Neil Hopcroft

Any Cambridge people (or further afield) into web design? – I need a fairly basic (small) corporate website and would appreciate some help from web wizards or artists. I can provide the technical content, I just need a framework to drop it into – indeed, I intend to automate that dropping in, to allow dynamic updates at a later stage. What would I be looking at paying for such a design?

“Based on experience with two dozen cases of Munchausen by Internet, I have arrived at a list of clues to the detection of factititous Internet claims. The most important follow:
1. the posts consistently duplicate material in other posts, in books, or on health-related websites;
2. the characteristics of the supposed illness emerge as caricatures;
3. near-fatal bouts of illness alternate with miraculous recoveries;
4. claims are fantastic, contradicted by subsequent posts, or flatly disproved;
5. there are continual dramatic events in the person’s life, especially when other group members have become the focus of attention;
6. there is feigned blitheness about crises (e.g., going into septic shock) that will predictably attract immediate attention;
7. others apparently posting on behalf of the individual (e.g., family members, friends) have identical patterns of writing.”

A livejournal equivalent of car-crashes.

“Last Friday I went to the mall to be a Part of the Problem, on this, the busiest shopping day of the year….I went to Dillards and bitched the lady out for not having the right color of perfume! “My girlfriend wants blue, dammit, blue!!” (I don’t even have a girlfriend…)”

The site is full of Bad Ideas, and conveniently enough Principia Discordia is timing out now…

It worried me last night. It seems I’m getting worse at holding together a stream of concious thought. I keep going off at tangents, getting distracted, forgetting what I was talking about.

In some ways this is good, it makes context switching easier when I’m trying to do lots of things at once. But it would be kinda nice to be able to stay with the programme, get all of my thoughts together and coherent before they disappear and get replaced by the next set of incoherencies.

Is this a symptom of being a member of the powerpoint generation? Consume consume, faster faster? Attention deficit? Soundbite culture? Too much caffeine? Too /little/ caffeine?

Anyone got any ideas for mental exercises, puzzles if you like, which would improve my concentration? Does anyone else have problems with concentration? Do you care? Should I care?

“A Danish vendor said Thursday that it has developed a system to create Bluetooth-enabled cows”

Some extensions to Service Discovery Protocol needed here, I fear, maybe a milking profile, beef profile, or perhaps an all-in-one bovine profile…

…and while we’re on the subject of cows, which came first Bovril or Bovril?

French “…car industry…is now nothing more than a supplier of quality satanic automobiles to the Lizard Alliance”

Thankfully my Laguna is too jaded by its life in the UK to attempt such kidnap attempts.

http://www.cutelittlekittens.com/ …thousands of them

Phew, what a struggle…finally got a livejournal server running here…
(mod_perl behaves so much better when you don’t install mandrakes enterprise class apache variant)

now for curry…

“So, why did I create a whole webpage about my motorcycle?
It runs UNIX!”
…and creates some fairly tedious videos of the journey to the Burrito store…it’d be potentially helpful in a crash, except I suspect the harddisk’ll get wiped out on the way down. Uncached solid state is the way to go.

Today I went for a whistlestop tour of fenland auction houses – they were confused in Ely, the auction isn’t until saturday, viewing friday. So I explained I saw they said they were an auction house and wondered how it worked. Duly furnished with a catalogue I was sent on my way. There are some incredible things for sale. Who buys this rubbish? Who /sells/ it?

194. Small brass figure with basket on back containing a thimble and three brass owls. 15 pounds.
205. 15 regimetnal journals for the Sherwood Foresters spanning from 1912 to 1918. 75 pounds.
246. Nazi Germany Workers Book, stamped from 1934-1939. Nice stamp and signature of Oberfifeldmeister of Hitler Youth Training Camp in back of book. 20 pounds.
270. WWI Princess Mary christmas 1914 gift tin including bullet. 5 pounds.
345A. Stuffed mounted head of a GNU. 10 pounds

(and its not my emphasis on the final one, seems the FSF is down one head…)

Onward, then, to March. Where their auctions are held wednesday mornings, I arrived just as they were tallying up at the end of this mornings. They’re less organised, with no catalogue, but somehow seemed more relaxed about it all. He showed me those lots that had failed to sell this morning, quite a collection of normal household junk, furniture mainly, but various other odd bits and pieces.

There was a funfair setting up in the carpark – what is it with places I’m going to these days, theres always closed funfairs.