So we headed up into the hills instead, searching for a slope that's close enough to the road, steep enough (but not too steep) and with enough snow to not get stuck in the grass.
Found it (eventually)
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]]>So we headed up into the hills instead, searching for a slope that's close enough to the road, steep enough (but not too steep) and with enough snow to not get stuck in the grass.
Found it (eventually)
]]>All sponsorships are made directly to The Prostate Cancer Charity which will use the money to fund high quality research into the causes, treatment and impact of prostate cancer and to provide support and information to men and their families.
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]]>All sponsorships are made directly to The Prostate Cancer Charity which will use the money to fund high quality research into the causes, treatment and impact of prostate cancer and to provide support and information to men and their families.
The results are pretty wonderful, not just because of the music (which has been rather unkindly described as Sitar lines and funky beats grafted on
, and frankly is where Scots music was ten years ago with Martin Swan's Mouth Music), but firstly because this project takes up the grand old broadsheet ballad tradition of updating or replacing the words to songs to fit whatever the current situation, and secondly because it's exposing contemporary young(ish — le Bragg is about to be 50) musicians to traditional performing practises.
Anyway, it's very much worth a listen; and if you like your free samples before laying down the cash, here are some video tasters:
They've released Cold, Hailey, Rainy Night as a samplepack, downloadable from RealWorldRemixed, so with Garageband or similar, you can produce your own mixes, which is just what I've done:
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]]>As you'll notice if you're watching my latest iTunes music buys (list down there on the right in the sidebar), I've just bought The Imagined Village — a set of resettings of traditional English tunes, with the likes of Billy Bragg, Paul Weller and Ben Zephaniah helping out folk stalwarts such as Eliza Carthy.
The results are pretty wonderful, not just because of the music (which has been rather unkindly described as Sitar lines and funky beats grafted on
, and frankly is where Scots music was ten years ago with Martin Swan's Mouth Music), but firstly because this project takes up the grand old broadsheet ballad tradition of updating or replacing the words to songs to fit whatever the current situation, and secondly because it's exposing contemporary young(ish — le Bragg is about to be 50) musicians to traditional performing practises.
Anyway, it's very much worth a listen; and if you like your free samples before laying down the cash, here are some video tasters:
They've released Cold, Hailey, Rainy Night as a samplepack, downloadable from RealWorldRemixed, so with Garageband or similar, you can produce your own mixes, which is just what I've done:
]]>Existing keychain data (ie central password store for pretty much everything from Mail Accounts to Web Sites) appears to have been dumped, so I had to remember the passwords for everything.
Up until Monday this week, the Time Machine page promised that you could back up to a drive attached to an Airport base station. Well it happens that I have one of those, and I bought it with just this use case in mind.
But on the production release, it doesn't work — the functionality's been removed. You can connect an external drive to the machine you're backing up, or any other Leopard-running machine on the LAN with File Sharing enabled. Maybe it just missed the QA cut and it'll be back for future point releases, but it's not there now.
This was the drive I bought for Time Machine purposes. Ideally this would be in RAID 1 mode, so you've two mirrored drives automagically backing each other up. If one fails, you can replace it, rebuild the array and no data loss. Some online reviews claim that the drive can't do that under OSX, but that's daft as it's a hardware device. This isn't true, but what is hard is working out how to switch it to RAID 1 — certainly the supplied docs don't tell you. The trick is you need to first press and hold the Rebuild
button on the front panel for 10 seconds or so. This will obviously (re)build the array, and it will then pop up in Disk Utility at half the JBOD size. You can then format and you're good to go.
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]]>Existing keychain data (ie central password store for pretty much everything from Mail Accounts to Web Sites) appears to have been dumped, so I had to remember the passwords for everything.
Up until Monday this week, the Time Machine page promised that you could back up to a drive attached to an Airport base station. Well it happens that I have one of those, and I bought it with just this use case in mind.
But on the production release, it doesn't work — the functionality's been removed. You can connect an external drive to the machine you're backing up, or any other Leopard-running machine on the LAN with File Sharing enabled. Maybe it just missed the QA cut and it'll be back for future point releases, but it's not there now.
This was the drive I bought for Time Machine purposes. Ideally this would be in RAID 1 mode, so you've two mirrored drives automagically backing each other up. If one fails, you can replace it, rebuild the array and no data loss. Some online reviews claim that the drive can't do that under OSX, but that's daft as it's a hardware device. This isn't true, but what is hard is working out how to switch it to RAID 1 — certainly the supplied docs don't tell you. The trick is you need to first press and hold the Rebuild
button on the front panel for 10 seconds or so. This will obviously (re)build the array, and it will then pop up in Disk Utility at half the JBOD size. You can then format and you're good to go.
Righteous Al-Quaeda Brethren in Jihadi Alliance under The Most Holy One to Western Materialistic Fascists, Greeting.
We promise no longer to attack your Western aggressor aviation industry by means of the bombs hidden in Shoes, honest we do. Therefore please call off the security shoe-removing behaviour which is causing us all to spend too long in Airports.
Yours in Faith
Osama
War on Footwear back on, sadly. Presumably Al Queda were just on half term.
Oh, also LHR now have a War on Loading Your Own Tray.
Perhaps I'm just missing it — perhaps it's not a War on Terror, but a War on Catching Your Flight...
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]]>Presumably Al-Quaeda sent BAA a note, saying
Righteous Al-Quaeda Brethren in Jihadi Alliance under The Most Holy One to Western Materialistic Fascists, Greeting.
We promise no longer to attack your Western aggressor aviation industry by means of the bombs hidden in Shoes, honest we do. Therefore please call off the security shoe-removing behaviour which is causing us all to spend too long in Airports.
Yours in Faith
Osama
The thing is, the security people at LHR swore blind that there'd never been a global 'Shoes Off' policy; just a random sampling incidence. Despite the surrounding Take your shoes off
signs, and my observation that everyone had to do it for every flight for a period of 3 months or more. Believe who you like on this.
Oh, and apparently, one scanner is still requiring all shoes off, while another isn't. But I didn't spot the All Shoe-bomb carrying terrorists are kindly requested to use Scanner 1
signs.
War on Footwear back on, sadly. Presumably Al Queda were just on half term.
Oh, also LHR now have a War on Loading Your Own Tray.
Perhaps I'm just missing it — perhaps it's not a War on Terror, but a War on Catching Your Flight...
]]>Back, obviously. Took a bit longer than expected — no thanks to BT and their useless Moving House
process that doesn't work if you have an inter-regnum between houses.
New ADSL providers are WebTapestry, who are fab, affordable, and approachable. We're getting 8 Meg despite being in a tiny village miles from anywhere. But it's in Scotland, so it has a BB-enabled exchange, which we're ~50m from. But the move has done something odd to the site's ability to fetch RSS feeds. I suspect it's DNS related as very little else has changed, but I'm still in problem analysis mode.
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]]>This is because it all runs on a server at home, and we're moving house, with some time in a caravan in between.
We'll be back up once we have ADSL in the new place.
Back, obviously. Took a bit longer than expected — no thanks to BT and their useless Moving House
process that doesn't work if you have an inter-regnum between houses.
New ADSL providers are WebTapestry, who are fab, affordable, and approachable. We're getting 8 Meg despite being in a tiny village miles from anywhere. But it's in Scotland, so it has a BB-enabled exchange, which we're ~50m from. But the move has done something odd to the site's ability to fetch RSS feeds. I suspect it's DNS related as very little else has changed, but I'm still in problem analysis mode.
RSS feeds all fixed; an (unplanned, but never mind) reboot of the box returned all to normality where restarting Apache had failed.
]]>Once again last night, coming home through LHR I was confronted by the sheer stupidity and theatrics of the security regime. In the last 6 months, LHR's security policy has moved from Occasionally, you will have your shoes checked
to Randomly, you will need to put your shoes through the scanner
to everyone will always have to have their shoes scanned.
Being a bolshie person who doesn't give in to implied orders, but waits to be explicitly told to do stuff, and even then challenges them, I enquired why this might be so. And the astounding answer was along the lines of:
Mumble, mumble, terrorism, mumble, mumble, current security climate, mumble, mumble, Shoebomber, mumble mumble.
Or, to put it another way, the best excuse they could come up with was a failed attempt nearly 6 years ago which hasn't been repeated since and has never happened under a British airport security regime, leaving two possible interpretations:
The paranoid civil libertarian would naturally pick on the second explanation, as preparing the travelling public for any number of future restrictions (hell, why don't we all fly naked. And ban all fluids from aircraft). However, I prefer the third option of Random order from on high, which seemed like a good idea at the time but is so pointless even the staff can't work out
(aka the Cockup theory). Well, it's better than the plain stupid the time taken to take off shoes lets them scan all the other things you now have to split out into separate trays
theory.
I wouldn't even mind so much if the 'higher up' source was HMG, as then at least there'll have been some oversight from an intelligence source (what am I thinking?), or perhaps it's a BAA-wide policy. But no, it only applies to LHR.
How do I know? Because at EDI, another BAA establishment, they don't have a War on Footwear. Oh no. At EDI, they have a War on Belts. Yes, you have to take off your belt and put it through the scanner, while you walk through the metal detector (which I might add doesn't detect mobile phones as I discovered by accident on Monday), holding up your trews. Fair enough if it's a whacking great big thing with studs, clan crests and the like on it. But where can I hide a bomb in a modest thing with the smallest of buckles strictly needed to hold the thing together?
Or maybe they're just all scared in case I'm trying to smuggle on Holy Water... And don't get me started on that hoax.
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]]>Once again last night, coming home through LHR I was confronted by the sheer stupidity and theatrics of the security regime. In the last 6 months, LHR's security policy has moved from Occasionally, you will have your shoes checked
to Randomly, you will need to put your shoes through the scanner
to everyone will always have to have their shoes scanned.
Being a bolshie person who doesn't give in to implied orders, but waits to be explicitly told to do stuff, and even then challenges them, I enquired why this might be so. And the astounding answer was along the lines of:
Mumble, mumble, terrorism, mumble, mumble, current security climate, mumble, mumble, Shoebomber, mumble mumble.
Or, to put it another way, the best excuse they could come up with was a failed attempt nearly 6 years ago which hasn't been repeated since and has never happened under a British airport security regime, leaving two possible interpretations:
The paranoid civil libertarian would naturally pick on the second explanation, as preparing the travelling public for any number of future restrictions (hell, why don't we all fly naked. And ban all fluids from aircraft). However, I prefer the third option of Random order from on high, which seemed like a good idea at the time but is so pointless even the staff can't work out
(aka the Cockup theory). Well, it's better than the plain stupid the time taken to take off shoes lets them scan all the other things you now have to split out into separate trays
theory.
I wouldn't even mind so much if the 'higher up' source was HMG, as then at least there'll have been some oversight from an intelligence source (what am I thinking?), or perhaps it's a BAA-wide policy. But no, it only applies to LHR.
How do I know? Because at EDI, another BAA establishment, they don't have a War on Footwear. Oh no. At EDI, they have a War on Belts. Yes, you have to take off your belt and put it through the scanner, while you walk through the metal detector (which I might add doesn't detect mobile phones as I discovered by accident on Monday), holding up your trews. Fair enough if it's a whacking great big thing with studs, clan crests and the like on it. But where can I hide a bomb in a modest thing with the smallest of buckles strictly needed to hold the thing together?
Or maybe they're just all scared in case I'm trying to smuggle on Holy Water... And don't get me started on that hoax.
]]>Co'pathincidentally) which is a few miles along the coast from Dunbar.
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]]>Co'pathincidentally) which is a few miles along the coast from Dunbar.
While we're there, we'll be looking for a plot to build a house, of which presumably much more later.
Move-in date is set for 21st29th September and we'll be in a caravan for 2 weeks between houses, so I guess we'll be having a joint housewarming/birthday party.
]]>* NDBeresford kind of wishes he hadn't read that Harry Potter page<garrettc> shut up<garrettc> don't say a word<garrettc> seriously<garrettc> i will hurt you<NDBeresford> It's OK<garrettc> no matter how funny you think it's going to be, it won't be<NDBeresford> No, what you mean is it won't be funny for you<martinb> Snape is Kaiser Zhoze<NDBeresford> Oh damn you Martin, give it away why don't you* NDBeresford sighs<martinb> Dumbledore is a woman<martinb> Hagrid is dead, really<martinb> Neville is The One<martinb> James Potter is part of Harry's Split Personality<martinb> Butterbeer is made of people (muggles though, so that's OK)<martinb> Voldemort is Hermione's father<martinb> and Slytherin House sacrifice Prof McGonagall
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]]>
* NDBeresford kind of wishes he hadn't read that Harry Potter page
shut up
don't say a word
seriously
i will hurt you
It's OK
no matter how funny you think it's going to be, it won't be
No, what you mean is it won't be funny for you
Snape is Kaiser Zhoze
Oh damn you Martin, give it away why don't you
* NDBeresford sighs
Dumbledore is a woman
Hagrid is dead, really
Neville is The One
James Potter is part of Harry's Split Personality
Butterbeer is made of people (muggles though, so that's OK)
Voldemort is Hermione's father
and Slytherin House sacrifice Prof McGonagall
(Somewhat inspired by this T-shirt)
]]>nspluginwrapper and installs the Flash9 plugin.-->
]]>Fortunately, Adobe's John Dowdell pointed out a rather useful wrapper that lets 64-bit Firefox use 32-bit plugins.
Two minutes on Google later, and I'd found a one-click install script for Ubuntu that sorts out nspluginwrapper and installs the Flash9 plugin.
NB it needs to be run for each user, but other than that, is bluddy grate.
JD, my kids thank you.
]]>However, lately she's excelled herself in lack of thought, research, tact and insight when she conflated problems with the recent Scottish Ballot Paper with the principle of PR, and in doing so, compared the new First Minister to Hitler:
Did not proportional representation give Germany Adolf Hitler? To a lesser degree, we have been given the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond). Can that be a good example?Source
To pick off the obvious problems:
Adolf Hitler (or the Nazi party) supported X; therefore X must be evil/undesirable/bad, etc.As X can include building motorways, painting watercolors, owning dogs and vegetarianism, this is clearly a fallacy. In the online world, this is known as the Corollary to Godwin's Law: the citing of Hitler in an argument ends the argument, with the citer being deemed to have automatically lost.
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]]>However, lately she's excelled herself in lack of thought, research, tact and insight when she conflated problems with the recent Scottish Ballot Paper with the principle of PR, and in doing so, compared the new First Minister to Hitler:
Did not proportional representation give Germany Adolf Hitler? To a lesser degree, we have been given the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond). Can that be a good example?Source
To pick off the obvious problems:
Adolf Hitler (or the Nazi party) supported X; therefore X must be evil/undesirable/bad, etc.As X can include building motorways, painting watercolors, owning dogs and vegetarianism, this is clearly a fallacy. In the online world, this is known as the Corollary to Godwin's Law: the citing of Hitler in an argument ends the argument, with the citer being deemed to have automatically lost.
How Anne Moffat voted on key issues since 2001:
Out of that lot, I strongly disagree with her on just about every single one; exceptions being Smoking Bans and Gay Rights.
]]>The interesting thing is that I think this is the same campsite that I went to with Mum and Dad when I was about 13. Although much has changed since then — huge swimming pools with waterslides are now de rigeur.
Now I have to hit the Michel Thomas on the iPod, to refresh my rusty French.
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]]>
The interesting thing is that I think this is the same campsite that I went to with Mum and Dad when I was about 13. Although much has changed since then — huge swimming pools with waterslides are now de rigeur.
Now I have to hit the Michel Thomas on the iPod, to refresh my rusty French.
]]>I am so proud!
I waked up in a dry bed mommy come see
I waked in a dry bed daddy I did
I woke up in a dry bed w/ dry feet & a dry head
I am a big boy now
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]]>I am so proud!
]]>I waked up in a dry bed mommy come see
I waked in a dry bed daddy I did
I woke up in a dry bed w/ dry feet & a dry head
I am a big boy nowChorus
Hey look at my dry bed
Come feel my dry bed
My bed's all dry dry I'm a big boy
Look look at my dry bed
Dry dry my dry bed
my beds all dry dry and I'm a big boyVerse 2
Rain didn't rain & wet my bed mommy come see
River didn't run & wet my bed daddy come look
Dry bed ho ho ho I'm gonna go to the movie show
'Cus I'm a big boy nowChorus
Verse 3
Pussy cat didn't wet my bed last night
sister come feel
Puppy dog didn't make my beddy bed wet
brother take a peek
Dry bed yippie iye iye take me down to the pony ride
'Cus I'm a big boy now
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]]>Today's lesson in stage magicianship comes from our old friends, the Labour Party. While you're all looking at the left hand waving goodbye (or the Glamourous Assistant), the right hand is busy palming £400m of my money and yours.
That 8% cost slippage (that's £2.4bn so far, or 76% of the original budget for those keeping count) came out in the Gateway Review, a month past the required deadline, and just happened to be published within a few minutes of the Dear Leader's Resignation Speech. Mind you, the only reason it came out at all was because the courts ordered to be published.
Yes, it seems that even in its death throes, the Blair Project cannot resist spinning for all its worth. It's another Good Day to Bury Bad News — an open goal so wide that we should have seen it coming a mile off.
]]>using their fame for good causes, more often than is right just to ensure they get a wee bit of extra coverage. However, here's something a bit different. For one thing, it's not gone out in a blaze of publicity (I heard about it via the Bard of Barking group on last.fm). For another, only the people who perform the desired activity are rewarded.
Billy Bragg has agreed to do a private concert on Sunday April 1st in West Bromwich. There's one snag though. You have to help out with the anti-BNP day of action first.
So that'll be an hour delivering anti-fascist leaflets, then free food and drink and a private performance from the legend that is. Gotta be worth a look don't you think?
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]]>using their fame for good causes, more often than is right just to ensure they get a wee bit of extra coverage. However, here's something a bit different. For one thing, it's not gone out in a blaze of publicity (I heard about it via the Bard of Barking group on last.fm). For another, only the people who perform the desired activity are rewarded.
But best of all, it gets people doing something concrete, that draws them into a greater level of involvement than just joining the latest fashion trend. Actually getting people engaged in the political process — marvellous.
Billy Bragg has agreed to do a private concert on Sunday April 1st in West Bromwich. There's one snag though. You have to help out with the anti-BNP day of action first.
So that'll be an hour delivering anti-fascist leaflets, then free food and drink and a private performance from the legend that is. Gotta be worth a look don't you think?
Couldn't agree more. Now, can we have one in Edinburgh please ;-)
]]>