writing, travelling, seeing, coding and walking the 🐕🦺
Ted Chiang I read this short story in a day. It describes the interactions with an alien species' brief stopover on Earth and the efforts of linguists and scientists to communicate with them. In particular it covers one linguist, going through the events in her daughters life in reverse chronoligcal order. A very interesting read about an alien species completely different world view of the…
by Simone Caroti An interesting and accessible academic review of the Culture Series , by Iain M. Banks. If you haven't read the series, this book won't mean a lot or be very interesting. For those who have read the books in the series, this review provides a wealth of extra information on and explanation of the plots in the books. It also explores how the Culture Series fits into the science…
Interested in how old my Yahoo account is, I requested a download of my data. Then I followed the instructions on this image on imgur , which was linked from a Reddit post. My account creation time is: "Dec 06, 1997 03:55 AM UTC". At this point I was in New Zeland . I still remember the owner of the internet cafe helping me to set it up.
I was the first to board the plane this morning. They asked to see my boarding card, and only mine. To make sure the passengers were all getting on the correct plane. Good to know they have this extra check! And they announced someone has a nut allergy on the plane. There goes my plan to eat the left over nuts in my bag.
A one week trip to Scotland to visit some distilleries and taste some whisky. Distilleries visited: Glendronach (valley of the brambles) Glenfiddich (valley of the deer) Glen Moray (valley of moray - the county) The first, Glendronach, was the smallest, with a production in the region of 3m litres per year. Glenfiddich was the largest with 21m litres per year and Glen Moray was the local option,…
3-2-1 System In our household we use OneDrive as our cloud file service. In fact OneDrive has the only complete copy of our files. There is not enough space on our day to day laptop. Clearly having a complete copy of all your files in only place is risky. That place being a cloud provider is even more so. It's not exactly the 3-2-1 system : Three copies of your data : Your three copies include…
Butterfly on our lavender bush.
Now into the second heatwave of the Summer. It's again been over 30°C for well over a week. It's hardly rained in the last two months. The fields do not usually look like this in early July. Or ever really.
Our third visit to Rock Werchter, after 2022 and 2023. This time the two outstanding acts were Kneepcap and the headliners Twenty One Pilots. It's always well organised and great fun. This time I spent most of it listening from a distance, whilst the kids went to the front. Keanu Reeves was also performing with his band Dogstar. Dogstar Kneecap Twenty One Pilots
Trying to escape the heatwave and the hottest June week ever in western Europe, we headed first to the Belgian coast (a cool 24 degrees) and then to Switzerland and Liechtenstein (both a sweltering 36 degrees). Belgium Switzerland Liechtenstein