Chaos Engineers

How hard is it to dye pubic hair, anyway?

• Whoops.

• Rocknerd: Now that's industrial.

• Wikimedia blog: Grape Lane (euph.)

• NotN: Differently-competent PM pleads against assisted career suicide; World's #4 website features "cunt" on front page; Emma Watson in black leather "most important news in world".

Has it been a week? My oath it has. Mostly Freda being an UTTER PICKLE. And too much CBeebies. I have informed arkady that she needs to supply Freda's television needs or I am going to go mad with an axe.

Phone interview yesterday. Rapport and technical clue seemed pretty good. They drilled down the technical questions and I have research to do! I was one of three, should hear on Monday whether I rate a face-to-face.

Tonight we are off to ewt's Celebratory Recital for having finished her music degree. Arkady has baked two cakes for it.

Tomorrow Arkady and I are off to a read-through of Midsummer Night's Dream (she's reading Philostrate) and then I'm off to aster13's party. This is rated "essential to continued mental health." I will be with deathboy's stag party in spirit.

Sunday is redcountess's and my sixth anniversary. *champagne*

( Spoiler for 1-3, speculation for 4... )

Hey you super-sleuths!

Just a gentle reminder that it's now less than 48 hours until our Murder-Mystery detective Judder with guest DJ Stodge! Reduced entry for those in detective clobber ready to solve the riddle of the 2 Pigs! Doors open at 9 and make sure you get there early - I get the feeling this is going to be one of our more hectic evenings!

Look forward to detecting you on Friday!

Lee Chaos
--=xXx=--
www.judder.org

I've let myself in for doing a mile race tonight in Tooting Bec Lido. But it's OK, as I had 2 days notice (!) and I've been able to get, er, two training sessions under my belt in advance. Do not expect a best time from me tonight.

Anyone around in, say, Streatham tonight? I might drop in on my way home - just have to see how late it all finishes (starts at 8pm).

Wish me luck.

This week's Show With No Name:

7th July 2009

It was another Show With No Charlie unfortunately due to ben Nevis mountaineering adventures, but we were lucky enough to get Rodney Orpheus of Cassandra Complex in the co-presenter's chair for this week.

Next week I'm away so hopefully Charlie will have another guest presenter for you - after that we should have the old team back together again!

Thanks for listening!

• UK charity Novas Scarman goes after WikiLeaks to suppress corruption report. Pass it on.

• Senator Fielding really is a completely embarrassing moron. (Americans: imagine if the US Senate was on a knife edge and Sarah Palin had the deciding vote in any contested decision.) Facebook group.

• How to make an editor put out a hit on you. (Worked example.)

• Not only did Ars Technica quote me, they illustrated my quote with a lolcat.

• Wikimedia blog: BibleBay!

• NotN: Palin: I can replace Jackson in your hearts.

Today we took Freda to have her inward-turning right foot checked out — the younger teen had a serious problem with this and needed shoe inserts for many years. Apparently all is well, check back in a year. She did puke on the bus on the way there and on the way back from motion sickness, just to add to the fun.

This Toshiba Satellite Pro 6050 is completely weird. It was obviously the executive penis toy of its day ... but they put a Celeron in it.

Cetirizine is da bomb for stopping hay fever. It also knocks me out like a light. Still vaguely blurry.

And, y'know, I'm still rather enjoying Torchwood. Especially Ian Gelder's turn as Mr Dekker...

I will be LIVE on Stroud FM from 8pm tonight - Charlie is away up Ben Nevis (fnar!) so my guest presenter will be rodneyorpheus!

Drop us an email at radio@stroudfm.co.uk for shout-outs and requests!

bcholmes took me to Stratford on the weekend, and we spent the weekend doing theatre. We we saw Three Sisters (barely even depressing on the Russian scale - only one person died!), Cyrano de Bergerac and finished off with A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum.

Hrm. Not a Shakespeare in the lot.

Now thanks to her I have Comedy Tonight stuck in my head in an repeating endless loop.

And a rather distubing lust for Colm Feore. (But only if he wears the prosthetic nose.)

"The day will come when Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will be studied in film classes and shown at cult film festivals. It will be seen, in retrospect, as marking the end of an era. Of course there will be many more CGI-based action epics, but never again one this bloated, excessive, incomprehensible, long (149 minutes) or expensive (more than $200 million)."

• I am now hopelessly addicted to Texts From Last Night.

• Police told to use Wikipedia for court preparation. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

• Transcendental Meditation is apparently tired of not being sufficiently widely regarded as a cult of vicious nutters, so they're trying legal threats against critics. Please spread the link.

• NotN: Wikipedia keeps the truth from everyone; Microsoft extends XP downgrade option to 2101; Minister praises high standard of science journalism; Sarah Palin gives maverickilicious resignation speech.

This week has been spent pretty much entirely on cleaning the house (it is now much nicer) and sweating. It's much cooler outside, but British houses are built to keep the heat in. Older teen and younger teen have been assigned chores; younger teen refused hers with shrieks of outraged entitlement but changed her mind after her intarweb was switched off for two days. Hypothesis: Skinner boxes are worth a try.

Tuesday I met secretlondon for lunch and grabbed some obsolescent tech off her, an old Toshiba Satellite Pro 6050, the subject of a pile of Ubuntu bugs filed by her. And a shitty ADSL2 wifi modem which apparently crashes all the time. Tuesday evening, a date with nyecamden, pub then visiting me!

Thursday we took Freda to the dentist. We were previously waiting a few months for her to turn two so they could fix her teeth (baby teeth do sometimes need work), as they wouldn't anaesthetise any child under two except in an emergency; now she's two, they've changed the age limit to three. This is NHS arse-covering, not law per se, so we could go private, except that my anus fails to produce gold ingots on a frequent and reliable schedule. Of course, if the teeth rot in her head and endanger her life, that'll be an emergency and they can do it. We are less than entirely pleased and the dentist is calling around the hospitals seeing what they can wrangle.

Kubuntu 9.10 alpha 2 Just Works on the N410c with a wifi PC card, which is most pleasing. (Yet to try compiling the driver for the W200.) Needed 300MB of updates straight away. Install "firefox-3.5" if you don't want Firefox 3.0. The video driver is somewhat imperfect (pixel crap left in various places). The machine I'm using right now is the Toshiba, because it has a battery. It too ran 9.10a2 just fine. I installed netbook-remix on it and it's mostly just perfect. Good speakers too (for a laptop). Needs an xorg.conf because the Trident drivers are too shit to autodetect properly. (This is fixable, but someone needs to bother.) Wireless antenna in the screen, must try some mini-PCI cards in the wifi slot.

(The Karmic netbook remix "CD ISO" is 833MB. Concept fail.)

i dont know how many of you will know steve from the phono/fenton. the guy who had a terrible habit of taking his clothes off whilst drunk.

i just found out that he died 2 months ago in a diving accident. it would have been his birthday this coming friday so there will be drinks in his honour at the fenton. if you knew him please come along.

rip steve, i will always remember being hungover and shocked as you cooked my breakfast naked

So, the 4th of July's here again. Time to slouch on the sofa and play Aimee Mann songs, I think.

The Labour Party, the Conservative Party and allegations of homophobia...

For what it's worth, I have to agree with the Conservatives on this one. They've changed. I still have a number of very major disagreeents with their policies, but IMO it's a few years too late for Labour to take this particular tack...

Anyone in Sheffield got an old 100mb switch they want to get rid of? (happy to supply beer / money / etc) - I've got most of the network here sorted since the lightening strike, but my 2nd switch is utterly broken.

No Freakangels this week, but Paul Duffield's posting a rather interesting behind-the-scenes look at how the art is created instead...

For gigs in 2nd week of October, in Brixton Academy. Here

I'm sure there are a couple of you on my flist that might be interested in this information.

Update: Hmmm, TicketMaster & SeeTickets were jammed solid, but I got tickets for the Thursday from StarGreen.com; StarGreen had sold out their Friday tickets.

Pre-dawn wakings notwithstanding, life is pretty fucking awesome right now.

I amcurrently enjoying 'Blood' This Mortal Coil - and I am possibly enjoying it more because it is playing off cassette on my old DCC recorder.

(this post is not for the benefit of anyone under 30...)