It's been a while

Well, it's been a while since my last post. I just looked what my last post was, and it was really boring! Just some crap about riser weights. That kind of stuff is going onto del.icio.us/hywel now. Anyhoo, I suppose I should update the world on what's been happening lately. I've just come out of the hospital, so those of you who I haven't told yet, I'll phone sooner or later to tell what. This is why I have some time at home to write for a bit - the last couple of months have been a bit crazy at work and at home, so not much time to dedicate to writing a diary.... the good news is the operation went great, but I'll be stuck at home for a few days until I can walk around properly. Lots of painkillers is making it bearable!

Charlie the dog is doing fine right now. He had to go to his own doctor's recently, basically to have a giant pimple removed from his head. Unfortunately due to his age he didn't respond too well to the pre-med, so the vet decided not to go ahead with the pimple-ectomy. Charlie therefore still has a big pimple. On the upside, the vet said he's got at least 2 more years, which is more than the 3 weeks he supposedly had left when we got him. I'm going to try some of his dog-food - there must be something in it.

Riser weights

From a thread on the Sagittarius site...

Riser Length Weight
Inches Grams Lbs Oz
Samick Mizar 23 920 2 0
Stylist Sapphire 23 992 2 3
Stylist Supreme 25 992 2 3
Merlin Apex 1080 2 6
Yamaha Eolla 25 1095 2 7
BMG Extreme 24 1100 2 7
Win & Win KAP Evolution 2 23 1100 2 7
Win & Win KAP Surprise 24 1100 2 7
Stylist Supreme 25 1106 2 7
Win & Win Winact 23 1120 2 8
Hoyt Radian 1130 2 8
Petron S3 23 1134 2 8
PSE X-Factor 25 1134 2 8
Yamaha Super Feel Forged 23 1145 2 8
Hoyt GM TD4+ 25 1150 2 9
Samick Agulla 25 1150 2 9
Hoyt Elan 25 1160 2 9
Martin Aurora 24 1162 2 9
Best Zenit 23 1190 2 10
Win & Win Toutall 25 1190 2 10
Hoyt Aerotec 23 1191 2 10
Hoyt Matrix 23 1191 2 10
Bernardini Nilo 23 1200 2 10
Win & Win KAP Winstar 25 1200 2 10
Win & Win Winact 25 1200 2 10
Bernadini Ghibli 25 1210 2 11
Spigarelli Explorer 23 1215 2 11
Petron S3 25 1219 2 11
Bernardini Nilo 25 1220 2 11
Bernardini Tuareg 25 1220 2 11
Sky Conquest 1230 2 11
Spigarelli Explorer 25 1230 2 11
Hoyt Matrix 25 1247 2 12
PSE Universal 1250 2 12
Hoyt Avalon 1270 2 13
PSE Intrepid 25 1270 2 13
Samick Agulla Ultra 25 1275 2 13
Bernardini Aladin 25 1300 2 14
Best Moon 25 1300 2 14
Win & Win KAP Certi-Q 25 1300 2 14
Hoyt Aerotec 25 1304 2 14
Browning Olympian 1320 2 15
PSE Zone 1320 2 15
Win & Win Exfeel 25 1320 2 15
Win & Win Infinite 25 1320 2 15
Green Horn Victory B+ 25 1335 2 15
Yamaha SFF 2 1340 2 15
Best Zenit 25 1350 3 0
Spigarelli 2001 V.B.S. 1380 3 1
Samick Masters 25 1400 3 1
Spigarelli 2001 25 1400 3 1
Win & Win Xpert 25 1400 3 1
Hoyt Axis 25 1550 3 7
KG Nemesis 24 1758 3 14

Border security, UK Style

We're stopping them coming in, but we can't stop them getting out. A great little analysis on the inanity of UK border controls and IT.

The Crash is coming and there is nothing we can do about it.

Gitterdammerung (The Twilight of the Gits)
"...first bear in mind the difference between today's greedy git versus someone hit by the Crash of '29. Our forbearers maybe lived it up too much in the Roaring Twenties, but they had also survived the trenches of the Somme, so they were better accustomed to hardship than today's spoilt Baby Boomer who suffers anxiety attacks while stuck in traffic. Will the gits buckle down and work three shifts a day as my grandfather did? Or throw all their toys out of the cot and turn nasty? No prizes for guessing."
from a Social Affairs Unit weblog.

My 400th Post - and my first video file

Well, this is my 400th post, so I thought I'd put up a video file for a change. This video is of the Phoenix Band at Stockton Heath walking day. Walking Day is held each year at many villages and towns in this part of North-West England, principally in Warrington.

The video shows the highlight point in Walking Day, when the band stops in Victoria Square in the centre of Stockton Heath, and the baton man (who incidentally works at Daresbury Laboratory), does his stuff.

Jesus in a Peruvian sand dune

Can you see Jesus in this satellite photo from Google Maps?

Wired News: Blogging + Video = Vlogging

Blogging + Video = Vlogging more internet madness.

Home-grown suicide bombers

Today's news has confirmed what most people were thinking: the London attacks were performed by British suicide bombers. And these are the first suicide bombs on British soil.

Given the information that is available from the police, it doesn't take much to put two plus two together to work out what these guys did. They hatched a plan up in Leeds, travelled down to Luton, took the bombs out of their car and then went their separate ways from King's Cross. Three of them killed themselves at 8:50 along with their victims. Perhaps the fourth one bottled it, then travelled around in an agitated state (according to one eye-witness) before blowing himself up on a bus. Was this fourth one deliberate or accidental?

I've been keeping an eye on the official victim list: although I checked on all my friends that I'm in regular contact with, I have this nagging doubt that someone I know might have been on one of the trains/bus. I guess that's a feeling shared by many people.

But, the attacks won't stop me going to London. See you there next week.

The Sorting Door Project

The Sorting Door Project - an interesting study into how multiple RFID tags can be used to reduce your privacy.

Truth In Cosmetic Surgery Blog

Truth In Cosmetic Surgery - an interesting website about how bad plastic surgery is.

RSS to JS

Free RSS/RDF to JavaScript Conversion Tool for Webmasters. Hmm. Could be handy.

Fingernails store personal information

Fingernails store personal information. An amazing article on biometrics from optics.org:

'Secure optical data storage could soon literally be at your fingertips thanks to work being carried out in Japan. Yoshio Hayasaki and his colleagues have discovered that data can be written into a human fingernail by irradiating it with femtosecond laser pulses. Capacities are said to be up to 5 mega bits and the stored data lasts for 6 months - the length of time it takes a fingernail to be completely replaced.'

Man vs. Car - in London

As an antidote to the terrible events in London last week, here's a little something to cheer you up. Tonight on Top Gear - the UK's most popular driving program - we were shown a challenge between car and runner. Each had to cover the same London Marathon course through Central London during rush hour, from Greenwich round to Westminster and back again, or thereabouts. Even with it being London, and knowing that the average speed of cars in London is 10.6 miles per hour, you would have to bet on the car, right? After all, marathon runners can only get up to about 15 mph, and there had to be sections of the 26 mile course, where the car would get way ahead of the typical runner and easily win the race.

Wrong! Although the car was initially in front (in a quiet part of Greenwich), it was quickly overtaken and never caught up. The runner won by a good 10 minutes.

Ok, so it's a runner not a normal commuter, but there's an important lesson here. It's total lunacy to drive around London. For short journeys you might as well walk. Am I the only person who thinks this in London? It seems so, given the zillions of people who struggle through the congestion charging zone every day.

Anyway, you can find out more about it here.

ELSEWARES » INDEPENDENT ART & DESIGN

ELSEWARES » INDEPENDENT ART & DESIGN. Cool stuff from old junk.

A Letter To The Terrorists, From London

From The London News Review. This pretty much sums it up to me:

This is London. We've dealt with your sort before. You don't try and pull this on us.

Do you have any idea how many times our city has been attacked? Whatever you're trying to do, it's not going to work.

All you've done is end some of our lives, and ruin some more. How is that going to help you? You don't get rewarded for this kind of crap.

And if, as your MO indicates, you're an al-Qaeda group, then you're out of your tiny minds.

Because if this is a message to Tony Blair, we've got news for you. We don't much like our government ourselves, or what they do in our name. But, listen very clearly. We'll deal with that ourselves. We're London, and we've got our own way of doing things, and it doesn't involve tossing bombs around where innocent people are going about their lives.

And that's because we're better than you. Everyone is better than you. Our city works. We rather like it. And we're going to go about our lives. We're going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we're going to work. And we're going down the pub.

So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your arseholes, and get the fuck out of our city."

Astrologer Sues NASA Over Comet Probe - Yahoo! News

Astrologer Sues NASA Over Comet Probe - more marvellous lunacy.

John Titor on the future

An interesting article from a set posted by an (alleged) time-traveller from 2036. Good stuff.

First reporter in Nagasaki - his report finally published

An article from George Weller in Nagasaki has only now been published in the Mainichi Daily News: "American George Weller was the first foreign reporter to enter Nagasaki following the U.S. atomic attack on the city on Aug. 9, 1945. Weller wrote a series of stories about what he saw in the city, but censors at the Occupation's General Headquarters refused to allow the material to be printed".
A powerful but harrowing account of the first atom bombs.

Landed Properties and Proprietors

Landed Properties and Proprietors: "Several other families have held land since the twelfth century, including Tremlett, Tichborne, Plowden, Fulford, Lucy, Mallet, Medlicott and Saltmarshe. They never ranked, as they do not rank today, among the great ennobled families, the Cecils, Thynnes, Cavendishes and Comptons, who date from post reformation days, nor even the FitzRoys, Churchills, Bentincks and Wellesleys, who date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They are older by far than these, and less distinguished. The first qualification is explained by the deficiency of the last. Many of them owe their survival to their very lack of past renown. By not aspiring to royal favours they ran no risks of attainder and forfeiture, consequent upon the disgrace of many an over-ambitious mediaeval and renaissance name, and few risks of losing all they possessed in later centuries at the gaming-table and on the turf. Whereas in 1618 Sir Walter Ralegh had his head cut off and his estates confiscated, and whereas in 1741 Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford, came to it premature end through dissipation, after being obliged to sell Wimpole and his unrivalled collections in order to pay his debts, the Plowdens still live unostentiously at Plowden in Shropshire, and the Fulfords at Great Fulford in Devon ~ two manor houses of moderate size as they have always done since the twelfth century."

Porn Peddlers Won't Bare It All

From Wired News: Porn Peddlers Won't Bare It All. A rather bizarre story about the maturing world of the internet porn industry...