“For professional Funeral Directors wishing to enhance their service we provide unique and tasteful motorcycle hearses”
Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
I’ve just tagged all my book reviews, so the following are available for borrowing should you be interested (I think a couple of them belong to evilmattikinz but I’m not sure I can remember which ones, and I’m sure he’d be happy to let you borrow them anyway):
Book review: JPod by Douglas Coupland
Theres something easy about reading Coupland. His work is quite disposable at some level but at another it describes people who are enough like me that I can feel myself being drawn into their world.
This book takes us into the world of a games development company, with a small group of six developers stuck in a corner of the building working on their own project. It follows their lives over the course of the project, through its invasion by turtles to a hilarious climax involving an oriental fir tree.
It is a little self-referential, in that Coupland turns up in the book, but its nicely done, and in such a way that its a bit difficult to work out which bits are fiction, which are ‘fiction in the fictional world’ and which are real (I suspect none).
There are some nice touches, like the guy who is drive mad by the sound of the coffee machine idling (it emits a sound every 45 seconds that noone else can hear), and fantasies about Ronald McDonald. All of which is both plausible and utterly absurd.
Who should read this book: anyone geeky or who wants to understand us geeky people.
What kind of person reads “Neurolinguistic Programming for Dummies” on the train?
In unrelated news, I’m feeling a bit stupid today. I managed to scrape the side of my car on the fencepost at the back of my flat last night. The parking area is a bit on the small side and there are now three cars regularly left in the area. Technically I have a garage but its still full of my landlords things so I just park my car as out the way as I can get it. But last night it was a bit tight up there and it was very dark when I got back (so much for light pollution, eh?).
I’ve not had a chance to look at it in daylight to see how bad it is, I suspect its not pretty but I’m hoping that its not structural – I think I misjudged the corner by about 1cm, but that can leave the paintwork in quite a mess if its the wrong 1cm. As long as its all basically functional I’m not going to bother fixing it – the car is going to be replaced at some point soon anyway, so in some ways its good to get these things out the way with a car thats not so precious.
So, anyone got any suggestions for ways to make the corner of the fence less dangerous to the sides of cars? One obvious one is to arrive in daylight when I can see what is going on. But thats not always practical. So I was considering trying to find a bell, a bracket and a piece of string, such that if you got too close the string would pull the bell and ring without damaging the car. But I’m not quite sure how to rig it, or where to buy a bell.
“Saturday morning John Doran, of Baraga while measuring lumber, was suddenly taken with a fit and fell into the lake and was drowned”
Slashcast (if you don’t know what thats likely to be you probably don’t want to follow the link – passed on for the sheer wrongness)
Last one standing has no socks (when knitters and gamers meet)
Whos up for the Screaming Banshee Aircrew gig in Southampton on Sunday?
No major casualties at saturday nights party, except for a little overenthusiasm with the packaging tape. Not enough food, and not organised enough to sort out what there was. The party bifurcated somewhat when someone found the source code for CP/M (admittedly a ROM based version, not disk based so the bootstrapping is somewhat different).
Depressing gender ratio, though, maybe I need to get out more, meet some charming young ladies who aren’t afraid of travelling to Surrey (do such creatures exist? Where would I find them?).
Book review: Failed states by Noam Chomsky
“Failed states” is another fairly typical Chomsky book. I find his writing style quite an easy read, he has a kind of clarity that you rarely get with political writing.
For this book he compares the actions of the United States government with their descriptions of countries they have attacked, and specifically the justifications for attacking them. His premise is very much that there are the words they say and the actions they perform, and that watching the actions would give you a very different impression to listening to the words.
There is a very clear political message in his books, people either love or hate his work because of the politics. Which is a shame because he presents a lot of interesting information which ought to be known by people who disagree with his political stance. (Personally I largely agree with what he has to say, but I do think he reads a *little* too much into things sometimes. I would like to find someone as easy to read and well informed on the other side of the debate, so that I could understand a bit more of their point of view)
In many ways this is just another Chomsky book – if you’ve already read him you probably don’t need to read this one, its more of the same. If you haven’t read his work then this is probably not a bad place to start.
Who should read this book: anyone who feels they are under-informed about the international political situation, especially the relationship between the US and the middle east.
I board the district line at Fulham Broadway for my journey home. Normally the train is quite busy, with people standing at Fulham but by the time it gets to Wimbledon theres often seats.
One day I got lucky, and got a seat at Putney Bridge – the train was still quite busy, with a number of people standing. Mostly I’m engrossed in reading my book, whatever it may be (I’m a bit behind on the reviews…expect a catchup soon). This day I looked down between chapters and saw a bulky, heavy looking bag left lying on the ground near my feet as people got off at Southfields.
Chances are that it belongs to somebody sat next to me and contains only their clothes for the week or schoolwork, or something. If thats not so, the next most likely thing is that someone has forgotten their bag, they will be upset, feel stupid, try calling the lost property department in the hope of finding it again.
Suddenly I feel conscious of people looking at me, like I’m the kind of person who would bring a suspicious bag onto the tube train. I can’t move away without making things worse.
Everywhere we go, in London at least, there are announcements reminding us that we shouldn’t trust anyone, that everyone has potential to do bad things. These announcements are fairly antisocial, they are very intrusive and start with the phrase “May I have your attention for an important security announcement”, they are pre-recorded announcements, repeated around every two minutes.
When did I turn into the enemy?
Linkblast:
Tank cosy (for those that missed it last time)
Total eclipse of the heart (warning: contains beards and abuse of white goods…actually I think theres only one beard, but its impressive enough to have gained a pluralisation)
Larvae – not for the faint hearted when it comes to insects
What are you going to do with those?…Fly…I like flying.