...I learned this all by my chemist reporting to my office with a hangdog look on his face. "I've got some bad news and some good news, Phil."

Phil: "Okay, what the bad news?"
Chemist: "There was so much caffeine it oversaturated the detector and probably blew the calibration."
P: "Crap. What's the good news?"
C (jumping up and down with glee): "There was so much caffeine it oversaturated the detector and probably blew the calibration!"

• Just painted the back bedroom bright blue and yellow - it looks grand! (19:27:36)

• "Music so wishes to be heard that it sometimes calls on unlikely characters to give it voice." - Robert Fripp. Lovely quote. (14:42:59)

• Whisky helps too. Whisky always helps. Mmmmm. (22:25:49)
• My brain is broken now. But at least in heaven, everything is fine. (22:10:01)
• About to watch Eraserhead. At the cinema. There goes my mind. (20:15:28)
• My mates Steve and Margaret are the front page story in this week's Cambrian News - they've just come back from their holiday. To Madeira. (10:55:32)

• Listening to Don Caballero always makes my cortex rewire itself in useful ways. (14:44:52)

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

Found here.

• Sitting in a pubby pub. I like pubby pubs. (23:11:30)

• Oh no, Steven Berkoff is chewing the mathematics! (21:04:42)

• Announcement I've sat on since Friday: I've got an unconditional offer from Aber to go back and get that damn Comp Sci degree! (10:31:44)

• Last night done, and it was fantastic! Now it's time for the aftershow party! (23:25:58)

• Opening night today. Eek. (18:06:08)

• Sitting in the concourse like the intervening 22 years never happened. Can't reprogram this coffee machine, though. (16:51:54)

• Well, that was weird. I've just been to a couple of first year lectures. (14:32:31)

• The Sunday rehearsal of Doom... (17:23:20)

Stuck, at last, in the sand. Mind you, they've given it a good go trying to get it out for the past nine months or so. And what's really amazing is that it was supposed to last only 90 days, and has been going for six years. And it hasn't stopped yet - most of the kit on board is still working, it's just stuck. An amazing feat of engineering.

The last word, though, has to go to Warren Ellis on twitter: "Martian rover Spirit stuck in sand for good: which is of course what happens when you give a human's job to a skateboard."

• Just saw student production of Lorca's 'Blood Wedding.' Great stuff. (22:04:27)
• Ah, I love Casa Miguel. (00:30:58)

• Yay! Karmic installed and working well so far - seems quicker on this old and clunky laptop. Took nine hours, mind.. (22:59:13)

Charlie Stross, in the comments on this post (on why he uses a Mac) explains:

the thing about the iSlate is ... we know Steve Jobs is just a little bit mad, right? I'm pretty sure Steve is chasing a vision. He's been chasing it since at least 1984, when he insisted on marketing the original Macintosh as a closed box -- perfect unto itself. He's polished this vision through successive products, and it gets a little bit more visible each time, culminating -- so far -- in the iPhone. What Steve wants is: a single, smooth, shiny device, like a sea-washed pebble. One control, and one only. You stroke it and it comes to life and light. It does what you want -- whatever you want -- smoothly and instantly, so intuitively it doesn't need a user manual, yet with incredible, unfolding, flexibility and power when you call for it.

This device does not exist. Arguably, it cannot exist. But Steve Jobs is trying to bring it into existence, because anything short of perfection irritates him to the point of throwing temper tantrums.

The iSlate is Steve's fifth attempt at giving birth to this Ur-device. #1 was the Macintosh. #2 was the iMac, or maybe the Titanium Macbook. #3 was the iPod. #4 was the iPhone. #5 ... will probably be the iSlate, and if it delivers even 10% of what Steve wants it to be, it'll be an eye-opener -- not because of any single thing, but because the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts.

See where the buzz is coming from?