This post is pure self-indulgence to celebrate that I'm now a Master of Arts. \o/ And it was the easiest academic qualification I've ever attained. :) A few weeks ago I just sent off an application form and some money, and today I picked up from the post office an official certificate entitling me to put the letters MA after my name. And yes, it's ( Read more... )

Or, why backing up your files is important ( Read more... )

This site might be of interest to anyone who's either British or has British ancestry. It can tell you how many other people share your surname - and more interestingly, whereabouts in the country they come from. The site also has data from both 1998 and 1881, so you can see how the distribution has changed over the intervening century.

In my case, ( Read more... )

...everybody else in Britain is doing it right now.

View from outside my back door, ten minutes ago. The snow-covered garden furniture makes me chuckle:


( Read more... )

Yesterday I downloaded and installed LJArchive to make a back-up of my journal. Today I discovered that it has a bunch of tools that analyse your entire posting history and tell you things like which words you've used most often...

( Cut for analytical geekery )