The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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10:54am on Friday, 25th July, 2008:
Anecdote
A bad-tempered fly was buzzing around the house today, so when it settled on the kitchen windowsill my wife beat it to death with a fly swat.
No wonder it was bad-tempered: look what crawled out of it.
All those little larvae things were alive and wriggling.
Oh, I guess I should apologise for showing something so gross on QBlog without warning, but yes, our kitchen windowsill really is that colour.
9:39am on Thursday, 24th July, 2008:
Comment
From this week's Practical Serial Killer:
9:31am on Thursday, 24th July, 2008:
Weird
Ha! I knew it!
Quite why Orthodox Christians like the Serbs would know about Santa Claus is another issue, of course.
8:11pm on Wednesday, 23rd July, 2008:
Weird
So, they finally tracked him down:
And all that time, I thought Father Christmas lived at the North Pole...
10:05pm on Tuesday, 22nd July, 2008:
Anecdote
So, today I was in London at Virtual Policy'08, a conference which, were British businesses less stingy, would have been State of Play Europe. Fortunately, due mainly to help from BERR (formerly the Department of Trade and Industry) and the Virtual Policy Network's founder, Ren Reynolds (who put up his own money), it went ahead. I say "fortunately", because attendees did not merely include the usual business and education specialists, but there was a substantial contingent of civil servants from several key government departments on hand to hear what was said; if the conference had not gone ahead, the government would have remained that much more in the dark.
I was up last, in the 5pm-5:30pm slot. I was expecting everyone to have gone home, but apparently civil servants either work long hours or are too polite to walk out (maybe that's why they're called "civil", heh). My talk was entitled, "Richard Bartle in Conversation", however we never actually found anyone with whom I was to converse. I thus had to speak for 30 minutes unprepared and without notes to an audience of 150 people including virtual world experts and government officials.
Let's just say I'll be wearing a different pair of trousers tomorrow...
1:40pm on Monday, 21st July, 2008:
Anecdote
Well, the man from the environmental health section of Colchester Borough Council came round today to examine our bee problem.
I was properly prepared to discuss the problem, having read all the various bee web sites that QBlog readers pointed me at (this subject having garnered me QBlog's biggest postbag to date). He, however, was not a great source of information. When I asked him, for example, whether there might be a chance of inadvertantly killing other colonies of bees if he poisoned this one, he said, "Well, I don't think you can really block the holes up". It was only later, in trying to find out how deadly to non-bees the "dust" he was proposing to use was, that he mentioned in passing it lost its efficacy when wet. So, if I were to stick my hosepipe into the nest and turn it on, at least that would mean no errant bees checking out the site from another hive will pick up anything deadly to take back with them. That's something, I suppose, but I'm wondering what other useful snippets of information may have been forthcoming if I'd somehow managed to ask the right question.
I was still very reluctant to give the OK for him to "dust" the hive, despite the fact that I'd been chased by some of its inhabitants at the weekend for daring to go nearby with a lawnmower, but at that very moment my father-in-law showed up. Having been stung twice in the past couple of weeks, he was in no mood to compromise. Given the real and present danger that he would have killed the bees off himself if I hadn't let the environmental health man do it, I finally acquiesced. Bye bye bees.
So, if you're wondering why bee colonies are disappearing across the globe, you now know the cause: it's because they're stinging fathers-in-law.
5:43pm on Sunday, 20th July, 2008:
Comment
Fans of my daughter Jenny's famous Mog and Tilly cartoons: the wait is at last over! Now she's finished her exams, she can create all those cartoons she would have been creating if she hadn't been doing past papers.
Peas, the first of what promises to be a string of new additions to the series, is now online.
>GROW< >GROW<
4:00pm on Sunday, 20th July, 2008:
Weird
Some council workmen came round my mother's house the other day to improve the safety of her windows. They installed new, child-proof locks.
OK, so here's something you need to know about my mother: the words "child proof" translate into "mother proof". I remember when I was a kid and they brought out the first pill bottles with child-proof locks — I had to open them for her, because she couldn't get in otherwise.
So it was with the windows. It took her 45 minutes of pressing buttons and pulling and twisting to open one window, and when she did get it open she learned that it wouldn't go wider than a couple of inches. The workmen had also put in some kind of retaining bar.
OK, so my mother may not get along with any technology invented within the past 100 years, but she's not stupid. Her house has only one door into it, so in the event of a fire she needs to be able to open her windows wider than 2 inches so she can use them as an escape route. She called the council about it, and next day the workers came back and undid what they'd done.
She asked them why they'd put the safety locks and safety bar on in the first place. The workers told it was to stop children from climbing onto the window sill, opening the window and tumbling outside.
So, this is a bungalow. If you fell out of the window, you'd do yourself less of an injury than if you fell off the sill onto the floor inside the house.
Someone, somewhere, has a council house checklist that they need to update...
10:52am on Saturday, 19th July, 2008:
Weird
From this week's Essex County Standard:
If I'd realised that this was news, I'd have phoned in to let them know that hungry snails failed to spoil my daughter's 18th birthday, too.
1:47am on Saturday, 19th July, 2008:
Miscellaneous
0 Aragorn
1 Arragorn
2 Araggorn
3 Arraggorn
4 Aragorrn
5 Arragorrn
6 Araggorrn
7 Arraggorrn
8 Aragornn
9 Arragornn
10 Araggornn
11 Arraggornn
12 Aragorrnn
13 Arragorrnn
14 Araggorrnn
15 Arraggorrnn
Hmm, this makes the Arraggornn my daughter saw in Lord of the Rings Online the 11th least imaginative Aragorn fan on the server.
Still, the Elroond and Elrroond in her kinship (guild) are getting along famously.
9:09am on Friday, 18th July, 2008:
Weird
A couple of years ago I took I blogged this road sign near Colchester train station:
Here's how it looks today:
As you can see, the rust is making slow progress. It'll be a while yet before the sign is completely unreadable.
If you want unreadable, though, it's so much faster to get the sun to do your work! Here's a second sign that faces the one above:
I wonder if, should you do whatever it is the sign is telling you not to do, you could still be prosecuted?
2:39pm on Thursday, 17th July, 2008:
Comment
From this week's Practical Serial Killer:
12:06pm on Wednesday, 16th July, 2008:
Weird
From today's Guardian:
Hmm, I guess yesterday's predicament isn't as isolated as I thought.
5:10pm on Tuesday, 15th July, 2008:
Anecdote
A couple of months ago, while I was away somewhere being famous, a swarm of bees decided to make our walnut tree its home. My younger daughter caught it on camera:
Now what with bees across the country dropping dead for no apparent reason, I was quite happy to have some living in out walnut tree. We had some there last year and they caused no trouble, and we had some in a hole in the lawn a while back and they were just fine, too (even when I mowed them). It's not as if they're wasps, which are so not fine that they constitute definitive proof that either gods don't exist, or they do but they're evil.
However, this bunch of bees is bad-tempered. A couple of weeks ago one stung my father-in-law on the arm, and today another one stung him on the ear. He has therefore expressed a desire that they "go".
So, what do we do? Save the bees in case they're the last ones left on the planet? Or call in the bee destroyer to stop them from stinging people?
I'm guessing that if we don't get in the pest controller, my father-in-law will control them himself...
1:35pm on Monday, 14th July, 2008:
Anecdote
I went to the dentist today, to complete the final step of the quest chain that delivered to me the loot of a +1 tooth of biting (which is BoP, by the way, so you can't get one yourself unless you also complete the chain). Here's the before:
Here's the after:
Not bad, and it only cost me two months' wages for the privilege of being able to eat apples again.
Hmm, actually, maybe I should go eat an apple just to make sure...
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Copyright © 2008 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).