Well here we are again a month later - such events, such events. The elation on the Wednesday and the horror on the Thursday. My current theory is Bin Laden is behind what happened. Reports I have read about BL suggests he is in either in Pakistan orAfganistan (which is right next door), the people who carried out the bombing were Pakistani British, there would be many natural lines of communication between Britain and Pakistan, communications between BL and Leeds would not need to have too many hops. I think that BL when he learned that London had won the right to stage the 2012 Olympics, pressed the go button on a prearranged plan, anyone that would like to know why I think this, write me, peter at dollyknot dot com.
I'm am going to try to write this blog on a monthly basis and upload on the 13th day of every month. Why the 13th - simple, On my wall is a reciept for the 13th of October 1995 this is the date I joined the internet it is the receipt I paid to my first ISP. On October the 13th I am going to have a party and the internet is invited to share my 10th birthday as a netizen.
Fredyoda is okay at the moment, if a bit quiet. When I get around to it I will upload a Fred pic gallery to this website. To start the whole thing off here is a taster.
This is a much reduced copy of the original. If anyone would like a copy of the original, please contact me and I will contact the person who photographed it and we can take it from there.
This is a blog being written in real time! Only on the 13th of the month tho', for now.
I have to renew dollyknot.com soon for another year. You are not actually reading this on dollyknot but on the webspace that I get from my ISP. I only get one meg of webspace with my dollyknot package, to get more functionality would cost me more money.
Hic, I might in the next few sentences get a bit untoward - I don't like Tony Blair, but admire his ability to talk on the hoof, to go from the elation of Olympic triumph, to the dispair of bombs on the underground and still keep some kind of composure needs remarking upon - obviously it could all be some kind of conspiracy, but I very much doubt it.
2005/06/13
Well its nearly three months now and things have progressed with Fred adapting to me. and me adapting to Fred. As to why I named him Fred. Goggling for "Fred Dibner" will explain He is now sitting besides me in the day and at night I carry him on his detachable perch except for tonight, tonight he flew back to his cage under his own steam, well all I can say is wow^wow
2005/03/31
After a long hiatus I am writing here again, the reason being, I have a new addition to my live in family of one. I have two children but they have grown up and flown the nest. I have been living alone for over ten years now, apart from one or two periods.
The new addition to my household is an approx 7 year old African Grey parrot. I first bought him home last Monday, he seems to like me and I certainly like him, he says a few words and makes many different noises. But I have not perceived any of the cognitive wonders that you can read about here African Grey Anecdotes and here African Grey Stories
He came with the name Tyson, a name I definitely do not relate to, so I have decided to call him Fredyoda - Fred for short. He is a little bit neurotic which is why the people I bought him from probably sold him.
He does not like leaving his cage or being in it, a somewhat contradictory neurotic behaviour pattern, he likes perching on top of it. The lady I bought him from said they used to let him out the cage twice a week, so he probably rightly assumed his cage was a prison, so dislikes being in it, but does not like leaving the security it represents, but he did venture off of his cage and onto my desk yesterday, which is right beside the cage. So it seems fairly obvious that given time he will explore my flat further which brings another set of problems.
Fred is not toilet trained, has a powerful beak and likes chewing things. So making progress will be a somewhat slow process. The first step is to get him onto my finger, here is where it gets somewhat weird.
When I stand by the end of his cage and offer him my finger, he behaves rather oddly, first putting one claw onto my finger, whilst strongly gripping the cage with the other claw, he then alternates to the other claw, flares his wings and makes cooing noises at me whilst getting generally excited, it seems as though he gets sexually excited, which is not a good idea, not with my finger leastwise. If I ever get him a mate, all well and good, otherwise he is not my type :)
We had a sort of incident this morning, when I first got up and was having my morning tea, sitting in my usual seat, which is on the other side of the room to the cage, he started cooing at me, like he has done before when trying to get him on my finger, so I went over to his cage to try again. He actually got both claws onto my finger then I made a mistake and lifted my hand off of the cage, which resulted in him launching himself into the air and flying once around the room in a very clumsy fashion and landing in a heap behind the TV.
Because he has not been finger trained, I had the problem of getting him back to his cage. After unsucessfully trying to get him onto my finger, I resorted to pick him up bodily, he did *not* bite me. And here is the interesting thing, once he saw his cage he wriggled out of my hand and flew *up* to his cage. What this tells me is, that his wings have not been clipped, he is capable of flight. He has never been encouraged to do so.
Many African Grey owners clip the wings of their parrot out of fear of losing them. This is understandable, not just from the point of losing the parrot, but that there would not be much chance that it would survive in an unfamiliar environment. The downside of wing clipping is that flying will increase Fred's confidence.
One of the doors to the room Fred is in, opens to the outside world, so I have a dilemma. If I do nothing, no problem, but I will have a parrot that never wants to leave his cage. I think flying will inrease his confidense no end. But people enter and leave my home through this door. More later.
2004/09/19
To my chagrin I have discovered that I have been rude to a lady.
Ms Liz Ditz who kindly wrote a nice review of my website and for this I thank her. I missed her email mainly because I assumed it was spam. I have filters but some of the mental polution still gets through. I discovered Liz's email by accident. It is amazing in life how things string together sometimes. The radio mouse for the house computer stopped working, which meant guests could not go on line. I had a spare mouse but it had a tail which was not long enough to stretch from the sofa to the computer. Solution move the computer to the other end of the desk so the mouse wire would reach. This meant moving the house box from underneath my main box this meant my main box is now on the floor. My main box has a mind of its own and I kid you not. Do any thing at all to it and it goes into a sulk and refuses to do anything at all. First of all it refused to have anthing at all to do with the net and kept moaning about a register in the ethernet card. I had a friend go round the back of the box to tickle the wires, to no avail. Finally in desperation I went around the back of the box myself and all I did was unplug the ethernet cable and plugged it back in again lo an behold it worked. All was well or so I thought, I went to bed thinking all problems solved.
Got up yesterday morning powered up the box as usual. The mother board muttered something that I could not quite make out 'coz I had the speakers turned down low. I have this weird/cute assus motherboard that speaks to you as it boots up, telling you as it goes through each stage of the boot, culminating in a twangy American female accent that 'your computer is now starting the operating system'.
Switched off and tried again, no deal, no voice, hard reset, soft reset, on off, plug in, plug out, off on, in out, on an on went the charade. Then I discovered with one particular combination of operations, that the voice I had hated for years came back. But damn it, I had not turned the volume up on speakers and again missed what she said, I set off for another bout of reseting and what not, for what it seemed like was an eternity, suddenly I managed to get the voice back, I was so glad to hear that voice again. And she was saying the cpu was being overclocked, this is Americanese for 'The cpu is getting hot". a ha I thought - blocked heat sink. Been there done that. I would have done it myself years ago but I sadly no longer have the manual dexterity I used to possess as regards extracting blocked heat sinks from motherboards this is a job that requires two hands and I only have one and a half hands.
So I decided to call in two handed help and made the appropriate phone call, sorted - today, two hands where coming around to reseat the heatsink sitting on top of the cpu. This is not a straight forward process. The cpu that I use runs hot hot hot - hot enough to fry an egg. I've seen it get up to 60 degrees C !.
I decided to use house computer instead to download my emails 'coz I was paranoid as to wether my personal computer would be back up to empty my email box. When I upgraded from Mandrake 9.2 to Mandrake 10. I backed up everything important on my house box. I looked at the emails on the house box and because they were from over a month ago ,noticed the email from Liz that I had missed. The point being if my mouse had not died I would not be writing this. It gets better/worse.
Knock knock on the door, lo an behold, who should be standing there but Sam my son, wow my eyebrows said, he works out of town and is away most of the time, so I did not expect him, and it was a very pleasant surprise and whats more two hands had arrived a day early, and further more he is an electrical engineer, so for Sam, reseating a cpu heatsink is childs play. The next problem was I had no thermal paste, so off went Sam to Maplins to purchase some, he turned up in a short while bearing thermal paste and this is the kicker, he had also bought a printer/scanner from Maplins, so from the death of a mouse, to the purchase of printer/scanner in a direct chain of causality. Obviously Sam was going to buy a printer/scanner anyway but had he bought it somewhere else, he might have ended up buying a different model which might have had other causal out comes who knows? Futhermore anybody reading this might do something else from other than what they would have done. Had my radio mouse not died.
Basically after cleaning the heatsink the machine now works fine it seems as though this is a six monthly house cleaning job. Maybe your heatsink needs cleaning, especially if you run a top end AMD, but you must apply thermal paste at the interface between bottom of heatsink and top of CPU. Hot CPU's do not run in a stable fashion.
2004/08/26
As you would guess by yesterdays posting, I am really enjoying the olympics . Being as I am largely housebound, it makes a great change to normal tv and the drama sometimes is amazing. Am watching the womens football at the moment, germany v sweden. Something puzzles me - what happens when the ladies have to er 'chest' the ball? The mind boggles, some of the ladies are most certainly not flat chested and it must change the tajectory the ball rebounds at. Perhaps they wear special bras shaped like football boots. I also wonder if the ladies with the largest breasts achieve the greatest rebounded distance. Also the question arises has a lady ever scored a goal with her breast mmm,
2004/08/25
Well lots of words have been flying about in my brain lately, words like keirin - madison and horses dancing. So much strivation, to what avail? To my emotional landscape, very acelleratory,
2004/08/08
To all my readers hello, especially those of you I have met in person. Visitors to my humble abode will be glad to know I have set up a community computer for friends to use when they visit. Its great having two computers with two screens. I've had two computers for ages but operated them through a 'Belkin omnicube'. Basically it meant that I could use one keyboard mouse and monitor for two computers. The problem was space. A CRT monitor is a bulky thing. I was waiting for an affordable LCD. And one turned up, 14" £160. The other really excellent thing is I've finally got my second machine to behave in stable fashion. It was crashing a lot, I cured it by going into BIOS and dropping the memory speed from 100 meg to 66 meg.
2004/06/27
Glastonbury time again, it happens every year to me and its seriously weird, I get the same feeling every year, a feeling of being misplaced I should be there, not here. It is not a case of wanting to go if I had wanted had wanted to go on previous years I could have done, a ride and a ticket were offered to me on more than one occasion in previous years and I turned them down, because of health issues. I think the last time I went was 1993 I'm not sure about that though. I've managed to track down the first time I went, it was 1983. I was hooked.
A term I have hated for many years is 'punter' I wish the beeb presenters would stop refering to people at the festival as punters. As tho' people who buy a ticket to go to the festival are somehow a lesser form of humanity. As tho' they were just walking wallets. Calling people punters dehumanises them
I am not a football fan but what happened with the England Portugal match disgusted me. Religion is a metaphorical affair, the creation myth is a metaphor. Football has replaced christianity as the main belief system in Britain, especialy amongst the rank and file of English society. As it has in many other countries.
One of the most important principles that enables society to function effectively is the principle of justice. But this principle only works if people believe in it. Football devalued justice as a principle last Thursday. I do not blame the ref, he might have made a genuine mistake. I blame FIFA for not making use of the technology available. Cricket and Rugby both make use of off-pitch video judges, why not football? One of the functions of a ref is to ensure that players do not get injured and if players do get injured that sanctions are applied to the offending player/side, Wayne Rooney had his foot broken by a Portugese player stamping on his foot and this happened in the penalty area. It was clear that he was fouled because his boot came off. There were no sanctions applied. Had there been video judges used, the out come would have been very different. Somebody needs to look at the crime rate prior to thursdays match and post thursdays match. If it shows a jump my point is made.
2004/06/20
Very excited about StarShipOne For the time being it is of only symbolic relevance, but much of human societal evolution has been engendered by symbolic dynamics. Kind of meaning - the ontology of symbol collections has been irrelevant, what has been relevant has been the effects of those symbol collections. A very unfortunate example for this is what happened to Easter Island From this one could make the assumption that having a societal symbol collection is a bad thing. But this is a "Sword of Damocles", the very nature of our minds requires that we can only symbolize reality we can not own reality. As Korsybski put it "In the head is only a map, it is not the terrritory'.
The danger of thinking life is only an individual affair, is apparent when individual behaviour is summed and we see the collective effect of nearly SIX AND A HALF BILLION OF US That seems a lot of people for a small planet but there again what do I know.
Now for something completely different
A little while ago I wrote this email, as a follow up, I wrote this email with the title 'Monogamy as a strategy'
'Know thyself' is an ancient maxim, it is easy to see why - if you do not know yourself, how can you know anything else. Knowing ones self is facilitated by knowing both genetic parents whilst growing up. Another ancient maxim is 'it is a wise child that knows its father'.
For myself evolutionary psychology is a formalisation of the nature/nurture debate. Science is about establishing causality, when applied to evopsych I would have thought that science can establish causes to the different behaviours observable amongst our species. Some behaviours have a genetic cause some are learned.
I have a friend that was adopted at birth, then after wandering around the
world for many years, he decided at 26 years old that he would try and find his genetic parents, this he did and he discovered to his astonishment, that they were happily married with two grown sons! What had happened was, his mother had been forced to give him up for adoption because she had given birth to him when she was very young, but the relationship between his parents lasted and was made formal.
Here it gets weird, both fathers were truck drivers, the two families lived twelve miles apart. But until my friend tracked his genetic parents down the two families had no knowledge of each other. But my friend had friends that knew his full blood brothers before he did. His adopted parents were both church going and teatotal. His genetic father likes a drink and his genetic brothers are football mad. My friend is likewise. But as always it is the differences that are interesting, one difference is with his sexual behaviour. A serial monogamist he is not and he has very itchy feet. Neither of his genetic brothers behave like this.
When I asked him what differences he thought it made, he said it was subtle things like gestures and forms of speech, also his politics are different. He is vegetarian and more left of centre more militant.
It is evident that different societies evolve at different rates, I would have thought that the rate of evolution would be governed by the dissatisfaction of the populace. Contented people dislike change. My friend is less contented than his genetic brothers.
I'm sure statistical correlations can be made between prison populations and percentages of inmates from broken homes. Not that my friend is in anyway a criminal.
Peter.
Ps. I would not have sent this without alchohol in me.
Needless to say the moderator rejected it. Which was probably no bad thing, because I had not discussed it with my friend first, I have now seen my friend and he agrees with what I have written, apart from one minor detail that increases the weirdness. The families lived not twelve miles apart, but three miles apart! Also my friend would like to find out if it has ever happened to anyone else.
2004/06/03
Happy birthday to me. The guitar ! I'm playing again amazing, using a pick, again amazing, after all those years. Confused ? I'll bet you are. I have played a guitar on and off for about thirty years. With a somewhat hit and miss success. Then about a four years ago I more or less stopped coz of my rightside problem. Then a few months ago, I saw this guy on the box with a gadget in his pick hand and he was getting sounds from a guitar that mystified me, later on that week a musician friend of mine named Nick came around to see me so I asked him what the gadget was, ah he said "that is an ebow", being a bit of a geeky gadget lover I immediately set about aquiring one. My reasoning being, I could over come my righthand problem by just holding an ebow instead of strumming or finger picking. Said ebow duely arrived. I have an acoustic steel string bowlback, which has a very nice tone but is a bitch to play, the ebow worked a treat, and another musician friend got a very decent sound with it. This piece of kit turns a steel string guitar into a completely different instrument sans wires but it can be tricky to use - easiest with a bottle neck. But I did not really gel with it. An ebow is really designed to be used with an electric guitar so I thought, I'll try to borrow an electric guitar. Asked around, then suddenly one turned up and a distinctly odd looking beast it is, a yamaha, very bright red body, jet black neck, bit beaten up looking, bits missing, very basic, the fret board you would not believe. Great valleys gouged about between the frets, never seen the like. Ah but here is the kicker, when you play her, the raddled old tart sings like a lark, But I digress.
Before my right side problem occurred I played fairly regulaly even in public sometimes. One style I could never get comfortable with, was playing with a finger pick. I used to try and always ended up discarding the pick in disgust. I used to posses a wonderful ibanez, I used to try over and over again with a pick and never got anywhere with it, I always used to end up dropping it.
So here comes the weird bit, with this new guitar, I am finally getting results with a pick that I like. The dynamics of my rightside problem, have changed the way my right hand works, the jerkiness gives me a nice rythym
Oh yeah the ebow sounds amazing with the yamaha. Kids like to play it to
2004/05/31
Started writing in public email space again heh. It has been a while - not in the same email space as I used to write tho'. Here is what I wrote:-
RPT:
I'm given to understand, there is a spectrum of mating strategies amongst the great apes. With gorillas having a strong harem, chimps having a weak harem, bonobos having a free-for-all, and the big exception - gibbons, who pair bond and mate for life. (apparently only 3% of mammals do this) Each strategy when looked at in the context of human cultures can be observed.
I believe it one of evolutionary psychologies duties as a discipline, to
ascertain, which strategy best ensures the survival of our offspring and
species diversity.
Regards,
Peter Turland
I've been wanting to write that kind of thing for ages, I could have said a lot more. Also I failed to mention Orangutangs which I subsequently realized was a very sad sick joke.
2004/05/26
It is with a heavy heart, I mourn the loss of my good friend Jon Kearns he was only 34 years old. What makes it worse he died in some what suspicious circmstances, he was a non swimmer and he drowned. It was his habit to go and sit by the canal and feed the ducks in his dinner break and had followed this habit for a good while. The police have detained a 19 year old youth
Anyone that knows me and wants a photo of him please email me
peter at dollyknot dot com (my email address is like this to foil spam harvester bots, just replace at with @ and dot with . leaving no spaces)
I will attach a photo of him I have
2004/05/10
Discovered a nice way to watch a film. Have the screenplay on the comp and read it whilst the film runs. Watched Abyss I don't watch films very often, coz I lose interest, this is down to my big reading habit. The written word allows my mind to emote more. So anyway if you can get a copy of abyss to watch, the screen play is here I suppose the fact that James Cameron wrote the screen play as well as directed the film helped , but it was fascinating reading Cameron's mental vision of the film whilst watching the finished product. it also helped me follow the plot far more easy.
Story telling is an ancient art, film making is a subset of story telling. For a story to work the audience has to suspend belief in reality and believe in the pseudo reality the storyteller creates.
2004/05/01
Ah the first day of May - an historic one at that, the EC has suddenly grown much to the dismay of many Americans. The country that will make a difference is Poland, I will always remember James Michener's marvelous novel Poland
2004/04/30
Watching the snooker, such a shame Docherty did not get through to the semi-finals what a line up that would have been, Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman and Welshman. Two Jocks a Brit and a Taff instead.
I've come across this story before.
Americans: Please divert your course 15-degrees to the north, to avoid a collision.
Canadians: Recommend you divert your course 15-degrees to the south to avoid a collision.
Americans: This is the Captain of a US Navy ship and I say again, Divert your course.
Canadians, No, I say again, you divert your course.
Americans: This is the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, the second-largest ship in the United States Atlantic fleet. We are accompanied by three destroyers, three cruisers and numerous support vessels. I demand you divert your course 15-degrees north, that is one-five degrees north or counter-measures will be undertaken to ensure the safety of this ship.
Canadians: This is a lighthouse.
Probably a made up story never mind. Makes a lovely point tho'. I have been blessed with an email response to this blog, woo hoo fame at last.
I keep trying to pluck up enough courage to make a doctors appointment
silly really, well that is that sorted - next Thursday 10 to 11. I start the process. A new life for Pete. No more stairs - more light - different surroundings.
2004/04/15
We need to sleep humph, I really like Billmon's stuff he writes sense.Things are a bit quiet in this neck of the woods at the moment. Son has just returned from a weeks holiday in LA why he would want to have a holiday in LA beats me . but there you go. Listening to the archers again, perhaps Greg will top himself so as to inject some life into the plot. Had a look at movabletype lots of blogs use it, I don't think I will bother, to me it makes ones website look like a glossy magazine. I can see why people use it, but to my modus operandi it just would add another layer of complexity. The biggest constraint being that NTL to the best of my knowledge do not allow CGI scripts on the webspace that comes with their package. I could get around it - but what would be the reward?
I like writing - comes from all those years of reading. Being that I am past the prime of my life, writing is my only way of being publically
creative, I chat on ICC sometimes and I think that I have made some people laugh. I still love chess but am very dissapointed at my abysmal standard of play.
Because of the fast level of change on one level of society and the sad lack of change at another level of society, I live in a state of future shock on one level and frustration at the lack of progress on another level. The written word and chess are two links between the past and the present that I appreciate greatly, chess has been played in its current form for about 500 years, I should imagine the birth of modern chess and the birth of printing would have happened at around the same time, probably the oldest opening is the Ruy Lopez invented by a spanish priest named Ruy Lopez (1530-1580)who put it into a printed book and there you have it. So here we are in the 21st century making the transition from printers ink to electronic ink. Still words tho' different medium maybe, but still words. Written words are far older than chess, they are the basis for what we call modern (sic) society.
Many years ago I was a merchant seaman being a sailor leads to all sorts of metaphors. In terms of the past, the present and the future - how can this be described in terms of a metaphor? The course sailed by a ship is one that comes to mind. With this metaphor we have an accurate artistic description of time - if we are not careful, we shall end up on the rocks.
Time is a mystery, please write back.
2004/04/02 Heh its been a year and a day since I put anything here, but there you go, such is life, and seeing as spring is here I thought I'd plant a seed in this section of my website to see if anything comes of it. Friday today and I will hopefully be having a drink tonight. If I
2003/04/01 As you will see I'm gradualy evolving the design of my site. The middle box will be archived every month, so if you want to find an old link, click on the 'here' at the top.
Started a new computer chess game with Pip, having finished the last one which took four months resulting in a win for my computer. Weather raining and I am worried about the roof which leaks.
Iraq seems to be getting messier.
2003/03/27 It has been a while. So much I could say, yet what good would it do. It has been a whole week of the second gulf war and I have had BBC news 24 on all the time. I've not watched any other TV programs all week.
The whole thing has such an unreal quality to it, seeing the same clips over and over again. Taking the rythm of the whole thing is weird, not the nature of the war, but the nature of twenty four hour news. The really weird thing is the lag, between what they think is ok to show us and events in the context of history. I think some people must have been reading the propaganda handbooks
Installed mozilla 3.1, quite good
2003/02/25Tided website up a bit. Tidied complexity essay.
2003/02/19 Look you, why are you reading this? The internet is crap, you are crap, I am crap, it is all mud.
2003/02/14 Six months has gone by, since I last wrote here. I think I stopped because I thought what is the point, if no one reads what I write in this section of my webpage. Who knows perhaps someone did read what I wrote. To bring things up to date, I got robbed and mugged just before christmas, had my beautiful cameras stolen, urgh. I suppose I'm writing this because i'm trying something new. I've managed to aquire some piracetum, a so called 'smart drug' I started taking on wednesday the 12 th so it has been three days, no strong effect as yet but things do feel slightly different, time will tell.
2002/07/21 MM, it has been a while, I've been busy, I'm writing this from Linux, which I am in the process of transfering to, I've been trying to learn Linux for over two years and I have my ups and downs with it, but it seems to be working well at the moment.
2002/0704 Ok so its not a daily diary, heh. What with the world cup and everything, glad its held only once every forth year. It is an amazing festival that gets beyond sport in a disconcerting way, it somehow seems more life or death. Its interesting to compare it to that other global phenomena, the Olympics. Possibly the WC is more profound because the more poorer sections of society are much more represented. Field sports rowing etc mostly are pastimes carried out by the wealthier members of society, the only sport that seems to buck this trend is long distance running. Ok it could be argued that they have football in the olympics, but football in the olympics is very devalued by the absence of most of the worlds best players. I'm surprised the WC don't use video referees and a radio headset connection to the on field ref. Other sports are using this technology, the benefit of the slomo replay will stop some of the injustices. Most people exist on a seesaw of hope and cynisism, some of the refereeing decisions in the WC will push many in the direction of cynisism, as to the behaviour of those in power. The most dominant paradigm in contempoary human society, evolved first in Europe, this paradigm has it roots in a Greco Roman ancestory. It is interesting comparing the ancient Roman attitude to sport, to the ancient Greek attitude to sport. The Romans seemed to see sport as a diversion and an entertainment, whereas the Greeks saw sport as a metaphor for individual excellence. Yeah this might seem like vauge generalities but I think it has important resonances in terms of understanding man as an individual and man as a species. People behave differently enmasse, to indivdually.
2002/05/31 Feeling a bit rough today so not much to say. Click here for an amazing screen saver.
2002/05/30 Drinking and typing don't mix.
2002/05/29 Chess and the internet were made for each other. Chess can become a sport at last. It is a potent mix, computers chess and the internet. A nice article about new developements in chess can be read here. Advanced chess The concept of using a computer for chess gives some people the willies, but the future points to computers in conjuntion with humans, a more symbiotic relationship, as opposed to the idea of computers taking over, a particulaly silly idea in my estimation. To my mind computers are a tool, no more no less. Having said that though, it would not surprise me to discover that some AI work is a military secret. I'm looking forward to Saturday, there is a rapid play tournament in Moscow, watching it live, gives it that extra frisson. Also some of the comments on the ICC server can be very funny.
2002/05/28 Depressing news on radio 4. Starving people in Africa and human beings overfishing the sea. The main cause of starvation seems to be drought, or that is what they seem to be saying on the radio. Its always seems to me to be slightly crazy that human beings suffer with drought, when 3/5ths of the planet is covered with water and energy. The answer to overfishing I would have thought requires stringent policing. The problem being, if an agreement is made with the fishermen in their interests, to preserve fish stocks, then some people will cheat on the agreement and spread a culture of cheating to boot. This needs international agreement and enforcement, else we shall have a tragedy of the commons, on a global scale.
2002/05/27 Spent all day fighting with software, then slung in the towel and gave a friend a call, who came around and sorted me out. I don't want to write about what I'm working on, because its no where near finished yet. But at least it is past the concept stage
2002/05/26 Went to a 40th birthday party.
2002/05/25 I don't usually follow football that much, I kind of take a mild interest really, more by osmosis than anything else. I happen to like my adopted city, so it comes as part of the package, that I'm pleased when Leicester City Football Club do well. The world cup is starting to impinge itself upon my consciousness, anything of a global nature interests me. The west very much exhibits a culture of individualism, terms like choice get bandied about a lot and identities are manufactured by media assembly lines. Many people look at life in terms of themselves, I attempt to do the obverse namely look at myself in terms of life. I posit that this can be achieved with a wider perspective. What would life be, if I were not here to catagorise it? No different to what it is now I should imagine. So how can I categorise myself? I have a kind of cultural dyslexia so that don't help much.
Leicester Tigers have won the Heinekin Cup. Why is Leicester so good at rugby and not so good at football, interesting. Rugby tends to be a middle class game and football tends to be a working class game.
2002/05/24 Windy day.
2002/05/23 Day 4 of this new venture. I've made attempts to write a diary before, but lost them. Maybe now I can use the electronic media I won't lose it. A diary is a personal thing so I suppose this is not a diary because it is a public thing ok I throw in the towel, its a blog.
2002/05/22 Ah ha, I espy smoke signals rising in yonder camp, rumours of discontent have been heard. Something to do with the rent, so I'm told. Well ... I have a shock for everybody, the rent has already been paid. Who is this kind benefactor you may ask, well its the dear old sun, I would reply and to act as a fail safe, I also have the son. And as we all know the son is father to the man. I've got this big problem with temporal constipation I have great difficulty passing time. The fathers have decreed we should all find something rewarding to do with our lives, so we all don't go crazy with the boredom of it all and we all know the devil finds work for idle hands. Problem is, everything costs money. It costs a lot of money giving all these people something to do. The grand old Duke of York had the best idea. Another variant that seemed rather apposite I once saw in a movie with Sean Connery, he was playing a prisoner and his punishment was this hill of sand, he was given a bucket and told to fill it at the bottom of the hill, climb to the top, empty it and repeat. I found this website a while back and they had all these Japanese ladies cutting a lawn with normal scissors, now that is creative, if I find it again I will link to it, so you'll know I'm not kidding. Its a bit like the Forth Bridge really. Another variety is called a makeover, with enough diligence this can be made to loop as well and you can spend your entire life making over. The problem is, football hooligans don't get off on makeovers. I should imagine the ancient Egyptians had a problem with football hooligans, their solution was to use the hill of sand solution, and they got them building special hills of sand called pyramids.They had a special sort of solid sand that piled up nicely. it is my theory that they used dollyknot s to pull the sand up the hill, archaeologists say they did not use pulleys to pull the sand up the hill, they say this because they did not find any pulley blocks, you don't need pulley blocks, you just use the calculus of dollyknots. The other day I happened to notice whilst at the funeral, that the church was built from sand as well, this is a contradiction of holy writ, what was that about not building your house on sand. I think this is an unfortunate slur on sand, amazing stuff sand, if you know what you are doing you can even make it remember things as well as building castles with it. click here to see some sandcastles Yes I know the tide comes in and washes the castles away but I think King Canute had something to say about this. .
The trouble with me is I'm a novelty junky I s'pose I haven't grown up yet. I'm also slightly barmy I want to join a crusade to build green cheese factories on the moon.
2002/05/21 Ok I do tend to keep my word, here is my next installment. Sem has just rung and asked me where an off llicense is that is still open. I have pointed him in the neccesary direction. I shall see him soon. Drink and typing don't mix.
2002/05/20 I've decided to do a diary as you can see. The reason I'm writing it, is not because I want to, but because I think I should. If I was doing it because I wanted to, I would have been doing it before now. I've had a website for about three years now, so why the change? Well I've down loaded the latest Google toolbar and it has a new feature that ranks the pages it finds. Dollyknot has been ranked 4/10 which is rather perculiar, the reason being, pages are ranked by the number of other pages that link to it, as far as I know there is only one other page that links to dollyknot. So if other pages somewhere or other are linking to dollyknot, I'm motivated to supply some content. There is also another reason, today I went to a funeral, my sons best friend to be precise, my son (21) grew up with him, they were friends from primary school. So to mark Carl's life I've decided that a diary is a positive step.
It intrigues me with internet culture, the difference between email and webpage. Email has a pedigree going back thousands of years, namely letter writing. I saw an archaeology program on the telly, about Hadrian's wall and they somehow or other recovered a letter of a roman soldier written to his mother, asking for some new socks! Ok some purists say the lack of handwriting detracts from a typed letter, but the message is far more important than the medium. Yeah I'm biased, my handwriting is atrocious. I do have a love affair with words though, I think it stems from my childhood, which was not a particulaly happy one. I used to use books to escape. I read constantly, they used to call me the book worm. Mr Johnson you really screwed written english up. It should read, I red constantly or readed, might be better. But to indicate a past action in a spoken word, changes the way one says that word. Perhaps read and reed might clarify, oh well never mind, who cares anyway. enuff lectronec enk hus bin spilled on the speeling of inglish lunguage.