I'm not going to be posting to LJ any more. I've been pretty unhappy with the way LJ has been run for quite a while now, but the latest annoyance, the "Driving Revenues" program which inserts affiliate (i.e. promotional) links whenever one clicks on an outbound link from a page on LJ - that's the last straw, for me. LJ management introduced this ( Read more... )

It's been a while since I've posted anything much here, hasn't it? Blame my data collection - yes, it's still going, it's still exhausting and annoying, and by the time I'm done with my work for the day, mostly I don't have much energy for anything as social as posting to my journal. I've done lots of cool stuff over the last couple of months, and ( Read more... )

You know how I put my shiny new cellphone through the wash the other day? At the time of last posting, it was in pieces on my desk drying out. Well, I put it back together again and powered it up... well, attempted to power it up, anyway. All that happened was the initial "power-up rumble", and then the little lights on buttons around the screen ( Read more... )

A week or so I ago I got a shiny new cellphone - a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. A nifty bit of kit with a touch screen, scads of memory and with tons of third-party apps available for it, I've spent a good chunk of the intervening time fiddling with it, putting music on it, downloading all sorts of daft apps for it, generally geeking out over it. Wot ( Read more... )

I'm going through data in the backlog of stuff from my data collection sessions that I've yet to transcribe, and am delighted to discover that two of the sessions have no voice track. (One of the tasks I get my research subjects to do involves responding verbally to sounds played over a headset that they wear while they drive.) Checking my booking ( Read more... )

So Martindale dragged me out to the movies this evening. Apparently someone had suggested to him that "2012" was worth watching, in a "cool special effects" sort of way, so since our local cinema does cheap tickets on tuesdays, we went to see it tonight ( Read more... )

Mister Miles is not making himself popular at present ( Read more... )

Following on from the Racefail debates earlier this year, I've been reading a lot of really interesting articles on the topics of racism, cultural appropriation and privilege. It's a big and complicated issue, and there's a lot of really eye-opening material being written on these related topics. One issue that strikes a chord with me is the ( Read more... )

I don't have time to do a full update of Noteworthy Stuff Wot Haz Happened Lately, since I've gotta go collect more data in a little while. Still, here's a potted summary of a few things that spring to mind, just to let folk know that I'm still alive out here in the Land Of Eternal Data Collection:

• A weekend or two ago I attended a Spinners & ( Read more... )

Well, Our Idiot Government has done it again. Replica and imitation firearms - which is to say, non-firing ones: toys and costume accessories, that sort of thing - now have to be registered as if they were the type of firearm they pretend to beUp until... well, just now, it was the case that if the type of firearm that a re-enactor needed to ( Read more... )