Recently in Rambling Category

In a week I'll be in California. I'm not packed, though I've been spending a lot of time trying to figure how exactly what I need to take, what I want to take, and what I really shouldn't take.

One item I've been uncertain about are keyboards. When Simon went to France for a year he took a UK keyboard with him, but then they have AZERTY which is substantially different. There are a number of US keyboards lying around the office so a few weeks ago I switched to one for work to see how it went. I think I'm bringing a stash of UK keyboards with me. Annoyances with the US keyboard:

• Enter is too small. I have this problem on my EEE 901 as well. Usually this manifests as me typing lots of half written lines on IRC.
• The " moving location is actually much more irritating than I expected. Likewise ~
• And, the decider, PERSON RAISING BOTH HANDS IN CELEBRATION simply doesn't flow as easily. On a UK keyboard it's left, middle, right. On a US keyboard it's right, left, right.

Last.fm tag:cover

I blame Flash but it's actually not been bad; the odd terrible choice, a few excellent versions (some of which were new to me) and mostly just acceptable covers that give me a reasonable range of stuff to listen to at work.

I am pleased to discover that my Sea Monkeys are not the only dirty buggers having a threesome.

(We have office sea monkeys. They freak out my coworkers.)

Brett, JD and I went to Domino's this evening for pizza. The Domino's in Norwich does any large pizza for £9 if you collect, but the Brighton one doesn't seem to have this. In fact, if you order online and get delivery you can get a 20% discount. Which means it's cheaper to sit at home and be lazy that it is to turn up and collect on the way home from the pub. Er, what?

I have to say "Yes" to the BBC. People say things about redheads they would think twice before saying about any other discriminated group.

A while back I decided that I needed my CD collection needed something for every letter. I've managed them all except X. Anyone any suggestions? My last.fm profile should hopefully give an idea of what I like.

I've been ill; I had the flu (first time I've ever actually had to take a day off work). And then I spent a week working from Portstewart. Which was a bit odd, as Katherine's living in furnished rented accomodation which means the decor is completely not us (we've always lived in unfurnished places before).

Anyway. I went down to London Saturday week ago, and of course there was no direct train from Norwich because Network Rail like to screw over people travelling on weekends. And then I came back from Stansted yesterday and there were no trains from Stansted. So I end up on a replacement bus service to Cambridge (where I'm supposed to pick up a train to Norwich). And the moron driver goes to Audley End (fair enough, we knew it would stop there), reaches J9 of the M11 and decides to go southbound rather than over the junction towards Cambridge. So we end up practically back at Stansted - at J8 he comes off the M11 and rejoins northbound, then drives up to J11 before coming off. I'm not a Cambridge resident, but I'm sure this isn't a sensible route, even factoring in that I don't think you can go northbound at J9. 3 hours of travelling time. I'd have been better on the bus, but I just missed it and the next one wasn't for another 2 hours.

And then there's pricing. I'm going to a wedding in Glasgow next month. It was £50 cheaper to fly than take the train (and even given check in times I suspect will be significantly faster). I'm considering a meeting in Manchester at the start of April and flying is cheaper than the train (again by over £50) and in fact given the timings would mean I could actually do it in a day rather than having to sort out accomodation. Flying is even cheaper than driving it seems, and probably faster or at least equal given check in times.

I know I'm supposed to be flying less, but it's hard. Give me a viable rail network that's actually competitive on pricing (I'm not even talking about walk on pricing, I'm trying to book in advance with known travel dates/times) and has a decent schedule and I'll use it!

Look, I know xkcd is great. I have the RSS feed hooked up to Liferea. I do not need people to continually produce blog posts with the latest cartoon in them. This seems to happen every bloody time there's a new cartoon, usually from at least 3 people (and not always the same ones).

I have a new fridge freezer. It has a hole in the back of the fridge. I can see through it to the outside world. This is apparently a drainage duct and part of the deicing/condensation thingy-ma-jig. It strikes me as just wrong. Won't all the cold escape? Simon tells me it's only a small hole and his fridge has one too, but I'm not convinced. I'll have to hide it behind some beer so I forget about it.

Having been reading about Small World Phenomenon (which I've been calling Small World Syndrome for some time now, guess I'll have to change) the other day I was vaguely interested in LOST when I was pointed at it. It doesn't really help model the interconnectedness of the matrix as it's a tree structure AFAICT, but I think it's an fun idea with about as much point as most social networking sites and none of the claims to usefulness. :)

I'd heard of Milgram before; my Mum did some stuff around Milgram's Experiment. SWP seems quite a different topic to me - are there similarities I'm missing or is it just the social psychologist equivalent of hacking on kernel code one day and a web app the next?