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Only in Aberystwyth
A statue of Buddha built for a musical turned out to be so big that a partition wall had to be taken down to get it out of the door. |
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Only in Aberystwyth
A statue of Buddha built for a musical turned out to be so big that a partition wall had to be taken down to get it out of the door. |
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Twitter posts for Wednesday July 1
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Twitter posts for Tuesday June 30
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Twitter posts for Saturday June 27
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Twitter posts for Friday June 26
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Seas
When I was a boy I'd dream fragments of places, small and vivid. The seaside town in the valley, the labyrinth near its harbour. The north-facing cliff by the beach, shady and cool on the sunniest day. The marsh to the south, a long day's walk, bordered by three sandstone hills, the tops of which house mysteries. The village to the north, nestled on a ledge of the chalk cliffs, invisible from the road. Beyond the village, an indeterminacy of hills, and then a sunny archipelago. As I grew older, I realised that these dreams were an analogue to the town where I lived. The geometry of the two map onto each other in a distorted way. The village to the north is the analogue of a real village - a narrow, ramshackle affair on the edge of a salt marsh, unlike the dream's cliffsedge perch; but the two share a spirit of isolation and a feeling of being overlooked. In the real world there is a plain to the south, not a marsh - but it, too, is bordered by a sudden hill. The dreamscape is quite fixed; things never change. The sea is always in flood, but is always calm under a clear sky. The waves lap gently on the doorsteps of the tall, coloured houses on the promenade. The denizens of the town travel from house to house in painted rowing boats. Night sometimes falls, over the labyrinth and the narrow valley - absent from the real town - where the little houses crowd together; but it is always the same night, with the same warm breeze and campfires in the encircling hills. The real town, like all reality, is in constant flux - people move away, people move in; shops open and close; buildings once thought a vital part of the shape of the place fall into dust and are forgotten. The reality is unfixed, while the dream endures. Yesterday, they began to build a labyrinth by the harbour wall. |
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The Bay
I've just found out that no only is the Bay closing, but it's closing with two days notice of closure and eviction, including gutting the place and dismissing all its staff. Bloody hell. You can go here and send Brains a comment if you like. |
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Twitter posts for Thursday June 25
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OS4000
Via Alec, two bits of news on this venerable and insane operating system, which ran on GEC mainframes back from the late 70's through to the turn of the century, and was a part of UK Internet history. Firstly, he's managed to get hold of an emulation of the bloody thing; and secondly, the Wikipedia page is under threat of deletion for non-notability. As Alec says, poppycock. Although I never really poked around inside it, I recall its bizarre directory structure and its awesome command syntax: everything you did sounded like it was a command to launch the nuclear weapons from some 80's hacker movie. FCOPY USER SINK TRACE DESTROY for example, to delete all a users files (IIRC). |
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Mark Kermode
...may be often be insufferable, but his video review of Transformers 2 is genius. |
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Twitter posts for Tuesday June 23
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Charlie Stross' claim to fame
Bugger the critically acclaimed scifi, he's the guy who's responsible for the ''robots.txt'' protocol to stop crawlers indexing marked websites: During one of my periods of burn-out I decided to teach myself Perl. So I started by trying to write a web spider - a bot that did a depth-first traversal of the web, to retreive (and eventually index) what it found, or just to download pages (a la wget or curl). There weren't many resources for robot writers back then; the internet in the UK was pretty embryonic, too. (SCO EMEA had a 64K leased line in those days, shared between 200 people.) I was testing my spider and, absent-mindedly, gave it a wired-in starting URL. What I didn't realize was that I'd picked a bloody stupid place to start my test traversals from; a website on spiders, run from a server owned by a very small company - over a 14.4K leased line. I guess I'd unintentionally invented the denial of service attack! Martin, the guy who ran the web server, got in touch, and was most displeased. First, he told me to stop hammering his system - advice with which I hastily complied. Then he invented a standard procedure: when visiting a new system, look for a file called "robots.txt", parse it, and avoid any directories or files it lists. I think I may have written the first spider to obey the robots.txt protocol; I'm certainly the numpty who necessitated its invention. (You can find the evidence here (look for websnarf).) This is from part five in an ongoing series on how he became a scifi author and got that weird CV. |
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Twitter posts for Saturday June 20
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Twitter posts for Friday June 19
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Twitter posts for Thursday June 18
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Twitter posts for Wednesday June 17
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HMS Charger
Looking out of the window, we saw two boats heading very fast directly towards Aberystwyth trailing a hell of a long wake. Binoculars showed no details (we're about half a mile from town here) but a gunmetal grey, so at home at lunchtime I popped down to the marina to make sure we weren't under TERRURIST ATTAK and took this rather uninformative snap (of Charger). Turns out it was the two boats Charger and Smiter, both P2000 (Archer class) fast patrol vessels (and boy are they fast). They're used by the University Royal Navy Units of Liverpool and Glasgow Universities, to train up people who might want a job in the Navy after graduating. |
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Chopsticks
Something I just learned - you know the tune Chopsticks? Well, if you ask an American and a Brit to hum it you'll get different tunes. |
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Twitter posts for Tuesday June 16
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Twitter posts for Monday June 15
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Billy Bragg
Bless him. Bloody brilliant. Also brilliant support act - the Alex Dingley band (with Swci Boscawen on keyboards. I thought it was her, not many people look like that). Another support act, Patrick "Nicky Wire's Brother" Jones. Er. Not so great. |
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Twitter posts for Saturday June 13
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Anne Frank
From Geoff Ryman's 253:
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Twitter posts for Thursday June 11
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Twitter posts for Tuesday June 9
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........... Older
All very testy-testy at the moment. Please mail any problems to me at jim spot finnis monkey-with-tail gmail spot com. Hah, let's see the email scrapers decipher that.
Jim talks a lot. I'm the comedy small person.
Well that's a bit of a far cry from Private Godfrey in Dad's Army. Although that policeman might well be asking if he might be excused (for brandishing a truncheon in a somewhat unfriendly manner). Maybe his job's under threat, so he's trying to ensure that there are enough people needing medical attention.
Like Jonathan Ross, you can't deny that he does know what he's talking about film wise. That being said, The Duchess got better reviews than it deserved, and that French thing with the hilarious sex scene (we were sure that there were five legs in shot at one point, and when the fella's wife turns up, the mistress goes and opens the door, and in order to preserve his modesty, the fella stands behind her in the open doorway stark naked. I'm not sure the wife was going to accept the 'Darling, I can explain' line in that sort of situation) did not merit rave reviews at all.
And you know what they're doing in the van. Science. That's what they're doing.
You mean like "We built this city on Rock and Roll"? Wheelbarrows roll. They rock too if you over fill them.
We do what we must because we can, for the good of all of us, except the ones who are dead. :-)
Ohhhhhhh, It's a portal joke. (I had to google the name to find that out!)
I thought you meant I had the theme music to DrunkenBungle...which wanders dangerously into the territory of Rainbow for grownups. I suppose that would be Elbow then.
In burligton arcade? Funny, I took an identical picture a few weeks ago..
I was sitting down. Feet aren't supposed to touch the floor when you're sitting down. Them's the rules.
And be quick about it - a surprisingly large amount of tickets had been sold last week when I bought mine.
Maybe they're a series. First you buy the house, then you decorate the house. In next week's exciting installment - pastel barbecues, pastel dinner parties and pastel people sitting around watching pastel telly and asking their spouse or partner whether they would like lavender tea, peach tea, coconut tea, mint tea or strawberry tea.
Other way round silly! The demon is so obviously an Emlyn.
It's absolutely fab and wonderful and I am delighted with it. Being immensely clever at these sorts of things, she also made me a very delicious cake, and a crocheted devil and Cathulu (Emlyn and Alf).
I'll hack that feature in - it's a trivial pattern to search for. I had a feeling it did that, because I didn't remember seeing any @replies or DMs in your feed.
your space, your rules - i find twitter summaries less invasive than delicious ones, in fact since i tweet more than blog it fills in the gaps. in the end it comes down to you as an author, what you write anywhere. consider twitter an adjunct of your blog and the problem is solved. Alex King's twittertools has the option to remove/skip any tween beginnin with @ - ie: a reply - since that tends to improve the S/N ratio...
Dancing around a handbag in a provinicial nightclub on a Saturday night perhaps?
I once fell off one that big! And it hurt lots!
I just found the story on the BBC website, so came over here to see whether you'd been along - fabulous! hugs to you both
This is a test wiki/blog system called Gwir, implemented in php5.
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re Only in Aberystwyth Mikey wrote:
What's the betting the man from Travis Perkins sucked through his teeth before he said "Who built that? You'll never get that through this door."
02/07/09 11:04:55 PM