mssv

  • Eve of Destruction

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    1–2 minutes

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    1 comment on Eve of Destruction

    Some photos of my trip to London to belatedly toast the destruction of the Culture Listserver, courtesy of Steve.

  • Vignettes of an active lifestyle

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    4–6 minutes

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    4 comments on Vignettes of an active lifestyle

    After I got back from Australia in August, I started doing an awful lot of exercise so that I might develop some good habits that would last in Oxford. I hadn’t been to the gym for about a year or so, and so when I went there and did my usual workout, I basically felt…

  • Lyra’s Oxford

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    8–12 minutes

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    2 comments on Lyra’s Oxford

    Lyra’s Oxford is more than just a short story and a collection of colourful extras. Pullman has set us a mystery, and judging by his past works, it’s going to be interesting.

  • Senses

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    1–2 minutes

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    No comments on Senses

    Senses (Flash) – a nice little interactive quiz from the BBC that deals with psychological phenomena and illusions (and some other not quite as interesting stuff), via Bhisma.

  • Killer Chairs

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    2–3 minutes

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    My karma was restored to its correct level this evening when I went to a signing by Neil Gaiman at Borders. I turned up half an hour early, just in time to bag one of the last chairs available (handily situated near some Philip Pullman novels); by the time Neil came out to talk there…

  • Delivery

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    1–2 minutes

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    1 comment on Delivery

    I spent the weekend visiting friends in Cambridge and fully expected to come home to Oxford to pick up my new laptop, which I ordered a while ago. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t at my college. When I checked the TNT website to track the package, it said that it didn’t have a correct delivery address for…

  • Wake Up

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    1–2 minutes

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    No comments on Wake Up

    Wake up calls in Portugal – people pay for personal wake up calls in Portugal, and we’re not talking the automatic hotel-variety calls either. We’re talking human operator wake up calls. No, I couldn’t believe it either. More on those calls (scroll down).

  • The Rules of the Game

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    1–2 minutes

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    No comments on The Rules of the Game

    I’ve just finished reading John Gribbin’s Science: A History, which is by all accounts a very well-written and interesting book. Gribbin could have probably done with making some of his sentences a little shorter and more readable, but other than that it’s an excellent review of science and the people who discovered it, starting from…

  • Cursed by Dust

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    1–2 minutes

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    No comments on Cursed by Dust

    So Philip Pullman will be at two events in Oxford in the next few days to promote Lyra’s Oxford. The first one is a signing at Waterstones on Saturday, conveniently at the same time I’m going to be in Cambridge. But no fear – the second one will be a presentation organised by Borders at…

  • UseMod

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    1–2 minutes

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    No comments on UseMod

    The long awaited UseMod 1.0 is now out. UseMod is one of the best simple wiki engines in development and 1.0 offers a number of useful new features (such as RSS feeds) that I may try out for a new idea I have.