It always amazes me how quickly my children sometimes manage to break new toys. So it cheered me up a bit to learn that the boffins at CERN (they have a web site you know) have already broken the Large Hadron Collider.
Hope they kept the receipt.
Monthly Archive for September, 2008
Have a look at this: http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/when-hardeep-met-les#comment-57497
I can’t bear listening to the man, but David Hepworth confirms the nation’s suspicion that BBC 6Music presenter George Lamb is a tosser, he knows or cares bugger all about music which is a bit of a failing when you’re on a station that claims to take music seriously.
A few months ago I had the misfortune to hear his interview with Martha Wainwright - he was clearly less interested in the music than in chatting her up. I assume he’d only agreed to speak to her on the strength of the cover photograph of the amusingly-titled I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too.
By the way, worth scrolling to the top of that Word magazine page to hear the cringeworthy BBC WM interview - thanks Westy!
Following a security update, my PowerBook kept losing its wireless connection when waking from sleep or starting up. 
This was a pain as my WiFi base station doesn’t transmit its SSID and I had to enter its name and long hex WEP key each time I wanted to get online.
Turns out the solution was rather simpler than all the mucking around I’d been doing deleting com.apple.airport files and the like.
I just made a new ‘location’ - its location had been on ‘automatic’, so I went to System Preferences > Network and clicked on the locations drop-down menu and made a new location (called ‘foo’ of course). Since then it’s been rejoining my wireless network ok when it wakes up. Phew! Or should I say ‘Foo!’?
Did a security update on my PowerBook today; now it keeps forgetting my wireless network’s name and password. So it really is very bloody secure as it’s now mostly not connected to the internet at all any more. I forgave this behaviour in a £200 (now defenestrated) Asus eeePC but it’s a bit galling in a £1600 Apple pro laptop. Where’s the window?
Home alone and at a loose end, I Googled ‘cool things to do with a Nintendo Wii’ 
(it’s been sitting in the living room not earning its keep) and discovered Wii Transfer. This allows me to stream iPhoto pictures and iTunes songs from the big fat old 320GB iMac in the back room which has all my MP3s on it. I had to shell out £7 for some Wii Points to download the Wii web-browser, but now here I am with a big stupid grin on my face dancing round the living room to the strains of That Petrol Emotion. Doesn’t seem to like long songs, though - the Wii says it doesn’t have enough memory and chokes. So we are spared The Orb’s ‘Little Fluffy Clouds‘ for now…
Possibly undocumented pleasure of family life: my daughter has a pink tube of Lisa Simpson toothpaste; the boys have a blue tube of Bart Simpson toothpaste. The contents are identical. Whenever possible I make sure the boys get toothpaste out of the Lisa Simpson tube, and my daughter gets Bart Simpson toothpaste.
I get my kicks where I can.
Oh, and just now - file under ‘don’t kids just say the darndest things’. William (6) said: “I know what girls have instead of willies. FASHION!”
Thanks William. That explains everything.
One of the unexpected pleasures of having young children who play rugby on a Sunday morning, is that one of the other dads just lent me Mark E Smith’s autobiography. I’m glad I didn’t shell out for the hard-back as it’s a slim volume, but I did chuckle at the things he had to say about the BBC and Johnny Cash.
They’re an odd bunch at the BBC. I remember having to meet these two media graduates just before they started filming that documentary… what a pair they were! One of them was this girl, a festival type, a Jo Whiley-ite. She’d just come back from some festival or other, and that was all she could talk about… First thing she did as she sat down was cross her legs as if she was about to do some fucking yoga - a modern hippy, in other words. I offered to buy her a drink but she’s like, ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly have another drink. I drank so much at this festival’… and she never made an effort to get her round in. What are they teaching them at the BBC?
I liked the way everyone started jumping on the Johnny Cash bandwagon as well. If you were a Cash fan in the 70s people thought you were a racist. Nobody admitted to it… I find it horrible the way they’ve made money out of him, releasing all these maudlin recordings. Give me early Cash any day… The film was a disgrace as well… Would you rather see Walk the Fucking Line with River Phoenix’s daft brother or Cash Live at San Quentin?
And just the odd beautiful turn of phrase:
You can bet some strange things go on behind the doors of the FA. They’re like a cult; a randy cult souped up on good wine, expensive fruit and nice clean sausages.
Never mind the possible end of the universe, on Wedneday. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is an amusing typographical error waiting to happen. You know it’s true.
I saw this on the CBBC show Chute! By the end I was laughing out loud.
I can’t believe that Ken Campbell is dead, or that he was only 66. But it says so in his obituary, so it must be true.
I saw two of his live performances, one-man shows… one in Deptford and another in a tent on Blackheath. Both were wonderful. He was a master of surreal storytelling, he had the audience in the palm of his hands on both occasions.
I also remember a story that he almost halted recording of the second radio series of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy because he was unable to deliver the line “Marvin’s got Poodoo” (or similar) without collapsing in laughter. Douglas Adams - who wrote it - and Geoffrey Perkins - who produced it - are dead too. Sad sad sad.
These look like fun… thanks to Azfar for sending me this link.
littleBits intro from ayah bdeir on Vimeo.
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