20 miles today, the last long run before the taper. To celebrate the occasion we decided to run over the actual Marathon course as a bit of an acclimatisation measure. The pace was good, pretty quick actually. A steady 9 minutes a mile repeated 20 times. So everything looks good and on track. I’m actually too tired to type any more. Time for some sleep perhaps. »
How on earth didn’t I know about the natural nuclear reaction at Oklo? It’s this sort of enlightened but sadly non-useful trivia that I tend to specialise in. Fascinating stuff, in case you’re worried that this means the world is about to explode, a properly scientific comparison with modern nuclear reactors should set your mind at rest (essentially there just isn’t a high enough percentage of fissile uranium about anywhere anymore to get natural criticality, that’s why you have to enrich the stuff if you want to build a bomb, reactor or just make your hand glow). »
‘Method for Preparation of a liquor of tea for use in sensory tests’, ISO 3103:1980 is the official British Standard how to make a good cuppa. Awesome. And if you don’t mind I’m off to go and follow its directions right now. »
We drink a fair amount of coffee, as most offices do these days, mostly from Eat as it’s the closest coffee producer not partially owned by McDonalds. Now I’ve always been fascinated by the mechanics and recipes behind UK high street coffee shops, how their business model works, how they do their portions etc. so unconciously in the background I’ve been deconstructing their model to attempt to optimise my coffee experience. »
As you know, I have a love for Tomboy, the cool note taking and personal wiki app for GNOME. Such a love that I use it every day for everything and rsync all my Tomboy DBs into a master list of TODO and snippet every night etc. Yet it’s not all plain sailing, for annoying reasons I often have to use a Windows OS at work. Booo, hiss and all that. »
“Ubuntu” is an ancient African word, meaning “humanity to others”. Ubuntu also means “I am what I am because of who we all are”. The Ubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world. Ubuntu (Hoary Hedgehog) 5.04 does everything that something should do right, right. It supports my wireless out of the box, tomboy is only a click away and it does frequency scaling on my processor so it doesn’t use as much power (or make as much noise) when it doesn’t need to. »
Continuing the theme of the last post slightly here’s a few cool links about the tube map: LUL ‘real underground’ to abstraction comparison-ator. Geographically accurate tube map also some strip maps of a few lines. Tube map overlaid onto a big satelite photo of london warning: huge jpg. Andy on Harry Beck for the Tube Magazine. Good general background for those not in the know. Also includes a really cool picture of the original sketch behind it all. »
Superb article on weather data and public access in the FT last week. A couple of excerpts: Take weather data. The United States makes complete weather data available to anyone at the cost of reproduction. If the superb government websites and data feeds aren’t enough, for the price of a box of blank DVD’s you can have the entire history of weather records across the continental US. European countries, by contrast, typically claim government copyright over weather data and often require the payment of substantial fees. »
This is awesomely cute and supports my thesis that Animal Crossing is in and of itself the pure essence of love: In the game, Adam traveled to Sarah’s town to write and deliver the letter. GameCube controller in hand, he typed: “I love you Sarah Dane Buck. Will you marry me?” He then shot back to his own town to save. On Valentine’s Day, Adam told Sarah to boot up Animal Crossing so they could see the game’s special Valentine’s celebrations. »
The new Edge website/blog is starting to get pretty good, rivalling the Guardian Gamesblog and Eurogamer in my feedreader. Yet the coup de grace is publishing top stories from their recent archive like this marvelous Time Extend piece on Prince Of Persia: The Sands of Time. 3,000 odd (up from 500-1,000 for their typical review) considered words of review on one of the best games ever, a year after its release. »