radiac.net

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Just when you can't believe that anything could be this cool, you stumble across something like this. And this is pretty exciting too. A little weird, but this is fun.

It's The Canterbury Parking Clowns!

Drank a little too much last night. I'm ok, but unfortunately the same can't be said for the floor...

Looking back on it, i should have gone for the bin, seeing as its closer. However, the trail did act as a useful guide for my next trips. Although it probably would have been better if I hadn't walked in it.

Since the RIAA attacks began on the peer-to-peer applications like Napster and Audiogalaxy, I've heard, and agreed with, a lot of people saying that it's been blown out of all proportion, and that file sharing actually increases exposure and therefore sales.

I have a few MP3s. Most of them I listen to once or twice a year, because they're fun to listen to occasionally, but not good enough to waste my money on. However, I have bought at least 15 CDs (I have a total of about 30) and 5 DVDs as a direct result of file sharing applications. Hell, I've bought 6 or 7 Dido cds, and I came across her thanks to Napster. My opinion of all forms of piracy - music, film, software, whatever - is that if it's good enough for me to listen to/watch/use on a frequent basis, then the person/people who created it deserve my money. Record artists aren't losing money because of me, they're getting more; I would never have gone out and bought a Tori Amos cd, but after Pete quoted the lyrics to '1000 Oceans' in a strip on Sluggy, I downloaded it, decided that it's definitely one of the best songs I've heard, and bought the cd. Incidentally, the record company forced Pete to remove the lyrics from the image. I mean, how rediculous is that.

Anyway, User Friendly linked to this article by Janis Ian, a musician who disagrees with the record industry's stance. While I know that there are a lot of people who agree with the points in this article, I havent come across anything similar. We need more people like her to speak out and make the record industry etc figure out what's really going on.

Just saw Resident Evil. A pleasant little movie, fun for all the family.

The holiday courses, which I love to teach, are about to start. I go collect the kids in about half an hour. That's the first problem.

The next problem is that I have no idea what the username or password we'll be using is. I have to wait for Mr P to appear and tell me. I'm hoping that he's at lunch and will be back in a few minutes. However, there is, of course, the possibility that he's not in today. In which case, todays lessons will consist entirely of 'OK, this here is a computer. This is a mouse.' type conversation while I tread time waiting for someone to magically appear with the necessary password.

Hmm.

I think I may have some problems today.

This is fun. 31 customers is my personal best. Although I did only play it the once.

This is fun. The air conditioning system has died, the rooms are incredibly hot, the windows have anti-suicide things on them so I cant open them wide enough to be of any use...

What is scary is that I can safely say to them that I've been using computers since before they were born. In most cases, since before they were concieved.

Argh, half are singing the scooby doo theme song, and the other half are calling out my name. Argh. Think I'll go try and open the windows a bit further...

Just finished programming something for Mr. P in BBC BASIC. Little wimp program which does the equivalent of 'du -sh dir/* > file', for those of you who understand these things. I haven't done anything with BBC BASIC in a long time, had forgotten how cool it was. And how good I was at it ;)

Went to see 'Bad Company' this evening... quite good :)

Anyway, this is great :)

As some of you may know, I was HC Admin on Trekkers Rest for over a year before Zozo decided to close it down in favour of his own talker. At the start of my reign, I was also coder. After Zozo took it over, I lost interest in coding (since there was nowhere to code for). However, I now spod on Dan's talker, Honeycomb (cats.meow.at, port 3000), and since he's not too fussed about coding, and I've managed to persuade him that the fact that 5 talkers died just after installing my Tag game was just a coincidence, he's decided to let me break his talker.

So tonight I've been setting up a dv talker and writing some things. I have now added two patches to my Playground Plus section - c_new, which lets you list new commands, and map, which displays a semi-dynamic map. More things coming real soon...

I also took the matrix test:

I got my uni results today. I was 100% certain I'd failed Computation II - I needed 15/60. Yeh, I know, but I reckoned I'd got 12, maybe 13 if I was lucky. Somehow I managed to pull out an amazing 20, allowing me to pass and live in the house I'm paying for next year! W00t!

Let the celebrations commence.

I have written a draughts/checkers patch for playground plus. It's kinda neat :)

I have finally bought sunglasses! Yesterday I went to TW and got a Oakley e Wire 2.1 pair of sunglasses, with Pewter frame and Black Iridium lenses.

Painfully expensive, but very nice :)

So of course, today is cloudy. Tomorrow, it will be raining, and the day after we'll have the worst storms since the 80s. Before being plunged into an icy (and foggy) winter, which will last till about July next year.

I'm teaching again today. This morning it's the internet and website design. So while they're surfing, I thought I'd do this. The biggest problem with these courses is that there is a such a wide range of abilities. There are some here who have used the internet quite lot before, and there's one who has hardly ever used a computer. Although it makes it easier for me - you tend to go at the speed of the slowest, or at least it lows down the progress of the fastest. Which means I'm less likely to run out of things to do :)

Going to a party tonight. Going to help someone use their computer first. Turning it on, loading word, etc, hopefully won't take too long...

Hmm, people seem to be getting restless. Time to bring out the web games ;)

Hmm, I discovered why. Seems the net filter isn't quite as good as the school would have hoped...

Ahh, that's better, 6/8 on harrypotter.com. And 5 minutes left till break... AND OMFG! SUN! Yay :)

Needless to say, the sun disappeared, and it's threatening to rain.

I have 4 children on the course this afternoon. It's worse than 9. At least with 9 you had some trouble and could yell at them and tell them to STFU... these kids are so well behaved though! We've got through the first 2 hours in the first hour... Argh. The last couple of days should be interesting =)

Well, somehow the afternoon kids (who don't go on the internet) have mananged to find what they would term 'pornography' in the clip art (biological diagrams)... took them 2 hours and about 15 minutes. One of them is really annoying and difficult to dicipline. Grr. Wish we could still hit them. Pussy parliment, bringing in all these child protection laws :p

Went to the party yesterday, it was great. Well organised etc, have some photos, but was too tired when I got home last night to do anything with them. Will put them up soon.

The sun shone earlier today! I got to wear my sunglasses! Of course the clouds are back now, but I have worn my sunglasses, and they rock :p

Woot. Last day before my 2 weeks off. Only 35 hours and 12 minutes of teaching left this year!

I have finally got around to doing something with my excellent domain yay.org.uk.

Yay is a regularly updated page containing something amusing, or failing that, just something. Currently changing every Sunday morning at midnight GMT, once the site has got going the page will change at midnight every day, and visitors will be able to submit their own pages.

Found this about Project Orion, a US project to design a nuclear powered spaceship. Interesting read.




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My, it's hot today. My fan shattered, so I had to go buy a new one. Got some new windscreen wiper blades while I was near Halfords, fitted them without much hassle. Although the connector thingies were missing from the passenger blade box, so I had to go back down and get a replacement one. I was wearing my 'Go away' t-shirt from ThinkGeek, and the woman behind the till made some comment about how she wanted to tell me what my t-shirt was selling her. I believe there is a moral to this tale, although it probably doesnt have much to do with this flash game, which is a lot of fun. You will find a photo of me here.

Finally got round to moving stuff off my digital camera, so there are some new photos of Chris Hawkins' summer party which I mentioned the other day.

Yay is looking promising, 41 hits in 2 days, and it doesn't count me... Thanks to those of you who have made guestbook entries :)

And some of you will no doubt be excited to learn that radiac's status is now working. It's a bit sparse atm (it either tells you if I'm online or offline), and fairly inaccurate (in fact, it tells you if stan, my router, is online or offline), but no doubt I'll add things like what computers are turned on, what computer the last keyboard/mouse activity was on and how long ago, what music I'm listening to, which computer I'm using, what I'm doing on it, what's going through my networks, how hot my computers are and how fast the fans are spinning... If you're really lucky, I'll rig up some kind of instant messaging thingy so if I am online and you want to insult me, you can do it in realtime, rather than wait 5 minutes for a reply to your email! Unlike the previous incarnation of radiac's status, this version does not time out in your browser. It tries for 5 seconds to talk to stan, and after that assumes I'm offline. Since I'm on ADSL, that could probably safely drop to a much shorter time, and when mir moves to my uni house, it probably will have to (since the status doohickey will have to talk to stan and mir to find out what's going on).

Radiac.info appeared a couple of weeks ago. Looks like a german electronic music band or something.

Cool :)