Rebels for Christ

The population is caught between rebels on the rampage and army on the run, in the eastern Congo.

Here is rebel's website, God help us.

Their leader, Laurent Nkunda "claims to be a devout Pentecostal Christian and says most of his troops have converted as well. In the 2008 documentary "Blood Coltan" about the real costs of mobile phones, Nkunda proudly shows a button he wears that reads "Rebels for Christ." He claims to be a Seventh Day Adventist Priest and that he receives help and guidance from American "Rebels for Christ" who visit the Congo spreading Pentecostal Christianity."

Blood Coltan is here. The general appears 24 minutes in.

There are no good guys in this mess.

Eunoia

Eunoia, which means 'beautiful thinking', is the shortest word in the English language to contain all five vowels. Christian Bök's book also contains them all, but never in the same chapter. Each of the five is univocalic, using only one vowel.

I am dumbstruck by his eunoiac audacity and craft:

Westerners revere the Greek legends. Versemen retell the represented events, the resplendent scenes, where, hellbent, the Greek freemen seek revenge whenever Helen, the new-wed empress, weeps. Restless, she deserts her fleece bed where, detested, her wedded regent sleeps. When she remembers Greece, her seceded demesne, she feels wretched, left here, bereft, her needs never met. She needs rest; nevertheless, her demented fevers render her sleepless (her sleeplessness enfeebles her). She needs help; nevertheless her stressed nerves render her cheerless (her cheerlessness enfetters her).

Nuke Bears

Over dinner on Saturday night, Sean observed that "Welsh born" as a compound adjective should strictly be rendered "Welsh-born". The trouble with that is that not having a double barreled surname (Nicholas Milton-Browne anyone?) good grammar would break my anagram if I changed the title of these spindrift pages.

In my defense it is a nonbasic howler, but given that Nicholas Shearing - senior editor on the new words group of the Oxford English Dictionary - doffs his cap to the Burkemeister, what can I do?

Trusting in your judgement dear readers I have decided to let you vote on my 'blog's title. Choose (if you can be bothered) between "Welsh Born", "Welsh-Born" and some other anagrammatical options below as the question is presented in the great man's authentic voice. (Sorry 'bout quotation marks rendering as gibberish in the question - but I gotta lotta balls in the air just now, and I can't be doing with character encoding conundrums.)

Online Surveys & Market Research

Attention Deficit

"More than 20,000 men, women and children have been forced to flee squatter camps and villages after rebels launched a fresh offensive in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo", says the Telegraph this morning.

I only started paying attention since Rod went out there with the UN.

Pay attention.

Catch my breath

When we wandered into the room booked for our meeting in West Dean last week, I was astounded to see the "the labio-morphic Mae West sofa Dali and James created in 1938 in a suggestively shiny version of Schiaparelli's 'shocking' pink" was in residence flanked by their champagne lamps. It was wonderful too see them outside a curated exhibition.

I wish now that I'd caught the V&A' s "Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design" last year.

I must find out more about the estate's Monkton House for which "Dali advised that one room should be designed to pulsate 'like the stomach of a sick dog".

fun fun fun

I try and write here each day.

I'm just back from Wales. Ben had fun at a party with his cousins on Saturday, and Sean and I managed to meet up over South Indian grub at Punitha's in the evening.

Next day, we went to The Old Barn Inn Charity Horse & Cart Drive (as promoted by my brother), met up with Chris, Kim and Dylan, and then drove all the way back to London with a stopover at my Mum and Dad's in Cardiff.

The end. Goodnight.

Environmental Security Hypothesis

As the credit crunch bites, I naturally turn to Terry F. Pettijohn, II and Brian J. Jungeberg in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 30, No. 9, 1186-1197 (2004) and their groundbreaking "Playboy Playmate Curves: Changes in Facial and Body Feature Preferences Across Social and Economic Conditions":

Past research has investigated ideals of beauty and how these ideals have changed across time. In the current study, facial and body characteristics of Playboy Playmates of the Year from 1960-2000 were identified and investigated to explore their relationships with U.S. social and economic factors. Playmate of the Year age, body feature measures, and facial feature measurements were correlated with a general measure of social and economic hard times. Consistent with Environmental Security Hypothesis predictions, when social and economic conditions were difficult, older, heavier, taller Playboy Playmates of the Year with larger waists, smaller eyes, larger waist-to-hip ratios, smaller bust-to-waist ratios, and smaller body mass index values were selected. These results suggest that environmental security may influence perceptions and preferences for women with certain body and facial features.

Key Words: facial features • body features • physical appearance • physical attraction • environmental security.

Smaller eyes?! Beachcomber! thou shoulds't be living at this hour: England hath need of thee.

Pamela Anderson is probably undergoing ocular reduction surgery as we speak, though I retain a suspicion that Pettijohn and Jungeberg pledge Delta Tau Chi.

Bumbling Through

The film about our auction site went out on BBC One last night. You can watch it on the One Show's website here if you like. It was truly bizarre to see Dom Littlewood sitting next to Burt Bacharach talking about it.

The traffic this generates is incredible (as the comments testify) and the site is still running like treacle this morning.

Ironic that Amazon Web Services announced a Beta of Windows Server and SQL on the very same day.

Windows Support - Beta level support for Microsoft Windows is now available on EC2, in the form of 32 and 64 bit AMIs, with pricing starting at $0.125 per hour. Microsoft SQL Server is also available in 64 bit form.

That could have made last night a walk in the park.

Avida Dollars

I'm off to West Dean again this morning, so in honour of Edward James' patronage of the famous surrealist consider yourself reminded that André Breton's sarcastic and anagrammatic nickname "avida dollars" is to Salvador Dali as "A Welsh Born Icon" is to Nicholas Browne.

Thank you very much.

Keep yer Aaron

The Bomber is the Arsenal supporter. I'm, at best, a step-gunner or gooner once removed.

That said, I did settle down to watch the Fenerbahce match last night. The last minute goal scored by Aaron Ramsey (born 26 December 1990 in Caerphilly) has persuaded me to install him as the youngest ever Welsh Born Icon, and to start feeling old.

August

I found out yesterday that the great Ken Campbell died in August, and then today that Bernie Mac died in the same month.

Invisibility is merely a matter of being able to hide in front of things.

Do not touch my TV, my DVD, my stereo, my dual-deck VCR. Do not touch my old school, my new school, my slow jams, my party jams, my happy rap, and you better not touch ........ my James Brown.

How'd that happen? Both will be sadly missed.

command line kung-fu

Happy as I am with the Aspire One running Linux, it is becoming clear to me that if I am to use it as a day-to-day machine, I am going to need to run some Windows apps.

I could try Wine, which is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API that can run on Linux, but if I do I foresee problems with USB and I want to be able to connect my Garmin 305 and Nokia N95 and run their respective Windows only interface programs.

It seems to me therefore that full virtualisation via Sun's VirtualBox is likely to be the way forward, especially as the burglar runs XP on his Aspire One already and if I can get an image of that I can save some set-up time and aggravation.

Further and better, John Green has already done the job and explains the wrinkles here.

Seeing is believing.

My fascinating life

I cycled to Whitton yesterday (over 18 kilometres in the saddle), and had a couple of pints in the newly refurbished Admiral Nelson with a few of the boys before they went off to see the Harlequins demolish Ulster.

Then I wandered up the High Street with Bondy and paid for my place (and that of the Bomber) in next year's skiing trip to Kitzbühel.

After that I went back to the pub for a few more drinks with a few more mates, then got a cab home early in the evening (with the bike in the boot) and watched Kate Williams (late of this parish) floating around presenting a one hour BBC Timewatch special on ‘Young Victoria’ on BBC 2. She remains as easy on the eye as I remember.

Andrew Sullivan: The blogosphere has added a whole new idiom to the act of writing and has introduced an entirely new generation to nonfiction. It has enabled writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And yet it has exposed a hunger and need for traditional writing that, in the age of television’s dominance, had seemed on the wane.

Myself: Not here it hasn't mate.

Banking on IT

The World Bank has an Application Programming Interface!

We are releasing this API because we believe this information can be mapped, visualized and mashed up in an unlimited number of ways that will help develop a better understanding of trends and patterns around key development issues.

I don't know if this is genius or lunacy.

• Browse the Documentation, read the Tutorial, and try out our graphical Query Generator
• Learn more about the Data Sources you can access through the API
  
• Read the Terms and Conditions and note important Legal Information
  
• Register for a user account.
• Apply for an API key.

I have applied for a key. Watch this space.

My Liege

I can't help but think that the Queen's trip to Google yesterday was a PR triumph both for the Palace and the company.

Prodnose: ???????????
Myself: !!!!!!!!!!!!

No Funny Business

Equinox Drama Productions are hosting New Comedy Scene 2008 this week in the ColourHouse Theatre. "10 original comedy plays by new playwrights will be showcased to make the public laugh", so the burglar and I went along last night to show willing.

We saw "The Man Who Loved Elephants" and "Godplay".

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

No Comment

Up until I moved "A Welsh Born Icon" to Google's servers last year I used Haloscan for comments. You can still see those comments on (ho ho very satirical) oldnick, but they've disappeared from the live site because I've moved to Blogger's native comments system. There are exchanges there that I don't want to lose, and I am sure it would only take a few lines of JavaScript on the template to add them back in the new location where appropriate.

Consider that added to my to-do list.

I've started adding comments to my own posts lately, to collect tips and trick for the Acer Aspire One or to record the continuing career of the Jabmeister etc.

I want to use a comment to link my discovery of Haruki Murakami to his year 2000 alternative universe Nobel Prize.

I was even invited yesterday (by way of a comment on a three and a half year old post) to a party in honour of a hero of mine.

Comments are important, and I need to make them more prominent.

There is an RSS feed of comments at http://nickbrowne.coraider.com/feeds/comments/default, just as there is an RSS feed of posts at http://nickbrowne.coraider.com/feeds/posts/default.

I've used the feed to pop a list of the last five comments towards the top of the template on the left.

If you've got any thoughts, leave a comment.

It's a wonderful lie

The credit crunch can't help but make me think of the bank run in "It's a Wonderful Life". In particular there is a lot more Mr. Potter than George Bailey in our monomaniacal Prime Minister. Remember that we used ant-terrorism legislation against Iceland last week. How the Government be trusted now, not to misuse any other anti-terrorism law?

While the world and his wife is praising the great Economist Statesman to the skies, let's observe that we ain't out of the woods yet. The money to be "invested" in the Government stakes in the banks will have to come from issuing bonds, so it will increase the national debt, but I bet you they'll keep in off the books by classifying it as a financial transaction with no asset implications because the shares purchased have the same value as the money used to buy them. Compare and contrast the Private Finance Initiative con. I wonder what the real National Debt will be at the end of this year?

At least, thanks to the House of Lords, I can't be banged up for 42 days for speculating.

To live and die

There's an interview with the Iraqi Prime Minister in The Times today:

Mr al-Maliki’s harshest words were for the actions last year of British troops in Basra, which came under Britain’s responsibility after the 2003 invasion. “They stayed away from the confrontation, which gave the gangs and militias the chance to control the city,” he said, referring to a decision by British Forces to leave a palace in Basra for their airport base.

“The situation deteriorated so badly that corrupted youths were carrying swords and cutting the throats of women and children. The citizens of Basra called out for our help . . . and we moved to regain the city.”

Asked whether he thought the British move had been premature, he said: “Very.”

I blogged the move at the time. The post and its links are very dispiriting in the light of such a comment.

Michael Yon's reports from the front are a useful corrective because - unlike Press Release and editorial writers - he is actually there.

Read Death in the Corn about C-Company 2 Para in Helmand. "Who whom?"

The sacred and profane

I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they.

I checked out the new Brideshead Revisited movie, in spite of lukewarm reviews and was pleasantly surprised to find it reasonably true to the book. That is to say - ahem - divine grace being the sovereign favour of God for humankind — especially in regard to salvation — irrespective of actions ("deeds"), earned worth, or proven goodness; the errant quartet of His Lordship, Julia, Sebasatian, and even Charles are saved. Changing the plot to have Julia bowl up in Venice, or having Sebastian and Charles swap saliva are comparatively trivial in comparison, though I was bemused as to why the actor playing Bridey chose to model his performance on Groucho Marx.

(Hayley Atwell as Julia made me feel very old as she was a pupil at Sion Manning when Jane was on the staff there. I've probably seen her on stage in school plays though - cries of shame - I can't remember her at all.)

Who?

French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I've never heard of him.

Ted Giola has compiled "The Nobel Prize in Literature from an Alternative Universe".

Imagine a world in which such honors are exempt from pettiness, politics and tokenism. Imagine a Nobel Prize in which the contributions of Proust, Kafka, Nabokov and Joyce are not forgotten. Imagine a Nobel Prize in Literature in which genre writers have a chance. Imagine a Nobel Prize in Literature that doesn't bend over backward to exclude native born U.S. writers (only three honored during the last 52 years!).

Let's start arguing:

Year	Actual Winner	Alternative
2008	Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio	Don DeLillo
2007	Doris Lessing	J.K. Rowling
2006	Orhan Pamuk	Philip Roth
2005	Harold Pinter	Milan Kundera
2004	Elfriede Jelinek	John Updike
2003	J. M. Coetzee	Mario Vargas Llosa
2002	Imre Kertész	John le Carré
2001	V. S. Naipaul	V. S. Naipaul
2000	Gao Xingjian	Haruki Murakami
1999	Günter Grass	Tom Stoppard
1998	José Saramago	Roberto Bolaño
1997	Dario Fo	Hunter Thompson
1996	Wislawa Szymborska	Stanisław Lem
1995	Seamus Heaney	Isaiah Berlin
1994	Kenzaburo Oe	Stephen Sondheim
1993	Toni Morrison	Ralph Ellison
1992	Derek Walcott	Bob Dylan
1991	Nadine Gordimer	Muriel Spark
1990	Octavio Paz	Octavio Paz
1989	Camilo José Cela	Theodor Seuss Geisel
1988	Naguib Mahfouz	Salman Rushdie
1987	Joseph Brodsky	Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein
1986	Wole Soyinka	Eugene Ionesco
1985	Claude Simon	Philip Larkin
1984	Jaroslav Seifert	Italo Calvino
1983	William Golding	Graham Greene
1982	Gabriel García Márquez	Gabriel García Márquez
1981	Elias Canetti	Elias Canetti
1980	Czeslaw Milosz	Czeslaw Milosz
1979	Odysseus Elytis	Philip K. Dick
1978	Isaac Bashevis Singer	Isaac Bashevis Singer
1977	Vicente Aleixandre	Tennessee Williams
1976	Saul Bellow	Saul Bellow
1975	Eugenio Montale	Eugenio Montale
1974	Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson	John Lennon, Paul McCartney
1973	Patrick White	Lionel Trilling
1972	Heinrich Böll	J.R.R. Tolkein
1971	Pablo Neruda	Pablo Neruda
1970	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1969	Samuel Beckett	Samuel Beckett
1968	Yasunari Kawabata	Yukio Mishima
1967	Miguel Angel Asturias	Vladimir Nabokov
1966	Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Nelly Sachs	Agatha Christie, Jorge Luis Borges
1965	Mikhail Sholokhov	Jack Kerouac
1964	Jean-Paul Sartre	Jean-Paul Sartre
1963	Giorgios Seferis	Giorgios Seferis
1962	John Steinbeck	John Steinbeck
1961	Ivo Andric	William Carlos Willaims
1960	Saint-John Perse	Ian Fleming
1959	Salvatore Quasimodo	Cole Porter
1958	Boris Pasternak	E. M. Forster
1957	Albert Camus	Albert Camus
1956	Juan Ramón Jiménez	Raymond Chandler
1955	Halldòr Laxness	Bertolt Brecht
1954	Ernest Hemingway	Ernest Hemingway
1953	Winston Churchill	Wallace Stevens
1952	François Mauriac	Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
1951	Pär Lagerkvist	Dorothy Parker
1950	Bertrand Russell	Ludwig Wittgenstein
1949	William Faulkner	William Faulkner
1948	T.S. Eliot	T.S. Eliot
1947	André Gide	André Gide
1946	Hermann Hesse	Hermann Broch
1945	Gabriela Mistral	George Orwell
1944	Johannes V. Jensen	W. H. Auden
1939	Frans Eemil Sillanpää	Robert Musil
1938	Pearl Buck	Virginia Woolf
1937	Roger Martin du Gard	James Joyce
1936	Eugene O'Neill	Eugene O'Neill
1934	Luigi Pirandello	Luigi Pirandello
1933	Ivan Bunin	Stefan Zweig
1932	John Galsworthy	Zane Grey
1931	Erik Axel Karlfeldt	G. K. Chesterton
1930	Sinclair Lewis	F. Scott Fitzgerald
1929	Thomas Mann	Thomas Mann
1928	Sigrid Undset	Edith Wharton
1927	Henri Bergson	Constantine P. Cavafy
1926	Grazia Deledda	Arthur Conan Doyle
1925	George Bernard Shaw	George Bernard Shaw
1924	Wladyslaw Reymont	Miguel de Unamuno
1923	William Butler Yeats	William Butler Yeats
1922	Jacinto Benavente	Franz Kafka
1921	Anatole France	Marcel Proust
1920	Knut Hamsun	Rainer Maria Rilke
1919	Carl Spitteler	Thomas Hardy
1917	Karl Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan	Joseph Conrad
1916	Verner von Heidenstam	Sigmund Freud
1915	Romain Rolland	Guillaume Apollinaire
1913	Rabindranath Tagore	George Trakl
1912	Gerhart Hauptmann	William Dean Howells
1911	Maurice Maeterlinck	Henry James
1910	Paul Heyse	W.S. Gilbert
1909	Selma Lagerlöf	August Strindberg
1908	Rudolf Eucken	John Millington Synge
1907	Rudyard Kipling	Rudyard Kipling
1906	Giosuè Carducci	Mark Twain
1905	Henryk Sienkiewicz	Henrik Ibsen
1904	Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray	Jules Verne
1903	Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson	Anton Chekhov
1902	Theodor Mommsen	George Meredith
1901	Sully Prudhomme	Leo Tolstoy

Blood River

DR Congo is on on my mind, as inspired by MacKenna's posting I'm reading Tim Butchers's Blood River.

Things are getting desperate again in the East, on the border with Rwanda. See this BBC report including quotes from Alan Doss, Rod's boss.

I wonder if I'd even notice if I didn't know someone involved. I was barely aware of "Africa's World War" when it was going on there. (Did it ever really stop?)

That ignorance is quite an indictment of me.

The Phoenix

Wimbledon Bookfest 2008 is running this week, but what with one thing and another I've only been able to get along to one event; Leo Hollis last night on his book (deep breath now) The Phoenix: St. Paul's Cathedral And The Men Who Made Modern London.

I bought a copy for £20, but got him to write "IOU £20" as the dedication when he signed it, thus making the deal neutral.

Perhaps with innovations like that, I should be advising the Chancellor on his £500 billion bank bailout scheme?

Come to think about it, even though I've actually got a postgraduate degree specialising in international finance, I do find myself tempted to shout out "double or quits" whenever a talking head on the TV spouts one of these extraordinary figures.

The New Etiquette

Dear Miss Manners,

In these days of near ubiquitous body art, what are the rules on reading another man's tattoos in the locker room?

ALVY: 'Cause I don't like to get naked in front of another man, you know-it's, uh ...

ANNIE: (Laughing) Oh, I see, I see.

ALVY: You know, I don't like to show my body to a man of my gender-

ANNIE: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I see. I guess-

ALVY: 'cause, uh, you never know what's gonna happen.

What is most appropriate; peripheral vision, a glance, or a frank stare? What about spelling mistakes, or grammatical errors? Is it impolite to point them out?

Yours,

Perplexed: Virgin Active.

And all be turn'd to barnacles, or to apes

From a terrific Times review:

Many points are so beautifully made in this excellent spoof of a Hollywood memoir that it is honestly hard to know where to start. But one could usefully begin with Cheeta's incisive contribution to the “infinite number of monkeys” theory of probability. It's all very well hypothesising about those monkeys and typewriters, he says: isn't it time for human beings to look around? “You've had a million humans, at least, writing away for much longer than a thousand years, and only one of them ever managed to produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Only one! Well, well, what's the big deal?”
..............................
What we have here is a showbiz memoir from a star whose gilded cage was no metaphor; who views the great days of Hollywood in zoological terms. It's a brilliant idea. Naturally, as befits the memoir genre, Cheeta defines himself as an actor (“I'm a comedian, not an intellec- tual”). Naturally, too, modesty does not prevent him from pointing out that, in his great middle-period work on the Tarzan pictures, he was a pioneer of “simian thespianism”. How much of his success in films was down to him being an animal? Cheeta will accept it's as much as 10%; the rest, however, was talent. In common with every other showbiz memoirist, he claims never to read his reviews; he then quotes them extensively. He mentions several times that he never won an effing Oscar. He will recall a great star such as Rex Harrison by first calling him “that marvellous light comedian”, then getting down to the more interesting truth (“universally despised, impotent, alcoholic”), before coming properly out with it: “an absolutely irredeemable c*** who tried to murder me”. And, like many another stellar memoirist, he can't resist a vicious sideswipe at a fellow thesp. “For three decades I think I ‘phoned it in' a bit,” he confesses. “It happens to actors. Look at De Niro.”.

Straight in to the top five in my reading list goes Me Cheeta: The Autobiography

What I talk about ....

I read and finished Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running yesterday on the train to and from a Muay Thai promotion. I picked the book up as an offshoot the idiot-participatory-martial-arts strand of my recent reading, and was very glad that I did. It reminded me, with its deceptively simple but artful voice, of Kurt Vonnegut's non-fiction; and I revere Kurt Vonnegut's non-fiction.

Pleasure indeed to stumble on an author with a twenty year back catalogue for me to work my way through.

Reach

I contacted Urban Freeflow after we saw them at the Thames Festival, to see if we couldn't organise a lesson for the bomber and some chums as a birthday treat. Fate played the straight man, so here he is trying to run up a wall yesterday under the supervision of UF's Cali while his mates look on.

Cali was a real gent; a pleasure to deal with setting the thing up then really great with the kids on the day (which can be harder than it looks).

Good memories. Here's his show reel.

Thinking out loud

Nearly two years after I begged for it, Amazon have announced that "starting later this Fall, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will offer you the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server".

Potentially this is hugely attractive. The One Show has about seven million viewers. When the film about our auction system gets broadcast later this month, our servers are going to get absolutely hammered for a few days. I've got enough bandwidth for the job, but at the moment I'm scrabbling around trying to get hold of extra hardware to rent for the demand spike.

As I understand it (a cursory understanding at best), EC2 works by creating virtual instances of servers. You can boot new and destroy old instances instantly. I wonder how Microsoft's server scaling will map onto this environment?

You pay for the services (monthly in arrears) in instance hours; 40cents for a Large Instance (7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform) for example. Microsoft licenses will be more obviously.

Data transfer is $0.100 per GB – all data transfer in, and 0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out.

Persistent storage is in Amazon S3.

I may have got some of this wrong, and there may be US versus Europe wrinkles I'm missing but a watching brief is definitely in order.

Ian Blair Forced Out

Infuriatingly obscure note to self:
Speaking of skiing companions, I have to pay for the me and the bomber to join Bondy's 2009 jaunt by 25th of this month.

Update: Joe Kinnear for Commissioner

Here's how to run an old-school press conference :

Joe Kinnear: Which one is Simon Bird (Daily Mirror journalist)?

Bird: Me.

JK: You're a c---.

Bird: Thank you

JK: Which one his [Niall] Hickman (Daily Express)? You are out of order. Absolutely f------ out of order. If you do it again, I am telling you you can f--- off and go to another ground. I will not come and stand for that f----- crap. No f------ way, lies.

F---, you're saying I turned up and they f----- off.

Bird: No Joe, have you read it, it doesn't actually say that. Have you read it?

JK: I've f----- read it, I've read it.

Bird: It doesn't say that. Have you read it?

JK: You are trying to f------ undermine my position already.

Bird: Have you read it, it doesn't say that. I knew you knew they were having a day off.

JK: F--- off. F--- off. It's your last f------ chance.

Genius.

Every day in every way

I've now got my little linux AAA1 driving an external monitor at a decent resolution and running a variety of remote access software. This means that I can plug it in at work and access all my other machines from it. I've also managed to replace the cut-down front end that Acer load on the machine with the more useful complete Xfce desktop.

Next vague tasks are Microsoft interoperability tasks are network access to files (SAMBA?) and PPTP VPN access.

As a University College Swansea graduate myself, I have been delighted to find out that Alan Cox and the Swansea University Computer Society played no small part in the evolution of this operating system.

He sorted out the networking. Only connect.

Louie Knight

I finished reading "Last Tango in Aberystwyth" last night, and will now pass it on to The Profit Burglar who attended University College Aberystwyth back in the day.

The book had lain unread in my house for a long time, but I think I'm hooked on Louie Knight mysteries now. ("Last Tango" is the second book in the series. Poignantly, I remember sending the first to David when he was in hospital. He didn't come out, which may explain volume 2's forlorn languishing on my bookshelves. I bet I got it for him.)

The next installment will be out in 2009:

Hughesovka? Sure, private detective Louie Knight had heard the stories, he'd heard about the legendary replica of Aberystwyth built in the Ukraine by some crazy nineteenth-century Czar. But he didn't believe it. He thought it was all phooey, just a land for dreamers and romantics where every house was an ice cream castle in the air. But all that changed when the museum curator of the fabled Shangri-la turned up in his office with a wild and crazy tale of love, death, madness and betrayal. Forced to swallow his scepticism, Louie is soon adrift in the neon-drenched wilderness of Aberystwyth Prom, pursued by snuff philatelists and a renegade spinning wheel salesman, and clutching two most unlikely talismans - a ticket to Hughesovka and a Russian cosmonaut's sock.Aberystwyth's only private eye and his sidekick Calamity Jane return as they swap the train to Dovey Junction for the Orient Express and try to unravel a murder mystery that is bizarre, even by their own exceptional standards.