Rik's Ramblings

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

What the %$@! are those people at the BBC smoking!

How is this more appropriate than Pugwash or Magic Roundabout.

In the Night Garden








Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Moved!

It took three moving men 12 hours and two trucks full ...



Not a small truck.

But we are now moved from Santa Clara to Cambrian.

Most of the house is now sitting in the garage. We didn't move it into the new house until we've had time to get the decorator in. So for now it's pot-noodle for dinner.

Glad to be out of the Santa Clara house. We loved the location, the proximity to the University, but the bloody neighbours were driving us crazy. I won't miss Mr Saurs white trash teenage kids, or next doors demented dogs.

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Ben Gone to England

Just sent Ben to England for the summer with his grandma

Friday, July 13, 2007

Sometimes I wish I were a dog



Not really :-) But it reminded me of this ;-)

Meritocracy

Sounds like a good idea to me. Though I don't think I'd be any more powerful in a Meritocratic society, as I'm too lazy. But at least the government wouldn't be a bunch of ass-holes.



From Wikipedia:

Meritocracy is a system of government or other organization based on demonstrated ability (merit) and talent rather than by wealth (plutocracy), family connections (nepotism), class privilege, cronyism, popularity (as in democracy) or other historical determinants of social position and political power.

The word "meritocracy" is now also often used to describe a type of society where wealth, position, and social status are in part assigned through competition or demonstrated talent and competence, on the premise that positions of trust, responsibility and social prestige should be earned, not inherited or assigned on arbitrary quotas.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

We Feel Fine

http://www.wefeelfine.org/

Interesting UI idea.


Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence ... and identifies the "feeling" expressed.

Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted ... The result is a database of several million human feelings.

Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions ...



I should add ... I feel excited!