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Party Party party
Yesterday, hacker-turned-Tantric-priest-turned-global-resilience-guru Vinay Gupta went on one of his better rants on Twitter. I've Storified it for your pleasure here. The gist was roughly- We don't have enough resources to give everyone a Western lifestyle.
- Said lifestyle isn't actually very good at giving us the things which really make us happy.
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Fixing the "blank page" problem in Wordpress
I've been doing some work with Wordpress off and on for the last couple of weeks - migrating a site that uses a custom CMS onto a Wordpress installation - and a couple of times I've run into the following vexing problem when setting up a local Wordpress installation for testing. I couldn't find anything about it on the web, and it took me several ( Read more... ) -
Please sponsor me!
You may recall that one of my New Year's Resolutions was to enter and complete the half-marathon event at the Meadows Marathon. Well, I entered it! Now I just have to actually run the thing. This Sunday, to be precise. I've pounded enough cold pavements over the last three months that I'm fairly confident of finishing, though I've no idea whether I ( Read more... ) -
Andrew Greig on training
It was often uncomfortable, often painful, particularly for the first month, but other days were pure joy, a revelling in the sensation of movement, of strength and wellbeing. My regular headaches stopped. For the first time ever, I got through winter without even a cold. I felt incredibly well, began to walk and hold myself differently. When ( Read more... ) -
The games kittens play
The Ball Game
This game is a particular favourite of Josie, but Haggis finds it boring. The kitten takes a ball (usually one made of silver foil), and bats it around with its paws and carries it around in its mouth. The game has a very complicated scoring scheme which we haven't worked out yet, and ends when the kitten gets bored.
This game has a ( Read more... ) -
What I learned on my winter climbing course
"Would you like some money towards another Glenmore Lodge course for Christmas?" said my Dad, some time in December. I thought about last year's course for about half a second and said "Yes please!". This time I signed up for the five-day winter lead climbing course, and had five fantastic days climbing: Wednesday in particular was one of the best ( Read more... ) -
SOPA/PIPA
As you've probably noticed, many prominent websites (like Wikipedia, Reddit, BoingBoing, XKCD...) have gone dark today in protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act and its Senate cousin, the Protect IP Act. If either of these passes, it will seriously impact the ability of any US website (defined in very broad, not to say insane ways) to host user ( Read more... ) -
New Year's Resolutions
I don't normally make New Year's resolutions, but what the hell.
1. Start tracking my weight and calorie intake again, and get my weight back down to a level where I'm comfortable. This morning it was 12st 1.9 - not terribly high in the scheme of things, but it's almost as high as it was when I first started dieting (though I think a bit more of ( Read more... ) -
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I've been writing some Perl code recently, and a couple of ideas have occurred to me.- Closures are great when you have several behaviours which can all vary independently; objects are great when you have several behaviours that must all vary in sync with one another. Put another way: if your problem is combinatorial explosion of objects, try using ( Read more... )
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I was pleasantly astonished to see Peter Norvig comment on my recent post about the Stanford online courses - with 160,000 students competing for his attention, that's dedication! I completely take his point that I'm only a small part of the intended audience, and what works best for me is probably not what works best for the students they really ( Read more... )