Glorified changelog
12/05/2008 - Long overdue blitherance. This is the one where I rant about everything that was wrong with the house I lived in for 25 years.
03/04/2008 - New sarcasm on the blitherances page. Can you think of an objection to your local eco-town that hasn't been done before?
19/03/2008 - Just a quick update to answer those people who say I don't update this site any more. We went to Rome about a month ago, and this is a picture taken there. In other news, with any luck, I'll be moving out of my parents' house this April. Yes, this means I will stop whining about long commutes.
20/01/2008 - In response to the "things we'd like to see" section of this week's b3ta newsletter, I've made the Daily Mail Headlineinator. Upload an image for it to be displayed on a copy of the Mail under the headline "BAN THIS SICK FILTH". Here's an example, for those of you who happened to have seen a particular episode of Father Ted.
11/11/2007 - DVD region coding, and alternator pulleys.
03/11/2007 - National Trust against homes plan. How, may I ask, does Sir William Proby imagine his own house got there? Sir William, it may be a shock to hear this, and this applies to everyone else who thinks that because they own a home, we shouldn't be building any more, but your house is not a natural feature of the landscape. It did not sprout up from the ground after careful watering; it was not formed by chance when the earth solidified from molten rock; it was built. But I don't see you filing an objection to your own home being there. Here's all housing development objections summarised.
16/10/2007 - How is someone like this allowed to head the School Food Trust? New entry on the page that has a list of rants and observations in date order, as opposed to this page, which, er, has a list of rants and observations in date order. I really ought to organise this site properly.
10/08/2007 - The Witney Gazette resumes its "follow David Cameron around and see what he's doing this week" feature, the issue about the floods a couple of weeks ago being the only Gazette in recent weeks not to feature a picture of our almost-ever-present MP cutting some ribbon or other. This week, he was in Witney giving a speech on school discipline. He said he wanted schools to be places where "the kids respect, and even fear, the teachers, not the other way round." Now, I always thought respect was supposed to be two-way. Anyway. Mr Cameron's attempts to distance himself from being likened to Tony Blair are not helped by copying his hand gestures.
19/07/2007 - We, the undersigned, petition the Prime Minister to have the Department for Transport issue all drivers under 25 with a free Burberry tracksuit and baseball cap. After all, if they're going to treat us all as if we're dangerous boy racers, they should at least do it properly. New blitherance.
24/06/2007 - I and some others recently went to Wales for a week, and I've now got round to putting up a few pictures. But first, some commentary on the housing market. I know that commentary on the housing market is overly abundant in the UK, which unfortunately is more than can be said for actual houses, but anyway, here's my effort at pointing out the blindingly obvious: buy-to-let made simple.
Now, Wales. Here's a selection of photographs (i.e. four): a lake visible from most of the way up the Watkin path up Snowdon, a view from on top of Snowdon, a diagram on top of the Snowdon trig point showing which landmarks are visible from the top of Snowdon, and the Welsh translation of "microwave oven" which provoked much laughter. More photographs, that weren't taken by me but by Jeremy, with a better camera, and at a higher resolution, are at his website here. Warning: there are a lot of them, and they're very big.
06/05/2007 - To add to the list of applications on this site that someone, somewhere, might find a use for one day, I've been writing one that takes a table of data and represents it as a graph on a PNG image. For want of a better name, it's called Give Me A Graph! This is also one of the rare occasions when I've thought to document something I've written.
19/04/2007 - Demonstrating in Parliament Square. New blitherance, in which I build a multi-slogan handle-crank placard and take it to London, because of something I listened to on the radio. Because I can.
09/02/2007 - The recent snow has induced Skoda to bring out their own implementation of in-car navigation. Here's the prototype.
Snow-related amusement aside, here's an insight into what I've been doing with my free time recently. The Do Not Press Box is a clock with a red button on it marked "DO NOT PRESS", which, when pressed, triggers a siren and flashing lights. When pressed again, the alarms are replaced, as in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with a sign reading "Please do not press this button again". It also knows when it's hung on the wall at a wonky angle, by means of this arrangement. Yes, I could have bought a mercury tilt switch, but where's the fun in that? Here it is telling you that the bottom needs to be swung right a bit. The writing doesn't show up well on the camera (it's some bright LEDs behind a piece of acetate with dry transfer lettering on it, which itself is behind some tracing paper with pencil scribbled all over it), but "right a bit" is indeed what it says. The red light on the bottom as shown in this picture reads "ARGH NO NOT MY FACE". And here's what the insides look like.
03/12/2006 - I don't normally put together things like this, but I had a free weekend, so here it is. If you don't care about the recent road pricing proposals or the Eddington Report, don't read this.
27/10/2006 - Holiday to the USA. New blitherance, with pictures.
23/09/2006 - I now have my very own domain, greem.co.uk. That's also the new address for this site. http://graeme.woaf.net/ will still work for the foreseeable future. Also, new blitherance about various kinds of motorist. These are the ones I've come across recently; use the comments system on the sidebar to suggest others.
14/08/2006 - Holiday. With cake.
25/05/2006 - Tamper-proof screws be damned, I have a new weapon in my arsenal! New blitherance.
30/04/2006 - Whether or not this is a good thing I've still not decided, but this site now has its very own comments page, into which randoms from across the interweb can dollop their ill-considered opinions. I've had a couple of e-mails now, from people who have managed to figure out my e-mail address (and it's not difficult). So, after RjY mentioned that it was unlikely that he would ever implement a commenting system for his website, I thought "what a good idea", and wrote one.
29/03/2006 - No new blitherance. Instead, a short update to say that last Saturday I purchased a new car - a Skoda Fabia Classic 1.9 SDI. Yes; a fuel-efficient, reliable vehicle (around 66 miles per gallon on the daily commute), rather than a fast and stylish one (nought to sixty in eighteen, count them, eighteen seconds). It even has a multi-function trip counter including journey time, average speed, and average fuel consumption, from which I plucked the above statistic. The 'S' in car model names is supposed to stand for Sport, by the way. I'm not entirely sure what particular sport Skoda had in mind, but there you are. Anyway, we have a new contender for the pedants' "I'm glad I didn't get my car from there" award: this outfit claims to specialise in something they can't even spell.
18/03/2006 - When in doubt, go off on an erratic and undirected rant about two- and three-door cars.
28/02/2006 - New blitherance; this time it's not about fonts. Honest. It's about why you shouldn't buy stuff from redstore.
05/02/2006 - If you're going to incite violence and terrorism, at least punctuate your placard correctly.
28/01/2006 - A new blitherance about Inspector Morse, or more particularly, about ITV needlessly fiddling with old episodes thereof. Is it really just me who notices things like this?
14/01/2006 - New blitherance, in which I make a very interesting and worthwhile point about fonts. No, only kidding. It is about fonts, though.
13/01/2006 - This page is now linked to by RjY's SNAFU site monitor. That will move this site to the top of the list whenever I update this page, which is why all blitherances are going to get a link here from now on. I'm the only one on there whose link doesn't point to a journal or blog, but what is essentially a changelog. Well, yes, that's what it is. I like to be different. As for "Moose Fish", that's the title of the main index page (the one above this directory) which I put in there as filler one day and forgot about. Anyway. Here's a picture I made. The old ones are the... oldest.
13/01/2006 - Here's an experimental thing I'm trying out. On the sidebar is a coloured dot. Believe it or not, that's a calendar. It starts at blue (#0000ff) on January 1st, and goes round the colour wheel through purple, red, yellow and green before returning to blue at the end of the year. Here's a key, not that it's much use. For those interested, the spectrum it uses is best described by the HSV (Hue-Saturation-Value) colour system, with the saturation and value always at maximum, and the hue changing throughout the year. Obviously you won't notice it change from one day to the next because the difference is so tiny. But I think that's the fun of it.
30/12/2005 - Other Bits has had its first major redesign since the dawn of time. There are now no longer separate "pictures" and "non-pictures" sections, as this was only ever an arbitrary definition to break up the list into two, and wasn't really obeyed anyway. There's now a single list of stuff: this one. What's more, the more recent ones appear at the top, in line with every other such update-list on the planet. This means I can announce any new updates on this page, including new blitherances.
29/12/2005 - Our attempt at playing 1000 Blank White Cards.
27/12/2005 - New blitherance. Today, I get annoyed about coming up against tamper-proof screws eighteen months ago.
08/11/2005 - As we all know, Kit-Kats consist of a number of wafers stacked one atop the other, with chocolate in between and around the wafers. However, I got a rather unusual one, with the wafers oriented vertically. Now, apparently this is actually relatively common. There have been occurrences, though, of the Holy Grail of Kit-Kats... a Kit-Kat with no wafer, just sticks of chocolate. Such a rare artifact has yet proved elusive. The closest thing I've ever come across is a jam doughnut with no jam. That just isn't the same.
10/07/2005 - Here is my CV. Jon expressed disappointment that it was only a page long, so I added an extra page of filler material. You never know when a recruiter might suddenly encounter a cat, and need to know quickly which end to feed.
18/06/2005 - Nailing jelly to a wall: is it possible?
05/05/2005 - The It's Spelt Like This repository is waiting for all those difficult-to-spell words to be added to it so that a comprehensive fount of pedantry might be conceived.
10/01/2005 - If you have a deadline approaching, before which you have to write a certain number of words, and could do with an annoying little program that counts down the minutes and seconds, displays the number of words left, and the average number of words per minute required to be typed up until the deadline, then this is for you. Example: use deadline -d 2005/1/12 15:00 -t 3000 -f assignment.txt for an assignment whose text is in assignment.txt, has a deadline of the 12th of January at 3pm, and needs 3000 words. Alternatively, give -c instead of -f to specify a command to be run (for example, detex) to produce plaintext from whatever format you're using.
09/01/2005 - I have implemented the popular Dissociated Press text perturbation algorithm. Click on the link in the sidebar. If you can't be arsed to reach all the way over there, here's another link.
06/01/2005 - It's the tried and tested "rehash an old idea with different data" method of website design. Play the 2005 edition of the Mike's Floor Memory Game!
19/12/2004 - "arg arg arg. death." said Jon. That is not particularly unusual in itself, but it led to an exchange which spawned this system administration tool.
14/11/2004 - I took this picture of our lounge when Mike was out. Yes, he's left both the monitor and the television on, but look at the position of the armchair. Deja vu?
30/10/2004 - Yes, the thirtieth of October. Having people ring the bell going "trick or treat" is bad enough without them getting the wrong day. Accordingly, anyone knocking on our door seeking confectionery will be handed one of these.
20/05/2004 - The jungle, as viewed from my bedroom window. Andy, Jon and his car are shown for perspective purposes.
20/05/2004 - Jon asks me to take a photograph of him to demonstrate his recently-acquired-through-not-being-arsed-to-shave beard. Unfortunately, he assumes a Pavlovian association between the red light on the front of my camera and a missile launcher locking onto its target. The results were worth making the first update to Other Bits for several months. Here's the real one, for completeness.
18/03/2004 - Mike's incompetence at using the washing machine, and generally at the whole clothes-washing experience, takes on new unwanted heights. Here's the link. Not for the squeamish.
16/01/2004 - And after Andy mended it, guess what happened last night.
11/01/2004 - Today, Mike has door issues.
13/12/2003 - Which housemate are you? Take this test to find out which of us you most resemble.
05/12/2003 - See how thirty-odd bottles of some strange alcoholic concoctions made their way into our house.
03/12/2003 (added here 07/12/2003) - Test your powers of observation and memory with the Mike's floor memory game.
02/12/2003 - Mike Annoyance No. 1,764.
30/11/2003 - Well, what else are you supposed to do to random cans of lager sitting around the house? Clickety-click
24/11/2003 - The Mike F.A.Q - a guide to Mike that I just happened to post on User Friendly. If you've never heard of Mike, this is a good place to start. Note that UF posts have an upper limit of 8 kilobytes, and I couldn't put in everything I wanted to. What remains is a small representative sample of living with Mike.
08/10/2003 - On the night of 5th October 2003, we glued a biscuit and a baguette to Mike's computer, continuing the precedent set by the potato incident above. The picture of the finished result is here. You can see footage (mpg format, no sound unfortunately) of the operation here and a video taken shortly afterwards here.
05/10/2003 - Services rendered to Mike's computer. At the time of writing, I don't know if he's pleased with it yet, as he hasn't noticed it.
01/08/2003 - It's nice to see that the manufacturer of my t-shirt thought it a good idea to put a label on the shirt to remind me what sort of clothing it is, in case I forget. Unfortunately, they've got it wrong.
30/07/2003 - The controversial growlercamp.jpg picture has laid unseen for so long, mainly due to the fact that I want to be able to keep my account without having to buy him beer all the time. So, for all those who want to see it, here is a compromise, the HTML-ised ASCII-art version of the growlercamp pic, created with aview. It's not technically a picture, so it doesn't go in the Pictures section.
01/06/2003 - The IRC log from when I related that fine story of Mike spamming people to the denizens of #woaftech on quakenet. Also, here's the post about it I made on the UserFriendly forum, which explains it a bit more clearly. You'll notice I've changed the names of the people involved to the exact same names.
06/05/2003 - Business cards of this dubiously-named taxi firm appeared around Leamington last May.
15/07/2003 - There's an ants' nest just inside my front door. I have taken steps to rectify this.
11/03/2003 - Mike - some random blithering about one of our housemates, with illustrations.
14/02/2003 - This picture is kept for posterity. It shows Growler getting ready to attend a lecture. "So?" I hear you say. "That might not be a regular occurrence, but it certainly isn't something worth taking a commemorative photo of." Ah, but look at the time - 8:41. Yes, this marks the first time in a calendar year that Growler attended a 9am lecture. A momentous occasion.
07/02/2003 - The sign outside Growler's bedroom door in Leamington.
25/01/2003 - The sandwich page - pictures of my system.
11/10/2002 - Growler goes to Telehouse - some photos I gathered from Growler's webcam and captioned.
Things that don't have a date for some reason
All those miscellaneous pictures that are in my "pics" directory but haven't linked to anywhere now get their own place here.
In no particular order...
The Ancient Leaflet - the leaflet that came with our television aerial. It's clearly older than I am. Bee Nest Horn - the instructions that came with my computer case. The button on the front actually controls the irritating blue flashing LEDs on the front. Why they've labelled it "Bee Nest Horn" is beyond me. Lunar Eclipse - not a picture per se, but several of them. Evil Sky pictures One, Two and Three. Ex-graphics card - this graphics card was broken before Jon took a crowbar to it. It's even more broken now. Growler in a Box - it all got too much for Jon as he took refuge in my cardboard box. Which, some days later, he destroyed and destroyed again. Annotated Me - I made this picture in 2002. It's still quite accurate. Stealth Growler. There is no more that can be said. My watch was just too big. So I took off the armour plating, protective shielding, anti-surface-to-air-missile cladding and the like, and came up with what I'm wearing now, the streamlined G-Shock. Where's Mike? Mike went missing one weekend. What he got up to is another story, but this was a map I constructed showing his possible whereabouts. The sickle now gets a link in its own right. Among my Christmas presents was a book entitled "The Book of Bunny Suicides". I was as puzzled as you are now when I read the title. But it's actually a very funny book. It's a series of cartoons about rabbits trying to find new and interesting ways of killing themselves. Here's the pic from the back cover and here's one of my favourite ones. With the third year project needing to be done, I have exercised a productivity enhancement. A picture taken purely so the frequency of radio 4 can be easily obtained. Serves no other purpose. Giant spider scales Warwick Arts Centre. This is an old picture I came across while browsing my pictures directory. I don't know what I find so funny about it. But it just is.
