We try to buy dry goods (rice, porridge, lentils, couscous...) in bulk, which is great for reducing cost and trips to the shops, but more of a hassle once you get the stuff home - the packaging is usually hard or impossible to re-seal, vulnerable to rodents, and a pain to pour from. For a while now, we've been using a system taught to us by dynix (and ( Read more... )

Last night I was re-watching The IT Crowd S3E4. It was one of my favourite episodes, and I still think it's beautifully constructed, but I found it a bit... squirmier this time round. For those who haven't seen it, one of the main characters meets a woman, invites her to dinner, then asks her to go to bed with him. She tells him that she's trans (" ( Read more... )

[In addition to the usual disclaimer, I'd like to point out that climbing and mountaineering are activities with a danger of personal injury or death, and participants in these activities should be aware of and accept these risks and be responsible for their own actions and involvement ( Read more... )

WP: The Tories are basically buggered in Scotland for at least a generation ( Read more... )

In an attempt to get fit, save money, cut her travel times, increase her mobility and reduce her carbon footprint all at the same time, wormwood_pearl has started cycling again after over ten years out of the saddle. The old adage about not forgetting how turned out to be true, but there's a snag: even with the rear mudguard removed and the saddle lowered as far ( Read more... )

bubbal: Why would you want to stay married to someone who doesn't want to be married to you?
overbored454: because you just can't turn love off like a car engine?
FlyingUndeadSheep: but you can handbrake-turn it sideways into a wall.

Link.

At the bouldering wall this afternoon...

wormwood_pearl: God, why am I so tired? I'm pretty sure I'm not pregnant.
pozorvlak: Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're not pregnant too. But if you are, I shall endeavour to love it as if it were my own.
wormwood_pearl: *glares*
*glares some more*
*glares a bit more for good measure*
I haven't been going down Alien 2 and seducing all the hunky ( Read more... )

Over on qntm.org, the always-entertaining Sam Hughes presents us with an essay on gay marriage: the database engineering perspective. It's a discussion of the real obstacle to legalising gay marriage, namely migrating the schemas of all the government databases so that they can accommodate the idea. Worth a read, perhaps especially if you don't ( Read more... )

Congratulations to wormwood_pearl, who climbed her first F6a at the climbing wall today! That's apparently a 5.9 in the US system - do you use the same system for top-roped climbs as for lead climbs over there ( Read more... )

Those of you who do scientific computation may be interested in this link:

Bye Matlab, hello Python, thanks Sage.Short version: Sage is a bundle of all of the various numeric/scientific/graphing tools for Python, made easy to download and install (even if you don't have root access, apparently). According to the blogger linked above, it's now good ( Read more... )