Avaragado's blog

Shamelessly lifted from boingboing:

By betamale

The word “no” sometimes ends in “wuh”. This means “No, and if you keep asking I will get annoyed”.

It’s probably a dialect thing.

Bango. Short-term contract, interesting job.

Tarantella Then and Now – A FUD Tale – Groklaw. Not particularly well-informed, associating Tarantella with oldSCO Linux FUD.

Tarantella’s new chief talks money – ZDNet UK. Interview with new CEO Frank Wilde.

Twice in the last twenty minutes my mobile phone provider, Singlepoint, has rung me touting for more business. I turned down the first one, of course, and interrupted the second one before he got too far into his spiel. He then tried to carry on!

“Are you not interested in saving–?”

“I turned down the first one twenty minutes ago, and I’m hardly likely to have changed my mind in the time being.”

“Not even to–”

“Look, I know you’re just reading whatever your system tells you to, but I’m really not interested.”

At this he finally gave up. Time to register with the anti-phone-spam people. Sadly it takes “up to 28 days” to be effective.

The Verbier 2004 skiing video has now had its world premiere at Avaragado Towers, so now it’s available to all. See the current Avaragado Pictures movie selection.

I mean, really. That teacher knew nothing.

If you’re part of a family of hoarders, like me, then when your parents move house after twenty years in the same place you suddenly find yourself surrounded by your past. Everything full of memories. The noise a toy makes. A phrase in a school book. Even the texture of a folder. You have to make instant decisions — chuck, jumble, storage, keep, take — on thousands of items, small and large. It’s hard work.

My brother and I have spent the last two weekends helping to clear out the loft. It’s family archaeology: layers, layers, layers, deeper into the past. What was fresh when you last saw it is now faded, dusty, the last resting place of flies and spiders.

Things I have learned:

• A Tardis is just a loft with a makeover. Emptying half the loft filled the entire ground floor with boxes.
• “I didn’t think we still had that,” a hundred times over.
• Sellotape is evil. Double-sided sellotape, which we used to kill for at Junior School, is the very devil incarnate. It stains, it degrades, it ruins that bad tracing of Charles I you did in 1979 to please Mrs L Rayner (“don’t forget the L!”).
• There was once a time when I misspelled words. It was a very long time ago.
• At college, I once wrote wearily at the start of a lecture: “And now we return to the land of make believe, and the man with the white hair and the tranquilisers”. I remember that lecturer, but nothing of the course.
• Some of the things I kept in case they might one day be worth something are still worth keeping. Honest!
• It’s time to throw away most of your computer magazine collection when:
  • Your parents move to a smaller house.
  • There is no conceivable way you could fit any more magazines in the cupboard.
  • The only things holding up shelves of magazines are the magazines on the shelves below.
• Magazines and comics I thought I’d thrown away ten years ago are still in the garage.
• I remember things that happened thirty years ago. I have thirty-year-old possessions.
• I’ve always liked standing with my hands behind my back.
• I need to “be more vocal during lessons.”

Having more or less recovered from the labyrinthitis, I’ve just had a relapse.

Interestingly, I’m now drifting to the left rather than the right. This supports my theory that the original “recovery” was in fact the brain readjusting to different inputs (cf studies where test participants spend a week wearing magic glasses that show the world upside-down, and cope perfectly well as their brains get used to it). Now something’s flipped back to its original state and my brain has to readjust (taking off the upside-down specs causes as much disorientation as putting them on in the first place).

Stop the world, my rear-view mirror fell off. So much for superglue. I blame the Hutton report.

I’ve tried again, with more glue this time. Most of it twixt window and mirror-clasp in the approved fashion. Some of it gracing my fingers, little shiny discolorations in the fingerprints.

I’m not a practical person.

Mozilla Firefox 0.8 (was Firebird) and Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5 are now out.

Despite <1.0 version numbers, they’re both stable enough to use as default browser/email clients.