Zorac's LiveJournal

I'm afraid it's all intellectually downhill after last night's philosophy'n'theology. Instead, I spent the evening catching up on The West Wing and Six Feet Under (note to self: stop dissing American TV) - thanks to E4's trailers I'm now visualising Martin Sheen replacing Christopher Walken in Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice video...

The nice chaps over at Amazon just emailed me to say that (at 00:15) they've dispatched my copy of the new Feeder album, plus associated other stuff for Ogging. In keeping with their recent trend of randomly splitting my orders, the one book is coming separately (but still RSN, honest).

Ah, well, should try and get some sleep before another fun day in the office, then it's up the M40 to the Big Smoke for more Fun With Colos on Wednesday (note to self: take larger book this time).

This entry was prompted by a discussion of this simple yet difficult question by angiej in her journal. My response (also included below) probably makes more sense if you read her article first.

As an aside, an interesting comparison is the episode of The Prsioner "The General" where No.6 defeats the computer with four letters "It's insoluble, for man or machine...W-H-Y Question mark : Why ?"

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The Game:	Othello/Reversi/Opposite
The Machine:	Nokia 7110 (highest difficulty setting)
The Man:	Me (plus 4.5 pints of Strongbow)
The Score:	6:1 to me. Yay!

Greetings, fellow Googlers! This article was inspired by a couple Google references I've run into over the last few days. Since then I've been doing a bit of digging and turned up even more cool stuff that Google does...
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That's right, those little white pills, come in a brown class bottle, a couple of those with a chug of water and all your worldly ills are gone... I'm talking about the wonder-drug Aspirin. Of course, to make it more difficult for me to kill myself, it no longer comes in convenient bottles of 50-100, but annoying blister packs of 16 which rarely survive one cold or headache attack. It gets worse, though:

Soluble Aspirin - the bane of my life. What's the point? It takes ten times as long to get it down, and they never dissolve properly so you just end up with a nasty gritty residue. Maybe this is another anti-suicide measure - you'd probably need your own body-weight in water to dissolve a lethal dose. The point of my rant is the fact that it's becoming increasingly difficult to find the non-soluble stuff - I couldn't find any in the two supermarkets and a chemist in central Kidlington, although thankfully Sainsbury's still stocks it.

Side note: While my speaking voice has been reduced to a painful croak, my singing voice seems pretty much unaffected. Bizarre.

Pleased to report that I spent the evening in the company of an attractive young woman. She took me to dinner, then it was straight back to her place...

Before you get started with the "Whoo Hoo"s (yes, you jiggery_pokery), you'd better read the rest...

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Once again, I manfully resisted watching Tipping The Velvet (as discussed by addedentry last week) on the grounds that I'd be watching it purely in the hopes of seeing some lesbian action (a letter along the same lines in next week's Radio Times helped with that opinion - which brings me to another letter quite rightly bemoaning the fact the ITV was deluged with complaints because The Bill contained a gay kiss before the watershed - wheras all the drugs, violence and plenty of straight action is absolutely fine and dandy. I despair).

The world, in it's usual way, conspired to ensure that I got some lesbian action subtext-rapidly-becoming-text anyway.

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No doubt most of you have come across - probably several times - the Nigerian 419 scammers (been there, done that, bought the T-shirt). quisalan pointed me at this amusing example of someone scamming them right back. Not having actually read H.P. Lovecraft (although I am aware of the Cthulhu mythos via User Friendly etc.) I doubtless missed some of the finer points, but still found it highly entertaining.

This saw the first meeting of the new term for the Oxford University Invariant Society, and to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the posing of the Four Colour Theorem Next Wednesday we had a talk from the estimable Dr. Robin Williams Wilson (think Richard Whitely with even worse dress sense and puns) on the history and solving of said problem.
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This is one of those times when I really hate my job. Right now, I should be happily in the Land of Nod, but instead I'm trying to sort out two machines down in London which have spontaneously stopped talking to each other.

:-(