… in no particular order.

This is the official announcement of my MP3 blog which I’m going to try and update with reasonable regularity. Kind of like an ongoing compilation tape.

It’s here. iTunes users can subscribe by going to the Advanced menu and selecting Subscribe to podcast, then pasting this address … http://www.sunnyblue.net/tp/radio/subscribe.php …into the resulting dialogue box, people not using iTunes; you probably know what to do.

If you’re subscribed the files will automatically be downloaded to your iTunes whenever a new one comes online. People not using iTunes, you probably know what happens.

Isn’t the word ‘podcast’ the ugliest thing ever? It sounds kind of scatalogical to me, kind of like the word ‘blog’, whoever is thinking up these terms needs to be stopped.

Anyway, it’s like my Festivus present to you. Please use the comments section for the airing of the grievances.

Surely after the xmas party they should let you bring in your toys and games to play with before you break up? Speaking of toys and games my DS ran out of battery on the tube this morning juast as Advance Wars was getting good. The early levels aren’t that great if you’re allready an experienced player but after about mission 20 it starts to get nice and tricky, with the battles taking on a more puzzle like structure where only an optimal strategy will see you through, unfortunately this means there’s not much space between success and failiure but the level design is good enough and the goal rewarding enough for this not to really matter.

(Comments are working now)

That huge column of black smoke, that’s pretty horrible right?

Well lets assume that the depot was totally full ( I don’t know if it was no one seems to have mentioned this ) that’s 60,000,000 gallons of oil. There are 34.97 gallons in each barrel of oil, so that’s at most 1,715,756.36 barrels that have gone up in smoke. By massive coincidence this is pretty much exactly the UK’s daily oil consumption. So we’re making one of those huge columns of black smoke every day. Pretty horrible right?

[Added the next day] Diggory emailed and pointed out that oil burned in a controlled and efficient manner is probably better, well less bad anyway, for the envioronment than just having a big bonfire. He’s right of course.

I’ll fix the comments tonight, I mean it this time.

I’m not going to complain to the BBC about this ‘cos… well obvious reasons really. I’ll just mention it here to distract you from the fact that the comments still aren’t working.

On University challenge last night there was a set of questions that claimed to be about hyperbolic functions (sinh, cosh, tanh) but were actually about sin, cos and tan*. Anyway the team’s mathematician had worked this out by the last question of the three and gave the correct answer “tan”, Jeremy Paxman was like “tan?” as if expecting more and after some muttering the team slightly sheepishly offered the wrong answer “tan^-1,” or something (I think they actually said “to the minus one” rather than inverse as they’d realised by this point that they were dealing with a bit of a dulard) anyway it turned out that the answer Paxman was expecting was actually “tan of x” (I’m guessing it was written like that on the card rather than simply “tan x”) which as anyone who’s done GCSE maths knows is pretty much the same as just saying “tan” which was the original answer. I wonder if he’d have accepted “tan of q”**. Whatever, you can imagine the annoyance this all caused in the Tom and Emma household.

Anyway comments should be working by er… let’s say Thursday.

But don’t hold me to that.

*actually, I’ve just realised I wasn’t really paying enough attention to know if the answers were even correct, Paxman could just have been reading “sinh” as “sin”. I don’t know, and come to think of it it’s a bit wierd to define sin and stuff in terms of e whereas for the hyperbolic functions it’s perfectly normal. Either way, Paxman is a big dummy when it comes to maths and should be told to hurry up in a condescending way.

**very lame pun comes to mind about tanh(q)

The site looks different. My main thing was that I wanted only a single post visible at any time. I’m kind of restructuring so the blog and other things are adjuncts to the homepage (which is where the links that used to live on the right will go) rather than being the main focus.

I’m pretty happy with the way it looks, colour will be added soon.

Oh yeah, i’ve managed to break the comments so they’ll be offline until at least tomorrow and also I need to add a link to the XML feeds.

   , , , ,
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we knew that even by trying to make it you would have one of the most ground-breaking programmes of all time - even if it never came off. One small step for man, one giant leap for TV

No he’s not talking about The Great War or Life on Earth, he’s talking about Space Cadets, a new low in reality TV that started on channel 4 last night whilst I was out watching the new Harry Potter film (Moderately entertaining nonsense, seriously I know it’s fantasy and it’s supposed not to be constrained by reality and stuff but even fantasy needs to have internal logical consistency, the Harry Potter universe doesn’t seem to have this or even realise that it might be a good idea. Compare it with Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books, the first of which also follows a young wizard through his training, and you’ll see how powerful Fantasy books can be when their systems and worlds are worked out properly. Anyway where were we, oh yeah, channel 4 last night…). So I realise I’m prejudging the show, it may well be groundbreaking but the concept is so unpleasant that I can’t bring myself to watch and find out. As ste said
“I sincerely hope everyone involved in this programme has one of their childhood dreams realised and then completely crushed before an audience of millions, too.”
Also the show is fronted by two of my least favourite TV presenters (Johnny Vaughan and some former MTV idiot whos name I don’t know but who is intensely annoying)

Do you, like Erin, enjoy making things and selling them? Or maybe you just like to buy things that other people have made. Either way, now you can do so here. It’s like a huge version of Spitalfields market but without the near unbearable crush of humanity.