Old, pretend spaceman shakes maracas at uncaring universe. ~bezlightyear~ ~at~ ~gmail~ ~dot~ ~com~ ...
We had a partial solar eclipse in the UK yesterday, about 80% of the sun was obscured by the moon at about 7pm. It was really cool. My youngest kid - now in his mid 20s - was with me in front of the house as I held up two pieces of card in the dying light to see the eclipse projected through pinholes in one card onto the other. All this time he was filming on his phone as we chatted. It weighed…
The Guardian newspaper website has run an article about how a pop single has been at the top of the UK pop charts for a record breaking 19 weeks, yet a large contingent of people in the UK claim not to have heard it. The single in question is by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean and is called Rein Me In. I'm one of those people who have not heard this song, so I just fired up YouTube and gave it a…
The Guardian newspaper website has run an article about how a pop single has been at the top of the UK pop charts for a record breaking 19 weeks, yet a large contingent of people in the UK claim not to have heard it. The single in question is called "Rein Me In" by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean. Its lack of impact on the UK public conbsciousness was noted in the Guardian article which reported how a…
This week the UK got a new Prime Minister called Andy Burnham. He took over from Keir Starmer who had to stand down because of reasons. Weeks before this happened, the media - especially the TV news and BBC News in particular - were running countless stories about how 'sources' within the Labour government were working to oust Starmer and how Burnham was top of the list to replace him. When…
So last night England were knocked out of the World Cup at the semi-final stage by an Argentine side that believed kicking Englishmen, pushing them over and sometimes punching them in the back of the head was all part of the rules. After England scored the first goal, the Argentines remembered it was the ball they were supposed to kick and subsequently scored two goals to go through to the final.…
I don't follow football (soccer) but I do enjoy watching football (soccer) matches. The tribalism of the whole football (soccer) scene just leaves me cold. I hear people at work talking about how "we" did at the weekend and it just puzzles me. Why tie your whole personality to a sports business? Also treating your opponents as your life sworn enemy who deserves nothing but death is kind of weird.…
It's been very hot in the UK* for the last week, so much so that the weather agency issued a warning, suggesting people should not travel unless they really need to. The last few days have been challenging, sleep-wise. Our bedroom is like a furnace even with an oscillating fan roaring away and three nights of broken sleep have left me feeling a bit rough. On the way into work I stopped off at the…
I bought a new car yesterday. Technically it's 6 years old, but it is new to me. I went to one of those car supermarkets that seem to have sprung up on the country's industrial estates over the last few years. The deal with a car supermarket is that there's no price haggling. The price on the website/windscreen is the price you pay. It takes the hassle out of car buying, which is good. So I had…
The UK government announced yesterday that it would follow Australia and enact a social media ban for under 16s by the end of the year. It's pretty infuriating for me that nobody is calling it what it actually is: Mandatory Age Verification. It won't be just 16 year olds that will be asked to verify their age - IT WILL BE ALL OF US. What then? What happens next? If Australia is anything to go by,…
When Adobe folded their AI image generation stuff into Photoshop a few years ago, I had a bit of a tinker with it at work. I found a picture of some colleagues and, with some prompts, turned one into a Viking, another into a medieval minstrel and a third into a bass player in a wetsuit standing on a surfboard. I showed this to my boss and remarked that pretty soon, people like me - who have spent…