Wake up, it’s morning

Well, I think it’s morning.

After a night’s fitful sleep I feel worse than I did when I went to bed.

I just hope I can function through the rest of the day.

One important thing I mustn’t do… get behind the keyboard of a root shell.

Mangling The Guide

Well, if you look here you will see the current state of play on the new Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film. (It’s been referred to on Slashdot.)

Does it seem to you that the casting is just a tad wierd? I mean, a rapper Ford Prefect and a migdget Marvin. It’s giving me all the bad vibes Hollywood adaptions usually have. I wonder what other characters they’re going to mis-cast and how much they’ve changed the whole story since Douglas Adams passed away.

LiveJournal not cool anymore?

Alec has just remarked on Bullet that he’s missing the three per hour postings to his friends’ journals.

Could it be that LJ has lost its glamour (a magic spell used by witches to make themselves or other things look more attractive than they are) or is just no-longer cool because it’s out of fashion or maybe even *shock* *horror* not exclusive?

The other theory put forward is that many of those posts were cries of pain and that either the people involved have moved on and don’t feel the same traumas or they have decided not to air their grief in public fora.

Myself, I lean towards the idea that blogging is becoming passé and yesterday’s thing. No doubt there is a part of the latter as people change and so do their lives and priorities. Life *IS* change.

So, for all those LJ users who have stopped blogging or stopped being so personal in their blogs I wish them well. And for all those who have got bored with the whole on-line journal thing, I say, farewell. It’s merely indicative of the blog reaching maturity and hence no-longer being fashionable or exclusive.

C’est la vie.

Sleepy.

Well, actually, it’s more dead tired.

Not only did the party take it out of me but that was really just the straw which broke the camel’s back. During last week I had been not sleeping too well, then on Friday night I didn’t bother going to bed ’til 1am as I’d only got in from work at 9pm. In other words, it’s all caught up with me.

Hopefully, this will be the shock which brings my sleep patterns in line so I can get a decent rest again.

Anyway, as far as other things are concerned…

Saturday daytime was spent mostly failing to find a new coat and a new pair of trousers.

On the coat front I couldn’t find anything which met my three functional specifications. ie. Waterproof, enough pockets which are large enough to hold my stuff, including cheque book, looked decent.

Now, I could generally find items which matched two of the three categories but none which met all three. The coats were either not waterproof but had the right sort and number of pockets and looked OK or they were waterproof and looked ok but had almost useless pockets.

It’s obvious that clothing isn’t made with enough thought these days.

As for the trousers, well, I could find lots of decent ones, the problem was that I could only find two pairs in my size and they weren’t in the colours I was looking for. It seems that 30″ waist and 30″ leg is either something they don’t stock a great number of or they’re all bought very quickly. I would think the former is the case. It was not so much the leg length which was the problem, merely the waist. Obviously, in these days of rapidly increating average girth, 30″ is being catered for less and less. Maybe I should just get fat so as to fit the shops’ sizes?

What time is it?

Last night I went to an anti-Valentine’s/engagement party at John and Katie’s.

I got home at about 3am.

Today I feel awful from sleep deprevation. I even fell asleep and missed the last part of Time Team.

I need sleep. Good night.

Birthday updates.

I’ve had a very quiet birthday this year.

Other than my parents visiting I didn’t do anything really special.

I did, however, get a nice pressie of a Breville bread maker.. The Anthony Warrell-Thompson one. It’s going to have to live on top of the fridge as it’s too big to store elsewhere. For operation I have a nice space on my folding table which also gives enough space to mix the ingredients.

The first loaf tasted nice though it does seem to go stale quite quickly, though this may be due to the loaf sitting in the open rather than being put into a bag after it cooled.

Yesterday, as well as making the first loaf, my dad and myself re-hung the side gate extending the post, moving the hunges outwards and the brakets on the gate itself. The gate now opens fully flat to the wall. All I have to do now is fit the hook to the wall and the eye on the gate.

Opportunity, more results..

Well, today, on the BBC News web site as part of the story of Opportunity’s initial results on the rock strata in the crater:-

Principal investigator Steve Squyres told a news conference in Pasadena, California that preliminary readings with the alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer (APXS) show rocks in the crater outcrop are loaded with the element sulphur.

“I’m not going to give you quantitative numbers, but it is maybe a few more times sulphur than we have seen at any location on Mars,” said Professor Squyres.

Well, now, what was my prediction for the white rock? That’s right, Calcium Sulphate. It’s looking more and more like that’s what they are.

Not only this, but looking at the close-up images on the rover web site, the rocks show polygonal cracking, suggesting being deposited in water and then drying out repeatedly. In addition to this there are balls of some other compound which suggest the possibility of wave action during precipitation of the salts. The possible cross bedding I thought I saw turned out to be an optical illusion caused by the mis-alignment of ajoining broken blocks.

Of course, this is still only speculation. I’m not even sure that the rovers have enough equipment to make the final resolution of what the rocks are really made of.

Spook-y

This evening I watched “Enemy of the State” and noticed that the chief bad guy, who was doing illegal things to get a “Patriot Act” like bill through the US government using the excuses of needing to fight terrorism, was born on 11th September 1940. This film was released in 1998.

Spooky, eh? I’ll go and put my tin foil beanie cap on in a minute.