florida recount was buried, too. Now, if the recount confirmed Bush as president, there'd have been no reason to bury it as it would have added to his legitimacy. About the only reason for hushing things up is if they'd found evidence that Gore had won, after all.
(yes, this is mentioned in my livejournal, too)

Monday, October 22, 2001

Ah. I found out how to link to a specific item in a slashdot journal (briefly: scroll down to the bottom, click on "List all Journal entries" in tiny print, and then on the appropriate title).

And why did I want to do this? Charlie Stross's birthday rant on social neoteny. It's a wonderful concept, and can be used to explain so much that is otherwise strange about working in a rapidly-changing field. And probably why my social life has returned to the level it was at when I was in academia back in the late '80s / early '90s...

Sunday, October 21, 2001

This is totally ridiculous -- carrying a book is enough to get you barred from flying under the new regime.

Yeah, I know I've bunch of other updates to stick in, and they'll be going in "as and when", but this one was so incredibly stupid that I had to mention it.

Thursday, October 18, 2001

A good day today, so far. Enough sleep (even considering the accidental session in the Glasshouse Stores last night) and some interesting and useful stuff to do on the shop pages this morning. Very pleasantly surprised by a call from my brother Jeremy, who just happens to be in London tonight and hence will be able to make it to the birthday bash in The Doghouse, Wardour St from sixish onwards (happy hour finishes at 7.30).

Monday, October 15, 2001

A very interesting page pointer on one of my mailing lists: Sleep Paralysis and Associated Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Experiences. It's sort of serendipitously topical as well, because, while I hadn't had anything like this for almost a year, I had re-occurrences on Friday and Saturday mornings last week.

Okay, the Friday one could possibly have been explained by the larger than usual (almost Leeds Biophysics-style), alcohol intake (beers, tequila shots, even sillier shots, beer drinking game, and then on to the Kro Bar) followed by checking into a hotel ('twas cheaper than a minicab at that time of the morning and I got into work by nine), but the Saturday one happened in my own bed at home, after a quieter than usual night on the sleeper.

Both times I had the sudden, jolting as if from a sudden fall, "wake up", followed by a feeling of sheer dread and being almost sure someone, not particularly malevolent, was watching me. Oh, and the complete inability to move or speak...

I suppose - in a more superstitious era - I may well have decided the hotel was haunted, but with the occurrences being on two consecutive mornings, and more than four hundred miles apart, the only common factor was me (oh, there's always the 'Meeting in Samora' hypothesis, but That'd Be Silly).

Saturday, October 06, 2001

Just begining to wake up about now -- off the sleeper at seven, back home and then spent vast chunks of the morning messing around with webby stuff (arranging some webspace for my nephew Sam got a little more complicated than I'd expected), doing a bit of newsreading (it's been Too Busy At Work) and setting myself up on livejournal as akicif.

Plans for the rest of the day? A meal out somewhere with whoever of the family's about, then maybe out to play for a while. That, or a quiet night in. It depends what's on, and who's about, I guess.

[memo to self: you're saying "I guess" far too often these days. That, and "'ey up" could well be affectations picked up dahn sahf...]

Chris O'Shea, gentleman, scholar, friend and landlord, now has a weblog at The Magician's Blog. It seems to be partially my fault, slightly, so I shall have to Do Better and Update More.

Oh, and the Plokta News Network seems to be back as a sort of fannish slashdot...

Thursday, October 04, 2001

Still here -- just been 'orrendously busy for a while with the work site...

Normal service, as such, will resume when things are a tad less fraught.