OneAndOneIs2

I've been using Ubuntu 6.06 - the "Dapper" release - on my desktop because I couldn't face the upgrade process.

Today, I bit the bullet and got on with it.

Burned a 7.04 "Feisty" CD, booted it, and installed the new version on the partition previously inhabited by Slackware - maybe I'll have another go with Slack later, I don't know.

Rebooted, installed the 119 updates (180MB later...) and also enabled "Desktop effects" - not because I really need wobbly windows, but because my screen has an oddball resolution (1400x1050) that can only work with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. Impressively, it auto-selected this res. after the driver was installed, no effort on my part.

Then did a "cp -Rav * /home/dominic" to copy all my old files to the new system. Do not do this yourself unless you REALLY know what you're doing, it can bugger your system up like you wouldn't believe...

For some reason, Firefox and Thunderbird's configs didn't update even with this, so I copied them across manually. And that's that, all done. A few little tweaks to get the last bits set the way I want, and I'll be done.

Not the most painful installation process ever (That would be Linux From Scratch) and not the quickest ever - it took over two hours to get what I would consider a usable system.

But no problems whatsoever, and that's what counts.

(Even got my webcams working - the 'normal' one AND the one I hacked to be infra-red...)

I thought the dinosaurs that wouldn't work with Firefox had all died out. But I just tried to order a book for my course (only one week to go!) and the order form wouldn't render properly.

Good old IE 4 Linux came to my rescue (again) by allowing me to sully my pristine Ubuntu system with Internet Explorer 6, courtesy of Wine.

Luckily, Open Office is pretty good at faking MS Word's .doc format, but I can't help but wonder how many other things are going to demand proprietary crud getting put onto my system.

Oh well.. worst comes to worst, I can always fire up Qemu and do it all via the emulator :o)

A piece linked from Slashdot says that most bloggers are female.

The way they measured this isn't the best - measuring how many people who comment on blogs have their own blog - and of course, Slashdotters have also pointed out that on the Internet, there's often a big difference between what gender people SAY they are and what gender they ACTUALLY are. My favourite comment on the subject puts it as: On the intenet, men are men, women are men, and little kids are fbi agents.

And there's a lot of truth to that claim, but IMHO much less so when it comes to blogging. Most bloggers talk about their personal lives, which include dating etc. It would be quite a chore to maintain a readable blog that lied about something as fundamental as your gender.

IM and chat clients, however... Now THERE it pays to be skeptical. I remember when I first discovered Yahoo chat had "Adult" rooms - this was about ten years ago when you accessed chat through a browser and it still had user-created rooms.

It's not often that I'm shocked. But I was shocked.

It very quickly becomes a habit to ignore blatantly "sexy" IDs - if they're not bots, they're men pretending to be women.

Or so popular perception would have it. However...

Final year at university. I was living on-campus in one of the posher halls of residence - we had permanently-on access to the Net in our rooms, quite a luxury back then. And one day, I was in one of the UK chat rooms (All the other rooms were invariably full of Americans, which you can get tired of after a while.)

I forget who I was talking to or why the subject came up, but somebody asked where I was, and I said I was in a university west of London.

Suddenly, one of the other occupants in the room pipes up with "What University is that?" Their Yahoo ID was "sexy_london_gals" (I kid you not) and so I had paid them no attention whatsoever up to then - a name like that was surely either a bot or a bloke..?

Slightly warily, I told them. And "Hey, what a coincidence! That's where WE are too!"

Cynicism overload? I was halfway expecting an offer of companionship in return for a small fee, but we chatted for a while. Nothing dodgy in the conversation - they claimed to be three first year girls who were bored and chatted under that particular ID for laughs, and they knew enough about the layout of the campus to be convincing.

(I later learned that they had an even-worse ID name than that as well, I might add)

So I was fairly convinced that he/she/they were genuinely student(s) at my university.. but surely not really who they claimed?

Since they were living on-campus as well, they offered to drop in and say hello. Intuiged, I said OK, and a short while later, there was a knock on the door. Upon opening it, I duly said hello to three genuine 18-year old girls.

Definitely one for the books. We chatted for a while, and it must be said that I got some very jealous looks from my neighbours the next day - what they saw & heard was three girls come into my room and quite a lot of laughing, after all...

The truth was far duller than fiction - we were just talking, and they were quite a laugh, I must admit. I met them a couple of other times, and saw them around occasionally, but that was all it ever amounted to. I was a very boring student really..

But it was quite an eye-opener, I must say. Prior to that meeting, I never would have even considered believing that a screen name of "horny_women" really was three actual women.

Yes, that was indeed the other name they chatted under

Unlike most other carnivorous plants, the venus flytrap I was given a year or so ago hasn't died. In fact, it's thriving so well that it's even flowered once.

The thing is... a venus flytrap has a maximum of seven leaves/jaws on it. If you have more than seven, you have more than one plant. They can do that, apparently: As well as the conventional flowering route, they can just split in two as well.

So, the questions are:

1. How many plants are currently in the pot on my windowsill?

2. Are there enough to gang up and overpower me if I can't find enough insects for them?

Yeah, yeah, it's a crap pun...

There's an article in The Independent newspaper today which talks about the new Ubuntu machines Dell are selling, and has a pretty positive (if slightly uninformed) review of Ubuntu and how it compares to Windows & OS X.

Nice to see Ubuntu and Linux in general making it into mainstream press where non-geeks can find out about it..

A bit of news on China's latest unusual legislation.

I was always under the impression that it was pointless to pass a law that couldn't be enforced. How, exactly, will they prosecute people for this one?

"Sorry, ma'am, your baby is under arrest: We have evidence that his soul isn't brand new."

Hmm...

Apparently, one of the biggest joys of buying a new car is the New Car Smell.

I've only ever owned one new car, and every time I drove it I drove it with the windows wide-open until the smell went away.

Our new sofas were delivered recently. They're leather. Unsurprisingly, the flat has a strong smell of new leather pemeating it.

Unfortunately, whilst I can open the windows, I can't drive the flat around at high speed to get fresh air into it. Besides, it's not very warm.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't see why new things stinking is supposed to be a good thing. Leather is the skin from a dead cow. It smells the way it does because of the tanning process. Historically, tanneries were considered so foul-smelling that they were relegated to the outskirts of town or deep in the country. Hardly surprising, when tanners made extensive use of dung and urine...

Bah humbug.

I made no secret of it: I was never a big fan of the GPL v3, nor of the insistence on being "anti-Tivoization". When a license starts to focus on putting in clause after clause to close loopholes, it's going to run into problems: More clauses typically means more potential for loopholes and more restrictions on previously-valid uses.

Case in point: There's a white paper at Linux Devices on how a hypervisor can be used to get around the GPL v3's Tivoisation clauses.

In the same way as there will ALWAYS be bugs and security holes in software (OpenBSD proves that - only two in ten years it might be, but it still shows that even the most security-focussed development possible can slip up) there will always be loopholes in licenses.

If Tivo use something like the hypervisor approach to continue their previous behaviour, then all the effort and all the legalese that went into the new GPL specifically to stop them will be shown to have been a complete waste of time.

That's why I tend to agree with Linus' take: The GPL v3 isn't a BAD license, as such. But by departing from v2's simplicity in a determined attempt to plug a few tiny, harmless leaks, the end result was to create a v3 that just isn't as good as its predecessor.

Ah well. At the end of the day, it's not my problem :o)

A.A.Milne, the creator of Winnie the Pooh, got a lot of fan mail. Often, when going through it, he would hand a letter to his wife, and ask "Wol?"

She would scan through it, and generally agree "Wol" - and then the letter would be put aside, with all the other mail that never got a reply because there were just too many letters to even try and reply to.

The reason the question was "Wol?" rather than "Do you agree that I shouldn't reply to this?" has its roots in the exchange between Owl and Rabbit:

"What did you do?"
"Nothing."
"The best thing," said Owl wisely.

Well, I've been doing the best thing all month, and I have to say I'm getting a bit sick of it. So I've decided to get some things done today.

First things first, I got up and did the usual exercise. As long-term readers may remember, I used to have bad RSI, until a recommendation from a physiotherapist on an online forum found me the cause (bad posture due to skeletal misalignment) and a cure: A series of stretches and exercises to correct the misalignment.

They were pretty effective insofar as they took away the worst of the chronic pain. But I still can't quite get fully-straightened. In a year or so's time, when I stop being a student and have a regular income again, I think I might finally cave in and go to an osteopath to see if they can get me the rest of the way there.

That said, I still recommend Pete Egoscue's book, Pain Free, if you either suffer from chronic pain, or want to make sure you don't. It's an interesting read.

Anyway, point being: After doing the typical series of stretches, I headed out for my morning jog around the park. But this morning, determined to keep that "Do things" attitude going, I tried a meditation exercise as I ran: Body awareness, focussing on my back and neck to keep my spine straight.

As I came to the final uphill straight of the first lap, I could tell by my breathing that I had been pushing harder than usual. In fact, I had to ease off slightly to avoid a stitch.

Normally, my time for the first lap is around 9 minutes 20 seconds. On a good day, it's maybe 9:10ish. When I've gone all-out and run as fast as I could round the whole lap, I can just about, by a matter of seconds, beat nine minutes.

Today, without even trying to go fast, but just by focussing on being upright and well-balanced, my time was 8:45 - an all-time record.

I was quite impressed by that.

So now I'm home, showered, shaved, etc. I have to get some more things done. I need to send a letter to the bank to get the last of my cash from my previous employer, so that I can put it into a cash ISA (That's a tax-free investment, for you non-brits) and pay a call on my bank and find out just what savings account I've got with them that gives me such a pitiful rate of interest. I never really worried about investments or interest before, but preparing to spend a year being an unemployed student does tend to make one worry a little more about where the pennies are :o)

Whilst in town, I need to call in on the library to get one of the "Recommended reading" books for my course out. Then I need to read it, and the one from Amazon that I'm already halfway through, and ideally the others that still haven't arrived, so that I can write the pre-course "critical commentary" on a very dry paper they sent out with the course paperwork.

It's somewhat galling that it's mandatory work, but the mark you get doesn't count towards the final qualification... And what the Hell IS a "critical commentary", anyway??

I also need to get the washing done, and ideally cook something for Lou's supper... so that should keep me fairly busy today. Then I'll have to start thinking about tomorrow.

I'm going to have the same problem every summer for the forseeable future, of course - teachers being cursed with the same long holidays as the schoolkids. Should be easier then, though: Hopefully, in a year's time, we'll be moving home. Then in the next few years, when we're no longer living in a small-ish second storey flat, I can finally get started on those hobbies I'd like to have, but just can't fit in right now. There's still one or two kit cars I want to build. And since decent metalworking equipment is useful for that, the Gingery series should also keep me out of mischief for a while to come.

It seems like I've spent far too much time recently thinking "Oh well, in a year or so..." - I spent the last year or two looking forward to quitting my job and starting as a student teacher. Now it looks like I'll be spending the next year looking forward to becoming an ACTUAL teacher. It's going to be very odd in a few years, when suddenly I'll have no excuse to look forward to things rather than just get on and DO them :o)

I went to University in September 1995 to study Applied Biochemistry. Four years later, I added the letters "BSc (hons)" to the end of my name. (Actually, that's a lie, I've never written them. But I could if I wanted.) In the meantime, I discovered the Internet.

There were a lot of Windows PCs on the Uni. network. They were, of course, very popular with everybody, but utterly useless for web browsing. The more things change...

Alternatively, there was the "Sun room" - a room full of machines with MASSIVE monitors that was almost always at least half-empty. These machines, of course, were the *Nix ones and booted to a very simple WM with a blue background and grey toolbars - there was no KDE, Gnome, Qt or GTK back then to pretty up *Nix desktops.

Even on these machines, the Web wasn't nearly as "built-in" an experience as it is today. You had to enter the command "use web" in a terminal before you could get a browser, for starters. But telnet, ping, IRC, and so forth were all available...

After use webing, you could run Netscape. Version one. If you were l33t like me, you soon discovered that you could, in fact, also run the beta of Netscape version two.

Commercial web pages were almost nonexistent back then. The web's content was massively more geek-made. Collaborative software like Wikipedia and the like was also nonexistent, so you had thousands of independant sites that stole shamelessly from each other. There was no Google, so there were quite a few search engines vying for business.

To start with at least, mostly I looked up jokes - there were a LOT of these - and worked on my own web page. Ye Gods, I was bad at this. Every time I learned a new bit of HTML, it HAD to be included. I had a textured blue wallpaper, yellow text, animated GIFs (that you could only view with Netscape 2), a scrolling message at the bottom of the browser (courtesy of Java and again needing Netscape 2), you name it.

Web comics were in their infancy - the first one I discovered was in '99, it was Bruno the Bandit, and I was impressed but mystified as to why anybody would do something like that.

Music was sort of available, but with slower network speeds and no MP3 compression, you had to wait ten minutes to hear a 3-minute song. The Sun machines could only play .au files, so when I discovered an "80s archive" with dozens of such music tracks on it, it got a lot of hits from me. Sadly, the song files were so large that I couldn't save them to disc - I only had a couple of MB storage on the network..

It was before the RIAA got worried about music piracy, tho, so it never even occurred to us that there was anything wrong with downloading music to listen to it...

The Web was smaller and far less useful back then, as I said, so the browser was a much less important part of the Internet experience than it is today. Most particularly, telnet was vastly more used back then. telnet, and MUDs - "Multi-user dungeons", they were originally role-playing games, but then started to become popular for chatting on too. After all, they were much better moderated than IRC or Yahoo's infant chat software... And MSN? Hah! Microsoft didn't even have their own browser yet!

I found a couple of MUDs to chat on - COLD, or "Castle of Lost Dreams" was one, a MUD with links to the "alt.good.morning" Usenet group. With a friend, I started one of our own a few years later - it was great, you could even have fights on it :)

Every now and again our DNS server would fall over, so I got into the habit of connecting to MUDs via their IP address instead of their .com - the IP address worked all the time, after all. I had quite a few IP addys memorised back then. I don't know any now. Sad...

In my second year, I got a Linux PC courtesy of a friend who was doing physics. I knew nothing about FOSS etc, as far as I was concerned it was Unix if it was on a mainframe, and Linux if it was on a PC. That was the only difference. Oh, except that you got the Doom demo installed free with Linux, and it was nowhere to be found on the Suns

I discovered Hotmail sometime in the first or second year.. Long before Microsoft got their paws on it. I only really set it up because I couldn't get to my university email when not actually at university. This would change later, courtesy of being granted external access permission, which meant I could telnet (SSH? What was that?) to university from home via my 56K modem, and then run elm, my favourite email client, via that shell. In fact, courtesy of "screen", one of my all-time favourite apps, I could leave elm running 24/7, along with the lynx web browser - important when the lagmonster was running amok - connections to MUDs, and various other things too, and just reattach the session upon logging in from wherever.

Slowly, the Web became more and more useful and useable, and the Internet became steadily less CLI-friendly. I went from saying "They might have a web page" to "It might be on their web page" to "Just go to the web page, it'll have it." Google replaced AltaVista as my default search engine. Internet Explorer appeared. Java became more powerful, Flash made its debut, MPEG compression came along. Less and less non-geeks looked at me with a puzzled and slightly glazed expression when I mentioned the World-Wide Web.

Along with the increase in less-skilled web users came a few nasties. Spam email and annoying advertising were the biggies. Back in the early days, we had no spam filters, no adblock extensions, and we didn't need them. As the number of users increased to the point that it became worth targeting, that changed.

The Web, like the OSes I accessed it from, was crude, primitive, and very much text-based when I started out with it. I created my homepage with nothing but the Pico text editor, and I would use Lynx as often as Netscape to browse. Email and chatting were both done via the command-line - who had the bandwidth to put graphics in, after all?

People who didn't really get online until the "Web 2.0" days would probably have found the Web in those days useless and unusable. I liked it, though. I liked using FVWM to run multiple xterms to do all my Internet things. I liked the simplicity of editing HTML (compared to today's PHP-based behemoths, such as this blog). I liked that just about everybody you met online was a geek at heart and could give a reasonably good answer to the question "What's the difference between the Web and the Internet?"

It was crude, but it was fun. It lost a lot of that fun when it got polished up and became so massively commercially important. In the same way as home-built go-karts with engines scavenged from lawnmowers are far more fun than a production car can ever be.

No Google, no wikis, no youtube, no iTunes. But no spam, no popup ads, no chatroom bots. The Web is certainly bigger. It's hard to argue that it isn't also better. But I still think it sacrificed a lot of its charm to get where it is today.

Something that occurred to me recently...

Remember the days before the Internet?

Remember the days when only geeks and nerds knew what it was?

Remember the web before the dot-com era?

Scary thought for the day #1: When I start teaching, I'll be dealing with kids aged 11 up. And they won't remember any such time. The Web has always been there, as far as they're concerned.

Scary thought for the day #2: I first went online when I started university, which was 1995. That means I'll have been using the Internet longer than those kids have been alive.

On the plus side, it means I have less to worry about than some teachers when it comes to the "Spotting when they've downloaded their homework off the web" types of things.

On the down side... it's quite a scary thought...

I was very slow to appreciate Wikipedia. All too often in its early days, when its fans were everywhere, proselyting to the masses, I would look up something I knew a fair amount about, only to find the entry lacking in quality, quantity, or neutrality. I gave up on it as a bad job - unlike open software, the open encyclopedia concept didn't seem to result in high-quality work. As somebody or other in the media said: Open-source code doesn't just have to be written: it has to compile and run; on wikipedia, all you have to do is write it and you're done.

So I tended not to bother with it.

The reason I mention this today is that we got new sofas delivered this morning.

I do great links, don't I?

Because we were expecting new sofas today, we threw the old ones out at the weekend. For the last couple days I've been unable to sit and read, therefore, as we've had no comfy chairs.

Now that we have sofas again, I've naturally had to test them out by sitting around and reading all afternoon. So I ran out of library books to read and had to fall back on my not-exactly-small personal collection. In the clearout that moving furniture around always seems to result in, I found one of the few Star Wars books I own.

Despite owning all the movies (Originals and remastered in the case of IV - VI) I've never been a huge fan of many books. I've read a lot, but not liked them enough to buy.

Revenge of the Sith is one of the exceptions. Not only because it doesn't suffer from the wooden acting making the plot hard to believe, but because Matthew Stover did a damn good job of writing. Just reading the introduction is enough to get the adrenalin going.

And when it gets onto the lightsaber fight between Dooku and the Jedi, it really starts to come into its own. The battle lasts about ten times longer than in the film, and there's a huge amount more background information about it. Not least of which is how they manage to go from Dooku having it all his own way at the start, to it becoming a battle for his life. Which he loses.

Simply put, the two of them use forms of lightsaber combat which they aren't all that skilled at, to make Dooku overconfident. Then they switch abruptly to the forms which they aren't just good at, but are Masters of. Hence the sudden turning of the tide...

If you're not a real SW geek, your reaction will probably be "Lightsaber forms? What do you mean, lightsaber forms?"

And THAT'S where Wikipedia comes into its own. The first time I found Wikipedia useful, exhaustively detailed, and highly accurate was when I was bored enough to look up details of lightsaber combat.

Pointless trivia, you might say, of interest only to geeks who dress up in silly costumes and queue for weeks to get cinema tickets. And you might be right, but still, it's interesting trivia.

And then I started looking up all kinds of OTHER entries about works of fiction. The Matrix. Transformers. Boneyard. Green Wing. etc. etc. Vast quantities of top-notch information. And finally, I admitted that Wikipedia COULD be a useful resource.

I even made a few edits to a couple of articles, something I had never bothered with before because there didn't seem to be any point. I even created the entry for one of my favourite childhood comic characters, The Comet, and made quite a few edits to the Boneyard entry - both somewhat obscure, but still worthwhile IMHO, titles.

Since then, Wikipedia has gone on to become the second engine in my Firefox search bar. There are a number of things I wouldn't like to rely on it as a source of information for, but when you're after less-contentious information, or willing to use standard research practices whilst gathering more 'serious' information, it's a really useful resource.

Still doesn't come even close to edging Google out of the number one slot tho...

I had any number of things planned to do with all this free time - Working through that book on Blender, and K&R... getting pre-course coursework done... etc. etc.

I think an entire month off is just too much. You spend the whole time thinking "I'll do it later" and look through the DVD collection yet again.

It's a hard life :o)

If you haven't already, take a look at what happened to SCO's share price after that judgement made in favor of Novell.

That must have REALLY hurt them.

...but SCO's attempt to extort money out of the entire Linux userbase finally got shut down as the judge ruled that Novell, not SCO, owns UNIX's IP.

From the early days of the case when they alleged "massive IP infringement" in the Linux kernel so huge that it would be "impossible to remove", SCO has been relentlessly harried by IBM down to a pathetic argument amounting to little more than a bizzare contract dispute claim that amounted to "If you ever look at our code, everything you will ever write will be a derivative work"

Now the coup de grace has been delivered, as SCO has been found to have been suing for infringement of IP they never actually owned in the first place. There are still legal hoops to jump through in their various lawsuits, but they are essentially formalities: SCO has lost, the FOSS community has won.

It comes as no surprise to anybody, and it is of course a total coincidence that shortly before the SCO FUD was wiped from the board forever, MS started their own "Linux infringes on our IP" mutterings. It is in no way a determined effort from Redmond to keep certain people worried about the legal safety of using Linux.

I'll be very interested to see how the pro-SCO propaganda merchants of the least few years peddle this one. Will they finally give up, or struggle onwards with the "SCO is in the right, the Linux pirates are scum" bandwagon?

On a purely personal note, I find it amusing to note the difference in tone on Groklaw when it concerns "Novell and SCO" compared to "Novell and Microsoft"

we must say thank you to Novell ... they won what matters most, and it's been a plum pleasin' pleasure watching you work. The entire FOSS community thanks you for your skill and all the hard work and thanks go to Novell for being willing to see this through.

Compared to:

Think about the ethics. You are losing out on the value add of FOSS, in my view, and sullying its good reputation.

Ah well. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" as they say. Nobody can deny Groklaw was a hugely influential part of the public "SCO vs. Linux" case, without which I strongly suspect the SCO FUD would have been vastly more damaging than it was - I remember the concern SCO generated in the days before Groklaw, their claims were so bold people thought there had to be SOME truth in them.

It must have been an attractive vision for SCO: Being paid eternally for every usage of an OS created by other people. I wonder how good an idea they think it was now? They aimed for enormous (if undeserved) enrichment, and now will be faced with a bitter uphill struggle just to stay alive.

I'd say my heart bleeds for them, but it would be an utter lie. Good riddance to their posionous lies and FUD, the world is a better place without them.

There's an interesting interview with Sun's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, at news.com.

It basically sums up the counter-argument to the ever-popular FUD statement "FOSS is bad, because you can't make money by giving the software away" in one sentence:

When that technology is run in a Fortune 100 company in a mission-critical app, the CIO will hunt me down to pay me money.

And also has an important observation that more people in the FOSS world need to hear:

The key is figuring out the difference between one's market and one's community. They are not the same.

Ubuntu, for instance, has a large and thriving community. But they're not really the market. Canonical doesn't expect to make money out of their community: Hell, they even ship Ubuntu CDs to them, free of charge. It costs little and gets them huge amounts of goodwill and publicity. That's what gets them slowly into the corporate space where the market really IS, because what's good enough for somebody to use on their home PC free of charge isn't good enough to be run in a corporate environment without paying for support.

A lot of FOSS enthusiasts turn GPL software into a real "bait and switch" trick - first they say "Use this software, it's free, you can use it and modify it and do as you like, without paying a penny or giving anything back."

Then the company gets big and successful, and suddenly the people who sold the software on "It's free" start to mutter and complain that the company is a parasite, that it's taking code and giving nothing back. Some people even wanted GPL v3 to include conditions that would force code changes to be released even if they weren't distributed - they see Google using Linux to power search, and they mutter that they haven't released the code they use - even though they haven't released the software to anybody and are in total compliance to the letter and the spirit of the GPL.

When it comes to most FOSS projects, there's two distinct targets: The community and the market. They can often be the same, they can also often be different.

It doesn't hurt anybody for a company to take FOSS and give nothing back. It doesn't hurt the market to have a community that gets the software for free. It doesn't hurt the community to have a market that pays for the product.

As Linus said recently, "It doesn't matter if 99.99 percent of all Linux users will never make a single change" - you can't make something from nothing: No matter how many times a company gives back nothing, that "nothing" will never do damage or cost the community anything. So long as there's some people giving back something, whether it's the community giving support or the market giving cash, that's all that matters.

In the 1960s, after some six months of arguing his case, Pat Morris was finally issued with a license to set up a number of "testing and development stations" - in those days, the rules were tighter and anybody wanting to broadcast any kind of radio signal needed a license.

The reason for the problems in getting permission to set up these broadcasting units? They were radio tracking devices attached to hedgehogs, and this was such a radical idea at the time that nobody in officialdom knew quite what to make of it.

It's amazing, the amount of weird information you can pick up when you start exploring the further reaches of the local library...

In other news, today was my first day 'home alone' since quitting my job, as Lou was on holiday last week. So I did some tidying up of the flat, played some computer games, wandered into town, had lunch, watched a DVD whilst eating some home-made peanut brittle, and cooked Lou's supper.

It's a hard life, but somebody's got to do it

According to my webhost's stats, I generally get a thousand hits a day on this blog. That does include RSS hits & everything, and it's variable, but it sits roughly between 900 and 1100 most of the time.

After a year-old post of mine was, for some reason, submitted to reddit.com and made the front page, I had a week's traffic in the space of a day: 6674 hits.

The day after, just 891.

Maybe I should just stop looking at my stats, I clearly lack the capacity to understand them :o)